But I asked these questions, fundamentally, because I find on this blog (and likewise in the writings of, say, Berry or Chesterton or Carey McWilliams) some usefully provocative counterpoints to my own social democratic mode of thinking about politics. And thus I was curious what you’d have to say.

So: thanks for your responses.

1. I’m not sure I attribute “intrinsic and not just instrumental value” to social democracy, but that’s because I’m not certain how you’re using the terms. I suppose one could argue that I do tend towards the “intrinsic” reading of social democracy, because I think our natures our disposed toward communitarian forms of social organization, and social democracy–with its, as I understand and use the term, empowerment of individuals in and through their particular communities so as to exercise participatory and democratic control over their respective economic and political environments–is a way to align modern life (which I do not reject, as much as I often question it) with such communitarian realities. But maybe that aspires to too much philosophy, when in fact the instrumental benefits of populist/social-democratic/localist economics are significant all on their own.

2. I know I’m not the only fan of unions and social democratic legislation in general who participates around here, but with the exception of Lew Daly, it’s possible I’m the only one feels this way who actually writes for the site. Though if by “Front Porch thinking” you’re meaning in general, and not simply the thinking which is taking place here on this site, then I think the answer is obvious: it was unions, more than almost any other single socio-economic development, which enabled the rise of and helped preserve as long as possible the kind of compact yet flourishing neighborhoods wherein front porches emerged as such an emplematic element of a particular kind of social life. So yeah, I think front porches and good union jobs, for many decades at least, went very much hand in hand for millions of people across the country. No doubt similar claims could be made for a lot of the rest of the industrialized world.

Next two questions, if you don’t mind:

1. What, then do you take “the whole point of social democracy” to be? (I ask because you seem to be attributing intrinsic and not just instrumental value to social democratic / union solidarities. Did I get that right?)

2. You write about trade unionism granting “an important role to families and neighborhoods and churches.” True enough. How much room within Front Porch thinking is there, then, for granting trade unions “an important role”? (Perhaps that’s not fair, though — you may be an outlier among the FRPers on this question.)

The “liberationist left” I’m referring to is the “New Left” of Europe and the United States during the 60s and 70s. There were some strong understandings of the local and cultural requirements of socialist equality and solidarity expressed by that varied group of individuals and movements, but by and large, as I read history, those voices were drowned out by those who embraced the self-indulgent and sexually and personally expressive elements of the “revolutionary” spirit. The “Old Left” wasn’t at all necessarily religious, of course (anyone who has read Marx understands what a confused claim that would be), but nonetheless much of early unionism and other movements towards granting equality and respect and sovereignty to ordinary people was carried forward along lines that granted an important role to families and neighborhoods and churches. The college-educated New Left, despite the things they got right, abandoned much of all that, reaping the individualism which their parents had sowed, and thus all they took from the language of “empowerment” mostly tended, in my view, to make “do your own thing” seem in their eyes to be an important philosophical claim…which, of course, it isn’t, or moreover it’s own that undermines the whole point of social democracy in the first place.

Sorry, that’s probably more than you were interested in hearing, but this is one of my hobby-horses.

Russell, could you please say a bit more about what you meant by the following?

“given the way the liberationist left so often misunderstood and abused social democratic understandings of solidarity in the past”

Second choice would be Everett Dirksen saying “A Million here and a Million there and pretty soon we’re talking big money”

http://richardsmith.posterous.com/kyle-thompson-inspiring-hopeful-positive-doll

“…echoing an age of idealism and humanistic thought” who would you put on a federal reserve note?

…Machiavelli… on the top denomination, $100

Yup sounds about right! The Prince could only dream of fiat ex nihilo… we’re all about “progress” don’t you know…?

The Society of Cincinnati is an example of “liberal minded” conservatism of the Framers Generation.

Fox, your presence here, in this light, is not at all surprising nor contradictory. Conservatism is not automatically a pursuit of the paranoid mugwump. To be truly conservative, the effort must be conversant in the full gamut of human condition and, equipped with this knowledge, approach the act of governance in a custodial and discriminating manner, knowing when to both open and close ones mind when the prosecution of a chaste and sustainable government is best served by it. It is, in its most basic form, an act of conservation , respectful of life and the future while cherishing the “received wisdom” of the past. It does not abide notions of “modernity” because the very term evokes a prideful stasis more the haunt of the triumphalist or perhaps the post-triumphalist who wallows in the domain we now call “popular culture”.

Accordingly, all types of philosophy are to be greeted with, if not enthusiasm, at the very least, considered forbearance because above all else, man’s fallibility is as omnipresent as his seemingly resilient urge to virtue.

Neo-Conservatives and Democrats, of course being more fallible than they might be prudent to be.
PoMoCons, well, the name alone remains baffling.

