Tardy Reflections on the Election | James Kalb | Ecclesia et Civitas | Catholic World Report
The November 2012 elections revealed that the Republicans believe in nothing, while the Democrats believe in Nothing.
A great many things might have changed the results in November. Hurricane Sandy might have headed into the Atlantic instead of the Atlantic states. Or moods might have shifted, so that memes like “the war against women” might have flopped rather than flown.
Still, there’s no explaining away what happened, and the re-election of Barack Obama, a pure representative of the media-bureaucratic complex and the intolerant social leftism it stands for, must show something. He may have won because the Republicans failed to come up with an appealing candidate and message, and not because the majority was smitten with his social views, but that failure must show something as well.
Many people have the sense that the election revealed a basic change in American life. What it shows is the extent to which advanced liberalism has become our established faith. It’s the one our most influential authorities accept and rely on, and they feel called upon to import its principles into all aspects of life. That’s why abortion is the law of the land and voters aren’t allowed to say otherwise. The election returns showed that they have grown used to that situation, and no longer find it seriously objectionable.
If that’s what the election showed, then it had to do with fundamental tendencies. On that point, it revealed that the Republicans believe in nothing, while the Democrats believe in Nothing.
To believe in nothing is to have no beliefs except success. Individual Republicans may be decent public-spirited people, and they are likely to believe on some level in other things, the role of marriage as a distinct fundamental institution, for example. The point though is that for the national party such issues aren’t taken seriously. They function as campaign slogans for particular audiences. What’s taken seriously is American power abroad, economic success at home, and victory for Republicans. That’s what the party, as a party, believes in.
Power and success are not bad things. Power is the ability to achieve goals, and success is actually bringing them about. Both are good as a general rule, and politicians should favor them, but they’re not enough for a political outlook that makes sense. Something more is needed to tell us what to aim for and what to do with it when achieved. The Republicans have nothing that serves that purpose.
The Democrats do: they have Nothing.
The “Nothing” that James Kalb speaks of is what Benedict XVI has called the dictatorship of relativism. But that it has the strength of faith is clear when the entrails of the election exit-polling were examined. It had been axiomatic in the past that voters would vote their pocket-book over ideology and that in some measure was the cynical assurance of some conservative commentators pre-election.
If we think about that assurance just a little we can see that James Kalb’s assessment of the belief system of the Republican party per se is fairly accurate. To rely on the economic self-interest of voters to curb an ideological and moral evil is a hopeless state of affairs, and carries no vision whatsoever. It is to pit concupiscence against a moral evil that we suppose are opposed in practice.
American Catholics have lived under a fantasy for some time, that a state can be morally influenced by the Church and at the same time be neutral. It has since been demonstrated that when the state is no longer influenced by the Church that the much vaunted neutrality is a misty vapor. Yet how many people, Catholics and otherwise, react vehemently when that article of faith “the separation of Church and State” is even remotely challenged. It is almost a mental block. But for how many decades have those self-same Catholics accepted the idea that the Church should receive tax money to further the Church’s charitable works.
There are a couple of simple truths that many Catholics have overlooked. The first is the axiom that all civil laws, not only the criminal laws but contract law as well, are based on a moral code. The source of that moral code then, is critical, and as James Kalb rightly points out, the natural law and human life basis has been usurped by Will and Technology, which really means whoever has the most influence at any given time determines the moral basis of the laws.
The other simple truth is that, much as we have been led into the comfort of enculturation (misapplied in many cases), the gospel is very radical. What we have seen over the past century is not the slide from the normal social morality of human society into a new evil, so much as it is the reversion of a society from a social moral pinnacle back to that human condition that St. Paul talks of when he talks of the “world” and the things that are “of the world.”
It is glaringly apparent that the Church in America, in the aggregate, has for a time forgotten her mission of preaching the gospel, and now is being forced to face it. What a great time for the Year of Faith.
Posted by: LJ | Friday, January 11, 2013 at 04:02 PM