No Solutions

AmConMag: Why Statecraft Is Still Soulcraft by Andy Smarick
Without personal character development, good self-government becomes impossible.

I wrote a long essay for @amconmag on character, virtue, and public life. https://t.co/kJgXIJGsai @RSI

— Andy Smarick (@smarick) June 6, 2020

State leaders should consider how best to formally integrate character education—especially moral and civic character—into policy issues. Civics is a natural place to begin. A 2016 study found that while most states have some kind of assessment for civics, only 15 make demonstrated proficiency on such tests a condition of high school graduation, and only 17 include civics and social studies in their accountability systems. And of course, the extent to which moral or civic character is reflected in these assessments varies.

1. The state has no interest in real republicanism and political liberty. The virtue it wants can't even be called obedience, since obedience must be rightly ordered to valid laws and legitimate authority and the common good. What it wants is servitude.
2. American public education, in form or content, has very little to do with classical paideia or the proper education of citizens into virtue, which is a responsibility not only of teh family or clan, but of the community as a whole.
3. The author of course doesn't bring up feminism and false egalitarianism and how that distorts our notions of citizenship. There can be no addressing of the problem of the state without addressing its weaponized ideology of feminism.

Plenty of Good Articles at Abbeville Institute

The Revival of (Southern) Conservatism by Carl Jones

See also Forgotten Founder George Mason by Brion McClanahan and The Transformation of American Citizenship via the Crucible of War by Marshall DeRosa

Switzerland... You have to ruin it for the rest of us.

Post by The Extraenvironmentalist.

Bishops and Citizenship

Post by Vatican Radio - English Section.

Post by ROME REPORTS.

NBC News

With what credentials did John Paul II and Benedict XVI travel to other countries? As head of state for the Vatican City? No doubt Francis will do the same, and it is said that Benedict XVI also kept his German passport. Therefore, one should not see the renewal of his passport as a repudiation of the sovereign status of Vatican City. Still, if the pope were to renounce his political independence, should he not then be a citizen of Rome or the Italian state, if he is bishop of Rome? Where should his political loyalties be? To another polity or state or people? The pope, like all Christians, should love all, but if we hold to the order of charity, his political community would have priority over other political communities.

Edit. There is a "second-hand" report circulating that Pope Francis did indeed express his desire to travel using his Argentinian passport: BERGOGLIO, Jorge Mario. Is the source reliable? If so, does Pope Francis intend to do so and not use his official credentials as the head of Vatican City at all? Does Francis's decision, then, differ from what Benedict did? (I have not found "official" confirmation that Benedict XVI retrained his German passport but did not use it; this "fact" was repeated by various people on posts about Francis's renewal of his Argentinian passport.)

Latest from Socci: The Papal Games by Christopher A. Ferrara



Terminology: What is the "official" name of the Traditional Latin Mass? Is it "Extraordinary Form"?

A Man without a State

Mike Gogulski and the Citizens of Nowhere

Even if he is free of the modern state, isn't he also a man without a community?

A stateless passport? Hrm.

The Land of Opportunity

Vox Day: Immigrants and the Economy

Most non-Anglo Americans have a very retarded and romantic attitude about immigration because their grandparents or great-grandparents were immigrants. First, they don't understand how those nineteenth and early twentieth waves of immigration harmed the USA for the obvious reason that they don't understand the Constitution or the English Common Law any better than their immigrant forebears from Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Scandinavia did. They may have the emotional attachment to the flag and the pledge of allegiance - the latter only created in 1892 - but they are not genuine Americans in the sense of having been born in a tradition of sovereign rebellion.

The've absorbed the Yankee national myth and an understanding of citizenship proper to servitude, not self-governance? (Does the latter go hand inhand with wage slavery?)

Dr. Fleming:

Our country was founded by certain sorts of peoples with a particular language, culture, and religion. It welcomed an increasingly diverse set of immigrants--Eastern and Southern European Catholics--but on condition that they make an effort to assimilate to our way of life. Since Catholics were here from the beginning--or in the case of Louisiana and the Southwest--even before the beginning, they only presented a problem if they tried to reproduce some of the Catholic institutions of the Old World.

