Saturday, March 23, 2024

The Agrarian's Lament: Blog Update. New Feature.

The Agrarian's Lament: Blog Update. New Feature.:  

Blog Update. New Feature.

 We have added a "pages" feature to this blog.  The currently visible page is:

There's a couple more in the hopper.

This blog has gotten more active than it was originally, as more original posts are now included here.  Originally, it was just a feed for Agrarian topics from Lex Anteinternet.  Showing, I suppose, that this is more active, this page is visible on that blog as well.

Friday, March 22, 2024

The Agrarian's Lament: A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 7. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? Wouldn't every one be just bored and poor?

The Agrarian's Lament: A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with th...:   

 

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.

So we've gone through this and lamented on the state of the world.

We looked at how working for largely local businesses, in an economy in which most were local, would work, in terms of economics.

In other words, if you needed an appliance, and went to Wally's Appliance Store, owned and operated by Wally, rather than Walmart, owned and operated by anonymous corporate shareholders, how would that look?

And we looked at something more radical yet, Agrarianism.

So how does this all tie together, and what difference would it really make?

Let's revisit the definition of Agrarianism.

Given the above, isn't Agrarianism simply agricultural distributism?

Well, no.

Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society

Bradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.

Agrarianism is agriculture oriented on an up close and personal basis, and as such, it's family oriented, and land ethic oriented.

We also noted that agrarianism as we define it incorporates The Land Ethic, which holds:

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.

The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac.  Aldo Leopold.

So what would this mean to society at large, and a distributist society at that?

To start with, it would mean a lot more family farm operations, and no remotely owned and operated ones where the land was held by Bill Gates or the Chinese Communist Party. Combined with Distributism, it would also mean a lot more local processing of agricultural products.  Local packing houses, local flour mills, local bakeries.

It would also mean a society that was focused on local ownership of homes with residents who lived a more local, land ethic focused, lives.

Indeed, the local would matter much more in general.

And with it, humanity.

There would still be the rich and the poor, but not the remote rich and the ignorable poor.

Most people would be in the middle, and most of them, owning their own. They'd be more independent in that sense, and therefore less subject to the whims of remote employers, economic interests, and politicians.

All three major aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, humanity, subsidiarity, and solidarity, coming together.

An agrarian society would be much less focused on "growth", if focused on it at all.  Preservation of agricultural and wild lands would be paramount.  People would derive their social values in part from that, rather than the host of panem et circenses distractions they now do, or at least they could. 

They'd derive their leisure from it as well, and therefore appreciate it more.  If hiking in a local park, or going fishing, or being outdoors in general is what we would do, and we very much would as the big mega entertainment sources of all types are largely corporate in nature, preservation of the wild would be important.  

And this too, combined with what we've noted before, a distributist society and a society that was well-educated, would amount to a radical, and beneficial, reorientation of society.

We won't pretend that such a society would be prefect.  That would be absurd.  Human nature would remain that. All the vices that presently exist, still would, but with no corporate sources to feed them, they'd not grow as prominent.

And we will state that it would cure many of the ills that now confront us.

Such a society would force us to confront our nature and nature itself.  And to do so as a party of a greater community, for our common good.

Which, if we do not end up doing, will destroy us in the end.

Last prior:

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 6. Politics


Directly related:

Finis

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, March 21, 1944. Dear John.

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, March 21, 1944. Dear John.

Tuesday, March 21, 1944. Dear John.


The first in print use of the term "Dear John Letter" appeared in a UPI article entitled Hollywood Girls Gain Weight on Tour in Africa.1   It was clear from the use, which was a quote from one of the increasingly corpulent Hollywood Girls that the term was in the common vernacular at the time.

