Of course you are!
Then, check this out:
And here.
What say you, Rick: Ready to join the Democrats on this one, at least?
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Interested in the "Catholic" take on the Health Care Reform Debate?
A great conference in Mexico: "The Lay State and Religious Liberty"
More info here.
The purpose of the symposium is to raise awareness of international religious liberty standards and how they apply to the United States, Latin America, and Mexico. The symposium is also meant to encourage the emerging voices of religious liberty in these countries and to foster collaboration among academics, activists and other creators of culture.
The symposium covers a large range of topics from the application of religious liberty in the international context to specific religious liberty issues in various countries on the American continents. Among the speakers are experts from different countries such as Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Canada, and different distinguished universities in the United States and Mexico.
Congrats to Russ Hittinger
MOJ bloggers and readers are, no doubt, familiar with the work of Prof. Russ Hittinger. I've learned that Russ has recently been named to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, the aim of which is
to promote the study and the progress of the social sciences, primarily economics, sociology, law and political science. The Academy, through an appropriate dialogue, thus offers the Church the elements which she can use in the development of her social doctrine, and reflects on the application of that doctrine in contemporary society.
Socialism (Catholicism?) 101, Part 5
[From today's NYT online's "Room for Debate:.]
Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore teach American history at Cornell University and are the authors of the forthcoming book, “The Long Exception: An Interpretation of the New Deal from FDR to Obama.”
When socialism can be used interchangeably with fascism — as it often is in the heat of contemporary political debate — Americans are playing with historical fires they do not understand. The muddle is telling.
The issue is on behalf of whose interests government intervenes.
America has not had a politically meaningful socialist movement since that of Eugene Debs early in the last century. The Soviet Union has perished, the Berlin Wall has fallen, and capitalist China is our No. 1 industrial competitor. Against such a political landscape, what meaning could the phrase socialism have even as an epithet?
Those who hurl the “s-word” misunderstand the role of the state in American history. While they accurately point to the enormous growth in government since the Civil War and claim that it has stripped Americans of their individualism and self-reliance, the focus of the state’s activities has been subsidizing and promoting “private” enterprise. Government growth promoted by Gilded Age Republicans, New Deal Democrats and Reagan revolutionaries has been one of the most enduring constants in American history. Despite regular election cycle pleas to shrink the size of government, a unifying theme of political experience has been the government’s growing intervention in the market on behalf of the business community.
For an exceptional few decades, however, things were different. Sparked by the Great Depression and the rise of the New Deal, the government expanded its responsibilities to include working people as well as business. It was not accidental that between 1945 and 1972, while business grew drastically, income inequality declined significantly for Americans while posing no threat to the nation’s wealthiest. Nor was it accidental that in the decades of growth since the early ’70s, a reversion to uniformly pro-business policies promoted a significant rise in income inequality with the top 1 percent of all incomes enjoying the largest percentiles of growth. This too is a direct result of government’s beneficence to the private sector.
The issue, therefore, is not government intervention, yes or no; rather it is on behalf of whose interests government intervenes. When the government assists business by bailing out the financial markets — as it often should — it is called supporting the market. When government helps regular folks, as with health care reform, it stirs up fears of something called “socialism.”
Republican Theodore Roosevelt understood the central role of property for American individualism and citizenship — much like those who wield the fear-laden charge of socialism today. But, he argued in 1910, when human rights are in conflict with property rights, “humans rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.” Some today would call this socialism.
Socialism (Catholicism?) 101, Part 4
[From today's NYT online's "Room for Debate".]
Terence Ball
Why are some — mostly older, overwhelmingly white — Americans so
afraid of “socialism” and, by extension, “socialized medicine”? One
explanation is that they don’t actually know what socialism is, namely
the public ownership and/or control of the major means of production
(mines, mills, factories,
etc.) for the benefit of the public at large. Another is that many
older Americans have vivid memories of the cold war and the dreaded
U.S.S.R. (the second S standing for “socialist”).
It’s miraculous that Medicare got through Congress at the height of the cold war.
In hindsight it seems strange and almost miraculous that at the height of the cold war a limited form of socialized medicine — Medicare — got through the Congress over the objections of the American Medical Association and the insurance industry, and made it to President Johnson’s desk. (These special interests won’t make that mistake again: they now have a veritable army of lobbyists assaulting Capitol Hill and every congressman there.)