The Gold Mountain attracted many Chinese men in the 1800s. What percentage of immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries came to the United States because they were fleeing persecution, as opposed to seeking greater [financial] prosperity? I'm betting few were coming for the sake of entering into a community with Anglo-Americans and being friends with them.

Lesser of Two Evils Thinking Even Among the Intellectuals

Obama’s Right Wing by Michael Brendan Dougherty

If one is a public intellectual or an academic talking about politics, can they do anything but preach participation in the system? A consistent localism that recognizes the futility of reforming the Federal Government through elections would also recognize the uselessness of most academic institutions, think tanks, and any political movement that is trying to effect change through voting.

The current unit for the 3rd grade is dealing with the clothing of other cultures. (Their next story: Suki's Kimono.) I think the textbook (Scott Foresman, Pearson) may have been written for California (or New York?); regardless, the textbook series promotes the multiculturalist agenda. Everyone is entitled to their own culture (and clothing) and to reject the artefacts of modern cosmopolitan Western culture (blue jeans vs. sari, etc. -- today's read-aloud story), except, of course, Westerners or white Americans. (No one, though, can reject liberalism if he is to be admitted to society.)

Outsiders to the community

Elusive Wapiti: Empathizing With Cops

I've been somewhat critical of law enforcement here at EW, mostly because of what I see as a system that has gradually morphed over time from one that protected liberty to one that erodes it. Indeed, as individual LEOs became "professionalized", American law enforcement ceased being a system in which citizens secured justice for themselves, on a level playing field, facilitated by law enforcement and the courts, to a literal "us" versus "them" arrangement on a steeply tilted playing field where the massive resources of government are brought to bear against presumably innocent individual citizens. In other words, ownership of the laws and the law enforcement process shifted from individual citizens to an amorphous "the people", thus divesting individual citizens from the justice process except as a collective (when enforcing the law), or as an isolated defendant (when targeted by law enforcement). This divestiture is so complete that jury nullification, that foundational right whose pedigree extends back as far as the Magna Carta, is viewed with contempt and hostility by those in the justice system and those who publicly profess this right are persecuted, pilloried, and/or proscribed from jury service.


It is in this context which LEOs, people just like any of us,* find themselves at odds with the interests of their neighbors while simultaneously being exposed to the worst pathologies of their neighbors. Rare is the person who is truly happy to see a cop in an official capacity.

I believe it was at Chronicles that someone mentioned how many police officers differentiate themselves from "civilians," using that term rather pejoratively. Peter Hitchens has done so as well.

I will be writing a post elsewhere about outsiders being mere functionaries for communities of which they are not really a part. If it is just commutative justice regulating their interaction with people in that community and not love and affection, should we not expect abuses and other problems? Too many LEOs do not live in the communities in which they work.

At the end of his entry EW links to the other posts he has written on the topic of law enforcement in the U.S. See especially A Brief History of Early American Law Enforcement, Part I and Part II. One should also consult what Peter Hitchens has written about traditional British policing.

Time to make citizenship requirements more stringent

CNA: US bishops encourage Congress to pass DREAM Act

Archbishop Gomez called attention to a number of qualifications in the bill, which differentiate it from the blanket immigration amnesty some Republicans fear.

He explained that it allows “deserving immigrant youth” to become permanent residents, provided they meet certain age and circumstance requirements, have “demonstrated good moral character, have no criminal record and … have earned their high school diploma.” The further step of citizenship would require two years of college or military service.

Given these requirements, the archbishop said, the act's passage was not only a matter of fairness, but an opportunity for the U.S. to reward hardworking and motivated young people who could otherwise be forced to leave.

Permanent resident status, ok. But easy citizenship after only 2 years? No. Good moral character does not include assimilation, does it? How would the bishops forestall balkanization?

From 1996: Gilbert Meilaender reviews Theorizing Citizenship, edited by Ronald Beiner.

