Why I am a Liberal and Why Humanists Tend to be Liberals

Thursday, April 04, 2013

Why I am a Christian Liberal (Christian Democrat).

By Richard J. Hilber

A consistent liberal posture includes and furthers  use of state and federal power to effect a just society while watchful of the results which indicate movement of a government towards either anarchy or statism.  I define statism as the unnecessary and excessive exercise of power by the state forsaking the humanism of individual rights and responsibilities.  Anarchy, or unbridled license of individuals to do as they please,  is no more American in my experience than is statism (being that America is a premier example of limited government by design and by grant of limited powers of the governed to the government).

As a Christian and an American, I share in what is best termed the quest for the “just society.”  Notice that the aspiration is not to a perfect government, rather an approximation of the ideal in both governance and results.  Even if I share my home country with atheists and those that are not humanists, if we have a regard for the ideals of  a democratic society with respect for minorities, even of the smallest minority, the individual, we can join together in common enterprise.  Humanism found in many religions as a high regard for human life and the furtherance of justice and charity make the vast majority of the religious persons of the world my fellow travellers.

By definition, the just society will not and can not embrace anarchy or its philosophical parent, libertarianism.  Nor can it further the excess of its opposite, statism, which in the Twentieth Century was identified as the common abomination which was Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and even the Benito Mussolini’s  Fascist Italy.  These three experiments in government, just to name a few of the failed states in which statism was triumphant, resulted in debasement of life and the erasure of any pretence of aspirations to being a just society.   Christians in all of these statism experiments were or should have been at odds with their governments at just about every turn, and to the point of non-violent protest and imprisonment. 

In each of the three named experiments in statism, Christians who participated in the experiments or even stood by and failed to object or suffer political consequence were later to be discredited as quislings, collaborators, endorsers, and encouragers of the evils perpetuated (thee game altering evil being pogroms, executions, and disenfranchisement of disfavored persons and classes of persons).   

If the Christian who aided the oppressed populations (populations harassed by the state on grounds of ethnicism or religion or politics) paid for their conscientious objection, moral support, wealth, or other assistance, with his or her life, we as Christians would be derelict not to find them martyres and persons worthy of canonization for sainthood evident in the acts of conscience of adherents of Christ.  The same would be true of Christians who failed to object, for their failure to object  would indicate unworthiness of a subject for sainthood.  Persons of power and influence found themselves in the crosshairs of history in which normative pursuits such as peace treaties brought into question a person’s moral compass.

In time the conduct of  Christianity in times of persecution of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, and persons with disabilities would be reviewed and criticized.  Pope Pius XII in silencing German Catholic hierarchy and laity did so to protect church vested interests under the Nazi regime.  Even the Lateran Treaty which yielded Church a Vatican State at a time of triumphalism of Italian nationalism has become the subject of valid criticism.  Historians have to ask: did the Pope not speak out in disfavor of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s edicts.  It is clear it  would have been counter-productive to winning soveignty of the Church and property rights in a Fascist Italy.  Needless to say the canonization of Eugenio Pacelli has stalled and principally because of morally ambivalent results of his efforts for accommodation with Nazi Germany as papal nuncio to Germany and then once he became Pope in his own right.  The record of this Pope is not easy to judge as he was hostage in Italy to first Italian nationalism and then a German usurpation of soveignty, which is when he took personal risks and advanced the cause of  his faith in a manner to reclaim his soul.

Personally, I think Pius XII was in his long reign to be credited for his growth in spirituality and resolve to rectify the results of the era of accommodation with statists like Hitler and Mussolini.  Did he ever challenge the phalangist Franco in Spain whose nationalistic socialism survived the reign of Pius XII into the 1960s.  Franco one must remember for using German supplied bombs and planes to destroy civilians in bombing raids on his own Spanish people in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.  His killing innocent children and non-combatants gave the world fair warning of the implications of all out war which soon would rain down on English, French, Polish, Russian, and German and Italian cities as well. 

What is lost in all of this of course is that appeasors such as Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Pius XII hoped to avoid the consequences of not working out an accommodation with the “modernist” regimes of  Germany and Italy.  The then and  now apparent consequences being the all out wars of aggression bent on empire and supremacy over nationals and foreign populations alike and the wars of self defense that would follow.  The Papacy of the late 1930s was in effect being left behind as a player in world affairs, having little to do of consequence about the ravages of Asiatic countries by a militaristic and nationalist Japan, with enormous suffering which resulted of the imperialism in Korea, China, IndoChina, and the Phillipines for starters. 

