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I finally got around to reading this fairly lengthy piece on the Darfur situation from this month’s First Things. The author, Allen Hertzke, criticizes religious human rights activists for not bringing the same zeal and attention to bear on Darfur that they brought to the persecution of Christians (and animists) in southern Sudan. He also makes the case that there’s a lot that can be done short of military intervention to alleviate the situation.

Lately I’ve been thinking about my economic philosophy. Not that I really have anything so grand, mind you, but certain quizzes notwithstanding, I don’t really think I adhere to what we would call economic conservatism.

As I see it, is that concentrations of economic power and the accompanying inequality they foster are genuine problems. Conservatives and libertarians are much too sanguine about the distribution of wealth in societies like ours in my opinion. On the other hand, too much of progressivism and liberalism lends itself to a certain kind of centralized nanny statism.

So, is it possible to curtail concentrations of economic power without concentrating a dangerous amount of power in the state in the process? Apart from the inherent problems of a powerful state, there is the familiar problem of “regulatory capture,” i.e. when the economic interests that are supposedly being regulated end up gaining influence over the agencies that are supposed to be regulating them.

One of my favorite social critics is the late Christopher Lasch. In his book The True and Only Heaven he criticized the prevalent ideology of “progress” – the assumption that more and more people would enjoy a greater measure of prosperity. This ideology has right- and left-wing variants, depending on whether the unfettered market or centralized social engineering is seen as the vehicle for social progress. Lasch thought that, if nothing else, ecological constraints had falsified the ideology of progress. In addition, the capitalism championed by the Right destabilized and eroded communities, while the government paternalism of the Left threatened to make ordinary people wards of the state with their lives being planned by a bevy of bureaucratic “experts.”

Instead Lasch favored what he called “populism.” But this was more of an ideal than a worked out economic or political program. Lasch’s populism valorizes what he considered to be lower-middle-class or “petit bourgeois” values of local community, solidarity, dedication to craft, loyalty and self-denial. In essence, it is an ethic of limits that doesn’t expect ever-expanding wealth and opportunity, but finds satisfaction in concrete attachments to family, neighborhood, honest work, and civic participation.

Lasch’s vision combined a desire for a certain level of economic egalitarianism with a distrust of the state and a commitment to what we might call “traditional values.” But it’s not entirely clear that such a state of affairs is possible (assuming that it’s desirable). Is it possible to ensure a measure of economic independence for working people without an expansive welfare state? Is it, as some have suggested, that it’s the state that makes the concentration of wealth possible through the various subsidies and supports it provides to big business? Is a kind of Jeffersonian agrarianism/populism feasible in the 21st century, or is that just nostalgia?

Salon has an interview with Richard Cizik, vice president of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals. Cizik is on a mission to convert evangelicals to what he calls “creation care” – an environmentally-friendly agenda that takes seriously issues like global warming.

I admit I’m sort of ambivalent about this kind of thing. On the one hand, it’s good to see evangelicals moving beyond a narrow identification with the Republican Party and toward a greater degree of political independence. And most of what Cizik suggests seems sensible to me.

He wants

Christians to shape their personal lives in creation-friendly ways by practicing effective recycling, conserving resources, and experiencing the joy of contact with nature. We urge government to encourage fuel efficiency, reduce pollution, encourage sustainable use of natural resources, and provide for the proper care of wildlife and their natural habitats. There are still plenty who wonder, does advocating this agenda mean we have to become liberal weirdoes? And I say to them, certainly not. It’s in the scripture. Read the Bible.

On the other hand, I’m not sure what I think about having every political issue under the sun couched in religious terms. Cizik talks openly about the “sinfulness” of despoiling the earth and how he had a “conversion experience” which convinced him that global warming is “a phenomenon of truly biblical proportions.” My worry about this is that when you treat a position on a particular political issue as the fruit of religious illumination you risk closing the door to reason and compromise. It’s easy to slide from “The Bible tells us to care for the environment/the poor/the unborn/etc.” to “The Bible tells us to support this particular program or bill or politician.” This can give an absolutist cast to political positions that they don’t merit.

