It is often remarked by those not caught up in it that American political discourse these days has reached a new low. True, bitter political divisions have always existed, but there seems to be something innate in modern media which appeals to crude demonization of one’s enemies and militates against thoughtful dialogue, or even an intelligent argument.
It’s like a big brick wall has been erected down the middle of the Republic. On the right side are lined up Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter and the rest, throwing bricks and insults over the wall. On the left side of the wall stand the lesser known Franken, Stephanie Miller, and the others, throwing bricks and insults right back. Both sides hold the other to be totally evil, and hasten to defend their own kind, no matter what hypocritical or corrupt act they have committed. Instead of discussion there is only yelling and insults, and shouting down the opposition is considered a victory.
Enter The American Conservative, Patrick Buchanan’s journal, founded in 2002.
When Mr Buchanan first ran for president, as a sort of extreme version of Republican orthodoxy, I declared to a friend that I wouldn’t vote for him if he was running against Satan himself. After the shocked silence, I hastened to add that I wouldn’t vote for the Devil either, but would sit out the election.
Then Buchanan ran again, and after meeting and talking with laid-off workers and seeing for himself the devastated American industrial landscape he had a change of heart. He came to question big business as well as big government.
To his credit, Pat Buchanan has long opposed the American imperialist itch. And he is one of the very few Catholic conservatives who has without hesitation condemned the use of nuclear weapons as immoral.
So by 2000 I, in good conscience, cast my vote for Patrick Buchanan in his–probably final–quixotic bid for the presidency.
He no doubt finally concluded that, as happened more than once in his career, any sign of momentum on his part triggered a coordinated attack by the combined forces of the political establishment and the national media. Such a combined effort is–or was–apparently unstoppable.
So he returned to journalism, and launched The American Conservative.
The journal is refreshingly free of the dominant political Manicheism and is so good that it is a shame that the title will keep so many people from reading it.
In a world where the "conservative" label has been appropriated by an administration intent on centralizing the power of the Presidency, circumscribing traditional rights, and embarking on an ideologically powered drive to establish a global empire, Buchanan’s brand of conservatism seems odd
indeed: antiwar, anti-imperialist, and unafraid to acknowledge not only that the better sort of leftist is not evil-minded but may actually have something of value to offer. The NAC offers hope to those of us weary of the shouting match.
In the most recent issue, for example, besides a tribute to the late Senator Eugene McCarthy, was a lengthy and admiring article, by Bill Kauffman, on that other Upper Midwestern Democrat, Senator George McGovern.
Mr. Kauffman–a sort of localist/libertarian with a hip sensibility–notes that McGovern has been falsely caricaturized by the Right as the wild-eyed social radical who led the Democratic Party away from mainstream American values into the la-la land of gender politics, gay rights, and shrill eccentricity.
Whatever you want to call this development–Id Leftism?–it was born in the wake of McGovern’s resounding defeat in 1972, but it was not his child.
The real George McGovern, as opposed to the the cartoon McGovern, was and is quite another creature.
George McGovern is a lifelong and apparently devout member of the Methodist church in his small South Dakota hometown, where he still lives. He is, in his 80s, still married to his hometown sweetheart (Kauffman remarks that many of the "family values" politicos lead less conventional lives). His political thought stems, not from Berkeley-style New Leftism, but from the older Democratic populism of the northern prairies. McGovern values rural life, the natural world and its limits and cycles, and simple unbureaucratic democracy. He is a decorated veteran of World War II, and Kaufmann remarks that if his
humility hadn’t prevented him from exploiting that fact- unlike certain other, later Democratic politicians- he may well not have suffered such a spectacular defeat in 72.
All in all, Senator McGovern seems a thoroughly decent man, of the sturdy Midwestern type that is one of the glories of America.
Of course, you are probably thinking, as I was while reading the article, "but what about abortion?"; after all, wasn’t McGovern the first American presidential candidate to hold a prochoice position?
Well, sort of. What his platform actually called for was for the issue to be left up to the states, not the federal government. This may well have been deemed a "prochoice" position before Roe V Wade, but it is identical to what every "prolife" Republican I am aware of is calling for today. And Kauffman notes that McGovern’s running mate was Sergent Shriver, a prolife Catholic and
admirer of Dorothy Day.
This got me thinking.
Neither the populists of the Left nor of the Right have the numbers to challenge the neoconservative establishment alone. But however much the Nader Left and the Buchanan Right have come to have in common, the "social issues," with abortion at the top of the list, keep them divided and ineffectual.
