Would Someone Just Shut That Pope Up?

Posted By Patrick J. Deneen On December 5, 2013 @ 10:03 am In Conservatism,Religion | 82 Comments

Pope Francis not sufficiently appreciating Ronald Reagan

Since the release of Evangelii Gaudium ^[1] there have been countless articles and commentary about the economic portions of Pope Francis’s Apostolic Exhortation. Some of the commentary has been downright bizarre, such as Rush Limbaugh denouncing ^[2] the Pope as a Marxist, or Stuart Varney accusing ^[3]Francis of being a neo-socialist. American conservatives grumbled but dutifully denounced a distorting media when Pope Francis seemed to go wobbly on homosexuality, but his criticisms of capitalism have crossed the line, and we now see the Pope being criticized and even denounced from nearly every rightward-leaning media pulpit in the land.

Not far below the surface of many of these critiques one hears the following refrain: why can’t the Pope just go back to talking about abortion? Why can’t we return the good old days of Pope John Paul II or Benedict XVI and talk 24/7/365 about sex? Why doesn’t Francis have the decency to limit himself to talking about Jesus and gays, while avoiding the rudeness of discussing economics in mixed company, an issue about which he has no expertise or competence?

There are subtle and brash versions of this plea. At “The Catholic Thing,” Hadley Arkes has penned ^[4] a characteristically elegant essay in which he notes that Francis is generally correct on teachings about marriage and abortion, but touches on these subjects too briefly, cursorily and with unwelcome caveats of sorts. At the same time, Francis goes on at length about the inequalities and harm caused by free market economies, which moves Hadley to counsel the Pope to consult next time with Michael Novak. The upshot—be as brief as the Gettysburg Address in matters pertaining to economics, and loquacious as Edward Everett when it comes to erotics.

On the brash side there is Larry Kudlow, who nearly hyperventilates ^[5] when it comes to his disagreement with Pope Francis, accusing him of harboring sympathies with Communist Russia and not sufficiently appreciating Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II. (R. R. Reno, who is briefly allowed to get a word in edgewise, wisely counseled Kudlow not to fight the last war—or, the one fought three wars ago, for that matter.) Revealingly, Kudlow counsels the Pope to concentrate on “moral and religious reform,” and that he should “harp” instead on “morality, spiritualism and religiosity,” while ceasing to speak about matters economic. Similarly, Judge Napolitano, responding to a challenge from Stuart Varney on why the Pope is talking about economics, responded: “I wish he would stick to faith and morals, on which he is very sound and traditional.”

These commentators all but come and out say: we embrace Catholic teaching when it concerns itself with “faith and morals”—when it denounces abortion, opposes gay marriage, and urges personal charity. This is the Catholicism that has been acceptable in polite conversation. This is a stripped-down Catholicism that doesn’t challenge fundamental articles of economic faith.

And it turns out that this version of Catholicism is a useful tool. It is precisely this portion of Catholicism that is acceptable to those who control the right narrative because it doesn’t truly endanger what’s most important to those who steer the Republic: maintaining an economic system premised upon limitless extraction, fostering of endless desires, and creating a widening gap between winners and losers that is papered over by mantras about favoring equality of opportunity ^[6]. A massive funding apparatus supports conservative Catholic causes supporting a host of causes—so long as they focus exclusively on issues touching on human sexuality, whether abortion, gay  marriage, or religious liberty (which, to be frank, is intimately bound up in its current form with concerns about abortion). It turns out that these funds are a good investment: “faith and morals” allow us to assume the moral high ground and preoccupy the social conservatives while we laugh all the way to the bank bailout.

The right’s contretemps with Pope Francis has brought out into the open what is rarely mentioned in polite company: most visible and famous Catholics who fight on behalf of Catholic causes in America focus almost exclusively on sexual issues (as Pope Francis himself seemed to be pointing out, and chastising, in his America interview ^[7]), but have been generally silent regarding a century-old tradition of Catholic social and economic teaching. The meritocracy and economic elite have been a main beneficiary of this silence: those most serious about Catholicism—and thus who could have brought to bear a powerful tradition of thinking about economics that avoids both the radical individualistic presuppositions of capitalism as well as the collectivism of socialism—have spent their energies fighting the sexual/culture wars, even while Republican-Democratic ruling machine has merely changed driver seat in a limousine that delivers them to ever-more exclusive zip codes ^[8].

