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Title: Statist vs. Liberal : What a crock
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URL Source: http://www.nolanchart.com/article1489.html
Published: Nov 3, 2008
Author: Logical Premise
Post Date: 2008-11-03 17:45:09 by christine
Keywords: None
Views: 58
Comments: 2
I'd like to preface this article with an acknowledgement -- there is no Statist canditate nor is there a "Statist" party running. That being said, the truth is that all of the Democrats in this campaign are basically fence-sitting Statists and the Republicans are basically Statists, too. Oh, I bet that stings. But let's talk about "real" Liberals, the type you read about and hear about and that are supposed to comprise the "core" of the Democratic party. You know, the ones O'Reilly and Rush are always bellyaching about. There are four basic premise points to the theory of Statism. The people cannot be trusted The state and it's totality is more important than the wishes of any one person or any one minority of people The state is there to be the check and balance to both the power of the mob and the tyranny of the elite. The state is absolute power, and requires complete transparency and the strongest controls possible Let's look at these one by one, as compared to liberals. 1. The people cannot be trusted with power Raw democracy, where one person = one vote and all people have the power over the government, is inimical to Statism. Statism belives only certain people throughout history have demonstrated -- through success in business, or charisma and vision, or support from the military -- their ability to lead a nation. It is these people we need in power -- the rich, the CEO's, the elite, the scientists, the doctors, the mega ministers. The average person is concerned first with their own well-being, then about what they feel is important. The mob cannot be trusted, and in it's unreasoning thought is the drive that created the idea of racism, that some groups are better. Liberalism, on it's surface, would decry this, and say everyone is equal. But if you look at liberal "policy", you will see that Liberals do not trust the people with power either. They tell the people that multiculturalism is somehow "as good as" American culture, that speaking other languages is okay, that the color of your skin means you deserve special slots in jobs, colleges, and in business dealings that whites don't get simply because of something that happened , at WORST, 50? years ago. They answer only with division and difference, never equality, and certainly never doing what the people want OR need, only what THEY -- the liberal elite -- THINK is best for the people. Well, hell. How is that any different than a statist? At least we're HONEST about it when we tell you that we don't think you have enough sense to govern yoursevles properly. Liberals do not trust the people with the power, they simply seek to keep everyone as divided and focused on their own wants and petty desires as possible. I'd never vote for Barack Obama. He's black, I'm black, and that's all we have in common. I vote on what is being said, and all I hear is a lot of talk about change, and a new direction, and nothing specific that will reduce the corruption and failure of this country. A statist government would concentrate the power of the government in the hands of those who know how to use it, and would take actions designed to benefit all of society. Liberals concentrate the power of the government into that of slick-speaking hucksters who don't give the people any more power, don't solve their problems, but pay attention to them in the form of broken quotas, broken promises, and broken government programs. 2. The state and it's totality is more important than the wishes of any one person or any one minority of people A statist believes the nation as whole matters more than the sum of it's parts, be that the various states that comprise it, or the minorities that make up it's population, or the religous beliefs that make it up, or what have you. The statist would regulate the economy both to ensure that private enterprise would be able to make a profit AND to keep the markets balanced, safe, and fair. The statist sees fair trade as a gimmick when other nations are tarrifing the hell out of us, ane we would not stand for it. The statist sees the world as a whole, and isolationism is the stupidest possible action -- every SINGLE time we've isolated ourselves, we've gotten in trouble or had to fix things. (Remember Pearl Harbor?) And above all, statists do not give certain segments of the population advantages not offered to others, it just creates discontent and hate. Liberals would say the government is there to protect the people and provide a safety net. But that's only half the real answer. Government is ALSO there to protect and enhance our corporations and businesses so they can compete. It's there to support our industries so they don't have to deal with unfair competition overseas. And if world treaties threaten our industries, it's the government's job to go out there and work to change the policies, or make sure the business of America isn't hampered. A liberal doesn't care about business, he cares about what makes him seem to be "for the people". The Welfare and Nanny state is NOT a statist idea -- a statist would demand people work ,and welfare would be a government jobs program. If you didn't work, you got no benefits, and the state would jail you and put you to work there. A free ride benefits no one. Liberals also don't care about the nation as a whole. They don't care about the cuts in national defense they would have to pay for their social programs with, or their damage to our economy by their short-sighted eco-friendly approaches would have on our industries. Even statists wouldn't go so far as to put forth programs which mostl help a demographic of people who blatantly refuse to work and are never going to be of any productive use simply so we can feel like we helped someone "down on their luck". Liberals do this so they can gather votes -- they don't provide assistance that's worth anything, and they don't help the country as a whole. 