After last year’s election the response of some parts of what we can call the “Religious Left” has been to try to beat the Religious Right at their own game by insisting that their preferred policies are the ones really mandated by the Bible. But the Bible, it seems to me, doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t provide us with a political platform any any straightforward way. And to insist that it does risks further dividing Christians.

I’ve turned on the Blogger feature that requires commenters to type in a displayed line of characters before submitting their comments. Recently I’ve started getting a lot of comment spam, so hopefully that’ll help stem the tide. Folks should still be able to make anonymous comments if they wish.

An op-ed from Marilyn Golden, a disability rights activist:

Today the Assembly Judiciary Committee begins hearings on AB 654, which would legalize assisted suicide in California. There is a widespread public perception that those opposed to legalization are religious conservatives, and the logical position for a liberal is in support.

But the coalition that’s formed to oppose the bill, Californians Against Assisted Suicide (http://www.ca-aas.com/) shows a diversity of political opinion that may be surprising to those who have not looked closely at the issue. In opposition are numerous disability rights organizations, generally seen as liberal-leaning; the Southern California Cancer Pain Initiative, a group associated with the American Cancer Society; the American Medical Association and the California Medical Association; and the Coalition of Concerned Medical Professionals, which does anti-poverty work in poor communities. Catholic organizations are in the mix, but no one could consider this a coalition of religious conservatives. They represent many groups coming together across the political spectrum. Why?

Perhaps the most significant reason is the deadly mix between assisted suicide and profit-driven managed health care. Again and again, health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and managed care bureaucracies have overruled physicians’ treatment decisions, sometimes hastening patients’ deaths. The cost of the lethal medication generally used for assisted suicide is about $35 to $50, far cheaper than the cost of treatment for most long-term medical conditions. The incentive to save money by denying treatment already poses a significant danger. This danger would be far greater if assisted suicide is legal.

Though the bill would prohibit insurance companies from coercing patients, direct coercion is not necessary. If patients with limited finances are denied other treatment options, they are, in effect, being steered toward assisted death. It is no coincidence that the author of Oregon’s assisted suicide law, Barbara Coombs Lee, was an HMO executive when she drafted it.

More here. (via Godspy)

On the Miers nomination:

The headline lately is that conservatives are stiffing the president. They’re in uproar over Ms. Miers, in rebellion over spending, critical over cronyism. But the real story continues to be that the president feels so free to stiff conservatives. The White House is not full of stupid people. They knew conservatives would be disappointed that the president chose his lawyer for the high court. They knew conservatives would eventually awaken over spending. They knew someone would tag them on putting friends in high places. They knew conservatives would not like the big-government impulses revealed in the response to Hurricane Katrina. The headline is not that this White House endlessly bows to the right but that it is not at all afraid of the right. Why? This strikes me as the most interesting question.

Here are some maybes. Maybe the president has simply concluded he has no more elections to face and no longer needs his own troops to wage the ground war and contribute money. Maybe with no more elections to face he’s indulging a desire to show them who’s boss. Maybe he has concluded he has a deep and unwavering strain of support within the party that, come what may, will stick with him no matter what. Maybe he isn’t all that conservative a fellow, or at least all that conservative in the old, usual ways, and has been waiting for someone to notice. Maybe he has decided the era of hoping for small government is over. Maybe he is a big-government Republican who has a shrewder and more deeply informed sense of the right than his father did, but who ultimately sees the right not as a thing he is of but a thing he must appease, defy, please or manipulate. Maybe after five years he is fully revealing himself. Maybe he is unveiling a new path that he has not fully articulated–he’ll call the shots from his gut and leave the commentary to the eggheads. Maybe he’s totally blowing it with his base, and in so doing endangering the present meaning and future prospects of his party.

I think it was Marvin who once said you gotta give ’em positive reinforcement on those rare occasions when they do something right. So, huzzah! and kudos to the Senate for voting 90-9 to approve a rider attached to a military spending bill banning torture.

Their measure would ban the use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of any prisoner in the hands of the United States. It is a response to the abuse by U.S. personnel of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, which caused worldwide disgust.