In the past several months, when discussing Pope Francis, the left press has at every opportunity advanced a “narrative of rupture,” claiming that Francis essentially is repudiating nearly everything ^[9]that Popes JPII and Benedict XVI stood for. The left press and commentariat has celebrated Francis as the anti-Benedict following his  impromptu airplane interview (“who am I to judge?”) and lengthy interview with the Jesuit magazine America. However, in these more recent reactions to Francis by the right press and commentariat, we witness extensive agreement by many Catholics regarding the “narrative of rupture,” wishing for the good old days of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

But there has been no rupture—neither the one wished for by the left nor feared by the right. Pope Francis has been entirely consistent with those previous two Popes who are today alternatively hated or loved, for Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI spoke with equal force and power against the depredations of capitalism. (JPII in the encyclical Centesimus Annus ^[10] and Benedict XVI in the encyclical Caritas in Veritate. ^[10])  But these encyclicals—more authoritative than an Apostolic Exhortation—did not provoke the same reaction as Francis’s critiques of capitalism. This is because the dominant narrative about John Paul II and Benedict XVI had them pegged them as, well, Republicans. For the left, they were old conservatives who obsessed with sexual matters; for the right, solid traditionalists who cared about Catholicism’s core moral teachings. Both largely ignored their social and economic teachings, so focused were they on their emphasis on “faith and morals.” All overlooked that, for Catholics, economics is a branch of moral philosophy.

I think it is because of the left’s “narrative of disruption” that the right is panicked over Francis’s critiques of capitalism. These Vatican criticisms—suddenly salient in ways they weren’t when uttered by JPII and Benedict—need to be nipped in the bud before they do any damage. Of course, all along Catholic teaching has seen a strong tie between the radical individualism and selfishness at the heart of capitalism and liberationist sexual practices, understanding them to be premised on the same anthropological assumptions. (If you don’t believe Catholics about this, just read Ayn Rand.) While Hadley Arkes laments that Pope Francis did not speak at more length on sexual matters, if one reads his criticisms of the depredations of capitalism with care, one notices that he uses the same phrases with which he criticized abortion—namely, that abortion is but one manifestation of “a throw-away culture ^[11],” a phrase as well as in Evangelii Gaudium in his critique of capitalism (Section 53 ^[12]). If one attends carefully to Francis’s criticisms of the economy’s effects on the weak and helpless, one can’t help but perceive there also that he is speaking of the unborn as much as those who are “losers” in an economy that favors the strong.  Like John Paul and Benedict before him, Francis discerns the continuity between a “throw-away” economy and a “throw-away” view of human life. He sees the deep underlying connection between an economy that highlights autonomy, infinite choice, loose connections, constant titillation, utilitarianism and hedonism, and a sexual culture that condones random hook-ups, abortion, divorce and the redefinition of marriage based on sentiment, and in which the weak—children, in this case, and those in the lower socio-economic scale who are suffering a complete devastation of the family—are an afterthought.

The division of the fullness of Catholic thought in America has rendered it largely tractable in a nation that was always suspicious of Catholics. Lockean America tamed Catholicism not by oppression (as Locke thought would be necessary), but by dividing and conquering—permitting and even encouraging promotion of its sexual teachings, albeit shorn of its broader social teachings. This co-opted the full power of those teachings, directing the energy of social conservatives exclusively into the sexual-culture wars while leaving largely untouched a rapacious economy that daily creates few winners and more losers ^[13] while supporting  a culture of sexual license and “throw-away” children. Without minimizing the seriousness with which we need to take issues like abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty, these are discrete aspects of an overarching “globalization of indifference” described by Francis. However, we have been trained to treat them as a set of autonomous political issues that can be solved by one or two appointments on the Supreme Court. Francis—like JPII and BXVI before him—has upset the “arrangement.” Rush and the gang are not about to go down without a fight. If only they could get that damn Marxist to talk about sex.

What was Really Behind the Republican Shutdown?

"If the Republicans had not fought on ObamaCare,

the compromise would have been over the budget sequester." 

The government shutdown is over and recriminations, ruminations, and machinations are rebounding around the halls of Congress, mainstream media, and the blogosphere. Here I am to add my $.02.

The general wisdom seems to be that Republicans are taking the brunt of the blame for the shutdown, as well they should. Allowing TEA Party members of the House to dictate a defund or die fiscal fiasco was a fool's errand and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was the errand boy. Recriminations within party ranks have made the Republican Party look disorganized to the point of disarray. Speaker Boehner comes off looking particularly bad as leader of his party. Politically, the circus orchestrated by Cruz hurt Speaker Boehner's reputation as leader of a cohesive Party, and seems to have made Cruz a pariah among rank and file Republicans.