We've touched on the topic of wartime marriages and breakups several times before, but my ability to link them in is restrained, as I can't find them all.  We haven't done one on wartime romantic relationships in general.  As our Fourth Law of History details, War Changes Everything, but like a lot of things surrounding World War Two, this topic is subject to a lot of myth.  According to one scholarly source:

Marriage rates rose in 1940-41 and peaked in 1942, only to slow down during the war and rise to even higher levels in 1946. Divorce rates followed a much smoother pattern, increasing from 1940 to 1946, then quickly declining in 1947.

World War II and Divorce: A Life-Course Perspective by Eliza K. Pavalko and Glen H. Elder, Jr.  

Frankly, looking at it, the Second World War didn't impact divorce nearly as much as commonly believed.  If it is taken into consideration that World War Two came immediately on the heels of the Great Depression, and that the ages of US troops in the war was higher than commonly imagined, it makes sense.  Consider:

While the Great Depression did lower marriage rates, the effect was not long lasting: marriages were delayed, not denied. The primary long-run effect of the downturn on marriage was stability: Marriages formed in tough economic times were more likely to survive compared to matches made in more prosperous time periods.

Love in the Time of the Depression: The Effect of Economic Conditions on Marriage in the Great Depression, Matthew J. Hill.

Indeed, that short snipped is revealing.

There were a lot of marriages contracted before soldiers went overseas, and some people did marry very quickly, which is probably balanced out by a lot of people who were going to get married anyhow getting married before they would be husband deployed.  Also, according to The Great Plains during World War II  by Prof. R. Douglas Hurt, there was an increase of pre deployment pre marital contact, although the book relied solely on interview data for that claim.  Having said that, a Florida academic, Alan Petigny, has noted that "between the beginning of World War II in 1941 and the inaugural issue of Playboy in 1953, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled".2

That the war had an impact on behavior in regard to relations outside of marriage is well documented.  Prostitution was rampant in every area where troops were deployed, with it being openly engaged in locations like London.  Examples of illicit behavior aren't very hard to find at all.  The length of the war no doubt contributed to this.  Nonetheless, traditional moral conduct dominated throughout the 1940s and after it, with the real, and disastrous, changes really starting in the early 1950s.

That "Dear John" letters weren't uncommon makes a lot of sense, however. The majority, but not all of them, would have been written by single women to single men, i.e., by girlfriend to boyfriend.  Those relationships were not solemnized and largely unconsummated, if we use those terms.  The war was long and accordingly the separations were as well.  Young women in many instances would have aged a few years, as the men would have also, but in conditions that were dramatically different than the men.  The women were, to a large degree, temporarily forced outside their homes, if they fit into the demographic that would have remained at home, but in conditions that were considerably more stable than the men.  If they went to work, they could have remained at one employer for years, whereas the soldier boyfriend may very well have constantly been on the move. Workplace romances certainly aren't uncommon now, with around 20% of Americans having met their spouses at work (Forbes claims its 43%).  Some large percentage of Americans have dated a coworker.  Given the long separations, a young woman meeting a man at work, or perhaps at church, or in her group of friends, was undoubtedly a common occurrence during the war, as it was never the case that all men were deployed, even though a very large number were.

FWIW, the Vietnam War is associated with the highest rate of "Dear John" letters, even though troops deployed for only one year in the country.  This undoubtedly says something about the change in economic and social conditions from the 1940s to the 1960s.

On a personally anecdotal level, I think I've met three people, now all deceased, who married during the war prior to the husband deploying.  One of those marriages failed, but the other two were lifelong.

The 20th Indian Division completed a withdrawal to the Shenan Hills. The 17th Indian Division was conducting a fighting withdrawal.

The Japanese were accordingly engaging in a very successful offensive in northeast Burma.  The war in that quarter was far from settled.  Be that as it may, as that was going on, the Western Allies were advancing in the Pacific ever close to Japan itself, which Japan was proving unable to arrest.  The Japanese situation, therefore, was oddly complicated in that in order to really reverse the tide of the war, they would have had to taken Indian entirely, and then knocked China out of the war, neither of which was realistic in spite of its recent battlefield successes.