But if the old "prochoice" position is in effect identical with the new "prolife" postition, might not this be a key to setting aside, at least temporarily, our differences to engage in a unified struggle to take the country back from the imperialists and the oligarchs, from the corporate globalists that both those to the right and the left of the Republican/Democratic mainstream see
as the enemy?
Of course the NOW and NARAL types, for whom abortion is the Most Important Issue in the World would not join in. Nor would those prolifers for whom anything but total victory is seen as betrayal, who would rather maintain their purity of principle than achieve partial victory.
As politics is "the art of the possible," and most of us recognize that America will not tolerate complete criminalization of abortion this side of some sort of miraculous mass conversion, a working compromise such as this could mean the birth of a new and vigorous movement that would transcend the dominant and mind-numbing Right/Left paradigm.
This prolifer, for one, would sign on.
–Daniel Nichols
Excellent post, Daniel. I keep running up against people I admire recommending The American Conservative to me, for exactly the reasons you state. There is a New Populism (or maybe it’s an Old Populism) lurking around in there; the question is, as you say, whether any possible political platform could ever articulate it in such a way as to draw enough support to actually make a difference. One can keep hoping, though. (I keep looking in the direction of Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey, Jr., but whether that hope will bear fruit or not remains to be seen.)
Daniel Nichols writes : “Nor would those prolifers for whom anything but total victory is seen as betrayal, who would rather maintain their purity of principle than achieve partial victory.”
Daniel Nichols trots out the old canard that was used in the 80′s to destroy the pro-life movement. Pro-lifers were urged to compromise until pro-lifers were fighting for nothing better than the scraps left under the table by their masters.
Where has that continual compromising which Daniel Nichols is advocating led to? It’s led to where if someone is in favor of 95% of all procured abortions, he is now cheered as pro-life. It’s led to where it is considered a great victory when there is a law passed against infanticide. It has led nowhere.
Terry Randall once said “if you think abortion is murder, then act like its murder”. The error pro-lifers made was in not acting like they thought it was murder through their continual compromising until there is now no babies left to compromise. They are all dead.
In the 80s compromisers snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and I was among those opposing them.
Now, in 2006, does anyone think there is even a remote chance of total prolife victory?
Yet Americans are ambivalent, and at least some states would probably outlaw abortion, while most others would restrict it to some degree, surely better than the status quo.
It often seems to me that the imperialists like to keep the electorate divided on the “moral issues”, which they have no intention of working for, to keep the sort of unified opposition I wrote about from forming. It’s a sideshow, most of this prolife posturing, while the political “prolife heroes” pursue their real goals of corporate and personal profit.
And it’s Randall Terry, not Terry Randall: one of the biggest disasters to hit the prolife movement, and whose personal life is far shoddier than Senator McGovern’s.
Daniel Nichols, writes: “And it’s Randall Terry, not Terry Randall”
Thanks, I didn’t see it. Dyslexia is an odd creature, it’s always interesting to see how it creeps up. I’m usually able to catch it.
————–
But more to the point, of course you used to be against compromise, and I was fool enough to buy into it. But compromise is not a solution because abortion is finally a spiritual problem, not a political problem. And because the U.S. gravitates towards the culture of death, compromise can only work as a wedge issue to incrementally move the culture further in its direction.
On the other hand, sending abortion back to the States is not a compromise, but a positive step away from the culture of death because of the connection between the nation-state and crypto-eugenics. The crypto-eugenicists use the nation-state to foster their agenda because the nation-state is unnatural to man.
Mr. Nichols,
I have often thought the same thing, however, I have always thrown the idea out in the end. I think the point Mr. Salazar makes is key. Do we really believe that abortion is murder? Let’s be honest most of us do not. We believe it is wrong, and awful, but not murder. If the people you wish to make alliance with believed that Jews could be rounded up and killed, would you be willing to make alliance with them? Of course not, because killing a Jew because he is a Jew is murder. Yet you ask the pro-lifers to make alliance with baby murderers. What is the difference? When you kill a Jew or a African-American or a Catholic that is out of the womb it is murder, but abortion is not really murder.