President Obama was seen generally as holding the upper hand in refusing to negotiate on the Affordable Care Act under threat on the Republican-led shutdown and the looming possibility of a government default. His position got stronger as the shutdown dragged on and Republicans began vacillating on what they hoped to get out of the impasse.

The Republican cause wasn't helped by some of the ludicrous things Republicans, without a consensus message for once, were saying. Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) told a reporter, "We're not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this and I don't know what that even is." And that was the crux of the matter. Republican leadership knew that getting the President to cave on the ACA -- his signature first term achievement -- was a pipe dream. So what the hell were they hoping to achieve by another round of budget brinkmanship?

It may be that an analysis of the Republican shutdown that assesses the question as a party tactic won't get us a sensible answer. Rather, the shutdown may have been orchestrated by individuals within the party, with help from outside political groups, like the Heritage Foundation and its sister advocacy group and political arm, Heritage Action. The purpose in this case, would be to shift the power base of the party from the moderates to the ultra-conservatives, including the TEA Party. How did they hope to do this? By doing exactly what they did. Making party leadership look bad, and then threatening members coming up for reelection with an all-out primary challenge to replace them with their brand of no-holds barred conservative.

Between now and the 2014 Congressional elections we will see Republicans continue to thwart the President on every front, but mostly on spending. There will continue to be attacks on the Affordable Care Act, but these will be focused on undermining the act, and making it look bad (through such tactics as Congressional investigations), with the hope that Republicans can make it a cause célèbre for the 2016 Presidential election.

It will be interesting to see how Republicans structure their primary for the 2016 election. They would certainly want to avoid an all-out battle with the TEA Party over who the presidential candidate will be, but this might not be possible. People might forget the debacle that was Ted Cruz reading from Dr. Seuss during his irrelevant filibuster, but the angry Republican moderates won't. They'll be a search for a compromise candidate. In steps Jim DeMint. Know who he is?

The Debt Does Not Exist

VIEWPOINT: The Debt Everyone Is Freaking Out About Does Not Exist
JEFF SPROSS, FEBRUARY 24, 2013

Excerpts:

The debt that’s got everyone worried is the part we haven’t yet incurred. And that debt, by definition, does not exist. It’s not a certainty, it’s merely a projection by the Congressional Budget Office. And trying to model how the federal budget, not to mention the entire American economy, will behave years or even decades in the future is a devilishly treacherous business.

By fixating on a problem that may or may not exist, Washington has trapped policymaking in a weird, postmodern dilemma. We’ve declared there’s a crisis because we’ve produced a hypothetical number, tethered to reality only by a host of assumptions and guesswork about what will happen in the next several decades. Then we insist this “crisis” isn’t “solved” until we’ve made policy changes that shift the math designed to spit out said hypothetical number. Policymaking becomes less about solving concrete problems and more about made-up numbers on an Excel spreadsheet.

In a depression, spending cuts suck demand out of the economy, leading to slower growth. Europe has so far pursued austerity with markedly more enthusiasm than the United States, and its economic performance predictably tanked as a result. Spain and France are anticipated to miss their latest debt-cutting targets, and the Continent as a whole will probably not see renewed economic growth for another year.

The vast majority of the deficits we’ve seen since President Obama took office were due to the 2008 collapse. Under depression conditions, deficits are a feature, not a bug.

We’ve already cut non-defense discretionary spending to 40-year lows, endangering all sorts of investments in America’s infrastructure, health, safety, communities, and future productivity. This massive failure to invest or aid saps the economy’s skills, education, networks, and future prospects.

Letter to a Good Friend Who Calls Me an "Environmental Wacko"

August 14, 2008

Dear Friend, Andy;

Yesterday was my boyhood friend, Nick’s birthday. He is seventy. We became friends in high school. We spent a lot of time at each other’s home, and were essentially adopted by each other’s parents. After high school, he went to Pepperdine and I went to USC. We still spent a lot of time together, but after graduation, he went to dental school in San Francisco and I joined the Air Force.

We saw less of each other, of course, but still kept in touch via PO Box – no email back then. Once he sent me photos of the cadavers the dental school students were dissecting. Another package contained teeth molds he’d made. I got back to LA on leave and went to see him in SF. We went to see a movie about a man who was a career officer in the Royal Scots Regiment, but could never live up to the legend or expectations of his father. A great movie. Can’t remember the title.