Even in experiments in statism which had a humanistic flavor, the collaboration of communism and statism produced results which indicate a war on the propertied classes (instead of the usual target of statism, the poor, the indigent, or the disenfranchised).  The humanistic bent had to do with providing government services to the poor  which were a means to justify autocratic and dictatorial powers of the government as vested typically in a dictator who jailed detractors, objective minded critics, and political opposition.  So the common traits of statists whether fascists or communists bent is the suppression of dissent.   Even in my lifetime, I had a sister tell me I should not criticize Genreral Augusto Pinochet of Chile, dictator of Chile, because under Pinochet the streets were clean and the trains ran on time.  I was appalled and by the American corporation that maintained relations with a fascist regime that oppressed dissenters with kidnappings, imprisonment, and executions (the infamous “disappearances of the Pinochet Era in Chile).

The word conservative has been tarnished for me by its political uses as descriptive of the Nazi, the Fascists, and too the conservative Stalinists.  Liberal for me came to mean “humanism” as the ultimate regard for life and liberty (but not to the point of anarchy or disregard of the rights of others).  In my understanding, government was a necessary evil, and only if responsive to problems and capable of procuring and inducing a just society (i.e. the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s being the premier example). 

The world I was born into had served up reactionaries to the liberal ascendancy of Franklin Delano Roosevel and as well the just society that if necessary to defend freedom had to go to war and conduct all out war (i.e. use of the atomic bomb on civilian populations).   Born in 1950, I would look at conservative politics in the United States and be wary of the fascists and Stalinists of the American  stripe even whilst I was taught of the menace of international communism as a threat to America’s vested interests in control of the economies of the world (the American dollar being the essential and stable currency not the least of America's interests and concerns). 

The world I was born into was a world with a conservative Stalinism (statist in governance even if in rhetoric communistic)  at odds with a conservative capitalist ascendancy that at times would put world peace at risk in a nuclear age.  To be fair the conservatives of the era (both statists and capitalists) messed with mutually assured destruction of nuclear war as a deterrent to one another’s excesses (the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 comes to mind as the example of the brinkmanship required of both President John Kennedy and Premier Nikita Krushchev.)  I must say that the use of the phrase “Western Democracies” was used much like “International Communism” as proxy phrases for unbridled capitalism of the West and the statism of the Soviet Union (and its control of its satellite nations). 

The competition that was threatenting to either side was quite frankly over who was free and not free to exploit the planet without being checked by its adversary.  So during the Suez Canal Crisis, France and Great Britain would risk all to stop nationalization of the canal which process of ownership by Egypt was supported by an expansionist Soviet Union who aided Egyptian nationalists who had come to power.  The United States did not, even if it did, have to lift a finger to procure the result it wanted (it had ballistic missiles in Turkey pointed right at the heart of Mother Russia).

The results we have today many decades later are mixed and a moving target of problems and subsets of problems which have left  liberals open to criticism from those who have no conscience that equats with a societal disposition to be the "just society."  Christians living in this republic (representative democracy) tend to be responsible citizens by being liberals (persons with a social conscience).  Liberals have rightly been challenged for adoption of a libertarian stance on the right of a woman to have the say over her pregnancy (especially with the establishment of societal interests limiting those rights as established by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1968)).   As events have shown since Roe v. Wade, the expansion of rights of the state over the body of a woman have expanded.  The public debate is over the extent of those powers and the necessity for such an enlargement of state’s rights over the individual.  It is just the debate we who advocated for a just society need to have and over which we are likely to be at odds with ourselves. 

The Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and the Bush Presidencies have exploited this divide with a measure of success as socially conservative Christians take issue with results indicative of abortion on demand and abortion for economic reasons at best and inconvenience to the woman at worst (ignoring the fact that the life of the mother is hers to decide as a medical decision and the disinclination of society to fund the expense of raising a child to majority a public liability).  

Taking of human life by abortion or capital punishment is inherently evil to a humanist (or that word means nothing).  This is not to say that a state’s rights to incriminate a woman for abortion is to prevail in a just society on any account.  To wit, if abortion is outlawed than the state must police the medical profession and drive the practice of abortion underground into the nadir of medicine, into quackery, and into the immorality of  the extortionist portion of capitalism which includes the sex trade, the smuggling trade, and organized crime.