3. The state is there to be the check and balance to both the power of the mob and the tyranny of the elite. A statist sees government as empowering everyone. It controls,regulates, and enhances our lives. It is a meta-constuct over and around and throughout society -- inhibiting crime, ensuring a free flow of resources and stopping injustice and radicalism. The state is therefore not only the champion of the people, but of the elite. It is there to support the common man and the billionare. They both pay taxes to it, they should both get benefits from it. Liberals seem to think the government is there to simply tax people as heavily as possible and redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, without actually providing jobs, or keeping our economy strong. We endured eight years of the Clintons, and the fact that the economy was good can be laid at the fact that he didn't do anything tremendously stupid, like, say, implement a 300 billion dollar war, or suggest we move to a trillion-dollar expense national health plan. In other words, we dodged a bullet. A liberal thinks the government is basically his wallet, and he will be happy to suggest pork and "welfare assistance" and support for "alternative lifestyles" and all other kinds of mess -- but what does he do for business? What benefits do those men and women who've busted their ass to make a lot of money get? WHY would anyone with more than a couple of million dollars to their name even want to live in this country under liberal rule? The government does nothing but hand your money off to any one asking for it, then has the unmitigated gall to disrupt the military, engage in unwise fiscal adventures, denegrate industry by heaping "environmental controls" on them, and imply that the rich are somehow evil for having money. Folks, if I seem to be repeating myself here, it's because no matter what part of government we talk about, the liberal answer is "tax and spend, tax and spend, down with the rich, give it to the poor". I grew UP poor. I don't plan to be poor again. But you know what? If I knew I could afford a nice house and a good car and all the food I needed, and I wouldn't have to work for that, do you think I would? Maybe I would. I bet a lot of people wouldn't, becoming a drain on our economy -- and yet to listen to liberals, any actions against their plans would starve the homeless and condemn babies to death and all other sorts of tear-jerking gibberish. And people say that Dr. Paul is outlandish? 4. The state is absolute power, and requires complete transparency and the strongest controls possible A statist has no problem with privacy, public or private. I don't care if there are cameras at every street corner, or if I have a national ID, or if they have my DNA samples on file, or if they put a black box in my car to track my driving habits. You know why? Because I don't do anything wrong. If the invasion is there to make me safer then I'm happy for it. Liberty does not help me when I get put out of a store because I'm black, liberty does not help me when my house is broken into and the cops can't find who did it because we don't have neighborhood monitoring, liberty doesn't help me when my friend is killed and they can't match DNA evidence to anyone because we don't have a national DNA database. Privacy is the past. Liberals claim they are for privacy. And they are, if it's something like gays or transsexuals or whatever the freak of the week is they're championing. They're for privacy if you want to smoke weed (or snort cocaine for that matter), they're for privacy if you want to worship Satan. Oddly enough, though, they don't like the idea of privacy of business. They want all that to be transparent, and? have created great reams of crap so the SEC can spent time hassling business owners to produce huge piles of unread documents and so that everyone can know they are "safe" from "another Enron scandal". They are also not much for privacy when it comes to the rights of people to own guns , I've noticed. Or run their business how they like in terms of smoking. And yet, then AGAIN -- they aren't for transparancy in government. So I'm confused. They seem to want privacy for what they approve of, but not what they oppose -- and they don't like opening up about their own issues. (Remember Whitewater?) The upshot of all of this is that liberals come off sounding like hypocrites to me when it comes to privacy and the role of government in a person's life. It's NOT okay for the government to say you can't have an abortion, but it IS okay for them to hassle you about guns. They can't tell you that , as gays, you can't get married, but they CAN tell you, as a business owner, that you aren't ADA compliant and make you install ramps into your skydiving shop on the OFF CHANCE a guy in a wheel chair wants to skydive. All in all, liberals piss me off. They are , at best, oppportunists, using the discontent of the people and promising them all they want in return for votes. Clinton wasn't any better than Reagan or Bush, nothing changed, nothing got better, but somehow I'm supposed to see him as a guy who helped me? Liberalism is the idea that everyone is equal , but liberals really mean "everyone is equally not as good as we are, and we need to tell you how to live, speak, talk, and act'. If you comment on that, you're a racist or a sexist pig or bigoted or something. If you point out that all they do is drive out corporations and businesses and the rich from America with their stupidly high taxes, they say the people have a right to be supported. If Libertarians are stuck in their idealized version of a magical past where old documents can ensure freedom and happiness, then liberals are cold, cynical manipulators, using the wishes of the downtrodden, the mistakes of the past, and the tensions of the present to keep America divided, distrustful and despairing. They offer a lot of buzzwords like "change", "hope", and talk about the future, but nothing will change. If a Democrat wins, we'll still have an ineffectual Congress without the power to make the laws they need to, a broken Supreme Court acting beyond it's powers, a weak executive office, and a bunch of squabbling states, and nothing will be "better" except we may have a black or a woman president and we can tell ourselves that means we've made progress. Spare me.