As that was going on:

The Aerodrome: 21–25 April 1944. First Helicopter Combat Rescue: 21–25 April 1944.

We don't think of helicopters in World War Two, but they were starting to show up, and in one of their classic roles.

US and Australian troops linked up on the Huon Peninsula.  

Fighting in New Guinea, while going in the Allied direction, was proving endless.

The Finnish parliament, in a secret session, rejected Soviet peace terms.  Secret or not, the Finnish rejection hit American newspapers that very day.  That the Finns and Soviets were talking was very well known to everyone.

The papers were also noting the German invasion of Hungary, and there were rumors that Hungary was going to declare war on Germany, which proved far from true.  The Hungarian situation must have caused some concern, however, in Finland.

It was the first flight of the Japanese kamikaze rocket plane, the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka (櫻花)


The first flight was an unpowered test.

It might be noted that there's a real logic failure with this design.  If you can build a powered rocket suicide plane, you can build a rocket powered drone.

The ice jammed Yellowstone broke over its banks in Miles City, Montana.

The Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit was founded near Conyers, Georgia.


Footnotes:

1. The "girls" were Louise Allbritton, an actress who would have been 23 years old at the time, and June Clyde, who would have been 35.

Allbritton married a CBS news correspondent in 1946 and retired from acting.  She remained married until her death in 1979.  Clyde, who was a pre code actress and dancer, was married (1930) and also remained for the rest of her life. She passed away in 1987.

2.  World War One, which was comparatively short, does not seem to have impacted behavior and marriage rates nearly as much, but it did cause a very notable boom in overseas "war bride" marriages anywhere American troops were deployed, including Siberia.

There were, of course, war brides as a result of World War Two, but that's another story.

Related items:

Yeoman's Laws of History




Last prior edition:

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Blog Mirror. Lex Anteinternet: Carrie Gress and feminism.

Lex Anteinternet: Carrie Gress and feminism.

Lex Anteinternet: Carrie Gress and feminism.

Carrie Gress and feminism.

Lex Anteinternet: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day: Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day : A Celtic cross in a local cemetery, marking the grave of a very Irish, and Irish Catholic, figure....

In the afternoon, I went out fishing and took the dog.  On the way, I was listening to a podcast, like I'll tend to do.  It was a Catholic Answers Focus interview of Carrie Gress and it was profound.  I'll post on that elsewhere.  

Here is elsewhere.

The title of the episode, and it should be easy to find, is Can Catholic's Fix Feminism?  Gress' answer seems to be no, but what was so interesting about it is that she, as a woman who holds a PhD has had a career as a professor was frank on some things that we've addressed here repeatedly, but from a more academic standpoint, and she was able to thread them together. Without really expressing it the same way we have here, she's spoke on metaphysics, theology and evolutionary biology, as well as political science.

We've typed out all of that here, but without really including the Marxism portion.

Gress basic thesis is that feminism really came out of the same radicalism as Marxism, and adopted a Marxist view that women should be compelled to live to the male standard.  It didn't really free women at all, it forced them into the male world where they're now judged on how well the live up. . . and down, to it.  She dared to say something that's an anathema to modern Americans, that your career will not make you happy, and it very well may make you miserable.

Tying it in to Marxism is also a bit of an anathema of a topic too, to most, but if you look at it, it's hard not to go there, at least in a fellow traveler's sort of way early on.  To at least a degree, even if you want to just lighten it up, early feminism fits into the family or radical movements of the early 20th Century, all of which were pretty heavily dominated by far left thought.  Communism itself was very hostile to motherhood and marriage, and wanted to destroy the latter.  The early radical Communists were opposed to both, and Whitaker Chambers discusses in Witness.  The association, at least tangentially, is there.  And of course, as the far left saw human value only in terms of people being "workers", this makes sense.  The American far left still speaks this way today, with Bernie Sanders, for example, being in favor of warehousing children so that their mothers can work, adopting the traditional leftist view that a human's value is found only there.

