In my last post I wondered whether Nat Hentoff and Richard John Neuhaus had ever met. So I went to google it, and learned that Hentoff was laid off at the Village Voice at the end of 2008. Here is a NY Times article about it. Hentoff is not the only person who was let go, but it certainly does look like the left is expelling the last vestiges of liberalism from its midst.
Below is from Joseph Bottum’s eulogy of Richard John Neuhaus in the latest issue of The Weekly Standard.
I often refer to the fact that there used to be liberals but there is hardly a one still left. I usually point to Nat Hentoff as being one of the few remaining ones, but I should have included Richard John Neuhaus in that group, too. I wonder if the two ever met — the anti-abortion liberal who is an athiest, and the anti-abortion, conservative liberal who was a pastor and priest. I would have loved to sit and listen while those two talked.
Take abortion, for instance. In 1968, he won the award for best editorial of the year from the Catholic Press Association–Catholics liked giving awards to a Lutheran in those days; they thought of it as being bravely trendy and ecumenical–for an essay in which he cried, “The pro-abortion flag is being planted on the wrong side of the liberal/conservative divide.” It ought to be those heartless conservatives who want to define the fetus as a meaningless lump of tissue; it ought to be caring liberals who want to expand the community of care to embrace the unborn.
If he later came to have a kinder view of conservatives, that was because he finally met some of them. But the pattern established by abortion continued through to his death. His work in founding the communitarian movement in 1977 came not because he thought he had changed but because he thought the United States was abandoning its commitment to families and all the voluntary associations that Tocqueville observed as a defining part of a liberal republic. He wrote his most famous book, The Naked Public Square–his 1984 argument against the attempt to secularize every part of shared life–because he thought the nation was in danger of losing the religious dynamism that had fueled everything from Abraham Lincoln’s speeches to Martin Luther King’s protests.
Even his conversion to Catholicism in 1990, and his ordination as a Catholic priest the next year, could be understood as a standing-still while the world altered around him. This was a man, after all, who titled his account of conversion “How I Became the Catholic That I Was.”
“The Problem of Pain” is a C.S. Lewis book that I’ve probably not read carefully enough. But this one may be useful if I ever get around to blogging that First Things article, “No Friend in Jesus” by by Meir Soloveichik. I’m not sure if the two are reconcilable. (Which two, you might ask? Ah, that’s the thing. There are different ways things might be paired off.)
In his introduction to The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis described two kinds of religion: the apprehension of the Numinous-the fear and awe of the sublime-and the following of a moral code. And he noted how bizarre it was that Judaism and Christianity had brought the two together:
We desire nothing less than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed with the incalculable claims of the Numinous. Of all the jumps that humanity takes in its religious history this is certainly the most surprising. It is not unnatural that many sections of the human race refused it; non-moral religion, and non-religious morality, existed and still exist.
The quote is in a book review by Eve Tushnet in The Weekly Standard: “Campus Confidential : Loving to learn, and learning to love, in America“
Haley Barbour says, “The Republican Revival will start in the states.” Well, that’s not actually what he said. That’s what a headline on a WSJ article about him said.
Whatever the case, there is a problem with that statement. It betrays a set of misordered priorities.
I really don’t care whether there is a Republican revival, and maybe Republicans shouldn’t care so much, either. I care a lot about whether we can avoid sinking further into a welfare-police state, and whether we can regain a government that protects rather than destroys human rights. Whether that’s done with or without a Republican party is of minor importance to me.
If someone wants to make the case that the only way it can be done is through a strong Republican party, fine. Just so long as that is not the end, but the means.
Here’s the NY Times obit of Richard John Neuhaus. I had to go looking for it — it wasn’t on Google News. The Times is still good for obituaries, even if it sometimes manages to be snide about points of view it doesn’t understand.
I learned today that Richard John Neuhaus died Thursday. Here, for my convenience, are links to WSJ articles about him in Friday’s paper:
Before I go to read these articles, I’ll mention that I had not paid a lot of attention to him until he turned conservative (sort of) though I had known of him before that. I started paying more attention to him after I had pretty well recovered from my own bout of left-liberalism during the McGovern-Nixon days.
He was a pastor in the same church organization where I got my undergraduate education. Some of the more liberal pastors who had known him in seminary days and during the civil rights conflicts, and who had thought of him as a kindred spirit, were puzzled and dismayed when they found him serving as religion editor at National Review. Then he was no longer at National Review, but had become a Roman Catholic priest, which puzzled some of the more conservative pastors.