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#1. To: christine (#0)
That statement is the comment to what this writer is. A communitarian (new age communist). And he is a very open element/supporter of the Hegelian dialectic. Communitarianism: America’s Downward Path to Obscurity By James T. Moore The American Dream is a reality that only can be attained with self-determination and freedom. And in America anything that hinders that in any way is reason for suspicion, concern, even contravening action. So when I ran across an unfamiliar word–communitarianism–and found out what it means, a red flag went up. The word surfaced in “The United Nations’ Global Straightjacket”, a heavily-documented book, by Joan Veon, which reveals everything that the UN is doing to subvert the principles, values, culture, and heritage of America. Communitarianism is a tricky word because it is long enough to be glossed over, obscure enough to sound harmless; and unattractive enough not to attract too much attention. But don’t be fooled. If you happen to know someone who claims he is a communitarian and is proud of it, don’t take it for granted that has joined a new third party, and pat him on the back just yet. A communitarian is an individual who is a member or supporter of a communistic community. Or, as Veon explains it, communitarianism is a new “marketing” concept, replacing the old communistic line of thinking, which passing time has turned into a non-sequitur for most Americans. Central to communitarianism (read: collectivism) is that no individual opinion should be dominant. Instead, individuals are “encouraged” to act for the “good” of the community. This suggests an authoritarian form of government, i.e. no opposition to THEIR way of thinking. And just who are these THEY? Anyone who is an enemy of individuality, self-determination and freedom. While the New World Order they are trying to peddle is supposed to exist as a global “community”, it still needs leadership—THEIR leadership. The neocons over at the Weekly Standard—the house organ of the Straussian neocon movement—have vehemently attacked former CIA analyst Ray McGovern in the wake of his confronting Donald Rumsfeld. In Bushzarro world, opposition to the occupation of Iraq is “extremism” and cheer leading the murder of around 200,000 Iraqis is patriotism. The Weekly Standard accuses McGovern of acting “as front man for an exceedingly unsavory group called Not In Our Name,” described as “a coalition formed in 2002 by the likes of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist party.” A quick Google search of the organization turns up little on its supposed communist affiliation, except by way of accusations made by the usual suspects—the rabid and vile freepers and predictably emanating from Frontpage Magazine, a website run with Scaife money by the former Marxist turned neocon, David Horowitz. It is interesting the neocons would call McGovern a commie, or rather a commie dupe. As is well-known, or should be, the Old Guard of the Straussian neocon movement is comprised of Trotskyites. “Authentic neocons descend from the Communist and socialist movements, with the most prominent leaders being Trotskyites (that is, ultra-Left Communists),” writes Dale Vree for the New Oxford Review. “Neoconservatism’s key founders trace their intellectual ancestry to the ‘New York Intellectuals,’ a group that originated as followers of Trotskyite theoretician Max Schactman in the 1930s and centered around influential journals like Partisan Review and Commentary (which is in fact published by the American Jewish Committee),” writes Kevin MacDonald. “In the case of neoconservatives, their early identity as radical leftist disciples shifted as there began to be evidence of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Key figures in leading them out of the political left were philosopher Sidney Hook and Elliot Cohen, editor of Commentary. Such men as Hook, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset, were deeply concerned about anti-Semitism and other Jewish issues. Many of them worked closely with Jewish activist organizations. After the 1950s, they became increasingly disenchanted with leftism. Their overriding concern was the welfare of Israel.” “Many of the top chieftains of the War Party are ex-leftists of one sort or another,” explains Justin Raimondo. “They owe more to Hegel, Marx, and Leon Trotsky than to Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. The ‘godfather’ of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol, was a Trotskyite in his youth, and the kibitzing that went on in Cubicle B at City College of New York has achieved the status of legend. The official line, of course, is that this was all just a youthful indiscretion and that any such allegiances have long since been put away in a trunk somewhere.” In essence, the Straussian neocons are Marxist reactionaries with a deep and long Jacobin streak. Raimondo continues: The ideological framework of neoconservative ideology is deeply rooted in the Marxist tradition. Francis Fukuyama, the boy wonder of the neocons, even came up with an application of the Hegelian dialectic as the ultimate rationale for American global hegemony in his famous article on “The End of History.” The Marxists, too, saw themselves as agents of History, and they constantly evoked images of modernity to justify their innumerable crimes against humanity. They came as “liberators”—a favorite word of Red Army propagandists, and one that our own Pentagon has since taken up with alacrity. The neocons retain the methods as well as the ideology of the left: party-line politics, periodic purges, and the nasty habit of smearing their opponents rather than engaging them in debate. The neocon method echoes that of its leftist progenitors: Once the party line is established—Israel must be unconditionally defended, Iraq must be utterly