But now the cold war is over. For those in their 20s and 30s, the cold war might as well be ancient history.
To many Americans “socialism” may sound vaguely “foreign” and “un-American.” Those at rallies protesting health reform now may be surprised to know that “socialism” and “socialist” have a long history in American political thought and that those terms weren’t always terms of censure.
For the anti-socialism protesters, here’s a quick quiz:
The author of the Pledge of Allegiance (1892), was A) a conservative, B) a liberal, C) a socialist.
The answer is C. Francis Bellamy was a socialist and a Baptist minister. (Yes, there actually were Christian socialists, then as now.)
The “Pledge to the Flag,” as it was originally called, was not descriptive of then current conditions, but it was aspirational: “One nation, indivisible” invoked a nation undivided by differences of race, class and gender. And “with liberty and justice for all” it envisioned a nation in which women could vote and African Americans need not fear rope-wielding “night riders” of the KKK.
Contemporary “patriots,” I hope, agree with such aspirations, despite their distinctly socialist provenance. It is historically false that the only “real” Americans are conservatives and that people of other ideological persuasions are not or cannot be “real” Americans. After all, what’s more American than the “socialist” Pledge of Allegiance?
Socialism (Catholicism?) 101, Part 3
[From today's NYT online's "Room for Debate".]
Recent denunciations of Obama’s proposed health-care plan as “socialist” have taken some observers by surprise, especially since the foreign threat of socialism receded two decades ago when the Soviet Union imploded. But, as historians should know, the degree to which conservatives invoke the specter of socialism has always been more calibrated to domestic anxieties than to foreign threats.
“Socialism” as a stand-in for modern threats, from feminism to federal health care.
Elizabeth Dilling’s 1934 catalogue, “The Red Network: A ‘Who’s Who’ and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots,” serves as an instructive prototype. Many of those listed were never members of the Communist or socialist parties, yet made their way onto a list of people who composed “the Communist-Socialist world conspiracy.” The list included Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, John Dewey and Jane Addams.
What did they do to merit being labeled socialist? In various ways, they represented the changes of the 20th century: feminism, civil rights, decolonization, relativism and progressive education. For people like Dilling, “socialism” became a stand-in for these modern threats to tradition. Obama and universal health care represent something similar in 2009.
This is not to say that all or even most of the recent howls about socialism are rooted in unconscious anxieties about modernity. For many, the label serves as an effective, if cynical sledgehammer. In a nation with a long history of anti-socialist sentiments, if health care reform can be associated with “socialism,” that’s good strategy.
For others, there are very real philosophical principles at stake. In his 1944 “The Road to Serfdom,” the Austrian émigré Friedrich Hayek elaborated his laissez-faire economic principles by setting forth a political philosophy. In the shadow of Nazi totalitarianism, Hayek argued that any government intervention into the economy was a slippery slope to authoritarianism. This philosophy has carried the day for American conservatives, even after last year’s financial meltdown seemingly proved laissez-faire capitalism more slippery than any government.
In short, lumping socialism together with all things liberal has a long history. It’s no surprise that such rhetoric has not gone the way of the cold war. As Whittaker Chambers wrote in his 1952 best-selling autobiography “Witness”: “When I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else. What I hit was the forces of that great socialism revolution, which, in the name of liberalism … has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”
Many conservatives would argue Obama and universal health care are the latest such ice storm
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Socialism (Catholicism?) 101, Part 2
[This one by my Emory colleague, historian Patrick Allitt.]
[From today's NYT online's "Room for Debate".]
Patrick Allitt is the Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University in Atlanta. He is author of “The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History.”
It’s odd that so many critics of the administration should use “socialism” as a devil word. In fact millions of Americans, including many of these critics, are ardent supporters of socialism, even if they don’t realize it and even if they don’t actually use the word. Think of two elements of society that enjoy overwhelming popular support despite being government owned and operated.
American public schools, highways and even the armed forces are organized along socialist lines.
The first is the public schools. Horace Mann, in early 19th-century Massachusetts, pioneered the project of creating publicly funded schools for every child in the state. The idea caught on widely and in less than a century had been emulated by every state in the Union. No Child Left Behind, endorsed by a conservative administration, is the most recent incarnation of this huge, centralized socialist project.
