The End of Democracy?: The Judicial Usurpation of Politics: A First Things Symposium

 

The End of Democracy? Introduction

The Editors 

November 1, 1996

Articles on “judicial arrogance” and the “judicial usurpation of power” are not new. The following symposium addresses those questions, often in fresh ways, but also moves beyond them. The symposium is, in part, an extension of the argument set forth in our May 1996 editorial, “The Ninth Circuit’s Fatal Overreach.” The Federal District Court’s decision favoring doctor-assisted suicide, we said, could be fatal not only to many people who are old, sick, or disabled, but also to popular support for our present system of government.

This symposium addresses many similarly troubling judicial actions that add up to an entrenched pattern of government by judges that is nothing less than the usurpation of politics. The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.

Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have. The American tradition abhors the notion of the rulers and the ruled. We do not live under a government, never mind under a regime; we are the government. The traditions of democratic self-governance are powerful in our civics textbooks and in popular consciousness. This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word “regime” we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.

Since the defeat of communism, some have spoken of the end of history. By that they mean, inter alia, that the great controversies about the best form of governance are over: there is no alternative to democracy. Perhaps that, too, is wishful thinking and self-deception. Perhaps the United States, for so long the primary bearer of the democratic idea, has itself betrayed that idea and become something else. If so, the chief evidence of that betrayal is the judicial usurpation of politics.

Politics, Aristotle teaches, is free persons deliberating the question, How ought we to order our life together? Democratic politics means that “the people” deliberate and decide that question. In the American constitutional order the people do that through debate, elections, and representative political institutions. But is that true today? Has it been true for, say, the last fifty years? Is it not in fact the judiciary that deliberates and answers the really important questions entailed in the question, How ought we to order our life together? Again and again, questions that are properly political are legalized, and even speciously constitutionalized. This symposium is an urgent call for the repoliticizing of the American regime. Some of the authors fear the call may come too late.

The emergence of democratic theory and practice has a long and complicated history, and one can cite many crucial turning points. One such is the 1604 declaration of Parliament to James I: “The voice of the people, in the things of their knowledge, is as the voice of God.” We hold that only the voice of God is to be treated as the voice of God, but with respect to political sovereignty that declaration is a keystone of democratic government. Washington, Madison, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and the other founders were adamant about the competence”meaning both the authority and capacity”of the people to govern themselves. They had no illusions that the people would always decide rightly, but they would not invest the power to decide in a ruling elite. The democracy they devised was a republican system of limited government, with checks and balances, including judicial review, and representative means for the expression of the voice of the people. But always the principle was clear: legitimate government is government by the consent of the governed. The founders called this order an experiment, and it is in the nature of experiments that they can fail.

The questions addressed have venerable precedent. The American experiment intended to remedy the abuses of an earlier regime. The Declaration of Independence was not addressed to “light and transient causes” or occasional “evils [that] are sufferable.” Rather, it says: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government and to provide new Guards for their future security.” The following essays are certain about the “long train of abuses and usurpations,” and about the prospect”some might say the present reality”of despotism. Like our authors, we are much less certain about what can or should be done about it.

The proposition examined in the following articles is this: The government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed. With respect to the American people, the judiciary has in effect declared that the most important questions about how we ought to order our life together are outside the purview of “things of their knowledge.” Not that judges necessarily claim greater knowledge; they simply claim, and exercise, the power to decide. The citizens of this democratic republic are deemed to lack the competence for self-government. The Supreme Court itself”notably in the Casey decision of 1992-has raised the alarm about the legitimacy of law in the present regime. Its proposed solution is that citizens should defer to the decisions of the Court. Our authors do not consent to that solution. The twelfth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone (1872-1946), expressed his anxiety: “While unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive or legislative branches of the Government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of restraint.” The courts have not, and perhaps cannot, restrain themselves, and it may be that in the present regime no other effective restraints are available. If so, we are witnessing the end of democracy.

As important as democracy is, the symposium addresses another question still more sobering. Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality. Indeed, as explained below, morality”especially traditional morality, and most especially morality associated with religion”has been declared legally suspect and a threat to the public order. Among the most elementary principles of Western Civilization is the truth that laws which violate the moral law are null and void and must in conscience be disobeyed. In the past and at present, this principle has been invoked, on both the right and the left, by those who are frequently viewed as extremists. It was, however, the principle invoked by the founders of this nation. It was the principle invoked by the antislavery movement and, more recently, by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the principle invoked today by, among many others, Pope John Paul II.

In this connection, Professor Robert George of Princeton explores the significance of the encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life). Addressing laws made also by our courts, the Pope declares, “Laws and decrees enacted in contravention of the moral order, and hence of the divine will, can have no binding force in conscience . . . . Indeed such laws undermine the very nature of authority and result in shameful abuse.” We would only add to Professor George’s brilliant analysis that the footnotes to that section of Evangelium Vitae refer to the 1937 encyclical of Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern) and other papal statements condemning the crimes of Nazi Germany. America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.

We are prepared for the charge that publishing this symposium is irresponsibly provocative and even alarmist. Again, it is the Supreme Court that has raised the question of the legitimacy of its law, and we do not believe the Pope is an alarmist. We expect there will be others who, even if they agree with the analysis of the present system, will respond, So what? Unmoved by the prospect of the end of democracy, and skeptical about the existence of a moral law, they might say that the system still “works” to the satisfaction of the great majority and, niceties about moral legitimacy aside, we will muddle through so long as that continues to be the case. That, we believe, is a recklessly myopic response to our present circumstance.

Some of our authors examine possible responses to laws that cannot be obeyed by conscientious citizens”ranging from noncompliance to resistance to civil disobedience to morally justified revolution. The purpose of the symposium is not to advocate these or other steps; it is an attempt to understand where the existing system may be leading us. But we need not confine ourselves to speculating about what might happen in the future. What is happening now is more than disturbing enough. What is happening now is a growing alienation of millions of Americans from a government they do not recognize as theirs; what is happening now is an erosion of moral adherence to this political system.

What are the consequences when many millions of children are told and come to believe that the government that rules them is morally illegitimate? Many of us have not been listening to what is more and more frequently being said by persons of influence and moral authority. Many examples might be cited. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a recent lecture: “A Christian should not support a government that suppresses the faith or one that sanctions the taking of an innocent human life.” The Archbishop of Denver in a pastoral letter on recent court rulings: “The direction of the modern state is against the dignity of human life. These decisions harbinger a dramatic intensifying of the conflict between the Catholic Church and governing civil authorities.”

Professor Hittinger observes that the present system “has made what used to be the most loyal citizens”religious believers”enemies of the common good whenever their convictions touch upon public things.” The American people are incorrigibly, however confusedly, religious. Tocqueville said religion is “the first political institution” of American democracy because it was through religion that Americans are schooled in morality, the rule of law, and the habits of public duty. What happens to the rule of law when law is divorced from, indeed pitted against, the first political institution?

“God and country” is a motto that has in the past come easily, some would say too easily, to almost all Americans. What are the cultural and political consequences when many more Americans, perhaps even a majority, come to the conclusion that the question is “God or country”? What happens not in “normal” times, when maybe America can muddle along, but in a time of great economic crisis, or in a time of war when the youth of another generation are asked to risk their lives for their country? We do not know what would happen then, and we hope never to find out.

