J-Knip turns some savvy phrases in response to this morning's seance with Tocqueville on the subject of Michael Gerson.
Me: Alexis, can you hear me? Is Gerson bad for political liberty?"
Voice: Mai-s-s-s o-u-u-u-i-i-i-i... [moans]
Joe's at his strongest right here:
the dismantling of "superfluous" government doesn’t take place in a political, moral, or cultural vacuum. The question is how to cultivate the characters who are willing to stand on their own and the civil society that can foster and support them. Cultivating the conditions of self-reliance and voluntary engagement with widows and orphans was--is?--the overarching purpose of "compassionate conservatism, properly understood.
Tocqueville explains in his Memoir on Pauperism that indeed sometimes in a jam the state ought to take on the public charity -- but that this function must be returned to private charitable institutions -- y'know, churches and stuff -- as soon as possible. Why? Not because the state is the devil, but because when the state is the privilege-based distributor of wealth, a tremendous envy, hatred, and mutual suspicion burbles up amongst rich and poor alike. And so it is today. Tax cuts are great, but not because people should hoard gold. They're great because the government is taking too much money in order to redistribute it -- to projects which increasingly merely keep the system going -- and that desperate redistributive system is poisonous to the polity.
But Tocqueville also adjudged our habits of mutual linkage to be ingrained deeply and even unconsciously enough so that we would be able to pick up where we left off when crises ended. Of course now is the time of endless crisis, the carousel of crisis, the lazy susan of crisis. Joe wants to know:
Will these "old aristocratic habits" come back without a nudge or two? Are they that natural?
Ask Alexis. He thought religion of some sort was indispensable to political liberty yet insisted that all political leaders could or should do to promote it was go to church. And he thought that the best we could do in the politics department proper as leaders was to inspire a taste for long-term projects among the people and throw them into the details of everyday administration by not sucking away all their political liberties and not extending the central government -- including, specifically, its power to disburse money and approve or deny its use -- across the land. This is no "government's got to move." Joe's bottom line:
can’t compassionate conservatism properly understood base itself upon a properly Tocquevillian (and "Catholic," a la Gerson and John DiIulio, with whom I’ll soon have a few bones to pick) understanding of subsidiarity?
Tocqueville might ask in response whether self-interest rightly understood would make useless or superfluous the term 'compassionate conservatism rightly understood.' My big question for the Catholic subsidiarists is where federalism goes on this model. And here's where I think I part ways permanently with Gerson and Huckabee. Subsidiarity, as a top-down, Rome-down phenomenon, is a rotten pattern for the American Republic. Alasdair MacIntyre, the Aristotelian Thomist par excellence, reiterates ever more frequently these days that the state and the market are positively inimical to the sort of subsidiarity that is needed for Americans to pursue the common good -- that is, a shared good devised locally and organized from the bottom of particulars up to the general welfare, not devised in Washington and organized from the harp-plucked cloudbanks of abstract compassion down to the practice of making the little people feel better too.
I know this is somewhat snide, but only a little. Catholic subsidiarity as a model for compassionate conservatism, Helmut Kohlism, or anything else doesn't cut it for America, my friends, unless it's flush with the vigor of federalism. Tocqueville, I think, knew this. That doesn't mean disband Washington. It doesn't mean waking up tomorrow, chugging a tall glass of Metamucil, breaking Medicare over our knee and tossing it in the trash. It does mean disabusing Republicans of Gersonism, and patiently restoring federalism -- by legislative rollback, not just judicial advance -- to its essential position of dominance in our system of government.
Update: the fun continues at the Dish. "Therapeutic Left-Liberalism:" just what the GOP does not need. Too bad it's setting the tempo of daily life in the west and, by design, increasingly around the world. And yes, bloggers are developing a hive mind.
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