The second example is the highways. Early auto enthusiasts asked Henry Ford to contribute to building a private highway system but he declined to invest and warned them that they should not create the precedent of private road ownership — much better to let the government pay. For a century now, governments — state and federal — have built an astonishing network of utterly “socialist” highways throughout the land. So far as I know, no one has objected to driving along them for that reason.
You could even take the view that the armed forces are organized along socialist lines. Government owned and operated, bureaucratic, centralized, exempted from competition, they are widely beloved all the same. Private military contractors, on the other hand, such as Blackwater, arouse more suspicion than support; there is a taint of dishonor to being a mercenary. And as Machiavelli showed 500 years ago, mercenaries are far less dependable than citizen armies.
Socialism by that name never became a mass movement in the United States. (The last serious socialist presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, ran for office from a prison cell for his criticism of President Woodrow Wilson in World War I.) But socialism as an organizational principle is alive and well here just as it is throughout the industrialized world.
Socialism (Catholicism?) 101, Part 1
[Frm the today's NYT online's "Room for Debate".]
Katrina vanden Heuvel
When any American reform leader takes on the status quo, he or she confronts a ferocious, well-organized and reactionary opposition. Is it any surprise that right-wing groups now compare President Obama to Hitler and liken his pragmatic health care reform to socialism?
It’s offensive and troubling. But it’s worth invoking history and remembering that Franklin Roosevelt confronted the American Liberty League, which called him a socialist and a Communist. And he faced down Father Coughlin, the demagogic priest who was a cross between Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in a Roman collar.
Social democracy is about government having a role in improving people’s lives — as it does with Medicare.
History again: the rabid protesters calling President Obama a socialist are representatives of a long national tradition which features an irrational and well-stoked fear of a strong central government. (Mr. Obama has found it more difficult to turn away from the fanatical right than his reform predecessors partly because conservative ideology has been in the saddle for three decades and the recession began too late in the Bush administration to sufficiently discredit its free-market fundamentalism and those who still speak on its behalf.)
Mr. Obama himself acknowledged parallels with previous battles for reform. He said last month, “These struggles always boil down to a contest between hope and fear. That was true in the debate over social security, when F.D.R. was accused of being a socialist. That was true when L.B.J. tried to pass Medicare. And it’s true in this debate today.”
I head to Moscow this Sunday to interview the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Moscow, I know that those who follow our politics are shocked that an educated nation (that’s us) can attack a moderately liberal president for being socialist. My friends e-mail me and ask: What is this complaint socialist-hating Americans have about the Obama administration having too many czars? Old-style Soviet Communism has been discarded, in these last years, in favor of flat taxes, capitalist corruption and oligarchs. Meanwhile, most enlightened Russians, like Gorbachev or his colleague Dmitri Muratov, the editor of Moscow’s last oppositionist newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, seek a European-style social democracy.
America’s Glenn Beck-inspired mobs would consider social democracy one and the same as socialism or communism. But there is a difference; and it is one which our history textbooks and our media have for the most part failed to fill us in on. So, now we are in a vacuum, and misinformation and mendacity fills it. At our peril. Isn’t social democracy — or call it socialism with a human face — all about a healthy and thriving public sphere in education, health care, transportation, libraries, parks, child care? Isn’t it about government programs that improve the conditions of people’s lives? If that is socialism, then Medicare is our America variant of socialism.
We are poorer today for the divisions unleashed by those who would lash the label “socialism” around the neck of a moderately liberal president in order to cripple efforts by government to play a smart and humane role.
"Being real"
In response to my post about Kanye West, Marc DeGirolami adds:
In addition to the self-creation angle, I wonder whether “being real” is now a justification (or maybe only an excuse) for various sorts of vice that might coincide with brutal honesty. Rudeness, arrogance, even cruelty – all are justified so long as one is being truthful or telling it like it is. For a society that seems sometimes to have such difficulty with the presumption to know ‘the truth’ (scare quotes!!), this seems an unexpected development. It also may belie the studied artificiality (i.e., the not “being real”) that is necessary to preserve and foster many types of social relationships, which may actually be quite fragile and unable to withstand honesties that are delivered with brutality.
Allen on Subsidiarity and Health Care Reform
Prompted by a statement of Kansas bishops Naumann and Finn, several MOJ posts in the last week or so have addressed the issue of health care reform and subsidiarity John Allen takes up the topic in his NCR column this week, which you can read here.
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