Early
in November, in the wake of the GOP electoral defeat, Howard Center head Allan
Carlson reflected in an interview [1] on the message that many Republicans were
taking from the election.
“GOP
leaders,” claimed Carlson, “don’t like social conservatives, except that they
want their votes....party professionals are going to blame social conservatives
for their own failures.” This is indeed what has been happening, at least among
the commentariat of the center-right. In a recent episode of the American
Enterprise Institute’s “Banter” podcast [2], Stuart James and Andrew Rugg began
offhandedly discussing what is apparently standard overheard AEI break-room
chatter about how the GOP needs to finally rid itself of its embarrassingly
retrograde socially conservative elements, in its quest to become a nice, sensible
center-right party that will focus on economic issues and national defense. Social
conservatives, in this view, are strange, flamboyantly out-of-step appendages
who don’t know how not to say inappropriate things at the dinner table, to be
jettisoned at Steve Forbes’ earliest convenience.
Carlson
thinks this would be a strategic disaster. “The mistake they made was not
grasping onto the social issues and running on them,” he claims: that would
have been a way to have made inroads among socially conservative Hispanics and
African Americans.
What
then does matter to GOP leadership? “First and foremost,” says Carlson, “they
are the party of the business sector…and particularly of the large business
sector...the needs of the great corporations are always first and foremost....Way
down the list, just there mainly to ‘rally the base,’ as they would say, are
the social-conservative issues.”
This
reflects the history of the Republican Party, in the years before the uneasy
truce of Fusionism emerged just before the Reagan era began. Prior to that,
explains Carlson, “the Republican Party, for decades, had been the party of
Planned Parenthood, it had been the party that had been most supportive and
conducive to the eugenics movement....This marriage…that was forced on the
Republican Party....Deep down inside, the Republican establishment doesn’t like
these people, and they don’t really fit in.”
What
then is the solution for social conservatives? Carlson made a surprising pitch
for what is in America a virtually unknown political tradition: Christian
democracy.
“What
would [a Christian Democratic party] look like?” he asks. “It would be
pro-life, it would be pro-family....It would be Christian, in all the best
senses of the word....We see examples of the Christian Democratic parties in
Europe after World War Two, the parties that put Europe back together after the
terrible wars of the first half of the twentieth century. They were genuine
Christians, and they understood how to reconcile the marketplace with families,
and with churches and small communities. That’s what you’d see...I’d love to
see such a party emerge….”
Christian democracy—in the sense of advocating a place for a
Christian Democratic party in the national conversation—is one of those things,
like five weeks of vacation time and nude bathing and automatically getting a
small glass of tepid water as a sort of side dish every time you order an
espresso, which we tend to associate with Europe. It’s not our tradition; we
don’t quite know what to make of the concept or even the words, juxtaposed like
that. What, distinctively, could a Christian Democratic party, or a Christian
democratic voice, offer? Could it be something more than just redoubt for
social conservatives, a place to flee from the market fundamentalists in the
GOP who no longer welcome their association with social conservatives?
Well, yes, it could. Such a movement—such a party—would be
in a position to offer a set of ideas, and, eventually, practices based on
those ideas, which are otherwise distorted or unarticulated in the public sphere—spoken
too loudly, spoken to softly, spoken alone or with strange bedfellows or in
nasty tones of voice; in some cases not spoken at all. These ideas are frankly
theological, and in tacking between them a Christian democratic movement would
end up making statements that would sound decidedly out of step with both standard
Left and standard Right political discourse.
In a different lecture [3], after giving a brief history of Europe’s
own experience with Christian democracy, Carlson draws out these points,
positing four lessons for any American Christian Democratic movement, drawn
from the European experience:
“First, the movement has had
the most success when it has held true to the “full” Gospel, particularly to
Christ’s radical command that we love our neighbors as ourselves. Issues of
social welfare and social justice lie near the heart of true Christian
Democracy.
“Second, this movement
successfully pioneered ways to funnel public health, education, and welfare
programs through churches and church-related agencies, models that should be of
interest to a nation now experimenting with faith-based initiatives.
“Third, Christian Democracy
has, at its best, carved out a ‘third way’ of social-economic policy,
independent of both the liberal-capitalist and socialist mindsets, by being
respectful toward family life and the health of local communities.
“And fourth, this movement
succeeded only so long as it found animation in authentic Christian faith and
enthusiasm. When those diminished, so did the coherence and effectiveness of
Christian Democracy, and of the European nations as a whole.”
These are practical points, but they are founded—as
Christian democracy itself must be founded —on principles that are philosophical,
and at base theological. These principles form a kind of network, a web of
truth in which to ground our political action and expectations; they counterbalance
each other and serve as correctives to our all-to-human tendency to grasp hold
of one truth and establish it at the expense of all others.
And what are these principles? On the one hand, we know that
with sinful humans— “in a Genesis 3 world,” as the Evangelicals say—politics
cannot deliver utopia, and the more that politicians try to do so, the more
likely they are to accidentally find themselves voting funding for the gulag.
This is the standard “conservative” recognition; when conservatives sit too
long in one position, looking at their tax bills, they often start to think
that therefore any attempt to be political or even to make laws to shape
behavior is a one-way ticket to Siberia and frostbite, and then they become
libertarians.
But on the other hand, it’s not the case, as libertarians or
anarchists (of the left or right) believe, that politics is inherently
evil. It is not. For one thing, the forceful restraint of evil—gun
control laws, perhaps; a defense force, certainly; a police force, obviously—is
an appropriate role for the state.
But it’s more than that: even if there were no need for
restraint by force—in a Genesis 2 world, as you might say—Man would still be by
nature a political animal. Politics is in our bones, and to deny this—to say as
the followers of, for example, Murray Rothbard say, that the market and not the
state is the only legitimate place for human interaction—is to make a profound
mistake about human nature. We are made to be citizens and subjects, not just
shoppers and traders. When conservatives sit too long in a different position,
while looking at crime statistics, they forget this truth, and start to talk as
though it is only because we are wicked that politics exists at all; in that
case they become Hobbesians and develop gout.
These then are among the collection of truths that a
Christian democratic movement has got to bring to the fore: that we are sinful
and need laws on that account; that these laws cannot perfect our natures, and
that if we expect them to do so we’ll become horrible utopians; and that,
though we cannot reach the perfection of politics under our own efforts, still
politics is in itself no evil and does have its own perfection, its own telos. It
is the course mapped out by this whole collection of truths taken together that
Christian democracy ought to chart.
A couple of points remain: First: the line between good and
evil, we must always remember, runs through every human heart, not between
political parties, and not between ideologies which can become idols. The
battle we’re engaged in is a spiritual one, and other human beings are not our
enemies, but comrades and potential casualties to be rescued. And second:
though political leadership is a good and legitimate thing, still, putting our
whole trust in a leader is foolish, just as much as putting our whole trust in
a political process is. The only one who can ultimately bring justice and
healing and peace is Christ; the only process that will get us there is God’s
plan working through history, and not the mechanism of constitutional
democracy, however provisionally and comparatively good that might be.
But that doesn't mean that we have no responsibility to make
things incrementally better now, if we can. We have got, after all, a kind of
sub-sovereignty in the world, and we have got to be faithful in the little
things. A Christian democratic movement, at this moment in American history,
might well be one avenue for such fidelity. With God’s blessing—and only with
His blessing—we can move forward in this hope.
—Susannah Black