>>Well-conceived and craftily written, the central argument of Grand New Party is quite simple.<<

How did that grammatical howler get past Boston Review’s editors?!

But it isn’t, to put it quite mildly.

More generally, the argument is based on an unexamined, assumption: that the period 1945-1965 represents “normalacy” (in income distribution, for example) and that we can somehow return to it.

It wasn’t normal — it was a highly exceptional period — and we can’t return to it. That world is dead, as dead as the Big Three’s oglipoly and hence the UAW’s ability to command skilled-labor wages and benefits for unskilled labor.

A couple of years ago I saw a German businessman interviewed. He was asked why German business wasn’t creating new jobs. He replied:

“We have created millions of new jobs. Jobs in China, jobs in Brazil, even jobs in Poland and the Czech Republic. When they make it worth our while, we’ll create jobs here. Until then, the working class can kiss my ***.”

The day when half or more of the world was imprisoned within Communist or subsistence-peasant economies is gone. All those people are now competing with us, and prices (for labor as well as other things) will seek their market clearing level. Trying to stop that is like trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom.

There’s another big invisible dog here: the assumption that the alternative to “the market” making decisions is some sort of communitarian families-working-together-locally setup.

It isn’t. The alternative, here on Planet Reality, is a federal government bureaucracy intensely hostile to traditional family arrangements. The people who brought you AFDC as we knew and loved it in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

In one of his more felicitous moments Karl Marx observed that human beings make history, but they don’t make it just as they please.

Most of the time we’re stuck with the social/political/cultural/global environment we’ve got and just have to make the best of it. The world is highly resistant to attempts at conscious shaping and planning, and the results of hubristic efforts to overcome these boundaries are rarely pretty.

My own skepticism about Faith-Based initiatives does not reflect a dismissive antipathy for the sentiments behind them but it needs to be said that Activist Government in concert with Religious Outreach found it’s first flowering in Indian missionary Schools. This history is usually put forth as a justification for modern applications but a brisk trip to the Rosebud Reservation will provide a look at how well this worked out for those who were the victims of the help. Admittedly, this is an oversimplification of a more complex issue but religion and government are strongest when they are respectful of one another at arms length and weakest when they cohabit. Kept apart yet respectful and informed by one another and they can flourish, join them and well….last call for the barflys is at hand.

Authoritarianism…. in trade, military affairs, national security, civil rights, a host of social engineering boondoggles and government-corporate machinations …when added to a religion-state partnership will complete this little foray into Stars and Stripes Fascism fer ijits. This energetic urge to control everything, everywhere with the Pentagon as our single largest consumptive focus will chew up and spit out any effort at grafting morality or spirituality upon the Federal Government. Religion in the U.S. will come to rue the day it decided a dalliance with gluttonous militant government might be a good idea.

Rather than dismiss or diminish Libertarians or secularists or cultural conservatives or labor-movement liberals or business first partisans or simply the reflexive anti-statist, I would assert we need them all in that classic Jeffersonian principle of Checks and Balances. Currently, we have Big Government Republicans and Big Government Democrats and any force arguing for fiscal probity is treated as a crazy uncle or worse. The Executive is stronger than at any time since the Depression. The Judiciary is increasingly a force of political expression. When there is no entity of strength arguing for chaste restraint by government and a countervailing strong and active independent religion propounding a fundamental moral force within the citizenry..and a dedicated Fourth Estate keeping everyone on their toes, you can be sure that morality and the life of the family is the first casualty. The people of the lapsed republic have been lulled into complacency and ennui by their acquiescence to the combination of Fiat Money, debt-centered Financialism wed to Energetic Federalism. This sorry denouement has elevated Irony to a State Religion and that is how torture becomes parsed in broad daylight by a culture with pretensions to morality. No Child Left Behind has it’s corollary in international relations ..or that thing we practice called democracy at gunpoint…. and it might be called ” No Peace Left Behind”.

The religious Left increasingly is providing “cover” for the political Left’s attack on free enterprise and capitalism. They argue that free enterprise is immoral because some people will do very well financially while others will fail. Sadly some young Christians are falling for this class warfare dressed up in religious garb. As a Christian, I am called personally and through my church to help the poor. I am not called to use the power of Big Government to take someone else’s earnings and redistribute them to those who did not earn it.
– Gary Bauer, May 1, 2009, “Is Capitalism Moral?”

Of course the conflating of Patriotism, Economics, and Christianity can be traced back much further. The following resolution marked the beginnings of the politically activist Religious Right (providing fertile ground for the Patriot’s Bible, Prosperity theology, and other aspects of the Culture Wars).

Southern Baptist Convention Resolution On Christian Citizenship
June 1984

WHEREAS, The Bible establishes three institutions as the foundation for society: the home, the church, and the government, all of which are to be God centered and established upon biblical principles, and

WHEREAS, God has richly blessed America with a system of government and economics which has elevated her from infancy to world leadership in a period of just 200 years–a country which possesses much of the world’s monetary wealth and the trained personnel with which to evangelize the world, and furthermore, a country in which men may freely and openly preach the Word of God from the pulpits of the land and Christians openly share the joys of Christ with others, and

WHEREAS, Political influence is that vehicle by which we set the agenda for debate, decide what issues are important for the guidance of the affairs of men and the meaning thereof, and furthermore, recognizing that many Bible-believing people have not participated in the political processes, now

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, That we Southern Baptists commit ourselves to become wisely informed and appropriately active in the political processes of the United States at the national, state, and local levels to the end that men and women who subscribe to and are governed by moral principles based on biblical authority be elected to public office, and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That this assembly reaffirm the doctrine of our forefathers of separation of church and state which should not be interpreted to mean, however, the separation of God from government.

BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, That we Southern Baptists pledge ourselves to urgently pray for and call our nation to repentance and to a return to the secure, reliable, and unchanging principles given to us by God in his inspired word.

Apparently the belief that God was responsible for America’s good fortune led them to conclude that America’s policies were sanctioned by God and thus all good Christian citizens must witness the gospel of America.

I greatly appreciate your critique of free market capitalism and very much concur in your judgments concerning the destructive tendencies not merely of free market federal/state policies but of the particular mindset it engenders. I can’t say I agree with the trajectory of your proposed solution, which seems to me to be too reliant on politics, government programs, and policies which, while you would certainly not intend for them to displace families and local communities, I think nevertheless would do so. Surely it depends on the specific policies and programs suggested, in which case, perhaps you might indicate in future posts how your new cultural politics and policies would differ from those of President Carter, who also sought to build a socially responsible politics that supported the integrity of families and promote distributive economic justice.

In general, references to history–other than the history of the failure of Reagan/Bush/Republican policies–would greatly strengthen your outline. Is there a reason why criticisms of the historical failures of the Carter and Clinton administrations, both founded upon particular precepts of liberalism and modernity, are conspicuously absent? One gets the sense from your piece that only Republicans are the bad guys. I do not think you believe that the flaws of modernity undermine the policies of only Reagan/Bushs rather than Carter/Reagan/Clinton/Bushs, but from the data reported in your piece, one could get that impression.

Another reference to concrete history that might prove beneficial is to address the roles of science, technology and militarization in the past 40 years. The Cold War backdrop is essential to understanding the policies which you are critiquing, and dealing with communism’s failure would serve as a helpful reminder not to ignore criticisms of Marxist policies.

Likewise, the social backdrop of the 60s/70s counterculture movement ought not be ignored because they were formative in the policies of those decades. You rightly point out that:

The wage-productivity gap has grown unabated for thirty years; this is the huge problem at the root of the current collapse, as wage decline created the need for easy credit. Median family income and productivity used to rise together. Between 1947 and 1973, productivity rose 103.7% and median family income rose 103.9%. Since the late 1970s, however, that convergence has been completely severed: between 1973 and 2005, productivity rose 79% but median family income rose only 22%. During the Bush years productivity rose 20 percent while average wages rose less than 1 percent. If wages had kept rising with productivity as they did in the past, average annual pay would be more than double what it is today.

… but it is impossible to understand the wage stagnation without taking account of the large scale entry of women into the workforce beginning in the 1970’s, concomitant with the equal rights movement in that period as well as the passage of Roe v. Wade (1973). More labor supply means lower wages across the board as a matter of economic fact and the necessity of both parents working to make up for the lower wages; if I understand “maternal feminism” correctly, this might be an inconvenient truth.

My criticisms notwithstanding, it’s clear that things need to change, and I welcome the opportunity to engage with a thoughtful, albeit perhaps a bit differently minded, individual such as yourself.

Welcome to FPR.

I am interested in exploring this. By wedding these two, are you suggesting that community-oriented cultural conservatism will temper the rationalistic and mechanistic aspects of security oriented economic progressivism?

Great post BTW – much appreciated.

Welcome fellow upstate refugee. I enjoyed your thoughtful posting, and look forward to your writings on subsidiarity and Kuyper’s principle of sphere sovereignty (of which I was unawre until my relocation to Minnesota). These two traditions will be foundational for any sort of human scaled economy we can kraft in the future.

Most of the readers who write in offer intelligent comments, so sorry about “Chuck’s.” That said, his comment inadvertently shines a light upon a crucial question of perspective your essay hints at, even perhaps embraces (but with a loose grip). Catholic social thought is, and should remain, allergic to classical liberalism and should serve as the foundation for any critique of liberalism that cares about family, community, and, indeed, the priority of these things to the state. It is a challenge to present these compelling ideas in a society that is historically anti-Catholic and has grown more so as it has gone from being merely suspicious of Ecclesiastical authority to becoming maniacally phobic of all claims of moral and social authority period, save some bureaucratic ones. The Know Nothings of today are even more dangerous than the ones who burnt down Catholic convents and universities (including mine) in the nineteenth century, because they make the mistake of actually thinking they know something. But, to return to your essay . . .

The substance of your essay goes to the heart of much of FPR: the insistence that American conservatism, like American liberalism, derives its principles, such as they are, from the canons of Classical liberalism. To make this critique, of course, entails being able to stand apart from that liberalism, and most of us at FPR have done so by standing upon the much older and more tested foundations of the various traditions of localism and distributism and, perhaps above all, the Catholic social doctrine of subsidiarity. I’ll be writing here on subsidiarity in the next month or so and look forward to reading your own reflections on what that tradition may teach us. I’d be particularly interested, beyond that, to read your engagements with the general attack on meritocracy and “cosmopolites” Deneen and Beer have offered us. My own doubts about what you have written above — few but serious though they are — will either be allayed or confirmed there.

Amen.

Dismantling and repudiating the libertarian-traditionalist fusion that has so poisoned the mind of Evangelicalism (and, increasingly, Catholicism and Orthodoxy as well) is a project I can get behind.