The section on “democracy without voting” reminded me a lot of how the Chinese government uses “Whole-process people's democracy” in order to effectively wield state regulatory power over industry for the common good. For example, local councils may have some direct stake in municipal governance (echoing the traditional township), but technical regional governance relies on participation in shared forums by people interested enough to show up.
It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court prevented the west from adopting this truer vision of Democracy. Hopefully judges take this post seriously. They should refrain from questioning this President’s (or the next one’s) vision if he makes a great leap forward by enacting a programme similar to the one proposed by FDR.
It seems to me the only way to organize mass society in order to regain cultural and political solidarity is to adopt some kind of arrangement like the one you just described. And because of the current moral character of the population, it may, paradoxically, require that a centralized government instantiate this type of order by creating the spaces for local governments, councils, and industry groups to step into. People on their own have largely lost the ability to "self-govern" and may need to be prodded along, at first, toward an authentic engagement in politics.
Christopher Dawson's book "The Judgement of the Nations" offers a preliminary sketch of this concept. He notes that technologized mass society must consciously incorporate spiritual principles and subsidiarity to avoid the dehumanizing effects of technological bureaucracy.
What limits, if any, would you place upon the State in its desire to “prod along” recalcitrant citizens (or are they merely subjects in your view)?
If any and all rights must be subsumed to someone else’s idea of the common good, how do you view Communism? Why is not Communism seen as classical? Okay it’s atheistic, but lo! here is a billionaire. If we take his billions and redistribute them, won’t this benefit the common good?
Now I know what I would say to this, but then I rather like the High Court’s Lochner era of libertarian judicial activism in support of the Constitution and the Truths of the Declaration.
You write under 2) that “NRA did not violate any constitutional principles or ideals.”
What do you make of the claim I see in Wikipedia that “By March 1934 the ‘NRA was engaged chiefly in drawing up these industrial codes for all industries to adopt.’ The agency approved 557 basic and 189 supplemental industry codes in two years. Between 4,000 and 5,000 business practices were prohibited, some 3,000 administrative orders running to over 10,000 pages promulgated, and thousands of opinions and guides from national, regional, and local code boards interpreted and enforced the Act.”
I see no way to square this with the Enumerated Powers given to the government by the Constitution. This is not Limited Government, but unlimited, indeed the Court found that “the discretion of the President in approving or prescribing codes, and thus enacting laws for the government of trade and industry throughout the country, is virtually unfettered.”
Yes there is a delegation issue, and you have come down on one side of this, but the Constitutional point is larger than this, for even if Congress, and not the President, arbitrarily imposes prescriptions and proscriptions such that innocent people are treated as guilty (ask The Little Sisters of the Poor about the Affordable Care Act) you have a violation of the Natural Law on which the country is Founded.
So from here “corporatism” just looks like fascism (the NRA “Blue Eagle” logo is not reassuring), presenting America as one big happy bureaucratically administered family under Mussolini, I mean Roosevelt.
There are reasons, strong ones, to not be what Buckley called a “200-proof libertarian,” but the Bible’s economics, looked at away from the specific time-bound provisions of the Hebrew Covenant, purely in terms of financial transactions, looks pretty free-market, laissez-faire:
“She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard….She sees that her trading is profitable…She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes.” (Proverbs 31)
There is more we can say, so I don’t want to oversimplify my case, but in a nutshell, I wonder if your understanding of what is Constitutional and what is not, the basic relation of the citizen to the State, is itself Constitutional. Mine is the Declaration’s insistence upon Creator-endowed “unalienable” rights (first of all the Right to Life), rights which the government has a duty to “secure,” not violate.
The classical legal tradition sees no contradiction between, on the one hand, robust government for the common good, and on the other hand, the intrinsic dignity of the person and the protection of his/her natural rights. The view that government and natural rights are always in conflict and competing over jurisdiction presupposes an anthropology of violence that the classical legal tradition simply rejects.
The answer to your question lies in a science that is one step above jurisprudence, namely, political philosophy. And the premises that classical jurisprudence borrows from that higher science are: (1) that cooperation is the basis of politics; and (2) conflict is the deviation from it. Enlightenment thought reversed those premises, holding that man is naturally in conflict and cooperation is always the result of a social contract.
If you are willing to accept a less social-contractarian political anthropology and grant the premise that government is a good and natural institution, then you will reap much fruit from the answers Adrian has provided in the field of jurisprudence in his series on the Separation of Powers, linked here:
Very well said, Paul. Jurisprudence is a subaltern science dependent on political philosophy and theology. And the rich thought of the scholastics have exceptionally well developed political philosophical/theological accounts of human goods, social well-being, rights, the common good, and the intrinsic limits of State authority that avoid the errors of liberalism individualism and materialist collectivism. People are of course welcome to compare the classical natural law tradition and Marxist-Leninism because of semantic superficialities in terms they might use, like the common good or social justice, but that imo undoubtedly betrays a total lack of familiarity of the substance of each of them and how they differ wildly.
