A Myth in the Making

Because Shelby Steele is a scholar instead of a pundit, he usually has something worth saying when he speaks up. Just so this column, Barack the Good, from tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal.

Teasers:

Mr. Obama wants to be—above all else—a profoundly transformative president … Mr. Obama … remains rather undefined—a president happy to have others write his “transformative” legislation … As the health-care bill and the stimulus package illustrate, scale is functioning as vision … “if I don’t know what to do, I’ll do big things” …

For me, the big insight was that the President may “literally experience [him]self as a myth in the making.” That rings true.

Subsidiarity, Sphere Sovereignty and the 10th Amendment

As I continue my autodidacticism, I encounter startling ideas that might prompt those with formal education in the discipline to yawn.

Any yawners out there at the thought that Roman Catholic social teaching on subsidiarity is congruent with Calvinist teaching on sphere sovereignty? That Pope Leo XIII was, figuratively speaking, in bed with Abraham Kuyper? Or that the 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”) was allegedly an application of the principle before it was articulated by these two figures from two traditions 100+ years ago (more on “allegedly” later)?

Since Wikipedia has separate articles on “Subsidiarity” and “Subsidiarity (Catholicism),” I’m betting there would be yawners out there from political science departments at least. Whether they’re raptly following this blog is an extremely different matter.

Although Lew Daly doesn’t mention the 10th Amendment, he does connect Kuyper and Leo XIII in his precis of his new book God’s Economy at Front Porch Republic:

In tracing the social-pluralist lineage of today’s faith-based initiatives, I pick up the story as it enters its distinctive confessional-political phase in the second half of the nineteenth century, marked by the rise of Catholic parties in Central Europe and (perhaps most dramatically) by the rise of the orthodox Calvinist Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands, led by Abraham Kuyper. Both Catholic and Reformed confessional traditions were strongly influenced by French counter-revolutionary thinkers as they sought to defend religious schooling and social welfare programs from being swept away by disestablishment and by the rise of public welfare systems. What emerged in this struggle between confessional institutions and the liberal state—understatedly described in the name it was given in Germany, Kulturkampf or “conflict of worldviews”–was a concept of plural sovereignty. Political order, in this view, was comprised of a plurality of sovereign group-domains, each ordered to its own distinctive nature and purposes and all held in balance across society by a limited but supportive public authority.

As you should have noted, Daly’s main task in the book is “tracing the social-pluralist lineage of today’s faith-based initiatives,” but his precis is more of interest to me because it reinforces, from yet another perspective, the idea (I’m tempted to call it a “reality,” but that perhaps would be premature for me) that liberal, Rousseauian individualism leads to destruction of institutions between the state and the individual – and a consequent disempowering of individuals, contrary to the promise of liberalism. Some of the French revolutionaries were quite explicit about it:

In August of 1789, after the Parisian insurrection and the taking of the Bastille on July 14, the National Assembly (created the previous June) set about abolishing the elaborate system of privileges upholding the First and Second Estates, from feudal dues and services, to proprietary offices, manorial courts, and tithes and plural benefices, to the aristocracy’s exemption from taxation. The annihilation of such privileges was famously the vision of Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès in What is the Third Estate? But for Sieyès and other republican theorists, abolishing aristocratic privilege was part of a much deeper vision of political transformation. It was a vision of a state-centered “dissociative democracy,” a totalistic politics in which the nation and the state become unified by dissolving all other orders of lawful existence outside of the selfhood and property of individual citizens. By the early 1790s, with decrees against the cloistered orders and secular congregations, and the famous d’Allarde and Le Chapelier laws abolishing trade unions and other corporations, revolutionary liberalism pressed further and further into the corporate and communal structures of French society and its producingclasses, the artisans and peasants.

I don’t think Daly’s omission of the 10th Amendment is a defect, however, because subsidiarity/sphere sovereignty is conceptually different than federalism/state’s rights, and I think it’s a defect of the Wikipedia article on subsidiarity to link them uncritically.

The 10th Amendment came from the reality (not “idea;” I know whereof I speak in this topic at least) that the national government was being constituted by 13 sovereign colonies, to become states in the new regime. They were retaining all their sovereignty except that ceded to the new national government or prohibited by the Bill of Rights – the preceding 9 amendments. This is a point widely missed even among educated people.