What is happening now is the displacement of a constitutional order by a regime that does not have, will not obtain, and cannot command the consent of the people. If enough people do not care or do not know, that can be construed as a kind of negative consent, but it is not what the American people were taught to call government by the consent of the governed. We hope that more people know and more people care than is commonly supposed, and that it is not too late for effective recourse to whatever remedies may be available. It is in the service of that hope that we publish this symposium.

Responses: 

The End of Democracy? Our Judicial Oligarchy

Robert H. Bork 

November 1, 1996

This last term of the Supreme Court brought home to us with fresh clarity what it means to be ruled by an oligarchy. The most important moral, political, and cultural decisions affecting our lives are steadily being removed from democratic control.

https://firstthings.com/the-end-of-democracy-our-judicial-oligarchy/

A Crisis of Legitimacy

Russell Hittinger 

November 1, 1996

In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court made abortion the benchmark of its own legitimacy, and indeed the token of the American political covenant. To those who cannot agree with the proposition that individuals have a moral or constitutional right to kill the unborn, or that such a right defines the trans-generational covenant of the American political order, the Court urged acceptance out of respect for the rule of law. “If the Court’s legitimacy should be undermined,” the Court declared, “then so would he country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals.”

https://firstthings.com/a-crisis-of-legitimacy/

The End of Democracy? A Culture Corrupted

Hadley Arkes 

November 1, 1996

We were taping, early in May, a program for public television dealing with “same-sex marriage.” Opposite me was a professor of law, openly gay, who had just written a book in favor of gay marriage. The question before us was whether the states would be obliged to honor the marriage of homosexual couples if the courts in Hawaii delivered to the country that unsolicited gift. After all, the states bore a residual authority to object, on moral grounds, to certain kinds of marriages”as in the case, for example, of incestuous unions. But with the same claims to residual authority, some states in the past had objected on moral grounds to interracial marriages. That ground of objection had been removed from the states as soon as the courts became clear that policies of that kind were in conflict with the deeper principles of the Constitution. The question then was whether the Supreme Court was about to do the same thing in relation to gay marriage with the decision, then pending, in Romer v. Evans : The case was not about gay marriage, but it could undercut the authority of a state to withhold any privilege or franchise from people on account of their homosexuality. When the question was posed, the professor reacted with a blank stare. Of Romer and its implications”and its connection to gay marriage”he professed to know nothing.

https://firstthings.com/the-end-of-democracy-a-culture-corrupted/

The End of Democracy? Kingdoms in Conflict

Charles W. Colson 

November 1, 1996

In America today, we have very nearly reached the completion of a long process I can only describe as the systematic usurpation of ultimate political power by the American judiciary”a usurpation that compels evangelical Christians and, indeed, all believers to ask sobering questions about the moral legitimacy of the current political order and our allegiance to it. This is an inquiry undertaken reluctantly and, I hope, with due caution, for the stakes are very high. Among the questions we must address is whether millions of Americans are still part of the “We the People” from which democratic authority is presumably derived.

https://firstthings.com/the-end-of-democracy-kingdoms-in-conflict/

The End of Democracy? The Tyrant State

Robert P. George 

November 1, 1996

America’s democratic experiment has been remarkably successful. Constitutional democracy in the United States has survived a civil war, a great depression, and two world wars. Our nation has assimilated into the mainstream of American life generations of immigrants”many fleeing poverty and oppression in their native lands. We have made tremendous strides towards overcoming a tragic legacy of slavery and racial segregation. We have secured safer conditions for working people and a meaningful social safety net for the most disadvantaged among us. We have demonstrated that citizens of different religious faiths can live and work together in peace and mutual respect. America’s economic prosperity has made our nation the envy of the world. Oppressed peoples around the globe look to our Declaration of Independence for inspiration and our Constitution as a model of free government. In the great ideological struggles of the twentieth century, American ideals of personal, political, and economic freedom have triumphed over fascist and communist tyranny. Two cheers for American democracy!

https://firstthings.com/the-end-of-democracy-the-tyrant-state/

Forgetting American Terror: The Christian Front: Story by Philip Jenkins and Interview with Charles Gallagher

 

Forgetting American Terror: The Christian Front

Last updated on: March 6, 2017 at 8:26 am   by Philip Jenkins

for PATHEOS/ANXIOUS BENCH

Imagine American cities under siege by extreme Right-wing movements and paramilitary groups calling for armed violence, and actually attacking Jews and other minorities in the streets. You might think that such horrors would be hard to conceal, and the resulting soul-searching would give abundant material to later historians. But here is a mystery. The situation I am describing actually happened in the late 1930s and early 1940s, on a national scale, and the crisis lasted for some years before it was resolved. Yet in contrast to other incidents of ethnic violence – such as lynching – this particular wave of violence and extremist agitation features remarkably little in the media at the time, and in consequence it has received little coverage in subsequent decades. Understanding this silence gives a powerful and quite surprising insight into American religious politics, and specifically the religious influence on the workings of the mass media.

From the late 1930s, extremist movements of various kinds were very active in US cities. Communists boomed on the Left, while various ethnic movements appealed on the Right. German Rightists could join the pro-Nazi Bund, and Italian Fascism exercised an enormous appeal to people of that national origin. Many Irish Catholics followed the extremist anti-Jewish and anti-Communist rhetoric of the radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin. By 1938, the most extreme of these Irish activists had formed into the powerful and widespread Christian Front, which looked to the militaristic anti-Communism of Spain’s General Franco as a model. (Other Irish joined the Bund, which was far less German in composition than we might assume).

From 1939, all these movements became deeply involved in attempts to prevent US involvement in war with Hitler and the Axis.

As Theodore Irwin wrote in Inside the Christian Front (1940)

In New York, where it reached the most advanced stage, the new anti-Semitism has been a domestic storm-troop mob running amuck, spewing racial hatred, fomenting violence, staging street scenes never before witnessed in the city’s history. Composed chiefly of admirers of Charles E. Coughlin and sundry hoodlums, crackpots, misguided patriots, and Bundsters, the Christian Front and its shenanigans have taken on startling resemblances to early Naziism.

At its fountainhead, New Yorkers for more than a year have been subjected each week to an average of forty or fifty turbulent and vituperative Christian Front street meetings, at which crowds have been exhorted to liquidate the Jews in America. Bands of rowdies have roamed subways and streets insulting and assaulting Semitic-appearing men and women; abusive stickers have been slapped on widows of Jewish shops; a “Christian Index” has been compiled for an organized boycott; and brawls have ended in close to 250 arrests and 120 convictions. Men were recruited for a private army. Unfriendly radio stations and sponsoring Jewish merchants were raucously picketed. Affection for Hitler and his policies was outspoken. Christian Front propaganda penetrated even the public schools, and several Jewish children were severely beaten by small-fry Streichers.

