I AM NOT A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT, I am an egalitarian democrat. The key differences in the two positions, as I define them, are in the modifying adjectives. Liberal democracy may well stress "liberty" which is sloppily identified as "rights" but it has no real interest in what those rights result in as a common possession except as a legalistic abstraction. In its most dangerous form, the form that holds dominance in the United States in 2022, "rights" as defined by Republican-fascism are seen as limitless for those who have the resources to not be limited - the Supreme Court making money = speech, is a perfect example of that.
Egalitarian democracy holds that all People have equal rights and the right to exercise those but within a network of equally held rights which must, necessarily, define the limits of the rights held and the exercise of those rights. Rights cannot be seen as abstract disembodied entities that can be dealt with on a theoretical basis but have to always be considered in the context of the People who have equal rights, really there is no such a thing as a "right" that is separable from the living being who possesses them as an inherent endowment. The rights of any one person or group of People in reality instead of the irreality of abstraction are necessarily held in tension with and bounded by the rights of others and the necessity of the common good and the sustainable viability of their environment.
Liberal democracy denies that reality or, really, ignores it and the consequences are that "rights" become a parody of something that is supposed to be a good in the world into something which is not infrequently extremely dangerous. "Rights" to pollute, to use guns and possess them irresponsibly, "rights" to cheat and swindle People on the basis of conman tricks legalized by courts and corrupted legislatures on the pretense that those swindled have exercised a "right of contract" or some such other gangster-lawyer-judge-"justice" created meta-con job. "Rights" of husbands to tyrannize over wives, "rights" of white supremacists to oppress, terrorize and murder People of Color, "rights" of slavers to their "property" things which have loomed large over and still basically deform and distort America's liberal democracy are all examples of "rights" in the definition of liberal democracy but which could never stand under the holdings of egalitarian democracy. There is no such a thing as a right which is not sustained on a reciprocal basis, if you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, inequality, destitution, poverty, racial, ethnic, gender and sexual inequality would not be practiced.
Abstracting "rights" from their only real manifestation as equal endowments as our law and Constitution and legal profession does is extremely dangerous. It is only one of a number of such sloppy and dangerous word games that are the basis of modernism as it has been other similarly inadequate and, as they ripen and rot, dangerous ideological framings.
To confuse things, as things are often confused by using labels and words, I am a liberal if you are talking about the traditional, American use of the word which is grounded in the moral obligation to liberally provide material, spiritual and cultural sustenance for the least among us and even the just not as well off or unfortunate. And if you also include mutual respect and, yes, the "l" word, love. I am in no way a "liberal" as the word is commonly used in post-enlightenment, scientistic European and academic use which stresses "rights" as I've defined them having often malignant legal, political and cultural potency under "liberal democracy." The habit of the physical sciences of abstracting particles and chemicals in order to come up with some general facts about them being extended far outside of science to apply them to far more complex entities is not only supremely nonsensical, it is extremely dangerous.
Those who are more comfortable with the formulation of liberal democracy because it seems more comfortably secular in an anti-religious or merely culturally "post-religious" cultural setting are fooling themselves if they believe it can result in a reliably good world because it is almost certainly guaranteed to devolve into the most wretched of inequality and, in time, despotism of the kind our liberal democracy is devolving into under the United States Constitution, a long and long failed experiment in 18th century conceptions of liberal democracy. I think the choice we face is either to ride that into fascism or we will basically alter it and give it up for egalitarian democracy.
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I was thinking about a passage from a book by Stanley Hauerwas and William Williomon, Resident Aliens which is worth thinking about both in context with the above and in the context of this week in August.
Christianity is more than a matter of a new understanding. Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ. Right living is more the challenge than right thinking. The challenge is of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.
Although our assertion is based, as was [Karl] Barth's, on a theological assessment of the world, it is also based, as was Barth's on a particular experience. For Barth, and for us, Nazi Germany was the supreme test for modern theology. There we experienced the "modern world," which we had so labored to understand and to become credible to, as the world, not only of the Copernican world view, computers, and the dynamo, but also of the Nazis.
I will break in here to note that despite the popular distortion of Nazism into some kind of entity alien to the ideological framing of modernism, it, like 20th century fascism was not only self-consciously modern ("National Socialism is nothing but applied biology") it was seen as progressive by many a modernist and many liberals, in the 18th century, modern usage of the word.
Barth was horrified that his church lacked the theological resources to stand against Hitler. It was the theological liberals, those who had spent their theological careers translating the faith into terms that could be understood by modern people and used in the creation of modern civilization, who were unable to say no. Some, like Emanuel Hirsh, even said yes to Hitler. (For a troubling account of Hirsh, see Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985]. What was so troubling about Ericksen's account is his demonstration that Tillich and Hirsh were not only close friends, but also that their theology was essentially the same. They differed only on what political implications came from their theology.)