Who belongs? Why belong? The first developed attempt in our history to answer these questions came with the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome-especially with what theorists term "civic republicanism," given its chief articulation by Aristotle just as the polis was, in fact, nearing the end of its golden age. Characterizing this articulation as "one of the great Western definitions of what it is to be human," J.G.A. Pocock summarizes it as follows. "What makes the citizen the highest order of being is his capacity to rule, and it follows that rule over one's equal is possible only where one's equal rules over one. Therefore the citizen rules and is ruled; citizens join each other in making decisions where each decider respects the authority of the others, and all join in obeying the decisions . . . they have made." This activity of ruling and being ruled, the life of politics, is a distinctively public activity. As free participants in politics, citizens shape their own lives and thereby bring their nature to its highest fulfillment.

The activity of ruling and being ruled is not something one does simply as protection against the tyranny of a despot, nor does one participate in politics as a means to securing any private good. On the contrary, freely participating in the shaping of civic life simply is what it means to be fully human. But, alas, this life will be possible for some only if others-slaves, servants, and women in Aristotle's Athens-see to the daily needs of private life, and it will be possible only in quite small communities (as Rousseau, the greatest modern theorist of civic republicanism, made clear). Inevitably, or so it must seem to us, such an ideal must come under intense pressure-in practice from those who are excluded, and in theory perhaps even from those who are not. Pocock locates the first theoretical move toward greater universality of the civic community with Rome. In an empire, citizens cannot regularly meet face-to-face for deliberation about public affairs. "Belonging" comes to mean something different. A citizen was "someone free to act by law; free to ask and expect the law's protection." A citizen was one entitled to be treated in certain ways, and citizenship was determined by membership in a community of shared law rather than residence within a particular territory.

One might, however, soon wonder why only citizens were granted special entitlements, why we should distinguish between the citizen and the human being. Once residence in a particular territory, shared history, and active participation in public life become unnecessary for citizenship, we are on our way to the liberal tradition of politics. This tradition, in Ronald Beiner's words, is "concerned with upholding the dignity and inherent rights of individuals understood as instantiations of a universal humanity, and so it is unclear why this philosophy would accord any special moral status to the claims of citizenship."

Among the essayists in this volume it is Joseph Carens who presses this point most insistently. Had a reviewer no obligations to his readers, I would be tempted to present Carens' essay as intentionally satirical; for it is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a certain understanding of the Western liberal tradition. Carens argues that "borders should generally be open and that people should normally be free to leave their country of origin and settle in another, subject only to the sorts of constraints that bind current citizens in their new country." Drawing on the work of John Rawls, he suggests that "one could not justify restrictions on the grounds that those born in a given territory or born of parents who were citizens were more entitled to the benefits of citizenship than those born elsewhere or born of alien parents. Birthplace and parentage are natural contingencies that are 'arbitrary from a moral point of view.'"

Thus, in an argument purporting to extend the implications of a liberal politics, we meet the tyranny of "the" moral point of view. I do not mean to underestimate the force of Carens' claim. The suggestion that universal community uproots all claims of particular attachment is the philosophical equivalent of the theological argument that grace does not perfect but destroys nature. Taken alone, however, that theological argument has never been satisfactory. Jews have not been drawn to it at all, and even Christians have regarded a life that transcends all particular bonds as a special, and nonuniversalizable, calling. They have described even heaven not simply as a universal community of generic individuals but as a "vast friendship" in which all share, in different ways, the praise of God.

To return to the less rarefied air of citizenship, Carens' argument, by finding little reason to exclude anyone from a civic community, can make little sense of what it would mean to belong to such a community. As Alasdair MacIntyre notes in his essay, "patriotism is one of a class of loyalty-exhibiting virtues" that involve "a regard founded upon a particular historical relationship of association." Citizens who are less deracinated than those pictured by Carens would think, in Michael Walzer's words, that "to live well is to participate with other men and women in remembering, cultivating, and passing on a national heritage." Walzer notes how often and how readily the "free-floating intensity" of this sense of national membership can "be turned against other nations, [and] particularly against the internal others: minorities, aliens, strangers." MacIntyre also grants that patriotic loyalty is "a permanent source of moral danger," but he argues forcefully that a purely liberal politics is also "a permanent source of moral danger because of the way it renders our social and moral ties too open to dissolution by rational criticism."