destroyed, Pat Buchanan must be smeared into silence—anyone who deviates is demonized. It should be noted that neocons such as David Horowitz and Stephen Schwartz are former communists who went over to the neocon Dark Side and brought their pedantic and doctrinaire baggage along for the ride. It is sincerely creepy to read Horowitz—he still sounds like a Marxist, although instead of evil capitalists he now excoriates Muslims and his former comrades and his response to the latter hints at the Stalinesque—they are traitors probably best herded in detention camps. Stephen Schwartz, who “speaks of Trotsky affectionately” (see Trotsky’s ghost wandering the White House, National Post), is a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard, a magazine owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (Murdoch also owns Fox News where neocons rant and rave daily). It is really quite strange to witness former (and in the case of Schwartz, apparently active) Trotskyites slamming Ray McGovern—a former CIA employee who presented morning intelligence briefings at the White House for years—as a commie dupe. McGovern is a distinguished military graduate who served in the US Army from 1962-64 as an intelligence officer, while most if not virtually all of the Straussian neocons are chicken hawks and military service shirkers (recall Cheney had “other priorities” during Vietnam and Rush Limbaugh skipped out due to a pilonidal cyst, an appropriate malady considering his vile personality). If indeed Not In Our Name is a commie front, it must not be the sort of communism approved by the Straussian neocons, a cabal of warmongers drawing ideological sustenance from vanguard Trotskyism, advocating “permanent revolution,” an ideology so radical and dangerous not even the fanatical Stalin would cotton to it. Instead, he had Leon Trotsky killed by assassin Ramón Mercader, who drove the pick of an ice axe into Trotsky’s skull in Mexico City, circa 1940. COMMUNITARIAN CRITICISMS AND LIBERAL LESSONS by Peter Berkowitz It is well known that a single work published in 1971, Rawls's A Theory of Justice, has been largely responsible for placing a form of liberalism, one devoted to both the protection of individual liberty and the securing of the social and economic bases of equality, at the top of the agenda of academic political theory. Inadequate consideration, however, has been given to the fact that, even though liberalism has a long and vaired history, the family of criticisms of liberalism which sprang up in the 1980's understood liberalism--even when not explicitly addressing Rawls's work--in roughly the way Rawls presented it. This family of criticisms focused primarily on three areas: liberalism's alleged indifference to conceptions of human flourishing; its supposed exclusion of the pursuit of higher goals from the domain of politics; and inattention to the ways in which a well-ordered society and a good life depend upon the exercise of virtue, the responsibilities of citizenship, and participation in a common political life. Somewhat misleadingly, this family of criticisms came to be known as the communitarian critique of liberalism. The communitarian critique was promptly countered by a rejoinder from a variety of liberals, including Rawls himself. The liberal rejoinder tended to pursue two lines of argument: First, that the communitarian critics mischaracterized liberalism, attributing to it rigid theoretical dichotomies and implausible assumptions about moral psychology and social life to which liberals were not committed either by intent or by implication; and second, that many of the practical reforms that communitarians endorsed were viable and indeed desirable within a liberal framework. Several books published in the last few years show that the time is ripe to take a step back and assess the course that the argument between liberals and their communitarian critics has run. There can be little doubt that the debate has been fruitful for liberalism. It has spurred liberals to articulate a richer and more flexible liberalism that is less embarrassed to acknowledge its dependence on institutions, practices, and beliefs which fall beyond the range of the liberal theorist's special expertise and the liberal regime's assigned jurisdiction. This more reflective and self-conscious liberalism is also better able to recognize its limitations and thus take measures to compensate for its weaknesses and disadvantages. And thanks in part to the communitarian challenge, liberal theorists have increasingly come to appreciate the capacity of a liberal framework to respect the role of moral virtue, civic association, and even religious faith in the preservation of a political society based on free and democratic institutions. A Communitarian Critique of Liberalism Daniel A. Bell, author of Communitarianism and its Critics, might well take exception to the emphasis I have placed on the advantages that have accrued to liberalism as a result of its encounter with communitarian criticism. For Bell argues that communitarianism constitutes a distinctive and desirable alternative to liberalism, and in his book, a lively dialogue between two Ph.D. candidates, one a communitarian and the other a liberal, he seeks to set forth a communitarian moral vision and explore some of its political implications. Bell's charming dialogue captures the spirit of the countless lively conversations that have transpired in university classrooms and cafeterias over the last decade as students have struggled to make sense of the varieties of criticism that leading communitarian theorists have levelled at liberalism. Yet Bell's dialogue is also valuable for the way in which it inadvertently displays a characteristic weakness of communitarian criticism. Although Bell plainly seeks to lay out the best arguments available on both sides of the debate and often admirably succeeds, he