We've dealt with all of this before, of course, and frankly we've taken it one step further.

Feminism, its battle, grasped the economic nature, and the prejudicial nature, of men having every career open to them and women not having it. But they never looked for a second at the history of how that came about.  The assumption always was that men had grabbed these occupations for themselves and retained them by brute force.  In reality, however, the vast majority of male occupations had been forced upon them.  Where this was not true, in and in the original professions (law, the clergy, and medicine), the circumstances of Medieval life and biology, where in fact women had far more power in a generally more equal society than that of the early industrial revolution, caused this to come about.  

Failing to understand this, feminists created the Career Myth, which is that not only did men make a lot more money than most women, which was true, but that a career was the gateway to secular bliss.  Find a career, women were told, and you'd be perpetually happy.  Promotion of the myth was so skillfully done that it became a culturally accepted myth by the 1980s.  Even well into the 1980s, young men were told that they should work to find a "good job" so they could "support a family".  The idea almost universally was that the point of your career was to support a future family.  Almost nobody was expected to get rich, and frankly most professionals did not expect to.  Already by the 1960s the next concept was coming in, however, and by the 1990s the concept of Career Bliss had really set in.

The problem with it is that it's a lie.  Careers can make people miserable, but they rarely make most people happy.  Perhaps the exceptions are where a person's very strong natural inclinations are heavily aligned with a career, and certainly many female doctors who would have been nurses, for example, have benefited from the change, as just one example.

We are so in the thick of this that we hardly appreciate where we at on these matters now.  But this explains much of the misery of the modern world.  We don't live in accordance with our natures, or at least very few of us do, and we're really not allowed to.  An aspect of that is this topic. Women have careers open to them, and should, but they are now compelled to act like men within them, in every fashion.

I've recently had the displeasure of witnessing this in a peculiar fashion.  It hasn't been a pleasant thing to observe.  The interesting thing is that in observing it, when people feel free to make comments, they grasp their way back to the old standards, as with so much else, even while not living them.

Related Thread:

Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?" Looking at women (and men) in the workplace, and modern work itself, with a long lens.


Sunday, March 17, 2024

Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day

Lex Anteinternet: St. Patrick's Day

St. Patrick's Day

A Celtic cross in a local cemetery, marking the grave of a very Irish, and Irish Catholic, figure.

Recently I ran this item: 

Lex Anteinternet: The Obituary: Mira qué bonita era by Julio Romero de Torres, 1895.  Depiction of a wake in Spain. I didn't have him as a teacher in high school, but I...

One of the things this oituary noted was:

"One more St. Patrick’s day craic for you, Dad."

That's nice, but what does that mean?

From Wikipedia:

Craic (/kræk/ KRAK) or crack is a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation, particularly prominent in Ireland.It is often used with the definite article – the craic– as in the expression "What's the craic?" (meaning "How are you?" or "What's happening?"). The word has an unusual history; the Scots and English crack was borrowed into Irish as craic in the mid-20th century and the Irish spelling was then reborrowed into English. Under either spelling, the term has attracted popularity and significance in Ireland.

A relative who know the decedent well told me that in later years he really got into "being Irish" and had big St. Patrick's Day parties.

But is that Irish?

Not really.  That's hosting a party.

Granted, it's hosting a party in honor of the Saint, sort of. Or perhaps in honor of Ireland, sort of.  And there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever.  After all, "holidays" comes from "holy days", which were "feasts".   There are, by my recollection, some feast days even during Lent, and for that matter, it's often noted, but somewhat debated, that Sundays during Lent aren't technically part of it (although this post isn't on that topic, perhaps I'll address that elsewhere.

And St. Philip Neri tells us, moreover,  "Cheerfulness strengthens the heart and makes us persevere in a good life; wherefore the servant of God ought always to be in good spirits."

So, no problem, right?

Well, perhaps, as long as we're not missing the point.