Nick was anxious to get away from big city life and settled in a small community in northern California called Avila Beach, where he opened his practice. He bought some property there, which he intended to build on, but when Avila Beach started booming, he sold to a developer, made a bundle of money, and moved to San Luis Obispo, a sleepy little college town roughly midway between SF and LA.

When I talked to Nick yesterday to wish him a happy birthday, he told me that he and his wife, Hedy are planning to move again. “SLO has gotten too big. Traffic is awful,” He said.

I found it hard to believe. The place was idyllic. A little hippy, as you’d expect in a college town, but nice, laid back, unspoiled. Now traffic clogs winding roads that were never laid out to accommodate the population growth, air pollution is creeping up aided and abetted by smog seeping over the hills from LA and Santa Barbara, fishing stinks, as does the air and water. Too bad, but that’s progress.

There’s lots of progress in California. The population of the state has grown from just under 16 mil when Nick and I graduated from college, to well over 36 mil now, not counting undocumented aliens, who, as the name indicates, are not documented. Some estimates of illegals in California reach 3 million, but the number varies from day-to-day, as they are rounded up and deposited back on the Mexican side of the border and take a day or two to get back. They generally start out in San Diego county, whose population has more than doubled since Nick and I drove through there in 1960 on our way to Tijuana, where we hoped to improve our Spanish language skills.

I blame growing up in California for turning me into an “environmental wacko.” You see, I was born there way back in 1938. You can’t even imagine what it was like there then. In the spring, you could smell the orange blossoms, in the evenings, you could smell the night-blooming Jasmine. I could lie on the lawn at night and see the sky lit up with the billions of stars. In the morning, I could look out across the valley and see the San Gabriel Mts. It took us a while, but we could catch the “Red Car” electric streetcar and go to the beach, cross the sand without stepping in blacktar goo, and swim without worrying about used needles bobbing about in the surf. I watched the Hollywood freeway being built at the bottom of the street on which we lived. I wasn’t smart enough to realize what the implications were when it went in and the Red Cars went out.

I’m afraid Nick isn’t moving far enough from SLO – he’s just moving north fifty or so miles to some out of the way place NW of Paso Robles. Another 10 years and he’ll want to move to Nevada, except there won’t be any water there.

But thanks for sending me the op-ed by Daniel Henninger, a conservative columnist who’d rather be clever than objective. Despite Henninger's snarky word invention, the United States absolutely must transform its economy in order to survive and thrive in the world to come. And the transformation should have started long ago – changing a consumption economy into sustainable economy will take a generation, be costly, and be painful. Corporate America will fight it every step of the way, because they are invested in the way things are, not the way they should be. Your conservative credo of letting unfettered market forces take care of things became untenable when corporate earnings started exceeding most countries GDP. Corporations pay to let democracy work for them, not you. Henninger’s “environmania” is not “messianism,” its righteous indignation.

Why you’d want to trust corporations to operate in your best interests is a mystery to me. Try to picture the boardroom of a corporation and look at the people around the table. They are not abstractions. They are people whose livelihoods depend on making money for the organization for whom they work, not on making the world a better place by providing products and services that work to better the lot of mankind and, in the process, making the organization a profit. That would be socially responsible. Forget about it. Corporate officers actively work to circumvent regulations and, when it suits them, break the law. I could give you examples (like Halliburton destroying evidence in the Gulf Oil spill), but you know the history of corporate greed and corruption. You just choose to ignore it, because the facts don’t jibe with your view of the conservative landscape.

You are so skewed in your thinking that you’d relieve corporations of any tax burden. “Why should they pay taxes? Their employees pay taxes.” Well, you might be surprised to learn that revenues from corporate taxes have fallen to historically low levels, due to subsidies, tax cuts, and a wide variety of avoidance strategies, such as moving headquarters to foreign locations. Our effective corporate tax rates are significantly lower than the rate in many other developed nations. The corporate operations are still employing our highways, waterways, airwaves, and polluting whatever they please, but they aren’t paying any taxes to do it. But not to worry, our budget deficits and national debt are now projected to be so enormous that you won’t have to worry about a transformation of our economy. It is in the process of transforming and the result ain’t going to be pretty.

You might as well send a note to your grand kids and tell them about what a great life you had and say you’re sorry they won’t be able to enjoy the same benefits you had – you used them all up. And oh, by the way, send them the Henninger article. I’m sure they’ll get a charge out of reading it, just as I have, and they'll ask themselves, "Were people really this stupid?"

Yep.

Richard

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.