stacks the deck against liberalism by idealizing his communitarian heroine while depicting her liberal antagonist as inept and slightly pathetic. By making the communitarian, Anne, cosmopolitan, loyal to friends and family, progressive, and sensitive to the variety of ways of being human, while depicting Philip, the liberal, as an insecure, uncultivated, smug, sexist boor, Bell gives dramatic expression to the tendency on the part of communitarian thinkers to direct their criticism against a narrow and one-dimensional understanding of liberalism. This unfairness to liberalism should be embarrassing to communitarians, for in criticizing liberalism, communitarians have often neglected their own interpretive principle that to understand a belief or practice it is necessary to see it in the context of the tradition of shared meanings out of which it arose. Communitarians themselves have typically failed to appreciate that liberal thought is a tradition with a rich and varied history, and have neglected to understand liberal regimes in context as basic institutional frameworks for coping with a specific array of concrete challenges in a particular set of historical and cultural circumstances. Bell understands liberalism as Rawlsian liberalism, and understands Rawlsian liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine that is rooted in a vision of the autonomous self always capable of standing apart from and revising its ends. This comprehensive doctrine, according to Bell, requires state neutrality toward competing conceptions of the good life and hence is incapable of remedying or even addressing the harmful effects of the atomizing tendencies generated by contemporary liberal society. Giving too much attention to individual choice and paying too little attention to the common good, liberalism, Bell maintains, is responsible for a variety of social pathologies and is unable to respond to "communitarian concerns about loneliness, divorce, deracination, political apathy, and everything else connected with the breakdown of community in contemporary Western societies" Communitarianism, Bell argues, can offer a more compelling vision of the self, a richer account of politics, and a better understanding of the common good. And Bell maintains that communitarianism's superiority as a moral and political theory stems from the fact that it reflects our deepest shared understandings about the role that constitutive communities play in a well-lived life. Communitarians emphasize that human beings are not fundamentally autonomous or unencumbered selves but first of all social beings embedded in practices and beliefs that we do not make but which rather, in a sense, make us by constituting our identities and forming the frameworks within which we come to understand ourselves and know and care about others. From this metaphysical claim about the constitution of the self, and out of concern for the dignity and well-being of the individual selves that are so constituted (though they often fail to reflect on the provenance of this concern), communitarians infer the practical imperative to sustain and protect constitutive communities such as families, religions, the nation, and the variety of civic associations that give human life substance and depth. Bell is aware of the standard liberal fears that communitarianism arouses--that communities can be conformist, stultifying, and seedbeds of prejudice and superstition, and that communities may trample over individuals in the quest to achieve collective goals--but he does not take them very seriously. He claims tht such fears arise from purely abstract theoretical concerns but in practice do not reflect real threats are weak and unconvincing. His own examples, though, suiggest otherwise. For instance, Bell quickly dismisses the idea that the German people's embrace of Nazism reflected anything important about their shared values. Instead he speculates that Hitler managed to seduce them into embracing ideas at odds with their "prevailing moral beliefs and intuitions" by exploiting Weimar's economic and political instability. Ironically, while Bell chides liberals for engaging in counterfactual history and neglecting the traditions of actual communities, he himself here substitutes a speculative hypothesis for a consideration of the considerable historical evidence that traditional German culture--especially the well-documented prejudice against the Jews that had marked German culture since the Enlightenment--made the Germans particularly vulnerable to Hitler's terrible demagoguery. Similarly, Bell briskly rejects the view that Apartheid reflected the "prevailing moral beliefs and values" of white South Africans. Instead, Bell suggests, Apartheid stemmed from a failure by white South Africans to recognize the import of their deepest beliefs and intuitions. Maybe so. But Bell provides little evidence to support his suggestion and scarcely acknowledges the possibility that belief in the need to segregate the races--even if it was in tension with an unarticulated belief in the equality of human beings--was deeply held by white South Africans. In short, in his effort to quiet liberal worries about the communitarian abandonment of universal moral standards or rights, Bell comes very close to relying on the hope that "prevailing moral beliefs and intuitions" always more or less conform to basic liberal or universal principles; when they appear not to do so it is only because the community has failed to recognize or live up to the principles most its own. Gliding by the experiences of actual historical communities, Bell escapes to abstract theory to arrive at the dubious proposition that communities cannot be constituted by deeply held beliefs that are wrongheaded or evil. Communitarianism?