Mt. Vernon Statement
The confusion of conservative fusionism
Here’s my oped on the Mount Vernon Statement in the Christian Science Monitor:
Have you heard the one where Ron Paul, Pat Robertson, and John Bolton walk into a bar? According to the “Mount Vernon Statement,” the declaration of first principles signed yesterday at part of George Washington’s estate by conservatives of varied persuasions, the punch line would be “Constitutional conservativism.” Led by Edwin Meese, President Reagan’s attorney general, the collection of prominent economic, social, and “national security” conservatives aimed to clarify and recommit themselves to conservativism’s bedrock political philosophy.
They modeled the project self-consciously on the 1960 Sharon Statement that ushered in “new conservativism” when the Young Americans for Freedom signed it at William F. Buckley Jr.’s estate in Sharon, Conn. Like those young activists, Frank Meyer’s and Mr. Buckley’s vision of a theory able to “fuse” disparate American conservative ideologies inspired Meese and Co. The resulting mix of pabulum, historical revisionism, and internal inconsistency sheds light on enduring and contemporary tensions within American conservativism.
First, their argument. The main nugget of “Constitutional conservatism” is that America needs to return to the “limited government based on the rule of law” ideals of the Founders, who “sought to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish true religious liberty and maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government.”
What the Framers intended
After watching this humorous video on the diversity of opinion among members of the same religion, I got to thinking about how such a phenomenon applies more broadly to philosophy.
It’s true that in a medium like religious faith, it’s near impossible to tell who’s interpreting the moral, political, and historical claims of a particular tradition correctly. God tends, suspiciously, to agree with all of our personal opinions.
The same can be said for America’s Framers. Our nation is home to a wide variety of political philosophies, and I’d bet you would be hard-pressed to find many that don’t claim the Framers as tacit supporters. There’s a conservative Christian movement in Texas right now that aims to alter school curriculum and textbooks in order to teach children the true intent of the Founding Fathers - to create a strong, Christian nation that would carry out Jesus’s mandate on Earth. Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens insists that the Founders were Enlightenment Deists, committed only to a vague, secularized spirituality and interested in avoiding the interference of religion with politics, science, and ethics.
The “American Tradition,” like its religious counterparts, is as contested as it is loved.
-Colin
The morality of bipartisanship
Pragmatism, Legitimacy, and Fraternity
Pres. Obama promised and thus far has failed to bring bipartisanship to Washington, D.C. Today he renewed the effort by attending a gathering of House Republicans.
Few, if any leaders contest bipartisanship’s value. It is one of those “golden” concepts of American politics, which Sam–our resident political consultant–can maybe tell us more about. What values, though, does it embody or further?
1. Pragmatism
To the extent that a proposed bill has value, it’s passage is a good thing. If one party does not have sufficient votes to enact a valuable bill without the other’s support, bipartisanship enables the bill’s passage. In this case, the value of bipartisanship is extrinsic or consequentialist, depending on the value of the law it enables, rather than inherent to the concept itself. It prevents legislative gridlock. One concern is that it requires watering down legislation to ensure it passes. But passing a decent law is better than not passing a supposedly perfect law. Bipartisanship gets the job done.
2. Legitimacy
The founders and the filibuster
Thomas Geoghegan writes a great op-ed in the NYT arguing that the filibuster “is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent.”
-Jake
Secularizing the calendar!?
The latest controversy to emerge at the intersection of public schools and Christianity concerns our dating system. A movement in my old school district is protesting the use of BCE / CE (instead of BC / AD) to teach kids about dates in history. “Before the Common Era” and “Common Era” are less offensive to non-Christians than “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini,” which is Latin for “in the year of the Lord.”
But there’s just no getting around the fact that BCE / CE are simply secularized labels referring to Christ’s suggested birth date. We shouldn’t feel too guilty about that, however, because most calendars are built around some otherwise arbitrary date of particular cultural importance.
We’re probably stuck with the date, but should we be stuck with the religious trappings? Like so many of these controversies, from school prayer, “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, “In God We Trust” on our currency, creationism in biology class, and the annual “War on Christmas,” the arguments are couched in language of cultural heritage - this has always been a Christian nation, so it goes, and efforts to “secularize” its institutions are either paternalistic or morally destabilizing.
Those in favor of church-state separation usually counter that in a society of many faiths and traditions, public representations of a particular faith must either be removed, like religious displays in courthouses, or secularized when useful for publicly justifiable reasons - like Christmas or having Sundays off. Regardless of our historical legacy (which is decidedly more complicated than most allow), liberals must weigh matters of cultural importance against the heavy counterweights of free conscience, association, and equal treatment.
-Colin
More on state sovereignty
Yesterday I posted a quick link to Josh Patashnik’s defense of states’ rights.
Patashnik argues that state-level policy making is valuable because there is a class of policy questions that are too local to be effectively legislated at the national level, but which do not require municipal-level policy. This much can be granted. But states’ rights proponents are generally making broader claims to the sovereignty of states, not merely a claim to their functional usefulness as makers of local policy.
Patashnik then moves on the defend the claim to state sovereignty, using carbon regulation as an example:
It seems unfair to force residents of sparely populated states with carbon-intensive economies to bear most of the costs of adopting a policy designed to benefit the nation as a whole.
This is poor example for the point Patashnik is trying to make. Carbon regulation is an example where regional differences come down not to culture, preferences, or policy experimentation. It is simply that some parts of the country must lose in order for the whole to win.
There is certainly room for state-wide policy making. However, its not clear that the framers clearly anticipated issues like climate change that require only a national solution. Is there a better case to be made for the continued existence of state sovereignty?
-John
Friedman and change
Is the American system broken?
Tom Friedman’s latest column is a bit of a polemic about the current state of American politics, which he compares with the “poisonous” environment in Israel that led to Rabin’s assassination. Friedman writes:
But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system. Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world.
Friedman argues that these factors have “overwhelmed the genius of the American system.” However, it’s not clear to me that most of these developments do anything to change the fundamental problem which was addressed at the founding: the dangers of factions competing bitterly against each other for poltiical control. While the tools may have changed, the problem has not.
The “checks and balances” of which every high school student are familiar curb the power of factions by, first, significantly slowing the policy process and, second, by ensuring some level of constitutional review over laws passed. This system is, contra Friedman, still in place — the glacial pace of health care reform is one example.
What Friedman is really getting at is whether we have the right system set up, as it might be working too well in maintaining the status quo.
-John
Money talks
The debate over campaign finance reform
On Monday, the Democratic National Committee filed a brief with the Supreme Court, arguing that overhauling the campaign finance system could “stifle the type of small donations that helped power Barack Obama to victory in last Novembers election.” The DNC’s brief was in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to review whether some of the campaign finance restrictions imposed by the 2002 McCain-Feingold Bill are unconstitutional. Read more
Rebuilding Athens
How much more democratic should we be?
A new Washington Monthly editorial by Paul Glastris argues that maybe the Athenian model of direct democracy wasn’t as bad as our Founding Fathers thought. Democracy has actually had a pretty bad rap until until relatively recently in human history, but a new book by Stanford classicist Josiah Ober suggests that Athens may have thrived — rather than suffered — thanks to its embrace of real citizen rule. Read more
-
Follow us on Twitter