Also, I am convinced that there is no natural way that we can win. In the natural order your compromise solution has no more chance for success than the uncompromising pro-lifer’s solution. There has never been a populist movement in this country that worked. Our country is designed to only allow two parties that can be controlled by special interests. Any populist movement that started to do something was swallowed up by one of the parties. However, I am certain that with God all things are possible. So from a supernatural perspective the no compromise pro-life position has some chance for success. The day we compromise about murder, we will loose the blessing of God. So I keep working, without compromise, knowing that all things work to the good for them that love God, and accepting what God’s Providence is allowing.
I’m not sure what y’all mean when you speak of “compromise” and “no compromise.” The latter to me would mean something like armed resistance, or at a minimum some kind of Gandhian throwing oneself into the machinery. Is that what you mean?
Regarding McGovern: I was not paying much attention at all to politics in 1972, but I had the impression that even then it was recognized that McGovern was not on board with the radicals who were taking over (had taken over?) the Democratic party, at least on social questions. The Wild Blue, by Stephen Ambrose, although subtitled “The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45″, is really about McGovern, and more than confirms the impression that he was/is a good and honorable man.
As a Pennsylvanian, I’ve been excited about Robert Casey, Jr., but it seems the pro-choice folks are beginning to ramp up a challenger.
So Franklin is on board, just doesn’t want to call it a compromise. Those of us not so opposed in concept to the State believe that a federal prolife amendment would be ideal; that as in the civil rights struggle in the 60s, when the states fail to defend human rights the federal government must do so.
The situation today is quite otherwise: the federal government, through the judiciary, guarantees the right to kill babies.
As what most prolife politicians are working for is to return the matter to the states it seems both wise and prudent to struggle to that end.
As for working with prochoice people with whom one is united about other issues, calling them “baby killers” is the sort of political Manicheism I was talking about. In fact very few who favor legal abortion have spent five minutes thinking about abortion: they hold their opinion for a variety of hazy reactive reasons, not least the unattractive rhetoric and right-wing politics of so many prolifers. To hold them fully accountable for a half-formed, unreflective opinion is unfair. Further, if they are working toward a common goal with prolifers, the prolife movement is suddenly humanized and when personal affection for prolifers develops they will be more open to the prolife position, perhaps even embracing it.
And let me clarify. When I said “compromise” I meant only a tactical compromise, not a compromise of principle. Political realities seem to demand that at this point: we ought not put other pressing issues- at a time when many of us fear the future of the Republic is in peril- on the back burner until by some miracle the majority of Americans share our principled opposition to abortion.
Indeed, if you are willing to work with Evangelical prolifers, most of whom would make exceptions for rape or incest- hardly principled- you shouldn’t have a problem working with anyone.
True immoral political compromise, it seems to me, would be an espousal of, say, a platform position that is intinsically pro-abortion. However, joining with pro-abortion people to achieve something less than perfect would not necessarily be immoral compromise. For instance, I cannot see the immorality of both sides agreeing to a platform statement that calls for the return of abortion to state authority, even if nothing in the platform calls for the abolition of abortion as such. By supporting such a platform, (when one thinks he can expect nothing better) one is not compromising on the level of principle but only, perhaps, on tactics.
Mr. Nichols,
Would you work with distributist Neo-Nazis, and dismiss their evil because they have not thought about the issue of killing Jews?
Also, I assumed you were talking about aligning with other people involved in politics. If that is the case you are naive to believe that they are pro-choice because they have never “spent five minutes thinking” about the issue, or because some mean pro-lifer told them abortion is murder. You are proposing (unless I am mistaken) a States Rights (at least when it comes to abortion) movement that would be officially neutral on killing babies (if you were not neutral the pro-abortion people would leave the movement).