καθως γεγραπται ο το πολυ ουκ επλεονασεν και ο το ολιγον ουκ ηλαττονησεν

(kathos graphos ho to poly ouk pleonazo kai ho to oligos ouk elattoneo)

sicut scriptum est qui multum non abundavit et qui modicum non minoravit

Como está escrito: El que recogió mucho, no tuvo más; y el que poco, no tuvo
menos.

“For it is written: “Whoever had much did not have more, and whoever had little did not have less.”

Conserving the abundance of Creation in place is dynamic, it happens in relation to time, by persons with a 3-eyed(**) faculty (a formed memory of past, an active intellect to anticipate future, and a will conscious of the import of “in the present moment”):
there are those able to gather plenty, the Xs
and from their plenitude act plenteously,
and there are those able to glean less, the Os
yet from their scarcity are not diminished.

We may not gather such that we diminish the gleaning.
We may not become XXX-sized at the expense of aborted mouths of the 000′s.

Yet this is exactly the immorality inherent in the inflationary monetary policy as we practice it in the USA: those with much get more, while those with less are robbed of what little they have. Those who would reduce the human three-eyed faculty to a 2-eyed calculus (sinners on both left and right: Marx, Adam Smith et al, diminish the social sphere to a “labor theory of value/just price” determined as cost-plus utility) render the human heart blind to the inner illumination of grace, and open the floodgates to a brutality in globalization a la Keynes’ “animal spirits” and an obliteration of civilization a la Huxley’s Brave New World. The communitarian third eye is our duty of care. I sense that folks here at FPR recognise it and seek to articulate it (e.g. Catholic legal scholar Elizabeth Schlitz development of justice for caregivers: “Why Care About Caregivers: Using Communitarian Theory to Justify Protection of “Real Workers,” http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2009/06/inthis-article-why-care-about-caregivers-using-communitarian-theory-to-justify-protection-of-real-workers-nicoleporterpres.html) I’m not so sure what terms in the PoMoCon cost-benefit analysis are reserved for tomorrow’s feeble and frail… “collateral damage” was the most unfortunate euphemism bandied about by Condoleeza Rice for millions of civilians killed rather than liberated by our magnanimous unilaterelism, right? Euthanasia beckons as the new family value of futilitarianism: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/secondhandsmoke/2009/06/24/the-poisoned-well-of-utilitarianism-or-why-so-many-bioethicists-drive-me-nuts/#respond
_____
* assuming solidarity, which is NOT a given in America, resting as it does on a fiduciary structure based on very faulty assumptions (rampant moral hazard permissive of privatized gain to non-citizen holders of our currency/debts and indentured-servitude of socialized losses to generations yet unborn of citizen holders of our currency/debts).

** prudence, as depicted by Dante

Ardour for the good chosen poorly leads to gluttony, avarice and lasciviousness. And more ominously ardour exercised out of pride, ambition or revenge in jingoistic foreign affairs corrupts the true valor needed to recognize tyranny before it can be subdued. Most aggregiously, IMHO, we accede to acedia in dulling our senses, imagination and will to the spiritual sloth all around us, a social malady not conducive to government dictat. Collectivism fills the void in our poverty-stricken urban ghettoes: raw communitarian solidarity of the municipal grace-n-favors-gravy-train, ugly gang violence, and bigoted sodalities of ex-correctional-institute-inmates. The vocabulary of the common good has been abandoned to the “rule of the ‘hood”. PoMoCons condescend with a bland pabulum of “Compassionate Conservatism” but in their zeal to root out moral chaos they overlook the vacuity in their own ranks. Nuclear weapons are immoral, no amount of harping on Iran absolves us of our duty to relinquish our own:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6597686.ece

I puzzled by the continued reference to Marx and why anyone wastes their time with him. I like to judge one by the life they lived and well ol’ Karl comes up short on all fronts.

Tragically–but, depending on whom you read on the subject, perhaps importantly–just about every significant thinker and artist are defective in important ways, and some are complete failures as the most important task in life–making a good home, being a faithful and loving human being to their children and neighbors, planting gardens. Marx was a loafer and adulterer, and Rousseau, as you later note, was a manic-depressive paranoid kook. (I will question your assertion that his ideas led to the deaths of thousands, however.) One of the very few really well adjusted and happy philosophers from the canon that I know of was Hume, and he was an atheist; maybe that tells us something, but maybe not.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the unhindered commerce between individuals, with the caveat that virtue (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance) imbues the market participants, and that the collective will (in the form of law) provides a punitive response to cheats, thieves, and those who willfully harm other market participants.

