It’s not enough to get me to register as a Democrat; I’m still holding out for the Christian Democratic Union to start running some local candidates. ~Russell Arben Fox

Prof. Fox, wise “left conservative” and friend of Eunomia, writes on why he is casting his lot with the Democrats this time.  The entire post is well worth reading and touches on, among other things, many questions of the value of party affiliation and the importance of social conservatism in deciding between the parties.  But I was actually more interested in and intrigued by the repeated invocations of the CDU as a more desirable model.  There is a sense in which I share this affinity for Christian democracy and the ideas of social solidarity expressed in political Catholicism beginning in the late 19th century, and this is the same sense in which I recognise in Walesa’s trade unionists and Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard speech as more genuinely representative of true conservative social thought than unalloyed Goldwaterism.  This is not to belittle where Goldwater was right with respect to the proper functions of the federal government, but to say that limited government is only one part of the answer.  Consider, for instance, one part of Solzhenitsyn’s address :

It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full of pornography, crime and horror. It is considered to be part of freedom and theoretically counter-balanced by the young people’s right not to look or not to accept. Life organized legalistically has thus shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil.

It is encouraging to hear German Christian Democrats declare to representatives of The Wall Street Journal, “For us, a human being is not only a function of production.”  What is always discouraging is the idea over here that saying things like this is somehow a “leftist” thing to do.     

Unfortunately, the Union today is run by the ex-commie functionary and market liberal running-dog Angela Merkel, who has received the halo of Thatcherism without having done anything to earn it while managing to weaken the position of the Union by clearly moving away from themes of Solidaritaet that made Edmund Stoiber a competitive candidate in the previous election and which increasingly sets the Christian Social Union in Bavaria apart from the national CDU itself.  Besides being an atrocious party leader and a miserable campaigner who very nearly lost an election that was all but assured, which are separate problems, Chancellor Merkel has managed to make the CDU be seen even more as a pro-business, pro-market party to the detriment of political Catholicism’s earlier economic values that sought to balance the interests of capital and labour.  Now the CDU is a secular party, of course, and many Protestants (including Frau Merkel herself) make up its numbers, but the specifically Catholic origins of the Union nonetheless remain the ultimate source of its social policy ideas.  So while I share some of Prof. Fox’s sympathies with the CDU, we should want to stress that this is the older CDU and not that of Merkel that we are talking about, since Chancellor Merkel seems intent on nothing so much as dragging the Union towards the tar pits of unelectability and the liberalism of the Free Democrats.  

Predictably enough, one of Prof. Fox’s commenters (who boldly wrote in as Anonymous–quel courage!) attacked his “left conservatism” (i.e., a conservatism that thinks social justice is not just a statist plot to take your money, but actually serves the common good–my short description) in the following terms:

Having grown up under communism, I have seen “left conservativism” taken to its logical conclusion. Is this not the worst combination possible? I mean you oppose both economic and personal freedom. What else is there? 

Such is the response from the brittle and limited critic of any kind of conservatism that possesses a social and economic vision not narrowly tailored to corporate interests, Manchester liberalism or bank-rule.  It is the response of the “liberal conservative” to the old Tory of the shires, and the response of the up-and-coming urbanite to his rustic cousins.  It is the response of the shocked Reaganite to the upbraiding of Solzhenitsyn, which goes like this:

Reaganite: Capitalism gives people what they want!

Solzhenitsyn: Therein lies the great moral problem with it.

 
Yes, to be a “left conservative” must be equivalent to Leninism (what else is there?); to be a “Red Tory” (as George Grant was) must be the equivalent of waving the Red flag and expropriating the kulaks.  George Grant enjoyed liquidating the kulaks, didn’t he?  What’s that?  He represented a humane, civilised conservatism descended from the Fathers of the Confederation and our own Loyalists?  He took American conservatives to task for being well-dressed liberal modernisers in hock to the Enlightenment?  He was critical of corporate power?  Surely, you jest!  There is a conservative social vision in which talking about community is not the occasion for libertarian snickering and the harumphing of modernisers?  That’s remarkable!