Liberal theology had spent decades reassuring us that we did not have to take the Jewishness of Jesus seriously. The particulars of this faith, the limiting, historically contingent, narrative specifics of the faith, such as the Jewishness of Jesus or his messianic eschatology, were impediments for the credibility of modern people and could therefore be removed so that we could get down to the real substance of Christianity. Jesus was not really a Jew, he was the pinnacle of the brightest and best in humanity, the teacher of noble ideals, civilization's very best. It was a short step from the liberal Christ-the-highest-in-humanity to the Nazi Superman.
It's not only liberal Christianity(which must be pointed out is often to be distinguished from the Christianity of traditional liberals) that demands that denial of the radical egalitarianism at the center of the Mosaic Law, 18th century modernism and secularism also demand it. If Nazism had not defined itself biologically under the doctrine of natural selection, it may have not been genocidal* but it would have joined in secular modernism in demanding of Jews and Christians the same rejection of the heart of the Jewish religion as so many modern Jews have accommodated themselves to in order to fit in. Christians have, of course, gone far farther than that, to the extent that Marjorie Taylor Greene can spout "Christianity" which is a thoroughly racist, inegalitarian, consumerist-modern- cargo-cult - paganism without the radical expression of the Mosaic law of Jesus. Modern American "Christianity" is, by and large, a modernistic, materialistic paganism which is certainly not confined to Protestantism but which, with billionaire and millionaire loot, is a Catholic heresy waging war against Pope Francis and the Gospel. The terms "conservative" and "liberal" can no more be used without extensive modification than "Christian" can.
I would be dishonest if I said that I think any viable, sustainable egalitarian-democratic liberalism that could withstand something like Nazism is possible without a real belief in The real God. I have become convinced that agnosticism, atheism and "deism" are bound to decay into what will corrode, erode and eventually collapse egalitarian democracy. There is a reason that the First Commandment is the one it is and that the Second and Third ones follow on from it. I am endlessly amazed at how well thought out much of the Scripture is as a logical presentation of things. I believe many religious traditions believe in The real God and their moral holdings will TEND TO confirm that. Of course no one is more responsible for carrying it out than the Abrahamic religions have often failed to do.
Barth's commentary on Romans countered with the insistence that passages like Romans 9-11 must set the tone for Christian thought. There he noted how the liberals had asserted certain humanistic assumptions about human nature and the world that did not need a living god to make them credible. "God is not 'man' said in a loud voice," was Barth's caustic remark to liberals.
It might have all been explained away by asserting that Hitler as a maniac and the German people were infected with some sort of mass hysteria. Then we North American Christians could say that, although the compromised German church failed, at least ours did not. Unfortunately, the ethical results of our inadequate theology had global implications.
On August 6, 1945, the fist atomic bomb was dropped on a Japanese city. Turning to a group of sailors with him on the battle cruiser Augusta, President Truman said, "This is the greatest thing in history." Truman, once described as "an outstanding Baptist layman," was supported by the majority of American Christians, who expressed few misgivings about the bomb. The bomb, however, was the sign of our moral incapacitation, an open admission that we had lost the will and the resources to resist vast evil.
The American church had come a long way to stand beside Harry Truman in 1945. Just a few years earlier, in 1937, when Franco's forces bombed the Spanish town of Guernica, killing many civilians, the civilized world was shocked. That same year, when the Japanese bombed the city of Nanking, the world felt it was now dealing with particularly insidious forces which had little intention of obeying historical prohibitions against killing civilians. President Roosevelt issued an urgent appeal to all governments, at the beginning of World War II, saying "The bombing of helpless and unprotected civilians is a strategy which has aroused the horror of all mankind. I recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited."
Yet only several years later, in 1942, Churchill spoke of "beating the life out of Germany" through routine bombing of German cities (after the bombing of London by the Germans). What had begun as the acts of ruthless Fascist dictators had become the accepted practice of democratic nations. Few Christians probably even remember that there was a time when the church was the voice of condemnation for such wantonly immoral acts (George Hunsinger, "Where the Battle Rages: Confessing Christ in America Today," Dialog, vol 26, no 4, pp. 264-74).
The fact is that science and technology (as if those are separable) has a way of creating things that change everything, leaving moral considerations on a leaking life-raft, though we're all on that life-raft as a result. I think the perhaps necessary clerical detail of leaving out questions of morality when doing science and technology, as well as financial accounting of money, etc. has real consequences when those practices of instrumental reasoning have real power and potency, creating a very real monster that can get us all killed. The law does the same thing when it turns things such as "rights under (human made) law" into things divorced from the People whose lives are the only real embodiment of any rights and considers them in a pantomime of scientific reasoning. As the present day Supreme Court of the United States proves, that legalistic pantomime has the ability to even break away from its scientific model and to deny the reality of even very good and desperately important science such as the science of human caused climate change. The bomb, that "greatest thing in history" was only ever at the service of humans exercising political and legal power, the bomb of secularism is probably the stronger and more destructive force it will serve.
* I will insert this update because it occurred to me that a good model of that might be Stalinism before Stalin became paranoid in the typical way and turned against and started murdering even Marxist Jews. Though, perhaps, what that shows is that eventually every gangster government will turn to the typical forms of murder of the expected groups. You don't need a biological excuse for that.
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