Well, obviously this is a sprawling and ongoing discussion, so let me just check your claim here–with which I substantively agree; I’m a social democrat, not a communist–with two assertions: 1) that given our corrupt and self-interested natures, it seems unlikely that “virtue,” as possessed and practiced by individuals, will ever be able to effectively “imbue” market participants so as to be able direct the market away from socially harmful ends, at least not on its one; and 2) that “the collective will” ought not be thought of merely in the form of law, but also as customs, traditions, and norms of equality and decency, the perpetuation of which often require, I think, the formal protection and extenuation of arenas of action (like the home and family life), separate from self-interested marketplace decisions, wherein such qualities are developed in the first place.

Too long…

Yeah, my stuff always is. Sorry.

Give me the Marxist W. Chambers–BTW, GREAT quote(Fox quotes it in the DSA link)–any day over that shit-maker Mailer. Are we not sick to death of those whose Marx-styled thinking basically makes thinking and politics into STYLE?

Folks like Bill Kauffman have convinced me to take Mailer somewhat seriously, but don’t think that I’m looking at him as a good guide to living–much less theorizing about!–Marxism or modern life or anything. As I encouraged a fellow over at my home blog, you definitely don’t want to read him if you want some help with this intellectual thicket. But in his own way, he touched on something important, something worth taking to heart.

I salute your seriousness. It is that which is cool about your beloning to DSA, coupled with that excellent Chambers quote. I also like your (in-the-link) meditations about not surrendering to a kind of cynicism about what can or cannot be changed–and on that score, really the thinker that you need to read is Chantal Delsol. Her books Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century are all about the stance the late-modern spirit ought to take given the collapse or drastic curtailment of various Progressvist dreams, given repeated failures, defeats, and ignominious crimes. And given her defense of “caregiving” and attack on “economics as religion” no bookish Porcher should neglect her.

Thanks for the compliment–and I think your praise and your assessment of the limitations of Harrington are pretty much dead-on; my favorite book of his, though, is The Politics at God’s Funeral–and thanks also for the recommendation. Chantal Delsol, huh? Never heard of her, but she sounds fascinating. On the to-read list she goes!

Fox is a member of the DSA! Well, now, that is cool. I attended their meetings back in my late 80s undergrad days, and still have a deep respect for Michael Harrington. (Harrington’s Socialism: Past and Future is a great primer on what American Democratic Socialism was at its best and what it ought to be about; recommended for those of my fellow conservatives who find themselves dumbed-down on the subject of what democratic socialism is by years of their peers’ “liberals are socialists!” rhetoric; of course, careful readers of the book will see that Harrington wishes for economic institutions that no-one has been yet able to pull-off; and yes, Harrington does not, and really cannot, face the full truth of Marx’s responsiblity for Lenin.) I essentially was a DSA member, but never did formally join.

So, Russel, while I now think DSA is very wrong, I salute your seriousness. It is that which is cool about your beloning to DSA, coupled with that excellent Chambers quote. I also like your (in-the-link) meditations about not surrendering to a kind of cynicism about what can or cannot be changed–and on that score, really the thinker that you need to read is Chantal Delsol. Her books Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century are all about the stance the late-modern spirit ought to take given the collapse or drastic curtailment of various Progressvist dreams, given repeated failures, defeats, and ignominious crimes. And given her defense of “caregiving” and attack on “economics as religion” no bookish Porcher should neglect her. She is a non-Strauss-influenced way, and thus a less heavily intellectual-history-referencing way, into the core Pomocon concerns, and she introduces you to the cream of current French thinking.

Second, as non-academic proletariat, I puzzled by the continued reference to Marx and why anyone wastes their time with him. I like to judge one by the life they lived and well ol’ Karl comes up short on all fronts. As a loafer, mooch, and bully he may have thought much, but had no expereince working or being a worker. Add to this that his theory of value holds no water, why do we continue to spend any time with and individual who has deluded too many to count and whose ideas sent millions more to their untimely deaths.

My third point stems from my second, why spend time with the deviant Rousseau? His ideas were the product of a seriously disordered mind. Ideas that also led to the untimely death and oppression of thousands.

Finally, as a lower case “l” libertarian, I feel impelled to come to the defense of the free market and attempt to separate it from term Capitalism. There is nothing inherently wrong with the unhindered commerce between individuals, with the caveat that virtue (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance) imbues the market participants, and that the collective will (in the form of law) provides a punitive response to cheats, thieves, and those who willfully harm other market participants. Capitalism, on the other hand is a term coined by Marx referring to the darker side of the free market, one in which the participants are unleashed from the restraints of virtue. The free market is not an “ism” but is a natural by-product of human interactions. The free market is also not consumerism or materialism, both of which are products of virtue-less free market.

Those are my two cents and I am heady back to the front porch to enjoy and ice cold Ski (diet of course).