Writing for The New York Times, Ross Douthat’s mention of “liberal communitarians” sounds a little odd to my ears, but he is dead on in his analysis of the current situation in the US: Government and its Rivals. An excerpt:
Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.
In this worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”
Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.
But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians [sic] don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good.
January 30th, 2012 | 4:04 pm | #1
“[C]onservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.”
As a broad overview, I think the popular conservative ideals are too individualistic, but that doesn’t permit straw man arguments like this one. I don’t affiliate myself with either major political party, but I don’t like how reductive Douthat’s approach is.
January 30th, 2012 | 8:59 pm | #2
Like the John Wayne analogy…
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January 31st, 2012 | 9:12 am | #3
Nikolai, please read the entire article, which puts my excerpt in context. If you start with the sentence in my excerpt, then, yes, it sounds like Douthat is setting up a straw man.
February 2nd, 2012 | 11:04 am | #4
The Federal government is not a village. Nor is pointing that out merely being pedantic. A real village would have the ability to bend it’s traditions to meet the needs of individuals because it has few enough people to see them as individuals. The Federal government is to big to see people as more then numbers even if it has a hypothetical benevolence toward those numbers. It is to clumsy an instrument to use for more then a collective benefit, such as building roads or at most a welfare system that consists mainly in the dispensation of subsidies to those who need the proverbial safety net. Attempts to actually meet the personal needs of people the way a real village(or neighborhood, or church, or for that matter a mere coffeehouse) might be able to are beyond the government’s capacity.
During a recent Earthquake in Nepal a Highland regiment spontaneously gathered funds to support them. They did this, not because of a British government policy, but because their regiment had a traditional, almost tribalistic, loyalty to the Gurkha regiment which had been comrades for generations. In other words they did it as a “village” not as an arm of the government.
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