By way of background, Irwin was the author of the once-famous 1935 novel Strange Passage, about “undesirable” illegal immigrants being transported across the US by a “Deportation Special” train, to be shipped back to their European homelands. This is apparently the first use of that particular theme in English language fiction, and it is timely stuff.

Street violence against Jews was particularly serious in Boston, where it persisted long after the outbreak of war, and some of the worst violence occurred in 1943.  Philadelphia was another storm center, but so in their different ways were Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and all the major urban areas. Across the nation, Christian Front activists drilled, sought out weapons, and organized under the cover of their rifle clubs.

As to what members heard from the leaders of this would-be “private army,”  journalist Arthur Derounian reported a meeting he had infiltrated of a Front-allied group at a New York “sporting club.” The militants reportedly mapped “every arsenal, subway station, power house, police and gasoline station, public building” in preparation for a rising. The club leader dreamed of the day of action: “I’d like to be able to pick up the paper someday and read ‘Grand Central Station Bombed,’ ‘The White House Blown to Bits,’ or ‘Queen Mary Sunk at her Dock’. . . . Terror! Terror! Terror! That is our watchword from now on.” Fortunately, it all remained a fantasy – but it still scared the FBI enough to arrest the Christian Front leadership in January 1940, on charges of planning just such a rising. (Let me make clear, I am not necessarily claiming that the Christian Front was ever close to an actual armed outbreak, but their rhetoric was terrifying).

Besides the egregious violence, Rightists in the 1939-41 period distributed thousands of anti-war leaflets and handbills by throwing them from high buildings, or even from low flying aircraft. The object lesson for the readers, of course, was how easy it would be for enemy forces to reach the cities with actual bombs rather than leaflets, so they should think very carefully before risking entry into war. All told, it would have been impossible for a city dweller in that era not to have had some encounter with the extremism bubbling up on the streets.

I cannot write about this in more detail here (because my knowledge is strictly limited), but I just note some intriguing ongoing work by Fr. Charles Gallagher on German intelligence’s recruitment of Boston’s Christian Front militants in the 1939-41 period. There is an excellent account here. I will follow this research with huge interest!

At this moment, even historically well-informed readers might find themselves startled by these observations. Dozens of fascist and anti-Semitic street meetings every week? “Kill the Jews” slogans? The Nazis sponsoring terrorism and hate movements on US soil? Why don’t we hear more about this? Well, some historians certainly have covered the phenomenon, and Stephen Norwood has an excellent Boston-focused article entitled “Marauding Youth and the Christian Front” (American Jewish History, 2003: do read it!). Other scholars have described different local communities, and the Philadelphia story was the focus of my own 1997 book Hoods and Shirts. But these events really have not loomed large in public consciousness, amazingly so given that, as Norwood says, “The pervasive anti-Jewish violence in Boston and New York during World War II suggests that anti-Semitism in the United States, at least in some locales, was much more deeply entrenched than most scholars have acknowledged.” That is an appalling conclusion.

So how do we explain the silence? The crucial factor was that the main perpetrators were Irish, Catholic, and looked as their leader to a Roman Catholic priest, Father Coughlin. Now, the Catholic hierarchy was deeply divided over Coughlin, and a good number of bishops viewed him as a loathsome insect, whose views they detested. However, the church’s traditions were very powerfully directed against any public attacks that might be construed as anti-Catholic, and they rallied to prevent negative coverage. And they were immensely well equipped to do so.

As George Seldes wrote in 1938, the Catholic church was “one of the most important forces in American life, and the only one about which secrecy is generally maintained, no newspaper being brave enough to discuss it, although all fear it and believe that the problem should be dragged into the open and made publicly known”. For the media, the consequences of non-compliance could be painful, and Seldes claimed that “To criticize the Catholic church is to invite a boycott, the withdrawal of advertising, loss in circulation and in revenue.” That censorship extended to international affairs, and woe betide the US urban newspaper that criticized General Franco, or even – God forbid – labeled him a Fascist.

In consequence, you can look carefully through all the newspapers of the time – and each major city had several at this time – and find strikingly little about the street violence, and the racist paramilitary mobs. When violence is discussed, it is virtually never attributed to the true culprits.

Look for instance at Philadelphia, where J. David Stern owned the Philadelphia Record, and ran it in the interests of progressive liberalism and the New Deal. Throughout the 1930s, the Record was the only paper in the city and sometimes the state that would publish stories seen as too difficult by other proprietors. He actually said bad things about General Franco (and it took a year for the Record‘s circulation to recover). But even Stern found the Catholic church too difficult an enemy to challenge.

Treatment of Catholic anti-Semitism was complicated by the structure of the Philadelphia press, in which both the major chains were dominated by Jewish magnates, respectively Moe Annenberg of the Inquirer and Stern of the Record. While both were sensitive to the growth of anti-Semitic activism, neither publisher could risk charges that their papers’ editorial views reflected the interests of a Jewish media conspiracy or cartel. In this context, any confrontation with the Catholic church would be uniquely perilous.

At the height of anti-Semitic agitation and violence by Irish Catholic Coughlin supporters in 1939, even the Record reported and denounced the incidents as fully as it dared, though normally without noting the religious or ethnic identity of the culprits, who are generally characterized as “Nazis” or “Bund supporters.” They are rarely acknowledged as Irish or Catholic. The only exceptions came when some local “Nazi” leader got himself arrested in a fracas, so that his name could finally appear in print, and it was Gallagher or Moran rather than Schmidt.

In Boston, out-of-control street violence against Jews raged until in 1943 the leftist New York paper PM addressed the “organized campaign of terrorism” and suggested, successfully, that the area’s Catholic priests should preach for peace. They did so, and the attacks subsided. Hitherto, the Boston press had basically left the whole matter uncovered, for fear of inviting boycotts from the immensely powerful Catholic Archdiocese. (The Christian Science Monitor also played an honorable role in this affair).

For a remarkable insight into the era, go to youtube and watch the short 1945 film, The House I Live In, a plea for tolerance using the person who was then the coolest of all urban idols, Frank Sinatra. In one scene, Sinatra stops a young street gang beating up another boy, and teaches them lessons in tolerance as the core of the American Way. If your dad was wounded at the front, he asks, wouldn’t you want him to have the blood he needed, from a person of whatever religion? Only a Nazi thinks different. The film does not explicitly focus on anti-Semitism, but obviously that is its whole point. Sinatra’s Italian Catholic background gave him unique credibility to an urban audience.

I should add that the Catholic Church was not the only culprit in this silence. In cities like New York and Boston, the New Deal rested on an alliance of Catholics and Jews, and public tensions between the two key Democratic Party factions had to be minimized. Any news stories of Catholic-Jewish violence would be a propaganda gift to the Germans.

So without newspapers or news media coverage, what is the historian to do? Obviously, part of the answer lies in unearthing confidential intelligence files, as Fr. Charles Gallagher is now doing. But there are other paths of entry.

The gap can also be remedied by oral history, but the whole crisis is actually covered in remarkable detail by several fine novels, which give a wonderful sense of the era. Arthur Miller covers the Christian Front under a pseudonym in his 1945 novel Focus, and Norman Mailer touches on the group’s mob violence in The Naked and the Dead (1948). Harry Sylvester’s 1947 novel Moon Gaffney likewise exposes the anti-Semitic and Coughlinite leanings of some New York Catholic clergy. One of the best sources is Lewis Browne’s 1943 novel See What I Mean, a detailed account of life in the Los Angeles far Right subculture of the era.