Libertarians (not liberals) espouse as large an exercise of personal freedom as maximizes the individualism of which our materialistic society is so enamored.  The libertarian view  wants for legalization of marijuana, abortion, weapons for high speed kills, and physician assisted suicide. 

Of such postures of libertarians, Christian liberals labor to see elements of the "just society" they could embrace in good conscience.

They do see elements of the "just society" in the ideal of a death penalty humanely administered, but the actual exercise of the death penalty is fraught with exercise of state and federal power that reeks of statism with tinges of racism and classicism as the persons executed tend to be black and of the impoverished class of persons, and even more daunting convicted on evidence that later proves or establishes lapses in the application of the rules of evidence or a harsh imposition of a sentence that constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment” of criminal conduct (i.e. execution of the criminally insane and minors).  I learned today that even in Texas, the premier capital punishment state and society, only two per cent of those sentence to death will ever be executed (based on the state’s actual record of executions).  So who lives and who dies under such a system of laws is judged on de facto results to be “cruel and unusual.”

Part of humanism is a regard for the victims of crime.  We have a need to know that criminal wrong doing is to result in meaningful prosecution of sentences imposed.   It also suggests that for victim families there is no justice.  Why?  Because statistically only a very small percentage of victim families will ever see execution of the murderer of their loved one.  As humanists, we can disagree on the efficacy of capital punishment as a procurement of a just society.  Is there deterrence to any degree in making murder a capital offense when the results suggest only two percent of the population in Texas face execution at some point, usually years down the road?  The Republican Party which shuns liberals has exploited this divide as well, playing off one part of the humanist community from the other the same as it does in the abortion debate.

When I hear younger generations speak ill of liberals, I do ask these same persons to be wary of libertarians who have very little or no regard for the just society to which Christians and like minded persons must aspire. 

The consequence of libertarian influence and control and that of an underregulated and unregulated capitalism is a loss of public confidence in the will of the people to check the excesses of capitalism and too of the individuals who have very little or no regard for the just society which I would pass on to my children and grandchildren.

For conservatives and liberals alike (oddly not for libertarians), I say be wary of a political process in which our elected representatives owe allegiance to the highest bidder who supplied the funds necessary to sway the electorate at election time.  Be wary of the turnstile nature of elected officials who purport to regulate industry, diligently  to enforce regulations as executive branch officers, and then become the paid lobbyists and consultants of the very businesses they had been elected to monitor and control.  A libertarian would simply say more power to the person who can exploit the system for every dime of which it can be milked!  Good grief, even Republicans and Democrats alike place love of country over selfish aggrandizement and not necessarily in that order (some Democrat being more public spirited than some Republicans or vice a versa). 

Our moral fibre as individuals means we must procure the just society for future generations and we do so both to procure and to receive the blessings of liberty.  Libertarians are about taking the individual's stake out of a common enterprise called representative democracy in our American experiment which is now 237 years old.  Do your part.  Practice the acts of concern for the commonwealth of persons that make  up this great nation and its progeny.  Safeguard the environment.  Educate the young regardless of the immigration status of parents or foreign origin.  We are a nation of immigrants and we are all on a pilgrimage towards the just society that merits us a tomorrow as a nation.  That is my political faith as a liberal.  

You will hear conservatives descry humanism as secular or atheistic, but the lie in that attempt is in Christianity itself in which the man who eats, lives, and sleeps the Great Commandment and the Beatitudes of Christ has his or her heavenly reward even if such do not profess that Jesus is God (notice how guarded Jesus was of any but the freest acclaimation of His divinity).  Remember Christ said he was the way, the truth, and the life.  The attack on liberals as humanists is justified in almost all cases, but not the noise about it being secular or atheistic.  Liberals err when they embrace statism or libertarianism.  The consequence of either of these two extremes is either  subsequent justifiable rebellion to statism or the anarchy that results of libertarian mentality of its adherents.

Humanism, which is not theology, can err too.  I will be the first to admit that.  Theology is even more legendary as a source of err though (the Inquisition and the Salem Witch Craft Trials being a common ancestry of right minded individuals later proven to be evil incarnate).  Enough said.