As long as we’re on painful subjects, on the new faith and work blog The Green Room I’ve started a new series of posts on physical suffering and work.

God loves us and made us for work, so that we could love him and each other through our work. But in a fallen world love is hard. To love God and neighbor in our broken condition is to endure suffering. That we do so willingly, rejoicing in the Lord, and that we are willing to forego work for the Lord as well, is how we know “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”

New installments in the series will come roughly every two weeks until I can’t stand to write about pain any more. Your thoughts are welcome!

Over at Inkandescence, I’ve concluded what began in Part One and Part Two of my series discussing the Libertarian Party and why, despite my formative preference for many libertarian thinkers and principles, I cannot support the Libertarian Party.  In my most recent post, I deal with arguments from party politics and from pragmatic efforts to leverage the Libertarian Party to achieve policy goals different than those its current leaders espouse:

So far, every reason I can adduce for attempting to ignore the utterly unconscionable elements, and the philosophically incoherent elements, of the Libertarian Party platform has always been a better reason to keep pushing forward those elements within the GOP that can and have made effective changes, while also shoving back at worthless fellows like Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, and maintaining my freedom to criticize the GOP when it’s wrong.  And under current circumstances I have been regularly calling for the defenestration of GOP leadership, so a fortiori what will I do with the current and longstanding Libertarian Party leadership?
…
We seem to be left with a Catch-22:  While the Libertarian Party remains ineffective, any argument against “protest” or “symbolic” or “identity-group” voting, made in terms of consequential political compromise, seems to favor leveraging sympathetic elements of a viable party rather than hoping to simultaneously change and boost an ineffective party that is wrong on top-shelf issues; and should the Libertarian Party become viable, its being emphatically wrong on the top-shelf issue would make it unconscionable to support it.

(source: Why I failed to be Libertarian, and why we still need a better way – Inkandescence)

Over at Inkandescence blog, I have a fresh post continuing the conversation about the Libertarian Party I mentioned earlier:

I’ve emphasized the serious philosophical incoherence at the heart of Libertarian Party expressions of libertarian political philosophy:  the notion that “individuals” are somehow proper subjects of law apart from “their bodies,” such that “their bodies” can be regarded as objects they “own,” is a metaphysical belief about the nature of human creatures, the nature of property, and the foundations of justice–and it is one that simply cannot be true.  In fact, the idea that a human creature’s proper subjectivity is radically distinct from bodily existence is a constant threat to the possibility of a binding natural law that addresses humans as they actually are.

All human creatures are embodied before they become capable of responsibly exercising their freedom, and live their whole lives in relationships, in varying degrees of dependency, which condition their freedom; no responsible law or standard of justice can possibly address humans as though they existed in a state of radical or unbridled subjectivity, or as though the human body was a negotiable economic instrument.

In fact, this denigration of the body to a merely instrumental role in human existence, and the concomitant treatment of a disembodied will as the proper subject of the laws, reverses the Lockean derivation of property rights from which it–especially the peculiarly American treatment of private property–nominally descends.  Rather than “property” being a necessary condition for each human creature’s freedom to live securely in society with other free creatures, and hence a moral imperative intrinsically related to each one’s basic needs and flourishing in society, “property” becomes a hypothetically natural and absolute responsiveness of the real to each individual’s subjective inclination.

(source: Inkandescence – Reflections and Reviews, Spiritual and Social)

I have been a Republican since I first registered to vote at age 18. They sent me in the mail a little card listing Republican Principles, which I dutifully pinned to my bulletin board of teenage paraphanalia. The statements on the card were a little too watered down and mealy-mouthed for my tastes – in that paleolithic era the term “focus group” was not yet in wide circulation, but the reality was very much with us – but it was indeed a set of principles. I understood that I was signing up for an organization that had at least some non-negotiables.

Today, exactly a quarter century later, I resign from the Republican Party.

I formed a resolution of doing so months ago, but I decided to wait and give the party the last chance to do the right thing to which it was entitled by both law and custom. It chose not to take its last chance to escape entanglement in disgrace, so I am taking mine.

