Turnabout thoughts in and out of season

A friend sent me something he was writing on the political prospects for protectionist legislation. I sent him the following response, which I've edited a bit and relates to much more than protectionism:

In general, your discussion follows the interest-group, competing political party, voter sovereignty model of political life in a modern democracy.

I sometimes think another view explains more, a sort of quasi-neomarxist view in which the state is a committee acting on behalf of the governing classes.

There's a longish interview with me at Ignatius Insight, the website of Ignatius Press.

Yet another review, this one by Carl Olson in Catholic World Report. It's longer than average (two three-column pages) and quite favorable:

The Tyranny of Liberalism ... is the work of an imaginative conservative who offers frank criticism and expresses the truth about authentic values and the permanent things with notable clarity, unusual insight, and welcome eloquence.

A weblog "dedicated to the late Murray Rothbard" gives a detailed and very positive review of my book, calling it "provocative and profound," and "a book I recommend to all" that "defends a traditional conservatism one can respect."

There's another review of my book, this one in the August Chronicles (not yet online). It's short (2/3 page) but lavish in its praise ("Savor that felicitous prose ... Rejoice that another voice has been added ... "). The author is the Rev. Lloyd E. Gross, a retired Lutheran pastor (Missouri Synod).

It's another brief one, this time in New Oxford Review.

Incidentally, the paperback version is sold out and the hardbound version is running low. I'm told a new printing of the paperbound is being scheduled but the hardbound will not be reprinted. So get yours fast!

Susan McWilliams, a political scientist and Front Porch Republic contributor, has a slightly belated contribution to the symposium on my book up at First Principles. She praises the book highly from a generally liberal perspective as an attempt to get beyond the dichotomies of today's politics by looking at basic questions.

Evan McLaren notes that I mostly deal with grand issues and tend toward a "big tent" approach, at least among right-wingers, and wonders whether that makes sense.

A friend has forwarded to me his translation of Letter to Cardinal Fornari On the Errors of Our Time by Juan Donoso Cortes and given permission to make it available on the web. At the time the letter was written Cardinal Fornari was in charge of a commission studying modern errors for Pope Pius IX and Donoso was Spain's ambassador to France.

And that comforts me. (The title of this entry isn't literally true, but Rod Dreher does say my book is "a blockbuster that belongs on the shelves of any thinking conservative who wants to understand where we are today, and where we are going.")

Zenit, the international Catholic news agency, just published an interview with me about the topics I cover in my book.

I just finished reading Allan Carlson's Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies - And Why They Disappeared. It's a really excellent collection of short case studies of 20th century attempts to create, recreate or maintain local, familial, distributist or agrarian economic forms in the face of commies, fascists, and cigar-chomping businessmen.

I've added arguments and responses made in a discussion of the issue elsewhere to my recent entry on faith and reason. For convenience's sake I've added them in the form of comments.

According to George Weigel, the big issue in the fuss over the Society of Saint Pius X (the traditionalist group whose bishops just got de-excommunicated) is religious freedom: whether "coercive state power ought ... be put behind the truth-claims of the Catholic Church or any other religious body."

We live in a liberal age. A conservative, then, is someone who resists liberalism. He wants to reverse it or at least resist its advance.

There are a variety of reasons for resisting liberalism, and they lead to different kinds of conservatism. Some are more liberal or radical than conservative, and each can be at odds with any or all of the others. Short of an extreme situation like an invasion from Mars there's not much they would all agree on.

Anyway, here are some of the possibilities:

1. The Simply Conservative Conservative:

The contributors to the weblog Secular Right: Reality & Reason have put together a sort of credo, What is the Secular Right? Here it is:

I should probably comment on the point of my last post.

A basic problem for a Catholic or any serious person in America is that he lives in a country people treat as a sort of religion. The reason for treating it that way is the need for social cohesion in an ethnically and religiously diverse society in which individual freedom and pluralism are promoted as the highest social goods. If you downplay normal social connections in that way you'll need some sort of superprinciple to make up for them.

I was looking at We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (1960) by John Courtney Murray. For those who don't know much about him, Murray was a Catholic priest and theologian who

A Swedish correspondent wrote to ask why ideas of historical and cultural community never seem to go anywhere today. My response continues some of the thoughts touched on in the recent discussion of social conservatism:

The basic problem I think is that such ideas depend on notions of what one is, and the modern and liberal understanding of man and the world makes notions of identity seem irrational and therefore threatening.