that they almost taste like wine: for Harriet, I offer this argument for not voting, from Alasdair MacIntyre. Curiously, the Revealer, where I found it, describes him as a leading conservative Christian. What, exactly, is he conserving when he turns the system on its side like this?
When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither. …
Why should we reject both? Not primarily because they give us wrong answers, but because they answer the wrong questions. What then are the right political questions? One of them is: What do we owe our children? And the answer is that we owe them the best chance that we can give them of protection and fostering from the moment of conception onwards. And we can only achieve that if we give them the best chance that we can both of a flourishing family life, in which the work of their parents is fairly and adequately rewarded, and of an education which will enable them to flourish. These two sentences, if fully spelled out, amount to a politics. It is a politics that requires us to be pro-life, not only in doing whatever is most effective in reducing the number of abortions, but also in providing healthcare for expectant mothers, in facilitating adoptions, in providing aid for single-parent families and for grandparents who have taken parental responsibility for their grandchildren. And it is a politics that requires us to make as a minimal economic demand the provision of meaningful work that provides a fair and adequate wage for every working parent, a wage sufficient to keep a family well above the poverty line.What is needed to secure family life is a sufficient minimum income for every family and that can perhaps best be secured by some version of the negative income tax, proposed long ago by Milton Friedman, a tax that could be used to secure a large and just redistribution of income and so of property.
Well, if he’s a conservative, he’s of a kind we hear from all too rarely.
The ones we do hear from are moralizers rather than thinkers.
It is odd to find him described as a conservative. He’s an ex-Marxist Catholic, born an Ulster protestant. I suppose you could say that he has never had much time for Liberalism, but that hardly makes him a republican.
MacIntyre has been through several philosophical incarnations since he first made his name in 1957, co-editing New Essays in Philosophical Theology with Anthony Flew. For the past two decades or so he’s been flogging “virtue ethics,” an ethic of self-cultivation that makes conservativism palatable to refined “thinkers” and legitimates political inactivity.
The Republican “base” is still the white working class, but don’t kid yourself–conservatives aren’t all gun-toting snake-handlers. The whole American political spectrum is shifted so far to the right that Nixon (who, interestingly, supported a “negative income tax) would now be a centrist Democrat. Republicans can count on the support of Libertarian ideologues, ex-Marxists repudiating youthful folly, curmudgeons reacting against the pieties of the left and, most importantly, upper middle-class Americans who vote their economic interests rather than their cultural agenda.
Nevertheless, without that crazy anomaly, an almost solidly conservative working class voting consistently against its economic interests, Republicans would still be the minority party. Here’s my take anyway: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
I think it’s worth remembering that many of the conservative Southern Christians have only recently been politicised, at least as far as the mainstream parties are concerned. Changing that looks like being one of the neo-cons’ best tricks, and I harbour some hope that it may not be as sticky as it appears.
But perhaps not. Power is tasty, even to the pious, and it’ll be hard for the Dems to reach these people without abandoning those chunks of human rights dogma which the rest of us consider a sign of basic civilisation and the conservative Christians see as the mark of the Devil bent on destroying the family. The neo-cons could care less.
Nevertheless, there was a major move towards tax reform recently in Alabama that looks to this layman like a classic liberal tax-and-spend proposal:
“”Whom would Jesus tax?” became the shorthand phrase to describe an unsuccessful effort this past summer [2003] by Alabama Gov. Bob Riley to restructure his state’s tax system. Faced with a $675 million shortfall and a desire to upgrade the state’s education system, Riley declared that as a Christian it was only right to raise taxes for the wealthy so the less fortunate could receive better state services. The move was surprising because Riley is a conservative who fashions himself a Reagan Republican. But even more surprising, Riley invoked the name of Jesus to justify his plan. Besides the desire to increase services and bridge a budget gap, Riley said that after much soul searching he had come to the conclusion that a good Christian could not allow Alabama’s tax system, which placed a heftier burden on the poor than on the rich, to continue. In one of the most heavily Christian states in the nation, the proposition was soundly defeated.”
Other interesting stuff referenced on that page includes An Argument For Tax Reform Based On Judeo-Christian Ethics.