So the sources are there, but they require research skills quite different from more “mainstream” history, where we can rely on the news media. The whole sad story is a powerful lesson in the means by which we can know history, and the constraints and prejudices that can prevent us ever knowing the full story.

In historical terms, no news is emphatically not good news.

Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at USC

The Nazis of Copley Square: the Forgotten Story of the Christian Front

Q&A with Rev. Charles R. Gallagher, S.J.

ByIACS Staff September 28, 2021

Spycraft. Nazis. The Vatican.

In his latest book, Vatican diplomacy expert Rev. Charles R. Gallagher, S.J. casts his glance stateside and takes an in-depth look at terrorism, Catholic theology and the mysterious world of espionage during World War II.

In “The Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten History of the Christian Front,” Fr. Gallagher spotlights a forgotten history of the American far right by detailing, through previously classified FBI documents, a clandestine plan by Catholic extremists to overthrow the U.S. government.

An expert on Catholicism, diplomacy and international relations, Fr. Gallagher examines the role of the U.S. counterintelligence and the Catholic Church prior to and during World War II to stop the rise of the Christian Front, a paramilitary group of lay Catholics who viewed themselves as crusaders fighting against Communism for the spiritual purification of the nation. Inspired by Nazism and guided by their religious beliefs, the Christian Front sought to incite a revolution and install a temporary dictatorship in the U.S.

Released on September 28, 2021, Nazis of Copley Square is available from Harvard University Press.

IACS spoke to Fr. Gallagher about his new book.

 

 

IACS: How did you find the topic and why did you write this book?

Fr. Gallagher: When I was a sophomore in college I took a class on U.S. national security history and my professor was a historian of the FBI. During my research for the class, I found newspaper coverage of a group of Catholics who tried to overthrow the government in 1940. I had never heard of Catholics trying to overthrow any government, let alone the U.S. government. Growing up, I had always been taught to be a patriotic Catholic.

At the time, I wanted to write a paper on this group of “fringe crazies.” But my professor said I couldn’t, simply because there wasn’t anything to write about. He was right — at least, that was the perception for 70 years among historians. The case brought by the U.S. government against the group, called the Christian Front, had faltered, and then World War II arrived. As the larger scope of the war consumed news headlines, everyone forgot about the Christian Front.

When working toward my doctorate at Marquette University, my dissertation was a biography on the first American to be named a diplomat at the Vatican. In the diplomat’s diary, he mentions this group.

The Vatican hierarchy — and even the Pope himself — was concerned about this issue and taking it seriously. They saw the rise of the Christian Front as something that needed to be examined and figured out. That’s when I knew I needed to investigate further.

What challenges did you face when researching and writing?

Fr. Gallagher:  I like using intelligence documents to write church history — to see what those agencies are writing about religious actors and religious institutions. Getting these documents declassified is the first thing I have to do. Writing the “Nazis of Copley Square” required getting 4,200 pages of documents declassified by the FBI — a process that stretched six years, requiring a lot of patience and persistence. In the background, I was doing extra research, snooping around and trying to find scraps of documents with information. I consulted between 50 to 60 archives. It takes a lot of time – but the benefit is that you’re the first person seeing this declassified material. I had a jaw dropping moment in just about every chapter I wrote.

 

Where did the name of the book come from?

Fr. Gallagher: The Christian Front’s headquarters were located at the Copley Square Hotel in downtown Boston, and the organization’s leader was in direct secret meetings with a Nazi SS officer.

 

Why did it happen in Boston? The city has an interesting history with religious, racial and ethnic tension.

Fr. Gallagher: The Christian Front flourished in Boston because it positioned itself as an organization of lay working class Catholic intellectuals. Boston is unique because of its heightened sense of intellectual fervor, along with the intellectual marketplace happening in the city. The Christian Front was deeply theological in their political organization and political positions. But they were also deeply antisemitic, and their anti-Semitism was religiously rooted in the theology of the day. That’s the sad part of this book — these people were theologically astute and inquisitive, and they applied anti-Semitism in a way that paralleled Nazis, while still being able to call themselves authentically Catholic.

After World War II, the Church began reforming itself, leading to the Second Vatican Council, and a formal condemnation of anti-Semitism.

 

How did the rise of the Christian Front happen?

Fr. Gallagher: When I approached my editors at Harvard with the book idea, I told them I was researching three different spy rings involving Catholics in Boston. But I wasn’t writing a spy story. Rather, it was a story about religion and theology. One of the Christian Front’s theological impulses I identified in my research was the Mystical Body of Christ, which was dominant in the 1930s – the way that climate change, Laudato si’ and ecological stewardship dominates the Catholic theological discourse today. Mystical Body of Christ theology was transnational, Christo-centric and broke down borders spiritually. When Catholics were persecuted by Communists in one part of the world, Church members across the globe could identify with that pain.  The fire-bombing of churches in Barcelona had impact – through Christ’s mystical body – in Boston.

The other pillar of theology that supported the group’s ascendancy was what was then known as Catholic Action. Sponsored by Pope Pius XI in 1922, it was meant to be a global program designed to promote social justice at the parish level, organized by priests and conducted by lay people. Due to Communist persecutions of Catholics in Mexico and Spain, anti-Communism became an unofficial theme of Catholic Action.  The Christian Front was led by devout lay Catholics who were supported by several priests. Because they had clergy support, the Christian Front could legitimately claim they were doing “Catholic Action.”

 

How close did they get to achieving their goal?

Fr. Gallagher: I show in the book how the Christian Front was a serious national security threat from two perspectives: propaganda and paramilitary. It’s a difficult question to answer, because the answer lies within these classified documents – the government didn’t want to tell us how successful they were in their espionage and how close the Christian Front was to reaching their goals. But the fact is that the government viewed them as a serious threat to national security.

 

What lessons can we learn from the rise of the Christian Front?

Fr. Gallagher: Catholic leadership needs to pay attention to the fringe in order to govern effectively. The proclivity of an institution is to dismiss the fringe as inconsequential, but I think it’s more important for Catholic leaders, rather than dismiss the fringe within the church, to try to come to an understanding on what their motivations and their grievances are so they can be effectively addressed.

 

Did the Christian Front have a lasting impact on western Catholicism?

Fr. Gallagher: They became a link in the chain of what is far-right extremism today. They became progenitors of many of the impulses still present – they kept breathing above water with many of these ideas embraced by the American far-right. In doing so, the Christian Front allowed these ideas to maintain life on the political spectrum.  Their ideas informed the anti-Semitic Christian Nationalism of the 1950s, the American Nazi Party of the 1960s, the Christian Identity Movement of the 1990s and impulses found in some areas of the far-right today.

 

Editor’s Note: Charles R. Gallagher is an associate professor of History at Boston College. His book “Vatican Secret Diplomacy” won the John Gilmary Shea Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association. 

