A Thinking Reed

Category: Politics

  • Rand Paul’s top-down conservatism

    Continuing the grand congressional tradition of monkeying with local D.C. affairs, supposedly libertarian G.O.P. senator Rand Paul has introduced amendments to a bill granting the District budget autonomy that would dictate city policies on guns, abortion, and unions.

    From the Washington Post:

    One Paul amendment would require the District to allow residents to obtain concealed weapon permits for handguns, and would require the city to honor permits issued to residents of other states. Another amendment would make the District “establish an office for the purpose of facilitating the purchase and registration of firearms by DC residents,” in response to reports that there is only one licensed gun dealer in the city.

    Paul has also submitted an amendment to codify the city-funded abortion ban. The prohibition — a continuing source of frustration for local leaders that is strongly supported by anti-abortion groups — has been extended via appropriations bills every year that Republicans have controlled one or both chambers of Congress since the mid-1990s.

    Paul proposed another amendment saying “membership in a labor organization may not be applied as a precondition for employment” in the District, and protecting employees “from discrimination on the basis of their membership status” in a union.

    Note that what’s at issue in this bill is whether or not the District gets to decide how to spend its own money raised by local taxes. (“Wait,” you say, “D.C. doesn’t already have that authority? But that’s crazy!” Indeed.) But for freedom-loving Rand Paul, it’s an opportunity to engage in some social engineering, conservative-style.

  • Political purism and playing the long game

    Garry Wills wrote a good response to the video from Harvard Law professor Roberto Unger calling for the “defeat” of Barack Obama. Unger, who is invariably billed as Obama’s “former professor” (according to Wills he taught Obama in two classes at HLS), maintains that Obama has “failed to advance the progressive cause in the United States.” Unger’s video has some good ideas in it–or at least ideas worth considering. But the conclusion that Obama “must be defeated” comes as a complete non-sequitur. It’s unclear why supporting the (admittedly flawed) Obama is incompatible with working to make the Democratic Party and the political system in general more progressive. And it’s even less clear how four or eight years of a Romney administration would advance the cause of progressivism. Why, for example, would it be a boon to “the progressive cause” to allow the social safety net to be further shredded?

    Fortunately for us, we have a pretty clear test case here. Remember back in 2000 when some liberals/progressives said that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush? And liberals had plenty of good reasons to be unhappy with the Clinton-Gore administration, arguably the most conservative Democratic administration since Grover Cleveland. Which is why some of those folks voted for Ralph Nader–helping to hand the election to Bush (with a generous assist from the Supreme Court). And yet, does anyone really think that the world was better off from a progressive point of view after eight years of Bush in the White House? (The institutionalization of the post-9/11 national security state alone is something we’ll be living with the rest of our lives.)

    Wills agrees with Unger that Obama’s progressive credentials are less than stellar, but disdains Unger’s political purism:

    The mistake behind all this is a misguided high-mindedness that boasts, “I vote for the man, not the party.” This momentarily lifts the hot-air balloon of self-esteem by divorcing the speaker from political taintedness and compromise. But the man being voted for, no matter what he says, dances with the party that brought him, dependent on its support, resources, and clientele. That is why one should always vote on the party, instead of the candidate. The party has some continuity of commitment, no matter how compromised. What you are really voting for is the party’s constituency. That will determine priorities when it comes to appointments, legislative pressure, and things like nominating Supreme Court justices.

    To vote for a Democrat means, now, to vote for the party’s influential members—for unions (including public unions of teachers, firemen, and policemen), for black and Latino minorities, for independent women. These will none of them get their way, exactly; but they will get more of a hearing and attention—“pandering,” if you want to call it that—than they would get in a Republican administration.

    To vote for a Republican means, now, to vote for a plutocracy that depends for its support on anti-government forces like the tea party, Southern racists, religious fanatics, and war investors in the military-industrial complex. It does no good to say that “Romney is a good man, not a racist.” That may be true, but he needs a racist South as part of his essential support. And the price they will demand of him comes down to things like Supreme Court appointments. (The Republicans have been more realistic than the Democrats in seeing that presidential elections are really for control of the courts.)

    The independents, too ignorant or inexperienced to recognize these basic facts, are the people most susceptible to lying flattery. They are called the good folk too inner-directed to follow a party line or run with the herd. They are like the idealistic imperialists “with clean hands” in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American—they should wear leper bells to warn people of their vicinity.