20 years or more ago, I argued with a Rabbi at the health club as we worked our way through the circuit of machines in sync. We had butted heads in public fora on a topic or two. Basically, I would characterize our conflict as being between his preference for secularism in contrast to my conviction that religion is not entirely banished from appearing in public. That conflict framed this vignette. I asked him “How did we ever got from ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m surprised you’re reading this at all) to ‘there shall be no prayer in public schools run by local communities’?” He answered, fairly confidently, that the states and communities were subsidiaries of the national government. Wrong answer.

(I recently stated a new appreciation of the seeming preference of Jews in this country for secularism in the course of a longer piece. I still think religion must be “allowed to appear in public,” but I’m far less apt to pooh-pooh talk of looming theocracy.)

Anyway, back to the 10th Amendment as distinct from subsidiarity or sphere sovereignty. As Daly puts it:

I needn’t explain here the tendency among American conservatives to interpret subsidiarity as a Catholic version of the Republican Party’s libertarian agenda of dismantling government agencies and privatizing entitlements and services. Of course it means nothing of the kind: subsidiarity is not a theory of local control or minimal government; it is a theory delineating precisely the critical role of central government in assisting natural social structures, beginning with the family, when they are weakened in the order of society. The properly subsidiary role of the state is to support, for example, the family, without distorting or usurping its place in the order of creation or its purposes as given by God. Unlike the liberal welfare state, a subsidiary state recognizes the prior ground of family and other natural spheres and does not encroach on the legal and moral autonomy they derive from God; but unlike liberal anti-statism, the subsidiary state is responsible for protecting and supporting the natural spheres when they are violated within society or otherwise falter. For example, when wages fail to support workers and their families in their proper dignity, the sanctity of the family is violated and the state must intervene, either by strengthening the power of workers to extract higher wages from employers, or by compensating families directly out of the public purse. Against the moral anarchy created by “market laws” that push working families beneath their dignity, a properly subsidiary state delineates “justice” by strengthening the weaker spheres against the stronger, those given by God against those ordered by men. In upholding and protecting such “sphere sovereignty,” as the Kuyperians termed it, the state “brings stability to the land,” and this, Kuyper insists, is called “justice.”

In my words, less eloquent and erudite than Daly’s, it would be quite possible for a state (not just the national government) to violate the proper sphere of families, churches and other human-scale institutions by action or inaction contrary to its proper role. (I wish I’d thought of this 15 years ago when City and County Councils were debating a politically-correct infringement on the sphere sovereignty of small business. But then, our local authorities really don’t know a lot about small business, do they? They only mostly suck up to the biggies. It’s called “economic development” and my local officials are very, very good at it – and I acknowledge at least temporary benefit thereby.)

Phillip Blond, in authentic subsidiaritist fashion, proposes provocatively that sovereignty be devolved, on some matters, down to the block level – as in “city block.” And he floats the idea (I’m not prepared to say “reality,” though it may be) that the “multiplier effect” – you know: that fabulous wealth creation tool whereby if we suck tourists in to spend a buck, it’s like getting $11.36 (or whatever) because the event sponsor pays workers who buy groceries from people who buy new homes and yadda yadda – is much greater when you do business with a local merchant versus a national big box. Something to think about when you’re enticed by low prices and convenience at Wally World.

No wonder Blond is becoming beloved over at Front Porch Republic.

After the Market State: Phillip Blond on the Future of a Free Society

I must pass along an important lecture which summarizes the direction my thought has been heading in politically.

Society and the private sphere have become increasingly monopolized by the state and the market, which seem inadequate for dealing with increasing economic and social dysfunction. Phillip Blond, the influential Director of the London think-tank Respublica, argues for the necessity of the enduring bonds of family and local community, and the wide distribution of property and public responsibility that these require. Blond will outline the vision that has increasingly captured the attention of Britains Tory Party in his lecture, Red Toryism: What it means and why it is a genuinely radical alternative to the Market State.

I tried to embed the YouTube video here, but couldn’t get that to work.

America at 2050 – and 400 millionsub

Another voice of economic optimism for the U.S. to counter my pessimism, Joel Kotkin thinks the next hundred million Americans, mostly immigrants, will be our economic salvation. But he thinks these folks – who won’t necessarily be very upwardly-mobile – will live in the suburbs, “the best, most practical choice for raising their families and enjoying the benefits of community.”