When I asked one pastor just what his pastoral duties were that they would allow him to keep the kind of schedule he did, I was told that in the negotations by which he entered the Catholic Church that he was given carte blanche to do almost anything he wanted.
Yes, I know. You don’t enter the church through negotiations. So that’s probably a crass way of putting it. And I don’t know if this was true or not, or how the teller knew about this, but he was in more of a position to know than I was.
I occasionally looked at Neuhaus’s First Things magazine, and even wanted to blog about one article that appeared there recently. Never got around to it, and never got around to learning a lot of things about Father Neuhaus, though I have a feeling it would have been better if I had. Maybe it’s not too late.
Michael Gormley of the AP tries to excuse the unprofessional behavior of the media:
The difference in treatment could also be explained by the position each woman had been seeking. Palin was hoping to become the nation’s first female vice president, just second in command to 72-year-old Sen. John McCain. Meanwhile, Kennedy is vying to be named one of 100 Senators.
Actually, the difference in treatment could NOT be explained that way. If that were a factor, the MSM would have sent hostile investigative teams to sneer at Barak Obama, who has difficulty speaking other than in cliches and platitudes. And they would have given McCain the treatment for his muddled ideas.
URL here.
I’ve often noticed those wood & styrofoam roadside memorials with flowers and handwritten signs for people killed in road accidents. They’re tacky but I love them because they show a piece of life where people just go and do things without getting permission from some government person. It’s a bit of life that hasn’t yet been standardized, bureaucraticized, and MacDonaldized.
Except in some states, such as California, Colorado, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, regulators have stamped out the personal initiative aspects. And now West Virginia is trying to do the same.
I didn’t realize until now that that the people who put up these memorials deserve one of the Leviathan Ankle-Biter awards. So I hereby present them with one.
And here‘s a link to Matt Frost’s article at The American Scene where you can follow the links to more information about them.
For years — maybe even decades — I’ve been talking up the idea of a net-zero gas tax. Except I didn’t know it should be called “net-zero” until I read Charles Krauthammer’s article in the January 5 issue of The Weekly Standard. And it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve decided in my own mind that the countervailing tax reduction should definitely be in the FICA tax.
For most of these years it has been like talking to a brick wall. LeftLiberals don’t like the idea, because for the most part they don’t really care about the environment. What they care about is growing the government and increasing the opportunities for power and corruption, all of which can be accomplished much better with CAFE standards and carbon-trading schemes (and more recently, with big bailouts). Conservatives until very recently haven’t liked the idea because their heads have been stuck firmly in the sand. Libertarians don’t like the idea because of the word tax and because it requires government action. They can’t get it through their heads that you can’t have free markets without government action. (LeftLiberals also sneer at the idea using the same words: “What? I thought you people were against all government regulation.” But that of course is not the reason they oppose it.)
It has been in just the past few weeks that I’ve been reading a few articles here and there in which conservatives have been talking up the idea. And now Krauthammer has explained the case in full.
I would add just one point to Krauthammer’s suggestion of reducing the FICA tax to pay for it: I would take Barak Obama up on his idea to expand the FICA tax to include all income; however, it too should be a net-zero increase. This would really give lower income people the tax cut that he talked in favor of during his campaign, and it would remove a regressive tax from our system. Obama probably didn’t mean to keep his campaign promise, but let’s pretend that he really did and let’s hold him to it.
One additional reason is that the Social Security system is underfunded, much like the Madden Madoff system was. There will be a temptation to enact a big gas tax with countervailing reductions in FICA, and then to increase FICA to pay for Congress’s fraudulent promises on Social Security. Maybe that will have to happen to some degree, but I want all the wealthy, influential people to have a stake in that decision, and not to be sitting out the issue because it doesn’t concern their own pocketbooks.
Headline from the Obama campaign organization (aka The Associated Press): “In Cabinet, Obama goes for experience, pragmatism”
A million bloggers have probably noticed that if he goes for experience and pragmatism, he isn’t going for [you guessed it]. The AP has an explanation for that.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Barack Obama has wholeheartedly embraced experience in choosing his Cabinet. That may seem at odds with the president-elect’s campaign theme of “change we can believe in.” But some Democratic activists and nonpartisan analysts say it makes sense, given the dire economy and public anxiety.
So let’s see if we have this right: When times are good, we need change. That must explain why that word was used so much during the campaign. But when times are bad, we need the same old, same old.
And to think that some of us were bothered by George W. Bush’s difficulties in expressing a coherent thought.