Blurring the left-right lines

This long, excellent post at Front Porch Republic by the progressive policy analyst Lew Daly is a good example of how the traditionalist right and alternative leftists have more in common than you might think. Excerpt:

But the direction of all my work, at bottom, is toward a new family economy, something I believe we can achieve only by fundamentally reformulating American politics around ideas of community wealth and family economic protection. This is a politics that leverages families and communities against market compulsion using the resources and regulatory power of a conservative or "subsidiary" welfare state--one that supports and protects traditional social structures but does not usurp their functions or alter their God-given purposes. I argue for a family-based economy and a community-minded protective state, and it will be obvious to many that such a politics of community control and family economic protection derives, most broadly, from Catholic social teaching. But it can also be found among certain Protestant traditions, most notably the Reformed social tradition of Abraham Kuyper, with its American heritage in the upper Midwest.

More:

No religious person can seriously deny that many aspects of American culture threaten family life and the common humanity that binds families together in communities and as a citizenry. I agree that some "social issues" and related policies have weakened family life and coarsened American culture imprudently if not unjustly, and I support recent progressive efforts to develop "common ground" on reducing abortion, strengthening marriage, and developing a new moral regime of bioethical regulation. These efforts reflect a significant evolution beyond the culture wars of the past. Yet even as we begin to establish more common ground on these important social issues, a much bigger threat, pressing deeper and deeper against the structure and very cohesion of family life, has gone unchecked for decades and threatens us on a massive scale.

That threat, of course, is the American brand of unregulated free-market capitalism--an economic power structure in which families grow more and more vulnerable and unstable even as the drive to commodify family functions and consumerize children and young adults erodes the moral and psychological well-being of our home lives, removing the last significant counterweight to raw acquisitive market forces and selfish greed.

What happened to America? The most basic trends are well-known among analysts and increasingly understood in public opinion: we've experienced a massive upward redistribution of assets, income, and security, leaving perhaps eighty percent of American households with little or no stake in the appreciating wealth of our society and none of the stability that comes with sufficient assets, good jobs, and a strong social safety net for when things go wrong. The average family is working more hours, for lower wages and fewer benefits, with less security and less public support in times of need. On average our children and our elders are the least well-supported such dependents in the advanced world.

If the left can open its eyes to how the decline in traditional sexual and social morals have led to deleterious consequences for society, and the right can do the same thing about the effect of American capitalism on the family, then maybe we can start getting somewhere worth going. Anyway, this is a discussion worth having, and not just on blogs.