Having begun with the limited and exclusive bond of civic republicanism, our political tradition moved to the greater universality and inclusiveness of liberal democracy. Carens' argument is one way to dissolve the bonds of democratic citizenship-by arguing that even it has not been universal enough. Extending the boundaries until they are virtually eliminated, he, in effect, loses the ability to explain what it means to belong to a civic community.

Arizona’s Next Immigration Battle
By Russell Pearce

It could be over the 14th Amendment and “birthright citizenship,” says the senator who introduced the Grand Canyon State’s controversial enforcement law.

(via Daniel McCarthy)

An oldie from Alan Wall

Regarding Thalia, and how seriously citizenship is taken in this country: Your Fellow Citizen—Thalia!

Citizenship is not an entitlement.

source: Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus

As another Presidential Inauguration draws near, one waits for things to fall apart because that is what we deserve.

Entitlement can serve as a reference to welfare programs and the welfare state. Or to the mindset of contemporary pampered Americans who believe they are owed everything. Possibly the two are not unlinked. Citizenship, however, is not something owed to us simply because we happen to be in the right place when we were born. Even if it is granted to us automatically it does not mean that we have earned it. It could mean that those who have the authority to grant citizenship have been foolish in their legislation.

Plato and Aristotle rightly criticized democrats and their erroneous understanding of equality. Both of them believed that only the virtuous had a valid claim to rule.

Republican government, government by the many, may be the best form under circumstances for a particular community. (Republican government = polity, politeia.) (The Catholic Church has not endorsed any one form of government as being the best for all, though in recent times some clerics have tried to argue that modern mass "democracy" is best in so far as it respects human dignity and rights.) The prudent man will grasp this and will work to safeguard that constitution, for the sake of the common good.

Aristotle saw a link between republican government and martial virtue. Can we dispute that this was a feature of ancient Greece and republican Rome? Is this the reason why many early Americans identified with George Washington as the model citizen? Serving in the military seems to be an important component of civic republicanism. And yet, fewer Americans join the military or have ties to the military in some way.

Those who believe in the lie that we are 'fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here' should do their part; it is the duty of every citizen to defend his community, and if he believes his community is in danger, how can he shirk from fulfilling his duty?

Andrew Bacevich argues that we do not need the draft--but we do need to realize that our professional armed forces are shouldering an unjust burden. If there really is a GWOT, why isn't the country doing more to support it? More consumption, as some sort of wrong-headed act of defiance (look at who was promoting it), is not the answer to terrorism. While joining the armed forces may not be incumbent on all, I do advocate the restoration of local militias, and all able-bodied citizens who would claim to be such should participate.

In addition, the classical ideal of the farmer-soldier-citizen underscores the link between economic freedom and political freedom. Those who are not masters of their own lives should have no share in governing others. How many Americans are not the masters of their own lives? Granted, they are not working all the time, but how free are they to deviate from the daily patterns? It is said that the medieval serf had more leisure time than today's office drone.

How much economic freedom is necessary for a citizen? Can one become free merely through advances in tools and energy? Or is there more to economic freedom than not having to do much work? It is being the master of one's household and being able to provide for the needs of that household (or at least most of them). There is something to be said for having others labor, if that is all they can do.

Some cannot but be servants of other, because they cannot direct themselves, given their appetites or their lack of foresight. They live only for the present, and fail to understand what makes their comfort possible. (The thought that what is needed to make their life of pleasure last may not be sustainable in the long run does not enter their mind.) They are so enslaved to their pleasures and luxuries that in our political economy, they are willing wage slaves.

Aristotle reminds us that the citizens of a healthy polity need the virtue of moderation and the other virtues to be able to use leisure rightly. The virtue of courage, which is necessary for wars and securing peace, is not enough for the good life. It is true that some cannot be economically free because of the circumstances that have been forced upon them. Should they be denied citizenship as a result? But others are willing dupes of the present political economy. Perhaps they are looking to profit personally from the system, or they may be defending an abstract ideology because it is comfortable to do so.

