"Green Thomism," Danny Kruger and the conservative future

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I think here of a line by Peter Maurin--the cofounder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker--about the need to make it "easy for people to be good." Maurin had no illusions that people were sinless or that government was the answer (the Worker was and remains deeply suspicious about governmental involvement), but he hoped to build communities and movements that could make virtue easier to achieve.

Deborah and I are growing increasingly aware--as perhaps you and Julie are--that intentionality is exhausting. Unlike our parents, we can't take anything for granted in family life. Finding the right parish, determining the right educational set-up for our children, connecting with good friends who mostly don't live in the neighborhood--all of these take tons of time that we often don't have. In previous generations--when greater consensus (and physical proximity) existed within our churches, communities, and societies--daily life was more organic and integrated. The kinds of choices that we have to make now were simply settled matters back then. As Andrew Greeley says (endlessly but wisely), the interweaving of parish, neighborhood, and school collected and
unleashed unprecedented amounts of social capital that benefited many through
space and time. As you often mention, Alan Ehrenhalt captured this in his writing on Chicago. There were limits--racism, of course, provincialism, a reverse snobbery--but something primordally good was experienced there.

Conservatism, I think, is well-suited to generate and sustain a conversation on how best to foster families and communities where it is easy to be good. A religious, cultural, and/or political movement that could tap this would be a mighty force (Jindal's health-care prowess could be political and cultural gold in 2012, especially since health-care costs are going to kill people--especially the newly-unemployed--in the next few years). The present-day Republican party seems unable to do so, wedded as it is in principle to libertarianism.

Chris goes on to say that conservatism has to find a way to speak to people in a postmodern culture where people are radically suspicious of truth claims, typically seeing them as "intolerant," and also unwilling to yield to any binding claims the community might make upon them.

Perhaps a good place for us to start is with the ideas of Danny Kruger, a top adviser to Tory party leader David Cameron, whose pamphlet "On Fraternity" has been highly influential on Cameron's thinking. Here's the gist of Kruger's thought. Excerpt:

How do these ideas translate into concrete policy? The reports of the Conservative policy review are still some months off, but certain themes are emerging that illustrate the connection between liberty and fraternity. When Cameron says he is concerned about the power of some big businesses, such as supermarkets, he is not moving leftwards towards equality. Anxiety about the power of large corporations is prompted partly by a concern for liberty. State support for large retail developments restricts the freedom of both consumers (choice is limited by supermarkets driving out smaller rivals) and of the local community (farmers are rarely in an equal relationship with the big retailers they supply). The same might be said of housing, where large housebuilders provide identikit dwellings and neighbourhoods are impotent to resist large and ugly new housing developments. Local discretion, by contrast, will encourage more houses where communities need them, meeting individual aspiration for home ownership (liberty) and the communal desire for beauty and the settled order (fraternity).

Localism is one of the defining themes of today's Conservative party. The pursuit of equality--often made, in line with the left dialectic, in the name of fraternity and social solidarity--has tended to a wholesale centralisation of local institutions. Yet research from Switzerland, where the cantons allow varying degrees of popular participation in decision-making, shows how important direct democracy is in growing social capital. Significantly, even when people do not get their way, when they find themselves in a minority on a local issue, they tend to be happier with the result than if they had never been consulted (Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer, "Happiness, Economy and Institutions," Economic Journal, October 2000).

Or, as Reihan Salam put it in a piece he once did on Cameron's rise:

For Kruger, conservatism must aim to restore the health of families and neighborhoods that have been badly undermined by statist excess. This can't be done by simply abolishing the state institutions. They must be remade in the image of the neighborhoods they serve by, for example, putting parents in charge of schools and local voters in charge of the police. Over time, the habits of self-government--as opposed to the habits of dependency--can be restored. Cameron's fuzzy talk about choice and civil society, which sounds so suspiciously Blairite, means something else entirely: It is about getting citizens to stand on their own two feet.

Here's a guess: Conservatism's future lies in a right-ish form of civil society communitarianism, and much of it will be worked out on a renewed religious right, among new generation Evangelical and Catholic intellectuals who can make and articulate the connection between the health of individuals and the communities in which they live (come home, Ryan Streeter!). And I think much will depend on what lessons Americans take from this recession.