Finally, the way you talk about zealous pro-lifers is rather disturbing. Perhaps in their zeal at the great evil of abortion they act imprudently, but it seems you have more of a problem with them than with your future pro-abortion allies. Providentially, I was proofing a book called the Prophet of Mt. Carmel a biography of St. Elias and the author, while explaining a stumbling block of Elias, touches on this very issue:
“We should have a deep respect for the zeal of good men, notwithstanding the errors with which it is frequently accompanied. It is so rare, especially in a skeptical age like the present, to find anything like a holy passion for the cause of God, that when we do meet with an individual in whom the fire of devotedness burns with vehement ardor, we ought to welcome him with special honor, and assist his aims with cordial cooperation. Men who are full of love for the glory of God, like enthusiasts of other kinds, often fall into errors of judgment through their eagerness to gain their point. They do not, for instance, always perceive accurately whither they are going; they are, perhaps, rough and clumsy in manner, deficient in tact and too impatient in their treatment of others, who, not possessing their own generous spirit, stand provokingly in their way. They have not always the time, even if they have the disposition, to be careful about the niceties and proprieties so much admired by those to whom life is rather a pleasant drama than a tremendous reality. Carried along by some highly important and absorbing idea, they think little of trampling upon inferior interests, if they be in the way of their own onward march. Whatever the defects of zealous good men, we ought to learn to make every possible allowance for them on account of the excellence of their motives. God treated the shortcomings of Elias with exceeding leniency, and few things are more repugnant to the spirit of charity than the detestable habit of criticizing and depreciating the conduct of fervent men, merely because that fervor is not always as perfect in practice as it is pure in intention. Open and avowed antagonists who fight you face to face and inch by inch, are far less offensive and injurious than those passionless critics who, whilst agreeing with you in principle, are ever on the watch, microscope in hand, to point out the minutest flaws, real or imaginary, in your course of action. There are persons who have little or no respect for even undoubted heroism, unless the hero himself belongs to the approved caste, and wears the regulation uniform. Zealous men naturally expect to meet with opposition, both intense and malignantly willful, from the powers of hell, and from the “manifest children of the devil,” but their most hampering and depressing obstacles come from the dead weight of the lukewarm, the carnal prudence of the timid, the caviling of the habitual fault finders, the tyrannical etiquette of the formalists and the gloomy foreboding and prophecies of the pessimists. These are stings which have, before now, made many a saintly “lion of the Lord” writhe with pain and slacken his pace, although they have failed to drive him from the path marked out for him by duty and love.
PS I would like to point out that the reason I found the above quote so moving is because I am a critic by nature, and have often been guilty of the above.
Mr. Zehnder,
It is not that easy. Okay the platform is neutral on abortion, and you think that would be okay. But now you are going to run candidates and some of those candidates are going to be vehemently pro-abortion, your not only going to have to vote for them, but work to get them elected. What are your proportionate reasons for supporting them, that would make up for the fact they are in favor of killing babies (the current Pope was pretty clear it would be sin to vote from them without proportionate reasons)? What if they are running against a pro-life democrat, or traditional conservative pro-life republican? When you look deeper into this idea, it just gets worse and worse.
Perhaps the answer is to start of Pro-life/Pro-distributist/Anti-Empire party/movement and invite pro-abortion people to vote for you. But you still have the problem that the system is set up for only two parties.
I rather like this use of “Mr.” as the norm; it has a pleasantly Toryish feel about it.
So: Mr. Nichols can correct me if applicable, but I didn’t read his proposal as calling for something as structured as a political party, with a platform agreed upon by all, but as a willingness to form coalitions around specific issues. I think there is a lot of room to work there without compromising on principle.
E.g.: supposing you had a local Distributist party, and a local Green party, the former anti-abortion and the latter pro. They could work together to oppose turning the park into a toxic waste dump.
You have to recognize degrees of involvement and culpability. I do think there’s a line there somewhere–it’s hard to imagine a situation where pro-lifers could join hands with someone who actually performs abortions. But for, say, the average Green, being “pro-choice” is not remotely as culpable as running a Planned Parenthood “clinic.”
Mr. Horton,
I see no moral problem with the idea as you present it. However, how can the green party or the distributist party win any seats? As I said the two party system is the biggest problem with our political system. Look at other democracies and you see coalition governments formed among different parties allowing even small parties to have some voice, but in America this can not happen, because the Constitution will not allow it. This is why I assumed Mr. Nichols was thinking of starting a 3rd party.
Mr. Horton,
Isn’t “Mr.” pleasant, so very civilized? I have always hated — HATED, sir! — being called my Christian name by people I hardly know or have met for the first time. Such as salesmen who do not call me merely “Christopher” but “Chris” upon meeting me for the first time. Adding the title before the surname shows respect — much like the formal “you” as opposed to the informal “thou” used to do in happier times. Intimacy should be earned, but in our day it is cheaply sold to the lowest bidder. Alas!
Mr. Sarsfield,
You make an excellent point in terms of a political party. I shall have to think more about it. I think, though, there may be proportional reasons to vote for a pro-abortion candidate — for instance, if the other party, though calling itself anti-abortion, favors a murderous war or shows itself willing, say, to use nuclear weaponry. Some Communists have opposed abortion in the distant past, I believe, but I wouldn’t vote for one. My general tactic has been not to vote for anyone if the choice was between, say, a pro-abortion candidate and a “pro-life” candidate who, nevertheless, favors a particular unjust war.
