Political spectrums

I live deep in the heart of red state Texas, which means I regularly find myself trying to expand the political imaginations of my students. Not, that is, to switch their allegiances from one color to another, but to redraw the map they've inherited; to place a question mark next to its self-evident obviousness, which they treat as if it were the periodic table of elements (with only two to choose from!).

So I've come up with a heuristic that is meant to help students in my context. Mostly I want them to see the array of combinations, both of political first principles and concrete policy convictions, beyond lining up the GOP's national platform versus the DNC's. So, e.g., I want them to be introduced to (the concept of) Catholic Communists and Pro-Life Progressives and Democratic Socialists and Communitarian Conservatives and so on.

What follows is the set of spectrums, eight in all, that I've conjured up in order to help them in this process. I would be very interested in learning about other examples of this sort of thing, either in print or in the classroom. Here's mine, with brief of explanations for each, mostly in the form of questions.

1. Secular———————Religious 

The question here is not whether one is individually religious. It is whether and to what extent one believes the governing authorities ought to be religious in character. The extremes here would be laïcité versus integralism; less extreme: separation of church and state versus established religion. Appeal to common faith or to Scripture as public norms, or practices like prayer in public schools, are litmus tests for where one stands on this spectrum.

2. Individualist—————Communitarian

Is the fundamental unit of society the individual, the family, the extended kin network, the neighborhood, the town, the city, or other? What is privileged in law and social mores? Is it plausible to treat groups as units irreducible to the individual—or no? Why or why not? Can such units be neither familial nor racial but, e.g., religious? This spectrum helps to answer such questions.

3. Democratic—————Aristocratic

How should the policies that govern and order society be decided and enacted? Who has authority to say so and power to make it so? Should any and all laws be put up to a direct vote by "the people"? Should adults be legally required to vote? Should one's vote ever be taken away? Should any processes of policy deliberation and creation be delegated to representatives? If so, ought those representatives to do what they deem the wisest course, or ought they to do whatever (the majority of) their voters say they want? Does society inevitably have a "ruling class" of "elites"? If it does, should this tendency be curtailed, indeed resisted, or should it be cultivated toward the common good? How "mixed" should government be, and what norms or laws, if any, militate against 50.1% majoritarian rule?

4. Liberal———————Illiberal*

What is "freedom," and how should it be protected or encouraged by the governing authorities? Does freedom pertain to individuals or communities? Is it purely negative (i.e., freedom from interference) or also positive (i.e., freedom to do, be, or say X or Y)? What may or must society "enforce" in the lives of its citizens? Are there moral or legal norms beyond the harm principle? How may they be adjudicated? Are the liberties properly sought or secured in society a creation of said society, or do they antedate their own formal recognition? What is their metaphysical status, in other words? Are they necessarily connected with "rights," or are "rights" as a concept unnecessary in a free polity? Are there "freedoms" or "rights" it is better not to permit, legally or otherwise, given the consequences for the common good? What are they, how can they be identified, and by what measure are they judged good or bad for society?

(*Initially I had "authoritarian" here, which would appear to load the deck. If someone has a nice neutral alternative term here, I'm all ears.)

5.  Socialist———————Libertarian

What is the ideal, most practicable, or most preferable political economy? One in which private property is abolished or protected? Should workers own the means of production? Is the accumulation of enormous quantities of capital permissible? If permissible, is it encouraged or discouraged? Should the governing authorities have the authority to bestow or remove money or property to or from individuals or communities? If so, under what circumstances and for what reasons may it do so? To what extent should markets predominate in society, and to what extent, if any, should the governing authorities be able and willing to intervene in or to regulate those markets? Is political economy a matter of first principles, universal in scope and applicable to all contexts, or is it a pragmatic or prudential matter, local in scope and differentiated in application? What level of inequity is tolerable in society—if any at all?

6. Progressive——————Conservative

What is the proper stance toward the past? Should it be received as a gift to treasure and pass on to the next generation? Or is it primarily a legacy of oppression and suffering to reject and/or transform in the present, for the sake of a more just future? Where do the dangers lie—in an undue pessimism about our ability to improve our lot and the lot of our neighbors, or in an overly optimistic confidence in our capacity for radical change for the better? What is the status of moral and social mores and traditions? Are they wise, hard-earned advice handed on by the democracy of the dead? Or are they stultifying, lifeless customs holding us in the grip of a past from which we need liberation? Must social practices by "rationally" justified in order to approve of them or incentivize them in others? What is the weight of convention? What authority, if any, do parents, families, neighbors, pastors, civic leaders possess, and to what extent, if any, should deference be paid to them?

7. Internationalist————Nationalist

To what or to whom are one's loyalties properly due? Is patriotism a virtue? Is it a moral obligation? Are "nations" the fundamental macro-corporate political unit? Should they be? (What of supra-national entities? What of empires?) To what extent, if any, does one owe one's fellow citizens of a nation affection, affinity, or service beyond what one owes to persons from other nations? Does one owe "allegiance" to one's nation? Is allegiance different than love, and if so, how? Would the world be improved if nations were dissolved, or at least, if national identities were softened substantially? Is one's national identity an essential part of oneself? Should it be?

