Greg has an excellent note on an NR column by Henry Olsen.  The nut is this promising little paradox:

[W]hile Sam Brownback has slashed Kansas taxes for the very richest and seen little beneficial result, economically or politically, Scott Walker has pursued broad-based tax relief and succeeded on both counts. The political benefits have come not only because Wisconsin has seen more growth but because of the more democratic and republican political morality Walker’s policy represents.

(source: The Real Job Creators | Greg Forster | First Things)

On what a father hopes and fears:

One of my most deep-rooted fears is that by trying to teach my boys right from wrong, I’m teaching them to be suckers. You try to teach your child the value of hard work, the value of honestly, the need to treat people with kindness and so on, and maybe the rest of the world isn’t teaching their kids the same things. A lot of parents aren’t even in the picture for their kids, and the lessons that are getting fed into their heads are more or less the opposite of what those kids need.

So my hope is that the boys grow up strong, smart, confident, and big-hearted, and that the country is in a good shape as they enter adulthood — secure, prosperous, full of opportunity, and considering how things are going lately, still having a Constitution and rule of law. I mentioned earlier that politics is probably inherently depressing. Parenting provides a pretty good contrast. When I shift from writing duties to daddy duties late in the day, I’m shifting from a world where I can’t control much to a world where I have a lot more control and influence.

(source: Jim Geraghty on the Spot)

A parallel noted:

China’s third step to weaken Islam, though, strikes much closer to home. The government is now forcing Muslim store owners to do something their religion forbids: sell alcohol and cigarettes and display them prominently. Muslim storeowners who refuse face massive penalties, and have been told they will “see their shops sealed off, their business suspended and legal action pursued against them.”

Why the coercion? The government claims the mandate is designed “to provide greater convenience to the public.” But that claim is hard to take seriously. The government’s interest is not so much in providing public access to cigarettes and alcohol generally, but in making sure that those products come from particular parties — namely the religious objectors. Local party officials are at least candid enough to admit it, saying, “We have a campaign to weaken religion here and this is part of that campaign.”

Sadly, China’s cigarette-and-alcohol mandate bears a troubling resemblance to our own federal government’s contraception mandate, which forces religious ministries like the Little Sisters of the Poor to provide health plans that include access to free contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs.

(source: American nuns, Chinese booze and religious persecution: Column)

…and it’s important to note that the parallel goes beyond the “contraception mandate” issue, too.

Harassment and legal assaults on people in business and public life that try, however imperfectly, to live in good conscience as Christians throughout their life–rather than in segregated corners, churches, and closets–has become a daily commonplace.  

Not betraying your artistic or other gifts by using them in support of a fake marriage, for example, has become the sort of thing that can cost you livelihood at the hands of faceless bureaucrats and the torch-and-pitchfork crowd.  Even nonpayment of bills is less dangerous!

We find ways to do otherwise, friends, or we start building the underground.  Everyone must choose.

Thomas Hibbs’ recent review of the Mad Men finale directs me to the following fascinating passage in de Tocqueville, one of those writers whose most famous quotations list has made him seem to be a token booster of American national pride.  But this could have been written in our generation, friends:

It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it.

A native of the United States clings to this world’s goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.

In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age, and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he brings a field into tillage and leaves other men to gather the crops; he embraces a profession and gives it up; he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves to carry his changeable longings elsewhere. If his private affairs leave him any leisure, he instantly plunges into the vortex of politics; and if at the end of a year of unremitting labor he finds he has a few days’ vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness. Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which forever escapes him.

At first sight there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance. The spectacle itself, however, is as old as the world; the novelty is to see a whole people furnish an exemplification of it.

(source: Tocqueville: Book II Chapter 13)

Do you doubt that this is a durable component of our national character?  Take a look at what mind-warping folly is often written on the subject of jealousy (the laudable, if tempered, desire to protect what one rightly enjoys) and envy (the mortal sin of desiring that no one else should enjoy anything unless I can enjoy it, too).

M. de Tocqueville continues: Continue reading →

I happened to notice this 2012 post from Greg, while clicking around the back end of the site.  With slight adjustments for windage, I think we’re heading the same direction, here:

In the lawsuits over Obamacare, the administration has asserted the theory that a profit-making business or a hospital or a school cannot be said to exist primiarly for a religious purpose or mission. If the courts endorse this claim, Christianity has been made illegal. Christianity cannot be what it is if the total primacy of God’s claim on our lives and the mission he has given us in the world is not permitted to achieve institutional expression in all areas of life, rather than simply in churches narrowly defined. This is not to say that all Christians must attend distinctively Christian schools or work in distinctively Christian businesses; far from it. However, if the formation of such institutions is illegal, Christianity is illegal.

(source: Religious Institutions and Modern Society | Hang Together)

And I’ll cheerfully sign on to this critique:

Romantic individualism has a contradiction at its core: it is not as individualistic as it thinks it is. It has always sought, and achieved, institutional embodiment – all while denying to itself that it seeks this. The two chief places it has been embodied are in the state – hence the need for a state-controlled “civil religion” in the Social Contract – and in educational institutions. The near-total triumph of Romantic individualism in these two sectors has coincided with a continual contraction of actual liberty for the individual, as both these types of institutions have become more rigid in imposing Romantic individualism as orthodoxy.

Rousseau foresaw all this and laid it out plain and simple in the Social Contract – those who do not voluntarily find their freedom in submission to the general will must be “forced to be free.” Those words are widely misunderstood and abused – Rousseau was no totalitarian – but the indifference to the individuality of the individual was very real and deliberately chosen.

(source: Religious Institutions and Modern Society | Hang Together)

I’m a tiny bit less sanguine about the potential for modern liberal democracy to survive its contradictions, but I whole-heartedly agree that if there is any hope for it, it depends on our recovering or inventing cultural institutions that offer a convincing alternative to “Romantic individualism.”

And in any case, first and foremost, if there is any hope for any of us, the Church must be the Church.