Arms on the Amazon: South America Goes Ballistic--with French Assistance

 Arms on the Amazon

South America Goes Ballistic--with French Assistance

The Brazilian Bomb: South America goes Ballistic

August 13, 1990 By Gary Milhollin and Gerard White

NEW REPUBLIC

August 13, 1990, p. 10-11

As the United States worries about missiles in the hands of Iraq and other countries in the Middle East, an egregious case of missile proliferation is taking shape in its own back yard. A group of European companies has agreed to sell Brazil the technology to build a rocket motor capable of launching an intercontinental ballistic missile. If the sale goes through, the first non-U.S. ICBM will take up residence in the Western Hemisphere, Brazil will be able to sell long-range missiles to Iraq and Libya (its leading arms clients), and international efforts to stop the spread of large missiles to developing countries will crash to a halt.

The outlines of the deal are clear. The French company Societe Européenne de Propulsion (SEP) is joining forces with Volvo in Sweden, MAN in West Germany, and FN Motors in Belgium to teach Brazil how to produce the powerful Viking rocket engine, developed by France to lift satellites for the European Space Agency. Other European firms—including Saab Space, Alcatel-Kirk, Sfena, and Contraves—will supply Brazilian engineers with extensive training in on-board computers, guidance systems, and the techniques of launching multistage rockets. All of this assistance will enable Brazil to build accurate missiles big enough to carry nuclear warheads.

There is a simple motivation behind the deal: greed. These corporations own a majority share of Arianespace, a holding company for the European Space Agency’s Ariane launch vehicle. Rocket technology is being used as a convenient sweetener to lure Brazil into hiring the Ariane for satellite launches instead of McDonnell-Douglas’s Delta launcher. (McDonnell-Douglas can’t make a similar offer without violating the U.S. Arms Export Control Act.)

France and the Ariane group are practiced in this sort of deal, having traded missile technology for satellite launch contracts since at least 1975. In fact, since its creation, the Ariane group has garnered more than half of the world’s satellite launch market—at the expense of international security. In the mid-1970s SEP invited Indian engineers to participate in the Viking’s development and later licensed India to produce the Viking at home. The French propulsion technology contributed to the development of India’s intermediate-range Agni missile. Not surprisingly, India showed its gratitude by hiring the French-dominated Ariane to launch its satellites. In 1988 Arianespace booked two more Indian satellite launches. At about the same time, France offered India another powerful engine for India’s newest space rocket—also a secret deal.

The agreement with Brazil shows every sign of working the same way. Brazil is now turning its largest and most successful space rocket, the Sonda IV, into an intermediate-range, nuclear-capable missile. The con-version is being handled by a research arm of the Brazilian Air Force called CTA (the Aerospace Technology Center). Besides converting the Sonda IV to a missile, CTA is also converting natural uranium into nuclear-weapon-grade material at a secret installation, according to press reports confirmed by US. officials. There is no reason to expect that CTA will keep Brazil’s obligatory promise to restrict the European rocket technology to peaceful use. In fact, Brazil is already breaking a peaceful use pledge to West Germany. To import German nuclear equipment, Brazil promised to allow inter-national inspectors to verify that it would not be used to make atomic bombs. Not only has Brazil refused to allow inspections, it has even shifted German-trained engineers from the civilian to the military side of its nuclear program.

Brazil is one of the world’s largest arms exporters to the Third World. Its first three space rockets, the Sonda I, II, and III, were all developed into surface-to-surface missiles that Iraq, Libya, and Saudi Arabia purchased right off the production line. U.S. officials have con-firmed reports that Brazil is currently trying to produce a nuclear-capable missile for Libya and Iraq. Both Libya and Iraq already make poison gas for missile warheads and want to acquire nuclear weapons. Iraq has sent a representative to look at a Brazilian missile prototype, and Libya has offered to finance Brazil’s missile development program in exchange for a supply of missiles and the technology to make them.

Brazil has publicly rebuffed US. complaints about its cooperation with Libya and Iraq. In 1987 the Missile Technology Control Regime (Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, West Germany, and the United States) agreed to restrict sales of any rocket that could carry a 500 kilogram payload a distance of more than 300 kilometers—limits the Viking clearly exceeds. Also a part of this nuclear non-proliferation treaty is an agreement not to sell the technology to produce such rockets. The Regime is the only international device for slowing missile proliferation. Although only a “gentle-man’s agreement” without international legal status or sanctions, it helps stigmatize such sales by providing a focus for international disapproval.

Brazil, which has publicly rejected the treaty, is exactly the kind of country the Regime’s drafters had in mind when they agreed to restrict missile technology. If France and Germany sell their production technology to Brazil, the Regime will be fatally undermined. No member country will abstain from sales that other members are freely making, and ballistic missiles will spread unchecked. The Ariane group—and the governments of France, Belgium, Sweden, West Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark—all seem perfectly willing to trigger such a free-for-all.

That means the United States must act alone. If President Bush really wanted to stop the Viking deal, he could threaten to cancel more than $50 million worth of SDI contracts held by Aerospatiale, SEP, Contraves, and other Ariane partners. Despite the appeal of this sanction, however, there is another that is faster, cheaper, and at least as powerful: publicity. Detailed public criticism of the offer to Brazil would produce exactly what the companies hope to avoid—public responsibility for their actions. Under cover of secrecy, the exporters can quietly argue their case for export licenses to key officials. With exposure, the deal would founder as the European public demanded explanations from the companies and their respective governments. Just over a year ago Bonn was publicly humiliated by revelations that German companies had sold poison gas technology to Libya for its plant at Rabta. Public disclosure forced the German government to stop its dangerous exports and tighten its lax controls.

The Viking deal is an important test. If it goes through, there is nothing to stop Ariane or other space-launch companies from selling the same technology to Argentina, Brazil’s rival, or to Pakistan, India’s rival. ICBMs could spring up around the globe. And the developed nations will find that for the first time since World War II their greatest threat will come not from super-power confrontation, but from their own exports.

GARY MILHOLLIN is a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and director of the Wisconsin project on Nuclear Arms Control.  GERARD WHITE is assistant director of the project.

France will help Brazil develop nuclear-powered submarines, Macron says

Americas

President Emmanuel Macron and counterpart Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Wednesday celebrated the launch of Brazil's third French-designed submarine, which will help secure the country's immense coastline, dubbed the "Blue Amazon."

Issued on: 27/03/2024 - 18:03

Modified: 27/03/2024 - 18:10

By:

NEWS WIRES

The two men highlighted the importance of their countries' defense partnership during a time of major global unrest, at a ceremony at Brazil's ultra-modern naval base in Itaguai near Rio de Janeiro.

It is here that Brazil built the Tonelero, the third of four planned conventional diesel attack submarines, with training, equipment, and technical assistance from France.

Under cloudy skies, the submarine was christened by First Lady Rosangela da Silva, nicknamed "Janja."

France and Brazil's defense ties "will allow two important countries, each on a continent, to prepare so that we can face this adversity, without worrying about any type of war, because we are defenders of peace," said Lula.

Despite differences, notably on the Ukraine war, Macron said "the great peaceful powers of Brazil and France" had "the same vision of the world."