--Or Liberalism Properly Understood Bell believes that the theoretical differences between liberalism and communitarianism have important practical consequences, and he seeks to show the distinctiveness of communitarian theory by identifying policy recommendations for the United States that flow from it. His communitarian proposals include stricter divorce laws, mandatory national service, civic education, and in general laws that encourage citizens to recognize that their own good consists in seeking the good of their nation. But despite Bell's insistence on the distinctiveness of communitarian theory, liberal principles are hard at work in his vaguely familiar amalgam of prescriptions. In his suppressed but fundamental reliance on moral principles rooted in contemporary liberalism, Bell is not alone among communitarian theorists. For example, in an instructive article on religion and constitutional law, Michael Sandel appears to take a stand against liberalism by arguing that the liberal principle of neutrality embedded in recent Supreme Court jurisprudence not only unwisely limits the public role of religion, but also discriminates against those for whom religious belief is constitutive of their identities "Religious Liberty--Freedom of Conscience or Freedom of Choice?" in Utah Law Review, 1989. Yet Sandel does not defend believers in traditional religion because he thinks their beliefs are true, or even useful to the larger political community. Rather, Sandel's key criticism of the contemporary liberal doctrines of freedom of choice is that it "fail[s] to respect persons bound by duties derived from sources other than themselves". In effect, Sandel attacks contemporary liberal jurisprudence because it fails to make good on the liberal promise to respect persons by promoting neutral laws. Sandel does not so much argue against neutrality, but rather, animated by an appreciation of the ways in which individuals are constituted by attachments and obligations not of their own making, he argues in favor of a truer neutrality, a more expansive and inclusive notion of neutrality than that envisaged by Rawlsian liberals. The time has come for communitarian-inspired theory to recognize the extent to which its criticisms and aspirations rest on and derive support from liberal principles. To do this, communitarians must avoid confusing Rawls's liberalism with liberalism as such. They must develop a greater appreciation of the historical varieties of liberalism. And they must reflect upon the implications for practice of the political conditions that their visions of reform usually presuppose, in particular a limited constitutional government, and a free, democratic, secure, stable, and prosperous society. In a revealing passage, Bell has his protagonist explain that there is no need for communitarians to worry about state coercion in measures designed to foster deeper communal attachments, because "basic civil and political liberties are taken as self-evident truths in liberal democracies, not in need of any justification". This belief, however, is historically uninformed and politically naive. As Rogers Smith has vigorously argued, liberalism in America has always had to contend with multiple and conflicting traditions ("Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America," in American Political Science Review, September 1993). Smith emphasizes, moreover, that liberalism's triumphs have been achieved through great struggles; and recent controversies in the United States--the multicultural quest for inclusion, the attack on civil liberties at the universities in the name of upholding a civilized community life, the debate over electoral reform to insure minority representation--along with the explosion of ethnic and nationalist hatred abroad, suggest that liberalism's struggles have by no means come to an end. What is especially needed now is a better understanding of the delicate interplay in liberal democracies between the goods of liberty and community, and a more supple appreciation of the alarming process by which the actualization of liberal and democratic principles has worked to corrode the very forms of association which sustain the practices of democratic self-government. A Liberal Case Against Community Like Bell, but this time on behalf of liberalism, Derek Phillips seeks to drive a wedge between communitarianism and liberalism. In Looking Backward, Phillips argues that communitarian aspirations are in fact rooted in mistaken notions about the extent and quality of community in the past. Communitarian theorists, Phillips observes, routinely contrast atomistic and acquisitive liberal society to a past in which people enjoyed the benefits of rich and robust community life. But, Phillips charges, communitarian theorists seldom define carefully what is meant by community and rarely supply historical evidence to support their contention that community as they understand it was once widespread and vibrant. Phillips sets out to correct these oversights. Drawing on key statements by principal communitarian thinkers, Phillips defines community as "a group of people who live in a common territory, have a common history and shared values, participate together in various activities, and have a high degree of solidarity". He then seeks to refute or at least discredit communitarianism by showing that such community did not flourish during the periods--revolutionary America, the High Middle ages, and fifth century Athens--that communitarians characteristically invoke. Yet the evidence of hierarchy, conflict, and severely limited political participation in each of these eras that Phillips assembles actually shows something quite different: what was rare in the past was a specific form of community, egalitarian community. Such historical knowledge is a welcome element in all thoughtful consideration of programs for building community in the present. Yet one can no more refute communitarianism by revealing a historical association between a