    The etherialists who are too good to stoop toward the “lesser evil” of politics—as if there were ever anything better than the lesser evil there—naively assume that if they just bring down the current system, or one part of it that has disappointed them, they can build a new and better thing of beauty out of the ruins. Of course they never get the tabula rasa on which to draw their ideal schemes. What they normally do is damage the party closest to their professed ideals.

    I don’t know why some progressives come out at election time to bash the more liberal of the two candidates, when the more sensible course of action would be to try to move the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction between elections. Unger’s monologue consists mainly of a wish-list of lefty reforms with barely a nod in the direction of how we’re supposed to bring them about. What is so complicated about the idea of supporting the lesser evil on election day, but also keeping your eye on the long game? Conservatives seem to have become pretty adept at this “walk and chew gum at the same time” approach to politics; they support viable Republican candidates who deviate from conservative orthodoxy all the time, but they’ve also been very successful at building institutional power and gaining influence in the G.O.P. This has been a decades-long effort, but conservatives have essentially established their preferred positions on a host of issues as Republican orthodoxy. Seems like a smarter approach than “destroy the village to save it.”

  • The fog of (just) war: more on just war and the “kill list”

    To follow up a bit on the last post, here’s a good piece published in Boston Review by Georgetown law professor David Luban, looking at the “drone war” more broadly in the context of just war theory.

    Luban homes in on some of the thornier issues surrounding the targeted killing program: distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants, the question of proportionality, and whether “the decision-making process is based on a genuinely skeptical, probing structure, with a heavy burden of proof on those proposing a killing and an institutionalized ‘devil’s advocate’ to argue against each and every deadly ‘nomination.’” Despite recent reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, “the process still remains essentially shrouded in fog.”

    Assuming that it’s permissible to use force in self-defense, Luban says, “targeted killings” aren’t necessarily immoral per se. “If anything, targeted killing is better than untargeted killing, which the laws of war call ‘indiscriminate’ and a war crime.”

    Among this welter of arguments about targeted killing, the genuine issues of principle are whether self-defense requires it and proportionality permits it. The question of where the zone of combat ends and civilian rules begin is important, but it is a question of line-drawing, not of moral principle. If self-defense is a just cause of war, and if killing is necessary for self-defense (a big if), then targeted killing is permissible–provided that it targets only enemy fighters, keeps civilian casualties low, and actually does more good than harm in defending ourselves.

    But this last one is a “far from a settled question,” Luban says, because the drone war may be creating more terrorists than it kills due to, for example, the radicalizing of Yemenis angered by the drone attacks. Add to this worries about the “opacity and unaccountability” of the program, and it’s far from clear that it is, on balance, a good idea.

  • Do the evolution

    As everyone not living under a rock now knows, in an interview with ABC yesterday, President Obama–who recently had said that his views were “evolving”–announced that he now supports the right of same-sex couples to get married.

    Some liberal critics complained that Obama’s announcement does nothing to change the status quo, with marriage still being essentially a state matter. This of course was vividly demonstrated just two days ago by North Carolina’s amendment of its state constituion to exclude recognition of any relationships other than heterosexual marriage, even civil unions.

    But others pointed out–such as in this article–that this may be part of a broader strategy on the part of the administration. This strategy includes its ending of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and its decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court. In addition to being good ideas on the merits, these may help set the legal stage down the road for the courts to recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. As Chris Geidner, the author of the article, sums it up, “Obama’s legal, policy and personal views are not in any way contradictory and present a clear path forward toward the advancement of marriage equality across the country.”

    Also worth noting is that the president couched his change of mind in explicitly religious terms. Writing at Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner highlights this part of Obama’s comments:

    when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a as a dad and a husband and hopefully the better I’ll be as president.

    Posner goes on to contend that

    Obama didn’t just endorse same-sex marriage today. He abandoned conservative religious rhetoric about it and signaled that religious conservatives, even his close religious advisors, don’t own the conversation on what Christianity has to say about marriage.

    Similarly, Ed Kilgore writes today that Obama’s “evolution” actually puts him in closer alignment with his own relgious tradition, the United Church of Christ, which has affirmed same-sex relationships as a denomination since 2005:

    Relgious conservatives may scoff at the UCC (or the Episcopalians, or other mainline denominations that are, to use the buzzword, “open and affirming” to gay people). But the UCC is the country’s oldest Christian religious community, and among other things, was spearheading the fight against slavery back when many of the religious conservatives of the early nineteenth century were largely defending it as a divinely and scripturally ordained instituion.