By the way, the quote from St. Elias is excellent. It puts things in perspective.
Mr. Zehnder,
I agree with most of what you said. During the last presidential election I argued that if the Democrats had run someone who was against the war (like Howard Dean) a Catholic could make a case that it would be better to vote for Dean than Bush, since the president can do very little for about abortion (Supreme Court’s call) yet he has a great deal to do with sending people to war. Of course most of my Republican Catholic friends thought that I had lost my mind. Which should not have surprised me because they were in favor of a statement saying they were voting for Pres. Bush because he was the pro-life candidate. I felt like putting a sign on my property (I live in a very Republican/Catholic section of Steubenville, OH) saying: “I support George Bush, he only wants to allow some of the babies to be killed.” In the end I could not vote for either Republicrat. I wanted *no* culpability for helping either win. I guess that is where I disagree with you. I do not think you are sinning when you vote for a pro-abortion candidate for other good reasons, I just personally can not bring myself to do it.
Mr Sarsfield:
So, you are a critic by nature? Well, I am a zealot by nature and I have an icon of St Elias that I painted in our icon corner..
I have, at least in the past, exhibited every trait your quote described.
I didn’t say most prochoicers had never thought about the “issue” of abortion. I’m afraid they have thought about “issues” more than is good for them. I did say they had never thought about abortion as in the actual act of abortion.
When they think about abortion they think of issues: Women’s Rights, the Religious Right, Theocracy, and so on.
Your suggestion of an anti-Empire prolife distributist party is of great interest, I am sure, to anyone so disposed. All 12 of us.
Yes, in fact I was thinking of something like a party, but perhaps one of the existing parties could be the vehicle, I don’t know.
And as for your political sign [in Steubenville!] if I went to the Right to Life March this year I was going to make a sign that said either “Prolife, Pro-peace, anti-Bush” or “Bombs Kill Babies, Too”.
Finances and family obligations did not allow me to attend, alas.
No, I don’t think I would ally myself with distributist neo-Nazis [though that is an oxymoron, the Nazis being, after all, National Socialists]. But then I hardly consider people like Ralph Nader or Bill McKibben, or the kindly but hard left guy I work with- the sort of leftists I have in mind- to be kindred to the Nazis.
And as for formality, while I don’t like salesmen calling me “Dan”, for the rest of it, aside from liturgy, I am an American, comfortable with easy informality…
Mr. Nichols et al.,
Divide and conquer seems a great strategy on the many moral issues. As all of the politics I have witnessed indicate, the national body governing the nearly 300,000,000 people in the US is a very poor agency of reform.
While forming a new national party is nigh unto impossible (although Peroutka got my last vote), convincing the established national parties to become partial adherents to subsidiarity seems within the realm of the possible. Once on the state and, even better, local level, the twelve interested people can have a much greater affect. My homeland of North Dakota actually almost passed a bill prohibiting abortions [http://www.goodmorals.org/hb1242/], except for the interference of the Catholic bishops. Even the Democrats in North Dakota are pro-life.
My current city, Front Royal, Virginia, successfully withstood a Walmart onslaught. It was quite possible for a small group to organize a campaign that brought the wrath of thousands of city residents upon the town council that completely ignored the protests of nearly everyone at the public meetings.
The point of my rambling is that, even though a distributist, anti-imperialism national party is outside of the realm of possibility in the forseeable future, local and state politics do not need to be so bound to the monolithic national parties, even if the local and state officials claim allegiance to the established national parties.
In sum, let us work to instill the principle of subsidiarity in our national parties.
As a now former Republican, I think the best strategy is ticket splitting and putting heavy influence into the primaries. Where I live, we have more local pro-life Democrats. When I lived Port Washington, Republicans ran unopposed and the election was pretty much the primary. I will probably vote on the Democratic ticket during the primaries this year. I’m looking strongingly at voting Democrat for the House and Republican for the Senate and Presidency. Democrat Diamond Jim Doyle won’t be getting my vote for governor.
feel free to delete this comment
I remember the wry campaign slogan from the 1972 election (the year I graduated from HS – I was too young to vote but would probably have supported McGovern after having survived what Nixon did to California)
[pithy off-color joke suppressed by blog owner]
pithy, off-color, and oh so true.
I was raised by my grandpa to be a Lincoln Republican, but registered as a Democrat when I came of age to vote – mostly because of the 1972 election campaign and the Watergate fiasco.