Macron is on a whirlwind tour of Brazil, a major economic ally, which kicked off Tuesday with the launch of a plan to raise over a billion dollars in green investments to protect the Brazilian and Guyanese Amazon.

Jungle bromance 

The visit, the first by a French president to Latin America's economic giant in over a decade, is also a move to reset ties which had deteriorated significantly under former president Jair Bolsonaro.

A warm meeting between Macron and Lula in the Amazon, in which the two men were pictured beaming and clasping hands in the jungle, spawned a raft of internet memes about their bromance.

The cozy scenes -- a far cry from the days Bolsonaro lobbed insults at Macron's wife -- continued Wednesday at the submarine launch.

With its 8,500 kilometers of coastline, Brazil is seeking to ensure the security of what it calls the "blue Amazon," its immense exclusive economic zone through which more than 95 percent of its foreign trade passes and where it extracts 95 percent of its oil.

The construction of the submarines was outlined in a 2008 deal between Lula and former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, which also included the purchase of 50 Caracal helicopters.

The fourth submarine, the Angostura, will be launched in 2025.

France skirts around nuclear sub 

Brazil is also planning to build its first nuclear-powered submarine, the Alvaro Alberto, a project that has suffered significant delays, mainly due to budget constraints.

The French naval defense manufacturer Naval Group is supporting the design and construction of the submarine, except for the nuclear boiler which is being designed by the Brazilians.

Brasilia is however trying to convince Paris to increase technology transfers to help it integrate the reactor into the submarine and sell it equipment linked to nuclear propulsion.

 France has been reticent to transfer such technology due to the challenges of nuclear proliferation.

"If Brazil wants to have access to knowledge of nuclear technology, it is not to wage war. We want this knowledge to assure all countries that want peace that Brazil will be at their side," said Lula.

Macron told Brazil "France will be at your side" during the development of the nuclear-powered submarines, without announcing specific assistance.

"I want us to open the chapter for new submarines... that we look nuclear propulsion in the face while being perfectly respectful of all non-proliferation commitments," he said.

Later on Wednesday, Macron arrived in the economic capital Sao Paulo, and blasted the long-stalled free trade agreement between the European Union and South America's Mercosur bloc.

The deal, which has recently run into fierce resistance from European farmers, "as it is negotiated today is a really bad agreement, for you and for us," Macron told an economic forum in the southeastern city.

"Let's build a new agreement ... one which is responsible from a development, climate and biodiversity point of view," he said of the pact, negotiations for which originally began 25 years ago.

After an agreement was reached in 2019, final approval of the deal was then blocked amid opposition from several countries including France, even as nations such as Spain, Germany and Brazil have championed its adoption.

(AFP)

Defending Lasch, Left and/or Right by Russell Arben-Fox for THE FRONT PORCH REPUBLIC

 

FRONT PORCH REPUBLIC

Defending Lasch, Left and/or Right

By Russell Arben Fox -October 8, 2009

Wichita, KS. No one, I think, has ever summed up the longing for a life with front porches–the localist longing which is this blog’s raison d’être–better than Christopher Lasch did, in this plaintive passage from his masterpiece, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, when he spoke about his and his wife’s hopes for their family life when they were young:

“We wanted our children to grow up in a kind of extended family, or at least with an abundance of “significant others.” A house full of people; a crowded table ranging across the generations; four-hand music at the piano; nonstop conversation and cooking; baseball games and swimming in the afternoon; long walks after dinner; a poker game or Diplomacy or charades in the evening, all these activities mixing adults and children–that was our idea of a well-ordered household and more specifically of a well-ordered education. We had no great confidence in the schools; we knew that if our children were to acquire any of the things we set store by–joy in learning, eagerness for experience, the capacity for love and friendship–they would have to learn the better part of it at home. For that very reason, however, home was not to be thought of simply as the “nuclear family.” Its hospitality would have to extend far and wide, stretching its emotional resources to the limit (p. 32).”

With this passage’s reference to extended families and its suspicion of an over-reliance upon public schools, with its invocation of moral and cultural virtues and of dozens of humble, bourgeois practices (evening meals, organized sports, family games, etc.), it could probably be labeled–by those who usually identify with the left, that is–as either a nice but harmless bit of right-wing nostalgia at best, or as a canny bit of “traditional values” agitprop at worst. But it’s neither, of course, because Lasch was himself a product of the left side of our confusing and often inaccurate ideological divisions.

Though he never took socialism particularly seriously, and though he spent most of his career probing the pathologies and misunderstandings of American liberalism, his fundamental political and economic aspirations were generally clear: he liked democracy, and believed in equality (among his last political acts were a vote for Bill Clinton in 1992, and speaking out in favor of a “huge jobs program” in the pages of Salmagundi in 1994). But such convictions don’t lay to rest his critics on the left, however.

A couple of months ago Crooked Timber, a well-known left-liberal academic group blog, hosted a symposium discussing a terrific collection of essays by George Scialabba, What Are Intellectuals Good For? In that book, Scialabba–a wonderfully smart and incisive reviewer of and commenter on the intellectual currents of American life–provides sharp takes on all sorts of writers and thinkers, from (moving left to right) Richard Rorty, Edward Said and Irving Howe to William F. Buckley, Victor Davis Hanson and Allan Bloom.

The only author, though, to receive two full essays all to himself is Lasch, whom Scialabba clearly considers a hero of sorts, and this made some of the respondents to Scialabba mad. Rich Yeselson, in particular, really let him have it, shaking his head at the sympathy a leftist like Scialabba shows for a man like Lasch, who believed the real hope for democracy and equality was to be found in local cultures, intact families, supportive neighborhoods, independent labor and ownership…in other words, in ordinary–and therefore, it must be admitted, usually rather defensive, and perhaps often somewhat exclusionary–producers and workers:

“Because all of [Lasch’s] hardy “Artisans against Innovation”…plus the populists, plus the virtuous small “producers” have been wiped out by the early part of the 20th century, and because these folks were all proud of their skills and because they were ethnically homogeneous, Lasch can’t explain how the hell millions of unskilled, ethnically heterogeneous workers formed the CIO in the 1930s–and with it the backbone of the American middle class for the next two generations….So why does Scialabba let Lasch off the hook? Perhaps because he seems drawn most to writers and thinkers whom Sartre might have called the “unsalvageable,” after Hugo [Barine], the disillusioned leftist who goes down in a hale of Stalinist bullets at the end of Dirty Hands while shouting that he is “unsalvageable” (as opposed to those The Party cynically deems “salvageable” for its own instrumental purposes)….So Lasch, shouting out the Great Refusal to all of modernity, is another in this long line of gutsy truth tellers who push against the grain of the conventional wisdom. And Scialabba gives him bonus points for his unsalvageability.