    So Obama has pretty strong authority for saying there’s no conflict between his faith and support for same-sex marriage.

    Liberals are prone to arguing in bloodless, technocratic terms, so it was nice to see Obama making the case in explicitly moral–even religious–language. I personally think liberals could stand to do this more often.

    Of course, no one seriously doubts, I think, that there was at least some degree of political calculation in this announcement. (Do presidents ever say anything that isn’t politically calculated to some degree?) And it remains to be seen if that calculation will pay off in November. But even granting mixed nature of his motives (and Christians of all people should be the first to acknowledge that we never act from completely pure motives), it was the right thing to do. Nice job, Mr. President.

  • A dime’s worth of difference, 2012 edition

    If you follow writers associated with what I’ll broadly call the “disaffected Left,” you’d be forgiven for thinking that there are few if any substantive differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Both, we’re told, are content with the corporate plutocracy, support a hawkish foreign policy and an ever-expanding surveillance state, are open to making cuts to entitlement programs, and generally do not present significantly different choices for the future of American society.

    Dig a little deeper and you’ll get into a common litany of betrayals that Obama has perpetrated: the expansion of drone warfare, continuation of Bush-era civil liberties abuses, a timid and incremental approach to health-care reform, and excessive obsequiousness to Wall Street being among the most often cited.

    And there’s truth to virtually all of this! Obama hasn’t governed as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal nor has he transcended partisan animosity to usher in a new era of beyond-red-and-blue politics. He’s done stuff that anyone on the “Left,” broadly defined, should oppose. I personally have been most disappointed in his record on civil liberties and foreign affairs, but I also agree with much of the left-wing criticism of his domestic and economic policies.

    All that said, however, there remain significant differences between Obama and Romney that will have major effects on people’s lives, depending on who’s elected. Here’s Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly’s “Political Animal” blog to summarize:

    Okay, I get it. But even if you think Obama has been a disastrous failure, or has betrayed the progressive coalition that supported him in 2008, the fact remains that if Mitt Romney is elected president and (as will probably happen if he wins) Republicans maintain control of the House and secure control of the Senate, the Ryan budget will almost certainly be enacted and implemented during 2013. If Obama wins, it won’t. If Romney wins, the odds of a constitutional right to abortion surviving the next four years go down to something like single digits; If Obama wins, it’s a very different proposition. If Romney wins, a war with Iran becomes something like a 50-50 proposition; not so much if Obama wins.

    Perhaps none of these things matter as much as Obama’s failure to reverse many Bush-era civil liberties policies, his failure to pursue single-payer health reform; his failure to nationalize the banks or pursue criminal penalties against corporate malefactors; his failure to convince the country that Keynes was right after all. But they actually do matter to a lot of people who will be affected by little things like the destruction of the New Deal and Great Society social net, and the potential unravelling of the constitutional structure that has made anything approaching progressive policies possible over the last several decades.

    Now Kilgore is a longtime Democratic strategist, but even allowing for some partisan cheerleading, this seems about right to me. Although he wants to tinker with it in a (possibly misguided) attempt to make it more fiscally sustainable, Obama accepts and even defends the basic post-New Deal social compact. The Romney-Ryan G.O.P., however, is a different story. In fact, opposition to the New Deal–and its principle that the government should ensure a basic level of economic security–is arguably the animating impulse of the modern conservative movement.

    Similarly with foreign policy. Do I wish Obama was more dovish? Why, yes I do. But there are still important differences between his brand of liberal internationalism and the vision of unilateral hegemony favored by conservatives. And these are literally differences of life and death, possibly for many thousands of people.

    To be clear, I’m not arguing that anyone is morally obliged to vote for Obama. But there are real differences between the candidates, even if not as many–or as significant–as we might like.

  • Let’s be clear: Romney’s a conservative

    A major part of the media narrative concerning the all-but-concluded Republican primary has been that Mitt Romney is “really” a moderate who has had to appear more conservative than he is in order to woo G.O.P. primary voters. This assumption of Romney’s moderation is based in part on his legitimately centrist record as governor of Massachusetts. Some have drawn the conclusion that Romney is a man of no fixed principles who will basically say or do anything to get elected. This in turn leads to the inference that Romney will move back to the center during the general election and govern from the center if he’s elected.

