Rod Dreher asks, in effect, if Natural Law arguments no longer work in politics “because our post-Christian civilization has lost the metaphysical understanding through which traditional Christian reasoning makes sense,” have we no option than to embrace a philosophically defective libertarianism just to buy some breathing room?
I’m afraid I find libertarianism too troubling to embrace, which may put me in Dreher’s “we’re going to get flattened” camp.
Of somewhat keener interest to me is Dreher’s musing on his hesitation to call himself “conservative” in a telephone political poll:
Normally I would say “conservative.” But I thought about how this poll would be read when it came out in the paper. I know what I think about my own philosophical views, and where that puts me on the spectrum, but this was an opinion poll. The real question is where would I fit in among the commonly understood sense of “conservative” in 2013 America?
I asked her to repeat the question, to give me a moment to think about it.
I thought about Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, the strong Catholic social conservative, and how he’s been denounced by that DeMint conservative SuperPAC as “too liberal.” It made me think about how so often these days, whenever I hear the word “conservative” — a word that I use to describe myself — used in the media, and in public debate, I’ve started to associate it not with principled, commonsense, trustworthy governance, but with obstinate, reckless, closed-minded assholery.
This has nothing to do with the standard conservative positions on abortion or gay rights. I hold those views. Though I am not as hardline on right-of-center economics and foreign policy issues as most Republicans, and I believe the GOP ought to open itself to greater diversity in its ranks (even if that means legitimizing social liberals within the party), my feeling here has less to do than you might think with any particular position mainstream conservatives hold. Rather, it’s at least equally the manner in which they hold these positions.
I’m not ready to let the barbarians co-opt the term, but I sure understand Dreher’s hesitation. “Conservative” today too often means mean-spirited and dishonest in style, uncritically Reaganesque in substance.
If you can take a weekly (or so) dose of mind-bending thought in the company of publicans, sinners and a self-declared Druid Freemason, check out The Archdruid Report:
When the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the newly founded American republic in the early years of the nineteenth century, he encountered plenty of things that left him scratching his head. The national obsession with making money, the atrocious food, and the weird way that high culture found its way into the most isolated backwoods settings—“There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” he wrote; “I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin”—all intrigued him, and found their way into the pages of his remarkable book Democracy in America.Still, one of the things de Tocqueville found most astonishing bears directly on the theme I’ve been developing over the last several weeks here on The Archdruid Report. The Americans of his time, when they wanted to make something happen, didn’t march around with placards or write their legislators demanding that the government do it. Instead, far more often than not, they simply put together a private association for the purpose, and did it themselves …
His specific example is the benevolent work of lodges. But it really has come to this: the idea of taking care of a problem instead of asking government to take care of it is mind-bending today.
Along with Archdruids, I hang out with zanies like the folks at Religion Dispatches.
I’m aware that a lot of religious news on the web is, well, religious. It comes from partisans of what passes for conservative religion today. GetReligion, for instance. Professor Howard Friedman is a rare bird: scruplously neutral in his coverage of religion stories with legal angles.
And then there’s Religion Dispatches, as very left-leaning blog of people who seem to relate to religion generally as Garry Wills relates to his putative Roman Catholicism: relentlessly opposed, root and branch, but hesitant to declare themselves apostate lest they loose the cachet of criticizing religion from within and become just another bunch of patently secularist snipers.
Religion Dispatches is high on my “likely to unsubscribe because it’s just not worth the time” list. Your mileage may vary, but if it varies very much, you’re probably not reading this.
I attended some professional education Thursday on the “health reform timeline.” Just about the only hopeful thing said was “the old system was broken, and at least we’re having a conversation now about how to fix it.”
The problem is that it’s not just the old system we’re fixing. We’re also writing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) in realtime.
I’ve tried repeatedly to understand the law, and now I know why I can’t. The commonest phrase in it reportedly is “to be determined by [insert regulatory agency].” In 4000+ pages (or however many it was) Congress managed only a skeleton for which regulators are to fashion flesh, away from prying eyes – whence things like the employer contraceptive mandate, determined by regulators to be “preventive health care” and thus within Congress’s mandate that women get all their preventive care for free.
In essence, every fiscal projection for Obamacare was “garbage out” from the “garbage in” that Congress fed to the CBO. It’s going to cost a lot more than one trillion over ten years. A lot more than 9 million people are going to be getting subsidized insurance through “state” exchanges (scare quotes because the feds now claim they’re setting up “state exchanges” in states that expressly refused to set up state exchanges). Regulators are making substantive law in direct opposition to what Congress said. Deadlines for implementation are being pushed back.
In 2012, Administrative Simplification Began. Did you notice? (Insert derisive laughter and scatological snark.)
As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'” No substantial promise of Obamacare will be fulfilled. No modest cost projection will be met. Most deadlines will be extended, if only to spread out the betrayals of promises to protect the guilty from the wrath of voters who, it is hoped, will forget the last betrayal in the miasma of intervening Jersey Shore episodes (if only the betrayals come no oftener than about six per year).
Oh, by the way: the Death Panel is now officially the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
We. Are. So. Screwed. But then, I already knew that. PPACA is only part of it.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 