politics of the common good and hierarchical and fractious social relations than one can rebut liberalism by showing that it has a tendency to produce atomized individuals and a culture of narcissism. Critics of communitarianism such as Phillips, who focus on the shortcomings of the historical communities from which communitarian theorists draw inspiration, offer scant reply to the central communitarian criticism: By resolutely working to emancipate the individual from authority, liberalism has contributed to the breakdown of the family, the dissolution of religious faith, the neglect of the wisdom embodied in custom and tradition, the erosion of civic associations, and consequently, to the formation of self-centered, isolated, and apathetic individuals poorly suited to the demands of self-government. Let us grant Phillips' key points: Egalitarian community seldom flourished in the past; the realization of an unqualified communitarian ideal would require an oppressive cultural homogeneity; a vigorous pursuit of community requires distinguishing members or insiders from nonmembers or outsiders and hence policies of exclusion; and a politics of the common good can be, and historically has been, an aristocratic undertaking by the wealthy and leisured few. What do such revelations tell us about the steps American liberalism may take, consistent with its own principles, to fortify itself by fortifying the various forms of community and voluntary association within the liberal state? Phillips thinks that revelations about the patterns of community in the past are extremely damaging to the communitarian perspective. In forming this judgment Phillips, like Bell, sharply distinguishes between the communitarian and liberal viewpoint; and, like Bell, Phillips asks us to choose between a communitarian political theory focused on community, virtue, and the common good, and a liberal one devoted to protecting individual rights and securing equality. But is this not a false choice? Toward a Liberal Synthesis That the dichotomy on which Bell the communitarian and Phillips the liberal agree is false is one claim of an impressive and tightly argued volume called Liberals and Communitarians. The co-authors, Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, blend their voices to produce a sympathetic reconstruction of the twists and turns that the quarrel between academic liberals and their communitarian critics has taken, and in the process Mulhall and Swift effectively offer a "synthetic resolution." Their fine book is not really an introduction, but rather a perceptive and critical exposition, for those already immersed in the controversy, of the major voices in the debate over academic or Rawlsian liberalism. Although, as the Preface explains, one of the authors has more liberal leanings and the other stronger communitarian inclinations, their book is not a dialogue, but rather the ripe fruit of a long dialogue between themselves and the political theorists whose views they explore. Mulhall and Swift conclude that a political theory that recognizes the primacy of the liberal principle of personal liberty or autonomy while giving due weight to the communitarian insight into the self's dependence on constitutive communities is possible, desirable, and well on the way to being worked out by leading liberal theorists. In their discussions of Rawls's recent work and the liberalism of Joseph Raz, Mulhall and Swift indicate the nature of the "synthetic resolution" they favor by showing how communitarian considerations can be incorporated into a liberal framework. Thus, for example, they show that in Political Liberalism Rawls in effect responds to the criticism that his theory of justice relies upon a controversial metaphysical notion of the autonomous self by arguing that the principles of liberal justice as he understands them should not be embraced on metaphysical grounds, but because they can be publicly justified to the vast majority of members of a pluralist society. His own theory of justice, he explains, is an elaboration of basic, widely shared intuitions about justice among citizens in liberal democracies. Insofar as his empirical claim about what citizens actually believe is correct, Rawls can be seen as engaged in the communitarian project of refining and elaborating his community's shared meanings. But this cannot be all that Rawls is doing. As Mulhall and Swift shrewdly point out, Rawls's motivation for finding and articulating the deepest beliefs of citizens and his commitment to the public justification of basic principles of justice is itself motivated by the liberal premise that citizens are free and equal, and that citizens show one another the respect each deserves by framing political arguments in terms that all reasonable persons can acknowledge. Like Rawls, but more expplicitly and delierately, Jospeh Raz rejects the hard and fast opposition between liberalism and communitarianism. Mulhall and Swift show that in The Morality of Freedom, Raz puts forward a perfectionist liberalism that defends autonomy as an ideal that liberal states should actively pursue. But autonomy, as Raz understands it, depends upon the discipline provided by a specific politiical culture and is achieved ina variety of voluntary associations and common activities. In carrying out its task of promoting autonomy, and consistent with the principles of toleration, the liberal state, Raz argues, ought to foster the forms of community in which autonomy can be most effectively exercised and most fully enjoyed. By building on arguments and insights made prominent by communitarian thinkers, Rowls's poltiical lioberalism and Raz's perfectionist liberalism admirably exemplify the flexibility, sympathy for the viewpoint of others, and self-critical rationality that characterize the liberal spirit at its best. But their contributions to the tradition should not be