    In today’s Washington Post, E.J. Dionne throws some cold water on this comforting theory:

    It turns out that there is at least one question on which Mitt Romney is not a flip-flopper: He has a utopian view of what an unfettered, lightly taxed market economy can achieve.

    Similarly, Think Progress has a short piece offering “8 reasons why Mitt Romney is more right-wing than George W. Bush.” These include his call for deeper and more regressive tax cuts, plan for converting Medicare into a voucher system, opposition to existing fuel efficiency standards, and professed agnosticism about the causes of climate change, among other things.

    On the foreign policy front, conservative blogger Daniel Larison has noted that Romney has ratcheted up his belligerent rhetoric on Iran and surrounded himself with neoconservative foreign policy advisors. He has (ludicrously) characterized President Obama’s foreign policy as one of “appeasement” and “apologizing for America,” suggesting a return to Bush-style unilateralism.

    Personally, I don’t think it’s important to try and discover what a politician “really” believes in his heart of hearts. What’s important is the positions he publicly stakes out, the constituencies he’s pledged fealty to, and the type of people he surrounds himself with (and will likely staff his administration with). Any radical about-face will cost political capital. On all these fronts, Romney looks, walks, and quacks like a conservative.

  • The failure of welfare reform

    The 1996 welfare-reform law, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton (who famously said that the “era of big government is over”), has been hailed by people in both parties as a great triumph. It replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (emphasis on “temporary”). The TANF program restructured the funding of federal assistance to the poor, creating block grants to be administered by states. Crucially, it also imposed strict limitations on the amount of time someone could receive benefits, increased requirements to move people off the rolls and into jobs, and gave states much more flexibility in designing their programs.

    At first, it did seem like a success, and the direst predictions of some of the critics (Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned of children sleeping on city grates) didn’t come to pass. Welfare caseloads plummeted, and a booming economy seemed to promise jobs for anyone who wanted one.

    Of course, the story in 2012 is quite a bit different. In the wake of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and a continuing unemployment rate hovering around double digits, the seams of the revamped welfare system are starting to pull. This story from the New York Times details how cash-strapped and jobless people (many of them single mothers) are coping with the absence of state support:

    [M]uch as overlooked critics of the restrictions once warned, a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the cash welfare rolls have barely budged.

    Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession — in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

    The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

    The article notes a couple of interesting facts. First, because the food stamp program is fully funded by federal dollars, while TANF comes via state block grants, states have been pushing people toward food stamps. (Hence the favorite GOP talking point about soaring food stamp enrollment under President Obama is actually a result, at least in part, of welfare reform.) Second, the “greater flexibility” given to states under TANF allows them to divert funds from providing cash assitance to the poor and unemployed to other uses–and not always ones that directly help the intended beneficiaries of the program. Or, as a representative from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it: “The states use the money to fill budget holes.” The upshot is that, despite increased economic hardship, the flow of direct aid has been slowing to a trickle. (It’s also worth mentioning, as the article points out, that this kind of structure–block grants to states and incresed restrictions–is one that Repbulcians like Rep. Paul Ryan would like to apply to other welfare-state programs, like Medicare.)

    The story notes that “the number of very poor families appears to be growing.”

    Pamela Loprest and Austin Nichols, researchers at the Urban Institute, found that one in four low-income single mothers nationwide — about 1.5 million — are jobless and without cash aid. That is twice the rate the researchers found under the old welfare law. More than 40 percent remain that way for more than a year, and many have mental or physical disabilities, sick children or problems with domestic violence.

    Welfare reform was driven by the assumption that jobs were available and that the only problem was the “perverse incentives” created by the existing welfare program. This was, and is, a popular view in conservative and “neo-liberal” circles. Take away the cash assistance, the theory went, and people would be “incentivized” (i.e., forced) into participation in the workforce. Whatever the merits of this as an explanation for why people remained on welfare, it falls apart if there aren’t enough jobs to go around. And for better or for worse, we aren’t, as a nation, committed to a policy of full employment. (During the Depression, for example, the government just flat-out created jobs for people.) Without the jobs is it any surprise that people turn to dubious means to feed themselves and their families?

    Secular liberalism and Christian social thought agree that a society should be judged, in significant part, by how its worst-off and most vulnerable members fare. By this measure, it’s very difficult to judge welfare reform a success.

  • Competing goods, sympathy, and democracy

    The Obama administration’s decision, as part of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, to require religiously affiliated institutions to provide contraception coverage in employee health plans has, not surprisingly, caused quite a stir. Personally, I’ve had a hard time forming a strong opinion on the issue, despite the fact that both conservatives and liberals have deployed near-apocalyptic rhetoric in arguing about it.