Most Americans seem to be unwilling to make the sacrifices that are necessary for the good of society. The poor, unemployed or the middle class-- how many of them would be willing to accept a reduction in luxuries, for the sake of being their own masters in the production of goods required for daily living? (Much less for reasons of sustainability or protecting the environment.)

Given the moral degradation of the majority of Americans, the judgment that our system grants citizenship too freely follows rather quickly. Not everyone's opinion counts equally, though this may be the sort of fiction that is needed to maintain a pseudo-democracy, and not everyone should be participating in the political life of the community or of the state (or in Federal elections) . For justice to be maintained, unequals may actually have to be treated unequally. We can understand that those who commit serious crimes against others or the state may lose their right to vote. What I am writing here is nothing more than an elaboration of the general principle.

Universal franchise is a relatively recent phenomena, and may not last much longer. Who should vote? And what does voting do in a mammoth nation-state? It can seem so distant from the real exercise of authority and the actual law-making. I will have to address voting at some other time.

I would note that many so-called conservatives lack any real roots in community. They are have few or thin ties to family, community, and the local Church. They also have no clue what they are doing when they "defend free markets" and the like is to maintain the power of the existing oligarchy. Something's wrong with one's liberal education if after receiving it, one still treats people like Rush Limbaugh as serious conservative intellectuals.

Excessive American mobility, in the name of individual advancement and economic opportunity, is the enemy of community and of justice, and generally works against citizenship instead of enhancing it (in the name of choice).


Conservatism and Religion

What is the place of religion (or Christianity) within conservatism? A few years ago, Heather MacDonald sparked a discussion of whether it is possible for there to be a conservative atheist. I chanced upon this article recently:

Mark C. Henrie, Opposing Strains (from Modern Age 44:1, Winter 2002):

In The Conservative Mind (1953) Russell Kirk delineated six “principles” or “canons” of conservative thought. First among these was “belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as consciences.” The life of the political community is not a mere artifact, and human rights and duties cannot be disposed at our convenience; rather, we are responsible to the divine. And this responsibility has public consequences. Kirk went on to argue that conservatives believe “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems,” and thus, technical or procedural fixes offer no lasting solutions.

In the introduction to his anthology, The Portable Conservative Reader, nearly thirty years later (1982) Kirk again placed a “transcendent” orientation as the first of conservative principles, observing that “conservatives generally believe . . . there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.” He contrasted this view with liberal utilitarianism and with a philosophical radicalism that detests “theological postulates” and that attempts to conceptualize human society as just so much matter in motion. For Kirk, any genuinely conservative mind had to it a religious cast, a sense of piety, a concern, as it were, for the rights of God—though he demurred from doctrinal disputes.

More recently, however, Professor Jerry Muller, in a widely reviewed “anthology with an argument” entitled Conservatism (1997), takes a far different tack. Implicitly in his selection of texts and explicitly in his carefully argued introduction, Muller reinterprets the tradition in such a way as to leave little room for any genuinely religious dimension to conservatism “properly understood.” As with religion, so too with the other mytho-poetic elements that many have associated with the conservative mind. All “romantic” nostalgia for “lost causes” championed by such “literary” conservatives as Kirk appears as an aberration to Muller. In contrast to Kirk’s transcendent view, holding first place among Muller’s conservative principles is the prudent defense of existing human institutions based on a profound sense of the limits of reason, an “epistemic modesty” directed equally against grand ideological schemes—and against every form of religious “enthusiasm.” Conservatives, according to Muller, properly hold religion at arm’s length, and they view the prophet and the saint with suspicion.

Edward Feser responds to Heather MacDonald (One of his responses, at any rate.)

Related:
wiki: Roman citizenship, Cincinnatus
Westminster Wisdom: Livy's Cincinnatus
Google Books: A Companion to the Classical Tradition, American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States

Ron Paul, On Reinstating the Draft

Begun on January 19.

Edit. Fabius Maximus: Are Americans still willing to bear the burden of self-government?