The next question is whether there is any future for “conservatism” under that name or in the historic expression it has recently taken. Many people are already passing around this powerfully affecting testimony from a young conservative that the movement she joined no longer exists. If you are not passing it around yet, you should start.

There is always, of course, some kind of future for the ideas and moral commitments contained within the ill-defined and somewhat incoherent jumble we currently call “conservatism,” just as there is always some kind of future for the ideas and moral commitments contained in the equally ill-defined and somewhat incoherent jumble we currently call “progressivism.” The past that made us who we are and our aspirations to unrealized possibilities; devotion to eternal principles and devotion to tangible, historic realities; these things are perennially attractive.

The quesiton is whether the ideas and commitments will continue to be organized in a way that resembles what we have known. Social conservatism and economic conservatism as we have known them have both been shown to be effectively powerless. Trump has neutered both of these conservative factions by demonstrating that one does not need to give them anything to gain power. The only question facing leaders of both factions is whether they value short-term power (in which case they bend the knee to America’s Mussolini) or long-term integrity (in which case they must admit they do not now have, and have not had for some time, much power at all). The choices we see these leaders making in real time before us reveal much that had been hidden – much good as well as bad.

My guess is that something will happen now that will be neither a repudiation nor a continuation of conservatism as such, but something in between. Jonah Goldberg has been talking about a new Liberty League modeled on the organization that gave anti-statists a home outside the parties during the high tide of American statism. (This is long but I could not stop reading it.) But would that be simply a place to keep the conservative flame lit in exile, or a place to forge a new expression of old ideas and commitments that would not be what we have called “conservatism” but would incorporate some of its elements?

Another model we might look to is Vaclav Havel’s Civic Forum. When the moment of crisis arrived, the Czech dissidents formed an umbrella organization that welcomed any and all opponents of the Stalinist regime, whatever their ideological commitments. Havel provided an expression of shared moral foundations broad enough to show that they all had something in common. The coalition held the nation together during the crisis – held it together in opposition to the Stalinist regime. After the crisis passed, it promptly fell apart and two-party democracy arose in its place – as one would expect to happen, and even welcome. I think we are probably entering a period of history that will bear more in common with Czechoslovakia in 1989 than America in 1934.

I do not resign from conservatism. But my priority is not conserving conservatism. My priority is building moral consensus so that Americans who love what is good, true and beautiful can find a way to hang together. For if we do not hang together, we will surely hang separately.

I just posted over at Inkandescence the first of a couple posts throwing cold water on an utterly understandable movement among many of my best and favorite people in favor of not just a protest vote but an actual, continuing advocacy of the Libertarian Party.  This first one, mostly concerned with principles of practical political advocacy for Christians, crescendoes thus:

Despite [and I might here have just as well said “precisely because of”!] my profound love of the Anglo-American tradition of enumerated liberties against the imagined total reach of government, rooted properly in the natural law tradition that recognizes that each human creature’s transcendent obligations to God and other people, in justice and in charity, individually and in marriage and the Church, are such as demand that no merely secular power claim the right to bind the conscience or impede the performance of these duties; despite my adolescent passion for Locke and Bastiat and von Mises and Hayek, despite my ardency in favor of the “historical best” nature of the United States Constitution and the openness to an honest natural law reading of the Declaration of Independence; despite having for years labelled myself a “civil libertarian” and still defaulting to libertarian arguments and principles whenever a merely American and Constitutional question is in view (though I then often have to correct myself)–despite having longed for decades, literally more than half my life now, to be able to vote for a candidate labelled Libertarian Party or Constitution Party or Taxpayers Party, and having not a few times actually cast sober or protest votes for them–despite all this, I fail to see how it is possible to faithfully relate Christianity to secular regimes and then advocate in favor of the Libertarian Party. Now, go back and note my concessions, and remember that I wish I could agree with you, friends & family who want the Libertarians to be right. But…they just aren’t.  And I would have to sin by taking counsel of despair for all effectual advocacy, or sin by advocating what I know to be utterly unconscionable, to support them.  We’ll have to find another way.

(source: Why I failed to be Libertarian, in spite of myself. – Inkandescence)

Anyway, I would be happy to hear discussion of the matter.