Huh!? I’ll grant the the faux estate in the auto-dependent suburbs has become the American dream since World War II, but is it really a community-promoter? And how will they afford the $10/gallon gas to get to their jobs?

The rosy picture doesn’t work for me at that level if nothing else.

Is economics really a science at all?

David Brooks at the New York Times describes the history of modern economics as a 5-act play. We’re in act IV currently.

In The Wall Street Journal, Russ Roberts of George Mason University wondered why economics is even considered a science. Real sciences make progress. But in economics, old thinkers cycle in and out of fashion. In real sciences, evidence solves problems. Roberts asked his colleagues if they could think of any econometric study so well done that it had definitively settled a dispute. Nobody could think of one.

“The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists,” Roberts wrote.

Consider my recommendation of the column as a contribution to iconoclasm.

Tiger Amadeus Woods: A Lenten Meditation

It started with Jason Peters rewriting William Blake. Then John Willson performed a dental colostomy* on Tiger, with FPR contributor Jeffrey Polet, I and at least a few others taking exception to what we thought was an extremely harsh tone. Now at last Polet has published his own promised thoughts on L’Affaire Tiger.

It was timely for me. I have avoided the details of Tiger’s transgressions, but moments before clicking on a link to Polet’s piece, I stumbled across a reproduction of some of Tiger’s text messages to a porn star mistress, and they were pretty shocking. I won’t link to them. I don’t think there’s a shortage of ways to track down the salacious detail.

I don’t recall who said “to understand all is to forgive all.” A quick Googling suggests that it’s probably a French proverb – proof again that the French are more than “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (as Jonah Goldberg called them. I can’t help but laugh at many French jokes, as the French in my experience deserve a reputation for haughtiness. There’s a reason why one Wall Street Journal columnist always refers to John Kerry as “the haughty, French looking Senator from Massachusetts who, by the way, served in Vietnam.”). But Polet’s analogy between Tiger and a tempestuous genius of an earlier century puts things in an edifying perspective. It helps to understand, and to me “feels right,” as I try to empathize with the temptations of superstardom.

I could meander off into some personal reflections about how easy it is to condemn X immediately after condemning Y’s condemnation of Z, but I won’t.

* “Dental colostomy” is a euphemism for the slang phrase “chewing him a new [body part omitted].” I think I coined it.

Civil War?

One of the very conservative columnists I frequently like, Dennie Prager, has sounded the battle alarm over Obamacare as a major event. Agree or disagree, it’s well-framed.

One of his points: “Our motto: ‘The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.'” Yes, that’s probably true. But in a regime that flirts with strict “separation of Church and State,” the Church (and other mediating structures that empower people – this is the best link I can find on that on the fly) are diminished, too. And I’m not sure that individual citizens can ever be “big” without human-scale institutions – i.e., something smaller than government.

Society works, government is sclerotic

I have breathed much economic doom and gloom in the brief life of this blog. It is remarkable to me how many people I come in contact with who feel the same way even as the official media view seems to be this is just another down cycle like all the down cycles before.

But my view nonetheless is not unanimous. James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic, outlines How America Can Rise Again.

Fallows brings to his task considerable experience living abroad, most recently in China, where he saw its emerging economy first hand. He gives a number of reasons why each of our major economic problems is really minor or can be fixed.

The catch is, we lack the will.

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation … Thomas Jefferson’s famed wish for “a little rebellion now and then” as a “medicine necessary for the sound health of government” is a nice slogan for organizing rallies, but is not how his country has actually operated.
Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

On second thought, maybe Fallows and I are closer than first appeared. Able but unwilling eventuates about the same as unable.

It’s safe to go back in the water again

(This brief blog likely will be of interest only to Orthodox readers.)

I had unsubscribed to the Ochlophobist blog for a while because he got off, it seemed to me, on an unedifying prolonged rant against the Antiochian Archdiocese. But I can report that it’s relatively safe to go back in the water again, and that this March 8 posting made me wince in a most edifying way. And of his past 25 blogs, the only one that poked at things Antiochian seemed fairly well-placed.

Market state, welfare state

“The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct and mutually supporting failures.” Thus saith Phillip Blond, whose name will no doubt generate a spate of “dumb blond” jokes, primarily from the Right defenders of all things Leviathan except the Leviathan state needed to keep Leviathan capital in check.

I don’t know Blond well at all, but people I know who know what’s going on in political thought are among his groupies, so I’d say the name bears watching.