McCain, who was a prisoner of war tortured by his captors during the Vietnam War, cited a letter written to him recently by Army Capt. Ian Fishback asking Congress to do justice to men and women in uniform. “Give them clear standards of conduct that reflect the ideals they risk their lives for,” Fishback wrote the senator.

“We owe it to them,” McCain said on the Senate floor. “We threw out the rules that our soldiers had trained on and replaced them with a confusing and constantly changing array of standards… . We demanded intelligence without ever clearly telling our troops what was permitted and what was forbidden.”

Graham, a former judge advocate in the Air National Guard, said: “We take this moral high ground to make sure that if our people fall into enemy hands, we’ll have the moral force to say, ‘You have got to treat them right.’ If you don’t practice what you preach, nobody listens.”

The nine bad guys who voted nay were Allard, Bond, Coburn, Cochran, Cornyn, Inhofe, Roberts, Sessions, Stevens (boo! hiss!). I note proudly that my two senators (Specter and Santorum) voted yea.(Sen. John Corzine of New Jersey didn’t vote.)

Still, the administration has suggested that Pres. Bush may veto it on the grounds that it would “tie the President’s hands.” Um, yeah; that’s kinda the point! That’s what laws do. Plus the final bill still has to worked out in conference with the House, but still a step in the right direction.

First Things now has a blog. (via Mark Shea)

Though, I have to admit, one of the things I like about First Things is that it takes the longer view on things rather than getting caught up in the ephemera of the moment. Still, this’ll no doubt be worth reading.

Is the church for acceptance and pardon or transformation and costly discipleship? Justification or sanctification?

Well, both actually, says John Garvey:

While insisting that we must take the cross and transformation seriously, the church should also be a place where those who are weak, who are not ready for the whole of what is demanded, can feel welcomed and loved. In one way or another, we all fall into this category. The church is often seen as smug, doubt-free, and self-righteous, and Christians of all confessions are often guilty as charged. When one kind of sinning is seen as more important-more really sinful-than other kinds, we miss the point of the struggle, whether the sins involved are sexual, or have to do with greed or compassion or selfishness. We are called to empty ourselves, as Christ did, called to a radical humility, and morality is only part of this process.

Pro-life liberal Melinda Henneberger says social conservatives and pro-lifers have been played for suckers:

Among pro-lifers, I have long held the minority view that Bush never had the slightest intention of packing the Supreme Court with justices who would seek to overturn the 1973 decision legalizing abortion. Karl Rove would throw himself in front of a train before he let that happen.

So where did I get my inside intel on this?

There have been several not-so-subtle signals from Bush himself. When asked, during his first campaign, whether he thought the decision should be overturned, he said the country was not ready.

At a news conference in Iowa in 2000, he was asked whether he would counsel a friend or relative who had been raped to have an abortion. He answered, “It would be up to her.”

That same year, Ari Fleischer, his press secretary at the time, said this to clarify his views on the issue: “There are several actions he thinks we can take and we should take and he will seek to take that can help make abortion more rare in America.” Oh.

Then there are the statements from the women in his life. The president’s mother and former First Lady, Barbara Bush, said this on banning abortion on ABC’s This Week in 1999: “I don’t think it should be a national platform. There’s nothing a president can do about it, anyway.”

First Lady Laura Bush went even further. When asked on NBC’s Today show in 2001 whether she thought Roe should be overturned, she said, “No, I don’t think it should be overturned.” Could she have been any clearer?

All the president’s talk about a “culture of life” might even have been sincere up to a point, of course; doesn’t everybody think they’re for a culture of life?

And it certainly did the trick for him. Many people I know—most of them pro-life Catholics who oppose the war and much of the rest of Bush’s domestic agenda—felt obligated to vote for the president on this one issue.

So will social conservatives now admit they’ve been had? Probably not.

I was surprised in 1999-2000 when social conservatives so readily jumped on the Bush bandwagon. I mean, this was the scion of the Bush family we were talking about – standard-bearers of country-club Republicanism. In retrospect, it looks more than a little like the syndrome that afflicted Democrats last year – to settle immediately on whoever seemed most “electable” and not worry too much about what his actual positions were.