confused with the tradition itself. To appreciate the liberal spirit in its fullness, one must go beyond the local and at times parochial debate that Mulhall and Swift have so skillfully reconstructed. One must explore the neglected resources within the classical liberal tradition--a tradition ranging from Milton and Spinoza, through Locke, Montesquieu and Madison, to Kant, Mill, and Tocqueville--to understand the always changing and ever elusive balance between right and duty, private life and the public good, and the claims of equality and the demands of excellence on which limited self-government depends. This is not at all to say that the liberal tradition has all the answers to the questions raised by critics, communitarian or otherwise, but it is to maintain that one will not understand the real limits of contemporary liberalism before one understands liberalism at its best. The communitarian critique of Rawlsian liberalism did a great service by focusing attention on dimensions of moral and political life that recent academic liberal theory had neglected. This was a genuine achievement. "Rights talk" is now balanced by attention to responsibility and duty; leading liberal thinkers find themselves preoccupied with the content of character; and concern for the dignity and well-being of individuals has been complemented by consideration of the role that communities play in forming individuals who are capable not only of caring for themselves and cooperating for mutual advantage, but also of developing enduring friendships, sustaining marriages, and rearing children. Despite initial, giddy speculations about theoretical breakthroughs and eager expectations of the development of a new political alternative to liberalism, few communitarian critics are eager to say farewell to fundamental liberal principles. And liberal theorists have increasingly come to recognize that the practice of limited constitutional government, the protection of basic individual rights, and the promotion of virtues such as toleration depend in part on citizens who are experienced in the art of association. It is high time that the communitarian critique of liberalism be seen for what it has been at its best--in Michael Walzer's felicitous phrase, a "communitarian correction" of liberalism, that is, a form of criticism generated by and especially pertinent within a liberal framework. The serious question is how well contemporary liberalism can be taught to care for what in the recent past it has been inclined to neglect--the responsibilities of citizenship, the cultivation of moral virtue, and the art of civic association--but which political theory and historical experience suggest it ignores at its peril. What the Communitarians Stand For www.crossroad.to/Quotes/communitarian/niki.htm ACL's Non-Fiction Studies of Communitarianism Bowling Alone, the title of Robert Putnam's 1995 article (later a bestselling book) perfectly captured a sense of national unease: Somewhere along the way, America had become a nation divided by apathy, and the bonds that held together civil society were disappearing. But while the phrase resonated with our growing sense of atomization, it didn't describe a new phenomenon. The fear that isolation has eroded our social bonds had simmered for at least two decades, when communitarianism first emerged as a cogent political philosophy. Communitarianism, as explained in the works of Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Amitai Etzioni, and others, elevates the idea of communal good over the rights of individuals. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, communitarianism gained popular and political ground. The Clintons touted its principles in the '90s, and the two presidents Bush make frequent references to its central tenets. In its short life, the philosophy has generated plenty of books, both pro and con. Beau Breslin's authoritative and original examination, The Communitarian Constitution, contributes to the debate from a wholly original standpoint. Existing critiques focus on the debate between liberalism and communitarianism—in other words, the conflict between individual rights and the communal good. Breslin takes an entirely different stance, examining the pragmatic question of whether or not communitarian policies are truly practicable in a constitutional society. In tackling this question, Breslin traces the evolution of American communitarianism. He examines Lincoln's unconstitutional Civil War suspension of habeas corpus and draws on Federalist and Anti-Federalist arguments, pegging the Anti-Federalists as communitarians' intellectual forebearers. He also grounds his arguments in the real world, examining the constitutions of Germany and Israel, which offer further insight into the relationship between constitutionalism and communitarianism. At a moment when American politicians and citizenry are struggling to balance competing needs, such as civil rights and homeland security, The Communitarian Constitution is vital reading for anyone interested in the evolving tensions between individual rights and the good of the community. www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/3357.html
Good article. People need to realize that, within reason, any system of government can work well IF the government is compelled, by force or example, to resist corruption. For example it is breathtaking for the republicans to be saying OB "wants to redistribute the wealth" as the US treasury is gifting AIG et. al. hundreds of billions of dollars that we all will be paying for - with compounded interest- for several lifetimes. Am I being slipped LSD in my coffee every morning, or is every one else taking it it every day and I an the only one not tripping?
"Satan / Cheney in "08" Liberals also don't care about the nation as a whole
#2. To: christine (#0)
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