8. Globalist———————Localist

Though similar to the previous spectrum, this one asks a different kind of question: What is the proper scope or extent of the polity to which one belongs and to which one owes service? Hypothetically one could be an internationalist localist: caring little for the nation as such, but finding life beyond the "local"—defined, let us say, as the concentric circles of household, neighborhood, and town, populated at the outer limit in the tens of thousands, but smaller than a full-blown city—too large for thick membership. The localist knows the names of her neighbors, streets, rivers, trees, native fauna, seasonal weather, and so on. The "globe" is an abstraction, and "global citizen" a contradiction in terms. Whereas the globalist thinks the localist backwards, parochial, nostalgic, or doomed for extinction in the near future. Politics is top-down, and while local town councils might seem to get stuff down, the forces that determine life in the 21st century, even the lives of farming and ranching communities in rural contexts, are as macro-global as can be. Best to recognize the fact and live accordingly rather than head for the bunker, hoping for the clock to turn back a few centuries.

/ / / / / / /

So much, anyway, for the heuristic I've come up with. For my students, as I say, what I want them to see beyond is both the GOP/DNC binary and the Right/Left master-filter. There are illiberal conservative socialists, and progressive nationalists, and secular aristocrats, and libertarian democrats, and communitarian liberals, and religious globalists, and on and on. (We'll leave aside the anarcho-syndicalists for the moment.)

Hopefully my students are enabled to reflect on the complexity of their own political commitments as well as learn a less reductive lens for interpreting the commitments of others. At the very least, my hope is to engender a more productive conversation in the classroom.

“We can't really be that fallen": a question for Christian socialists

Recently Nathan Robinson, editor-in-chief at Current Affairs, a socialist magazine, responded to National Review's issue "Against Socialism." He considers, successively, thirteen different writers' contributions in the issue. The tone of the piece is cheeky while wanting genuinely to respond in kind to substantive critiques of socialism.

One passage stood out to me. First, here is a paragraph that Robinson quotes from Theodore Dalrymple's essay in the NR issue:

"Socialism is not only, or even principally, an economic doctrine: It is a revolt against human nature. It refuses to believe that man is a fallen creature and seeks to improve him by making all equal one to another. It is not surprising that the development of the New Man was the ultimate goal of Communist tyrannies, the older version of man being so imperfect and even despicable. But such futile and reprehensible dreams, notwithstanding the disastrous results when they were taken seriously by ruthless men in power, are far from alien to current generations of intellectuals. Man, knowing himself to be imperfect, will continue to dream of, and believe in, schemes not merely of improvement here and there but of perfection, of a life so perfectly organized that everyone will be happy, kind, decent, and selfless without any effort at all. Illusion springs eternal, especially among intellectuals."

Here is what Robinson writes in response:

"Now, this part has a bit of truth to it. Socialism is not principally an economic doctrine, and I’ve suggested that the best way to understand it is as the set of principles that arise from feelings of solidarity. But it is not a 'revolt against human nature.' We simply have a difference of opinion on what 'human nature' means and what it allows to be possible. We believe human beings can be a cooperative species and do not see our fellow creatures as helplessly 'fallen' (or rather, if they’ve fallen, it’s our job to extend a hand and get them back up.) It’s true, we like to daydream about everyone being happy, kind, and decent, perhaps because we know so many people who fit the description and we find it easy to imagine the ethos spreading further. But we’re also realistic: we are not focused on mashing our fellow people into a vision of the New Human Being, but on achieving concrete goals that will materially improve people’s lives. I’m a utopian by twilight, but during the day I’m a practical sort, and so are the other lefties I know. Their goals are actually so modest that it’s remarkable they’re so controversial: a good standard of living for all, freedom from exploitation and abuse, democracy in the workplace, a culture of mutual aid and compassion. Can we not manage these things? We can’t really be that fallen."

It's unclear to me whether Robinson is having some rhetorical fun here, or whether he doesn't know the Christian theological language of "fallenness" on which Dalrymple is drawing. For what fallenness names is the condition of human (and indeed all created) life under sin, a condition that, according to Christian faith, will not change, much less be resolved, so long as this world endures. To the claim, "We can't really be that fallen," the broadly catholic, or Augustinian, tradition replies, at least in principle, "Indeed we are that fallen—and it is far worse than you imagine."

Now, that doesn't per se answer the concrete political, economic, or policy goals that Robinson sets out (though I do think there is a bit of a sleight of hand at work between the "modesty" of the proposals and the normative anthropological vision of flourishing he admits underwrites them). And non-religious or non-Christian socialists may be perfectly coherent, and even justified, in rejecting the theological account of human being that the church confesses, following revelation, to be true.

But the Dalrymple/Robinson pairing of perspectives makes for a nice contrast, and one, moreover, that touches on a question I have had percolating in the back of my mind for a while now. The question is for Christians who claim the socialist vision—and here I mean socialism in the strongest of terms, not as a cipher for left-of-centrism or left-of-the-DNC or even social democracy as such.

Here's the question, put a few different ways. What is the relationship between the Christian doctrine of original sin and Christian support for a socialist economy? What role does ineradicable human fallenness play in such an account of socialism's operation and success? Is "human nature" and/or the limits and/or sinfulness of all human beings without exception a determining factor in the Christian support for, or version of, socialism? Does affirmation of human fallenness in some way modify, alter, color, qualify, mitigate, or otherwise affect specifically Christian socialism as opposed to secular or atheistic socialism? Does original sin put a "brake" on the envisageable "perfectibility" (however analogically defined) of human character, action, will, and life together? What role, if any, do fallenness and tragedy play in theoretical accounts of, and policy proposals regarding, ideal economic arrangements in human society?

You get the idea. It's a real set of questions. I know or read just enough Christian socialists to suspect there are answers; I know or read just few enough to lack the awareness of which resources to consult on these questions. I welcome direction—or answers!