Your statement of principles is fine, the question is how you are going to apply them.
In my book “liberalism” and “individualism” are not sinister terms, but simply mean that Farmer Brown offers his goods to the market without coercion or confiscation.
That you wanted the Court to more or less impose Quadresimo Anno on an America with a different set of Constitutional ideas reminded me of a paragraph from Russell Hittinger. In an article about John Courtney Murray, he wrote that
“The question before the Second Vatican Council was rather whether, given "ideal" conditions -- when they constituted the majority in a democracy -- Catholics ought to force the state to adopt Catholicism as its official religion. The traditional teaching was yes. Understandably, this was not often preached for public consumption in the United States, but it was no secret either. And the question for Catholics and non-Catholics alike was how Catholics could be good citizens if their doctrine required them to lie in wait for those conditions that allow a confessional state.”
I’m sure you’re no fan of John Zmirak but he makes the same point:
“[Shall we] …reveal to our Protestant and Jewish neighbors that in fact were merely wearing a kind of mask, asking for a freedom that we never intended to grant to them?”
Thank you for engaging with my essay. I appreciate these thoughts. I'd say three things.
1) Quadragesimo Anno did not impose religion on anyone. It did not require the state to recognize the Catholic Church or divine revelation. It simply prescribed a way of organizing the community for effective economic cooperation. To implement these suggestions did not violate anyone's religious conscience, much less did it implicate the First Amendment.
2) NIRA did not violate any constitutional principles or ideals. Scholars have long debated that question, particularly as it relates to the nondelegation doctrine. I respect the opposing opinion. But there is nothing about adopting the NIRA framework, with broad delegation to the executive, that required abandoning American ideals or the Constitution. The Supreme Court's nondelegation doctrine jurisprudence in the last 90 years supports this view.
3) There is nothing in this essay that would contradict the perennial teaching of the popes that political change must always be carried out prudentially, especially as Catholics in the state try to move the regime's orientation toward the ideals that are propounded in Catholic social teaching. There is no such thing as revolutionary integralism. But all that aside, this essay doesn't address that topic or implicate it. You've raised an objection to an argument I didn't make.
The section on “democracy without voting” reminded me a lot of how the Chinese government uses “Whole-process people's democracy” in order to effectively wield state regulatory power over industry for the common good. For example, local councils may have some direct stake in municipal governance (echoing the traditional township), but technical regional governance relies on participation in shared forums by people interested enough to show up.
Here’s a link to the Chinese government’s description of it: http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/whitepapers/2021-12/04/content_77908921.htm
It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court prevented the west from adopting this truer vision of Democracy. Hopefully judges take this post seriously. They should refrain from questioning this President’s (or the next one’s) vision if he makes a great leap forward by enacting a programme similar to the one proposed by FDR.
It seems to me the only way to organize mass society in order to regain cultural and political solidarity is to adopt some kind of arrangement like the one you just described. And because of the current moral character of the population, it may, paradoxically, require that a centralized government instantiate this type of order by creating the spaces for local governments, councils, and industry groups to step into. People on their own have largely lost the ability to "self-govern" and may need to be prodded along, at first, toward an authentic engagement in politics.
Christopher Dawson's book "The Judgement of the Nations" offers a preliminary sketch of this concept. He notes that technologized mass society must consciously incorporate spiritual principles and subsidiarity to avoid the dehumanizing effects of technological bureaucracy.
A great article in American Affairs a couple years back also gave an excellent overview of China's largely successful implementation of corporatism: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/the-century-of-chinese-corporatism/
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
What limits, if any, would you place upon the State in its desire to “prod along” recalcitrant citizens (or are they merely subjects in your view)?
If any and all rights must be subsumed to someone else’s idea of the common good, how do you view Communism? Why is not Communism seen as classical? Okay it’s atheistic, but lo! here is a billionaire. If we take his billions and redistribute them, won’t this benefit the common good?
Now I know what I would say to this, but then I rather like the High Court’s Lochner era of libertarian judicial activism in support of the Constitution and the Truths of the Declaration.
You write under 2) that “NRA did not violate any constitutional principles or ideals.”
What do you make of the claim I see in Wikipedia that “By March 1934 the ‘NRA was engaged chiefly in drawing up these industrial codes for all industries to adopt.’ The agency approved 557 basic and 189 supplemental industry codes in two years. Between 4,000 and 5,000 business practices were prohibited, some 3,000 administrative orders running to over 10,000 pages promulgated, and thousands of opinions and guides from national, regional, and local code boards interpreted and enforced the Act.”
I see no way to square this with the Enumerated Powers given to the government by the Constitution. This is not Limited Government, but unlimited, indeed the Court found that “the discretion of the President in approving or prescribing codes, and thus enacting laws for the government of trade and industry throughout the country, is virtually unfettered.”