    I think part of why I find it hard to come down clearly on one side or the other is that we seem to be dealing with incommensurable goods here. On one hand, the Catholic Church–or at least its leadership–is claiming that this requirement is a violation of the freedom of religion and of the church’s conscience. If a Catholic hospital or university, say, is required to pay for coverage that includes birth control, the church is subsidizing behavior it believes to be immoral. On the other hand, supporters of the administration’s position say that providing universal access to contraception enhances people’s–particularly women’s–health, autonomy, and well-being. Further, they argue that the church shouldn’t be able to impose its views on its employees who don’t happen to be Catholic, which is a significant number of them. (The ruling doesn’t apply to organizations with more explicitly “religious” purposes like the local parish church, only to organizations that provide a public service.)

    For my part at least, I think both the freedom and relative autonomy of religious organizations to function according to their own convictions and ensuring widespread access to birth control are good things. But I have no clear sense of which should trump the other when they conflict. And it doesn’t help to put this in terms of rights (e.g., the right to religious freedom vs. the right to contraception) for the simple reason that there’s no clear or universally agreed-upon way of adjudicating between such competing rights-claims.

    Conservatives have argued that the ruling is a clear violation of religious liberty. But we accept circumscriptions of rights all the time in the name of the common good. There is no “absolute” right to property or free speech. And we don’t permit discrimination based on race or gender in most cases, even if it’s rooted in some deeply held and sincere religious conviction.

    By contrast, some liberals have argued that the case is clear-cut because anyone who takes the state’s money (whether in the forms of tax breaks or subsidies, or direct payments such as Medicare or Medicaid patients or federal student aid) has to play by the state’s rules. But this begs the question because, in a democratic society at least, the state’s rules are supposed to be contestable and subject to debate. What the opponents of the policy are claiming in this case is that the rule in question is wrong.

    I’m not usually one to wring my hands about a lack of charity and civility in public debate, partly because I think “civility-policing” can and often is used to suppress strongly expressed, unpopular, or non-mainstream positions. But in this case I can’t shake the impression that neither side is particularly interested in trying to sympathetically understand the view of the other. I’ve seen conservatives say that this represents nothing less than a “war on religion.” On the other hand, I’ve seen liberals say that this shows that religion just needs to up and die already. Whatever you think of the case on its merits, I don’t think you can argue that this is a healthy attitude for citizens in a pluralistic, democratic society to take.

    I guess for me what this comes back to is the simple fact that politics always involves trade-offs among competing goods. Unmixed progress is rare; more often, gaining one good comes only by giving up another. In this case, both sides seem unwilling to admit that the other is defending a legitimate good. But my hunch is that the ability to recognize that our political opponents are often trying to defend legitimate goods and to sympathetically enter into their perspective is essential to the well-being of a democratic society. It also seems like the right thing to do.

  • Do we need a Christian party?

    Today I came across this article (via Crystal) arguing that American Christians should abandon the Republican and Democratic parties and form a “Christian party” that embraces something like Phillip Blond‘s “Red Tory” or “Big Society” program:

    British theologian and political philosopher Phillip Blond correctly notes that, “the current political consensus” in the United States is “left-liberal in culture and right-liberal in economics. And this is precisely the wrong place to be.” It’s also the fundamental reason why Christians cannot be at home in either political party – the Christian vision of the social and economic order is almost exactly the opposite of the current consensus.

    The author, Michael Stafford, a lawyer and Catholic, argues that we need an American version of a European-style Christian democratic party to put this vision into action:

    What would the views of a hypothetical presidential candidate from an American Christian Democratic Party look like? I think they would closely track Marcia Pally’s description of the ideal candidate new evangelicals are longing for, a candidate neither of the current major political parties are capable of producing – “someone who will help the poor, protect the planet and dramatically reduce the need for abortion, someone who will help both secular and faith-based organizations to do this work.”

    I’d be the last to deny that both our major political parties have significant flaws. But even if it was possible to overcome the institutional barriers to third party success in the U.S. (ballot access, campaign finance, and our first-past-the-post election system), I don’t think that a “Christian” political party is particularly desirable.