“Way too many. Lasch builds a vast transportation device that does not move. His fantasy of a producerist ideology somehow redistributing wealth and power in a multi-polar world dominated by large pools of capital is just goofy. Lasch fears the very State that is the only entity capacious enough to circumscribe the power of private interests. He’s all dreams, he’s got no plans, and we want the plans….The people are busy–I’ve spent a lot of time around them. I’ve got a pretty good feel for this. Their jobs suck and they’re exhausted. When they get it together to do something amazing like build the CIO or create the Civil Rights movement, it’s a mitzvah composed of all kinds of things, especially incredibly tenacious, labor intensive organizing. Some of them are wonderful, and some of them are awful, and most of them are in between–kind of like everybody else. People who actually spent time around working class people…do not think of them or write about them in the way Lasch did….Lasch spent too much time trying to demonstrate that some stratums of the downtrodden were right or noble or resistant to the encroachments on their way of life. [Richard] Rorty spent his time just trying to argue against those with power who were trying to screw them, regardless of whether the downtrodden themselves were so wonderful or their way of life was so great. Because frequently they aren’t and it isn’t. A lot of local knowledge isn’t so humane….The world has always been a scary place, and it’s always been the fit though few who have undertaken to make stuff better. And, over time, they pick up some fellow travelers, and, oddly enough, things do get better.”

This is, of course, a particularly influential strand of the liberal progressive mentality in a nutshell: the conviction that most people, most of the time, are too invested in taking care of their own, or too exhausted by the simple demands of survival, to care much about systematic exploitation, and hence that any real “progress” towards equality and democracy is almost always going to have to come from the “fit though few,” not from ordinary people, in their own places, speaking from their own limits. It is a mentality that Lasch denies the truth of, root and branch.

Genuine democratic and egalitarian improvement in the lives of human beings–ending slavery, improving working conditions, respecting civil rights, providing education–always has at its heart, Lasch maintains, the activism of men and women from more or less well-defined communities, demanding independence and respect. It should be noted, though, that unlike some critics of the progressive ideal, Lasch himself didn’t think that the so-named “Progressives” of American history were themselves so thoroughly addicted to that liberal progressive worldview that they failed to recognize the communitarian and cultural undercurrents which efforts to better one’s own and others’ lives must invariably draw upon. He wrote, in his last complete work, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, that:

“Progressive thought was lively and suggestive precisely because so much of it resisted the political orthodoxies associated with the idea of progress. A number of important progressives refused to accept the division of society into a learned and laboring class as the price of progress. Nor did they embrace the welfare state as the only way of protecting workers’ interests. They admitted the force of the conservative objection that welfare programs would promote a “sense of dependence,” in Herbert Croly’s words, but they rejected the conservatives’ claim that the “wage-earner’s only hope is to become a property owner.” Some of the responsibility for “operating the business mechanism of modern life,” Croly maintained, would have to be transferred to the working class–or, rather, wrested by the workers from their employers since their “independence…would not amount to much” it is were “handed down to them by the state or by employers’ associations” (p. 82).”

So readers of Lasch–perhaps especially Front Porch Republic readers of Lasch, drawn to him because of his populist case for an economy of producers, a society of communities and neighborhoods and families–remain confused. He praises Progressive reforms, but attacks the dole. He speaks glowingly of strikes and labor unrest, and calls it all “conservative.” How to defend such a person, when you don’t know which direction the target is facing when attacks come from left and right?

Many of Lasch’s fans have tried, of course. Alan Ryan, in an old essay in The New York Review of Books, wrote that Lasch’s “populist values…defy categorization,” since “Lasch sounded very like a member of the Republican right when denouncing work-shy, sexually predatory young men, and like an unreconstructed member of the Old Left when denouncing hard-working but financially predatory bankers, managers, and brokers.” Jeremy Beer, in an essay for Modern Age a few years ago, suggested that The True and Only Heaven was Lasch’s “attempt to provide a pedigree for a more radical, more democratic–and more consistent–brand of cultural conservatism,” one that combined economic leveling with traditional and local ways of life.

Kenneth Anderson, in a Times Literary Supplement essay published soon after Lasch’s death, seemed to want to remove Lasch from his frequent association with communitarian critics of modernity, and align him instead with the left-libertarian cause, emphasizing his “anti-statist and anti-capitalist” teachings, suggesting that it wasn’t so much radical self-interest and individualism which Lasch opposed, as it was “authoritarianism, the peculiar form of communitarianism emerging from the conjunction of state and therapy,” and concluding that the public virtues Lasch rightly believed to be necessary for democracy could never come from such communitarian-praised actions of the 1990s as “Bob Dole’s railing against Hollywood or Bill Clinton’s preaching against pregnancy to black teenage girls,” but rather that “communities [must be allowed] to reformulate themselves, if indeed they will and along such lines as they will.”

Which, really, isn’t at all an untrue claim…but it is an incomplete one, and Lasch’s own writings show why it is incomplete. While that may not settle Lasch’s place once and for all–which is a bad goal anyway; isn’t the whole point of criticism such as Lasch’s to “unsettle” us?–responding to this particular claim, at least, may make it a little clearer exactly how we who love our local places should defend Christopher Lasch.

The one time that Lasch engaged with communitarian thought in a sustained way (in the chapter “Communitarianism or Populism? The Ethic of Compassion and the Ethic of Respect,” in Revolt of the Elites), he described his disagreements with the movement as a “difference in emphasis” rather than one of “irreconcilable opposition.” In fact he has many good things to say about some of the movement’s foremost thinkers, including Robert Bellah and Amitai Etzioni, and lumps communitarianism together with populism as “third way” projects, “reject[ing] both the market and the welfare state.”

At its roots, his real reservations with communitarian arguments are, in essence, class reservations: as he saw it, communitarianism emerges from an academic, sociological perspective, and tends to look upon the crucial virtues which participation in the traditions and rough equality of decent communities can teach people as something needful and precious, and thus in need of conservation and compassionate support. Whereas populism, on his reading of its arguments, is more defensive, radical, and grounded in a defiant expression of the limits of life in a decidedly non-elite (usually, though not always, rural) working world.

Academic defenders of community can be misled by top-down thinking, missing the essential structures–including the bottom-level socio-economic class structures–which populists intuitively know that their communities depend upon if their expressions of respect, competence, and judgment–all essential parts of their contribution to democracy–are not to be blown away by elite and/or intellectual reconstructions of social life. He writes:

Communitarians regret the collapse of social trust but often fail to see that trust, in a democracy, can only be grounded in mutual respect. They properly insist that rights have to be balanced by responsibility, but they seem to be more interested in the responsibility of the community as a whole–its responsibility, say, to its least fortunate members–than in the responsibility of individuals….But it is our reluctance to make demands on each other, much more than our reluctance to help those in need, that is sapping the strength of democracy today. We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good. In the name of sympathetic understanding, we tolerate second-rate workmanship, second-rate habits of thought, and second-rate standards of conduct….Democracy in our time is more likely to die of indifference than of intolerance. Tolerance and understanding are important virtues, but they must not become and excuse for apathy (pp. 106-107).