Yes there is a delegation issue, and you have come down on one side of this, but the Constitutional point is larger than this, for even if Congress, and not the President, arbitrarily imposes prescriptions and proscriptions such that innocent people are treated as guilty (ask The Little Sisters of the Poor about the Affordable Care Act) you have a violation of the Natural Law on which the country is Founded.
So from here “corporatism” just looks like fascism (the NRA “Blue Eagle” logo is not reassuring), presenting America as one big happy bureaucratically administered family under Mussolini, I mean Roosevelt.
There are reasons, strong ones, to not be what Buckley called a “200-proof libertarian,” but the Bible’s economics, looked at away from the specific time-bound provisions of the Hebrew Covenant, purely in terms of financial transactions, looks pretty free-market, laissez-faire:
“She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard….She sees that her trading is profitable…She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes.” (Proverbs 31)
There is more we can say, so I don’t want to oversimplify my case, but in a nutshell, I wonder if your understanding of what is Constitutional and what is not, the basic relation of the citizen to the State, is itself Constitutional. Mine is the Declaration’s insistence upon Creator-endowed “unalienable” rights (first of all the Right to Life), rights which the government has a duty to “secure,” not violate.
Thanks for writing!
The classical legal tradition sees no contradiction between, on the one hand, robust government for the common good, and on the other hand, the intrinsic dignity of the person and the protection of his/her natural rights. The view that government and natural rights are always in conflict and competing over jurisdiction presupposes an anthropology of violence that the classical legal tradition simply rejects.
The answer to your question lies in a science that is one step above jurisprudence, namely, political philosophy. And the premises that classical jurisprudence borrows from that higher science are: (1) that cooperation is the basis of politics; and (2) conflict is the deviation from it. Enlightenment thought reversed those premises, holding that man is naturally in conflict and cooperation is always the result of a social contract.
If you are willing to accept a less social-contractarian political anthropology and grant the premise that government is a good and natural institution, then you will reap much fruit from the answers Adrian has provided in the field of jurisprudence in his series on the Separation of Powers, linked here:
https://thenewdigest.substack.com/p/skepticism-about-the-separation-of
Very well said, Paul. Jurisprudence is a subaltern science dependent on political philosophy and theology. And the rich thought of the scholastics have exceptionally well developed political philosophical/theological accounts of human goods, social well-being, rights, the common good, and the intrinsic limits of State authority that avoid the errors of liberalism individualism and materialist collectivism. People are of course welcome to compare the classical natural law tradition and Marxist-Leninism because of semantic superficialities in terms they might use, like the common good or social justice, but that imo undoubtedly betrays a total lack of familiarity of the substance of each of them and how they differ wildly.
Conor
Yes, yes indeed. Thank you Conor. The definition of terms is always step 1 before undertaking a comparison.
Your statement of principles is fine, the question is how you are going to apply them.
In my book “liberalism” and “individualism” are not sinister terms, but simply mean that Farmer Brown offers his goods to the market without coercion or confiscation.
That you wanted the Court to more or less impose Quadresimo Anno on an America with a different set of Constitutional ideas reminded me of a paragraph from Russell Hittinger. In an article about John Courtney Murray, he wrote that
“The question before the Second Vatican Council was rather whether, given "ideal" conditions -- when they constituted the majority in a democracy -- Catholics ought to force the state to adopt Catholicism as its official religion. The traditional teaching was yes. Understandably, this was not often preached for public consumption in the United States, but it was no secret either. And the question for Catholics and non-Catholics alike was how Catholics could be good citizens if their doctrine required them to lie in wait for those conditions that allow a confessional state.”
I’m sure you’re no fan of John Zmirak but he makes the same point:
“[Shall we] …reveal to our Protestant and Jewish neighbors that in fact were merely wearing a kind of mask, asking for a freedom that we never intended to grant to them?”
Thank you for engaging with my essay. I appreciate these thoughts. I'd say three things.
1) Quadragesimo Anno did not impose religion on anyone. It did not require the state to recognize the Catholic Church or divine revelation. It simply prescribed a way of organizing the community for effective economic cooperation. To implement these suggestions did not violate anyone's religious conscience, much less did it implicate the First Amendment.
2) NIRA did not violate any constitutional principles or ideals. Scholars have long debated that question, particularly as it relates to the nondelegation doctrine. I respect the opposing opinion. But there is nothing about adopting the NIRA framework, with broad delegation to the executive, that required abandoning American ideals or the Constitution. The Supreme Court's nondelegation doctrine jurisprudence in the last 90 years supports this view.
3) There is nothing in this essay that would contradict the perennial teaching of the popes that political change must always be carried out prudentially, especially as Catholics in the state try to move the regime's orientation toward the ideals that are propounded in Catholic social teaching. There is no such thing as revolutionary integralism. But all that aside, this essay doesn't address that topic or implicate it. You've raised an objection to an argument I didn't make.