    Lucky for me, I don’t have to spell out the reasons why in any great detail, because this was ably done by C.S. Lewis over 70 years ago in an essay called “Meditation on the Third Commandment.”* Lewis points out that a Christian party “must either confine itself to stating what ends are desirable and what means are lawful or else it must go further and select from among the lawful means those which it deems possible and efficacious and give to these its practical support.” However, all political parties generally agree on ends: happiness, security, freedom, etc. Where they disagree is about what means are most effective in attaining these ends. But Christians, as Christians, have no special expertise or insight into what means will be most effective.

    Lewis goes on to argue that, if all Christians formed a party, they would inevitably disagree over the means to attaining their ends. Lewis imagines three “types” of Christians who might make up such a party: an authoritarian, a democrat, and a revolutionary radical. All agree about the ends, but disagree radically about the preferable means. So what happens?

    The three types represented by these three Christians presumably come together to form a Christian Party. Either a deadlock ensues (and there the history of the Christian Party ends) or else one of the three succeeds in floating a party and driving the other two, with their followers, out of its ranks. The new party — being probably a minority of the Christians who are themselves a minority of the citizens — will be too small to be effective. In practice. it will have to attach itself to the un-Christian party nearest to it in beliefs about means — to the Fascists if Philarchus has won, to the Conservatives if Stativus, to the Communists if Sparticus. It remains to ask how the resulting situation will differ from that in which Christians find themselves today.

    The chief danger here (and this is presumably what the title of the essay means to refer to) is that a Christian party would be tempted to give its political views a kind of divine sanction:

    By the mere act of calling itself the Christian Party it implicitly accuses all Christians who do not join it of apostasy and betrayal. It will be exposed, in an aggravated degree, to that temptation which the Devil spares none of us at any time — the temptation of claiming for our favourite opinions that kind and degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to our Faith. The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal, is always great.

    […]

    All this comes from pretending that God has spoken when He has not spoken. He will not settle the two brothers’ inheritance: `Who made Me a judge or a divider over you?’ By the natural light He has shown us what means are lawful: to find out which one is efficacious He has given us brains. The rest He has left to us.

    What Lewis suggests is precisely the course of action that Mr. Stafford is arguing against: Lewis says that instead of forming their own party, Christians should act as “leaven” in the existing political parties. He suggests that Christians might establish an interdenominational “Christian Voters Society” that would “draw up a list of assurances about ends and means which which every member was expected to exact from any political party as the price of his support.” I take it that what Lewis has in mind here is a determination of what ends and means are “lawful” (i.e., morally permissible or obligatory) rather than what means are effective in bringing about desired ends.

    In a fallen world where our knowledge is inevitably limited and our motives are clouded by self-interest, faithful Christians, like everyone else, are going to disagree on political issues. As Lewis argues, to try and paper over this disagreement with the formation of a Christian party will either result in political failure or religious betrayal.
    ——————————————————————–
    *Found in the collection God in the Dock; a slightly truncated version can be found here.

  • Silly season

    I haven’t been following the Republican primaries all that closely–partly because it’s too depressing, but also in part because I’ve been convinced virtually from the get-go that Mitt Romney will ultimately be the nominee. Nevertheless, what’s apparent even to the casual observer is that the G.O.P. intends to rerun the playbook they used in the 2008 election by attempting to brand Barack Obama as fundamentally un-American.

    Romney thinks Obama wants to turn America into a “European-style welfare state”; Newt Gingrich is convinced (or wants to convince us) that the president is a “Saul Alinsky radical.” Obama, we’re told, intends to preside over the United States’ “decline” into a second-tier power, relinquishing our status as the global hegemon.

    If this was unconvincing as an attack on candidate Obama in 2008–and the voters seemed to agree that it was–how much less convincing is it against President Obama in 2012? After all, the Obama Administration’s first term has, if anything, confirmed the hopes (or suspicions) of those of us who always saw Obama as essentially a center-left pragmatist, if an unusually charismatic and eloquent one. From the economics of “austerity-lite” to the killing of Osama bin Laden and the escalation of the war in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, Obama has rarely strayed from the centrist playbook, for better or worse (and in my view it’s been a little bit of both).

    I guess what I find so dispiriting about this is that it’s virtually impossible to have a good-faith debate about the problems facing the country when one party is attacking what amounts to a fantasy version of the current occupant of the Oval Office. Moreover, when the president is perpetually under the burden to prove that he’s not a “radical” or “socialist,” genuinely liberal or progressive ideas become that much more marginalized. Come to think of it, maybe that’s the point.