The ability to make judgments is a function of maturity, and maturity comes, Lasch argues, drawing upon both history and psychology, when individuals depart infantile worlds of helplessness and instant gratification, and instead come to appreciate–and eventually fiercely protect–the chastened lessons of experience, struggle, and the limited victories of life. An environment where wealth and respect is fluid, mostly untied to practical disciplines requiring time to master but instead rewarded to those who excel in pleasing or manipulating their human and intellectual surrounding, will result in gaps between winners and losers that no person can consider legitimate, thus making any attempt to impose community-wide standards and responsibilities slightly ridiculous and primitive to members of the new class of elites; it will be obvious to those in power that those ordinary folk who have not made the meritocracy work for them, and entered into the world of financial and social opportunity and mobility which it makes possible, will likely have no grasp the modern world. Which, of course, in turn leads to resentment, and a poisoning of the very virtues which a localized economy of limits once taught.

Lasch’s overall conclusion, in analyzing this process, is that democracy needs a defense of community that is more specific than the kind which some sorts of arguably condescending, vaguely redistributive, communitarianism promises; it needs some local, historical basics, and bite. He concludes:

“Back to basics” could mean a return to class warfare (since it is precisely the basics that our elites reject as hopelessly outmoded) or at least to a politics in which class became the overriding issue. Needless to say, the elites that set the tone of American politics, even when they disagree about everything else, have a common stake in suppressing a politics of class. Much will depend on whether communitarians continue to acquiesce in this attempt to keep class issues out of politics or whether they will come to see that gross inequalities, as populists have always understood, are incompatible with any form of community that would now be recognized as desirable and that everything depends, therefore, on closing the gap between elites and the rest of the nation (p. 114).

I think this is unfair to many communitarian writers, at least some of whom have very clearly articulated the impossibility of preserving the democratic and egalitarian potential of community membership in an environment where often unregulated and technologically unlimited capitalism ruins any sense of common life between the classes, and thus often ruins as well any possibility of collective, virtue-teaching participation, the sort where–as the quote at the beginning of this post emphasized–families could take a secure place in, and thus contribute to, a wider context of life. But whether you call it populist or communitarian or something else entirely, the driving charge of Lasch’s critique is clear.

As he says in his introductory essay in Revolt of the Elites, “a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation…civic equality presuppose[s] at least a rough approximation of economic equality” (p. 22). Scialabba sums up Lasch’s overall claims similarly in one of the essays in What Are Intellectuals Good For: “[Lasch’s] ideal has at least two radical implications. The first is that democracy requires a rough equality of conditions. Dignity and virtue cannot survive indefinitely amid extremes of wealth and poverty; only someone with a paltry conception of virtue could believe otherwise. The second is that the democratic character can only flourish in a society constructed to human scale” (pp. 182-183).

What follows from such a diagnosis? Good question, and one might be justified in thinking that Lasch’s vocation as a critic too-easily saved him from the harder work of answering it, and thereby building up some alternatives. (In this, he was perhaps taking too much comfort in being in the same position as his populist forerunners; on the last page of Progress and Its Critics, he called the populist tradition failure to develop a strong political or economic theory “its most conspicuous weakness”–p. 532.)

But it is not as though answers are impossible to find in Lasch’s oeuvre: he wanted to see jobs defended, wages secured, trade limited, cultures respected, neighborhoods supported, manual labor revived, proprietorship encouraged, industry regulated, corporations restricted, families embraced…and he wanted, to every degree possible, this done in a manner which did not rob authority and integrity from (quoting John Dewey–another Progressive!–here) “the local homes of mankind” (Revolt, p. 84). Complicated? Obviously.

Some of the above would require broad reforms and expensive legislation and politically unpopular stands, while some of it–perhaps the even more difficult parts of it–would depend upon individual and family sacrifices and changes. Is the goal itself impossible? Yeselson thinks so; in one of his further responses to Scialabba, he insisted that “Lasch somehow thinks, that in the name of a greater sense of self and stronger connection to one’s productive capabilities, you can mitigate the great productive power of capitalism–but yet have plenty that will be left over to expropriate from the expropriators. It doesn’t work that way–dividing up less leads not to serenely making your own buttermilk, but to fascism.” That’s quite a leap there–a not-completely-unreasonable leap, but a big leap nonetheless. One can only hope that Yeselson is wrong, and we can make compromises which move us in a Laschian direction, seeing as how our current global environmental and economic situation suggests what we will have to accept “dividing up less” anyway.

Scialabba, assessing the final value of Lasch’s perspective, suggests that at our present moment we have only three options for the future: “1) ecological catastrophe; 2) a domestic and international caste system, with extreme and permanent inequality, harshly enforced; or 3) a voluntary renunciation of universal material abundance as our goal and of mass production and centralized authority as the means”…then adding that “[o]bviously, only the last is even potentially a democratic future.” Assuming that people who like localism like it at least in part because of its democratic promise, then defending Lasch’s fierce commitment to economic and civic equality seems to be a necessary step in any vision that includes front porches.

Lasch’s connection of democracy and community to equality–as both a prerequisite and a result–moves him definitely to the left, I think (making “equal prospects for a flourishing life” a central value being almost stereotypically a left-wing attitude rather than a right-wing one), but it’s an odd left, a left that owes more (and more directly) to Rousseau’s moralistic concern with how modern economic life could warp private life and the development of individual character (a point Ryan made in the aforementiond NYRB essay). A left conservatism, perhaps? Or maybe, more simply, just different, more serious, religious left? Paul Gottfried, in a long, thoughtful and lyrical reminiscence about Lasch (and others), wrote that Lasch’s ultimate goal was to articulate “a religiously based communitarianism that could serve as an alternative to multinational capitalism.”

Why religiously based? Because, it seems, he doubted that individuals would be able to recognize and adhere to the limits of local communities (and thus receive and be able to contribute to the virtuous blessing of such membership) when confronted by market-and-technology-driven inducements (or delusions) of personal liberation and opportunity…unless, that is, there was a tangible belief that such limits–moral, social, and economic–were reflections of, or perhaps even instantiations of, a higher order of things. It is actually at this point that Scialabba’s defense of Lasch hits its most difficult patch: “[Does Lasch] propose to resurrect ‘the theological context’–the existence of God, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul? The Covenant and the Incarnation? Must we believe in order to be saved? If so, then we are lost. We cannot believe the unbelievable, even to salvage our culture” (What Are Intellectuals Good For?, p. 172).

If we assume from the outset, of course, that religious belief–perhaps especially the kind of beliefs which sustained many community-grounded populist and progressive pushes towards greater democracy and equality throughout American history–is “unbelievable,” than it would appear that Lasch’s whole oeuvre is compromised. His close analysis of the role families and local communities do and should play in developing democratic citizenship and economic egalitarianism won’t hold water, if there is no reason for anyone to ever stay on the farm once they’ve seen the city. We might as well accept Yeselson’s–and many others’–criticisms, and consign Lasch to the dustbin as we ponder strategies for extending justice. Or else, of course, we could just give up on social and economic egalitarianism entirely. Which if, to be honest, where the majority of devotees of localism probably already are, anyway.

But, so long as belief has a chance, Lasch’s criticisms remain pertinent for making a defense of his great populist/communitarian insight: that local producers and democratic egalitarians needn’t be enemies after all.

• TAGS
• capitalism
• Christopher Lasch
• communitarianism
• Left
• localism
• populism
• Right
• socialism