The Irish everywhere honor this day, and some of that involves revelry.  Traditionally it was a day that events like Steeple Chases were conducted, sports being closely associated, actually, with religious holidays on the British Isles.  But the day is also often marked by the devout going to Mass, and as the recent Irish election shows, the Irish are more deeply Catholic than some recent pundits might suggest.

Perhaps it might be best, really, to compare the day to the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in North America, which is widely observed by devout Catholics, and not only in Mexican American communities.

So, I guess, a purely bacchanalian event, which is so common in the US, doesn't really observe the holiday, but something else, and that risks dishonoring the day itself.  Beyond that, it's interesting how some in North America become particularly "Irish" on this day, when in fact the root of the day, and the person it honors, would import a different type of conduct entirely to some extent, if that was not appreciated.  Indeed, with many, St. Patrick would suggest confession and repentance.

Am I being too crabby?  

Probably, but we strive for authenticity in our lives and desire it.  That's so often at war with our own personal desires which often, quite frankly, aren't authentic.  Things aren't easy.

Lex Anteinternet: If you wonder what is giving rise to the strong populist/Christian Nationalist/Naotional Conservatism reaction in some quarters . . .

Lex Anteinternet: If you wonder what is giving rise to the strong po...:  

If you wonder what is giving rise to the strong populist/Christian Nationalist/Naotional Conservatism reaction in some quarters . . .

 it's complete crap like this:

Theorizing White heteropatriarchal supremacy, marriage fundamentalism, and the mechanisms that maintain family inequality

The abstract:

Abstract

In this article, I draw upon critical feminist and intersectional frameworks to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs) and marginalizes others as a function of family structure and relationship status. Specifically, I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy. Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family. But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States. Through several examples, I demonstrate how—since colonization—marriage fundamentalism has been instantiated through laws, policies, and practices to unduly advantage WHNFs while simultaneously marginalizing Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) families, among others. I conclude with a call for family scientists to further interrogate how marriage fundamentalism reproduces family inequality in American family life and to work toward its dismantling. A deeper understanding of how these complex and often covert mechanisms of structural oppression operate in family life is needed to disrupt these mechanisms and advance family equality and justice.

Marriage is a human universal.  It's not "white", and indeed "white" doesn't really exist either.  When people say "white" they mean Western European culture, maybe, or maybe they mean American European culture. Or maybe they just don't know what they mean and are in fact simply reinforcing the language invented for the more recent form of slavery that existed in North American until 1865.

Anyway you look at it, when you wonder why people go in and vote for Trump, well, stuff like this has an awful lot to do with it.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Agrarian's Lament: A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 6. Politics

The Agrarian's Lament: A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with th...

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 6. Politics

James Monroe.  

And, yes, we're still not on to the Agrarian finale in this series.  That's because we have one more important topic to consider first.

Politics.

If you read distributists' social media, and you probably don't, you'll see that some people have the namby pamby idea that if we all just act locally everything will fall in line.  While people should act locally, that's a bunch of crap.

What these people don't realize is that politically, we're a corporate capitalist society, and we are where we are right now, in large part due to that.  Corporations are a creature of the state, not of nature, and exists as a legal fiction because the state says they do.  This is deemed, in our imaginations, to be necessarily because, . . . well it is.

Or rather, it's deemed to be necessary as we believe we need every more consolidation and economies of scale.  

We really don't, and in the end, it serves just itself.  We do need some large entities, particularly in manufacturing, which would actually bring us back to the original allowance for corporate structure, which was quite limited.  Early in US history, most corporations were banned from being created.

Legally, they would not need to be banned now, but simply not allowed to form except for actual needs.  And when very large, the Theodore Roosevelt proposal that they be treated like public utilities, or alternatively some percentage of their stock or membership would vest in their employees, would result in remedying much of the ills that they've created.

Likewise, eliminating the absurd idea that they can use their money for influence in politics could and should be addressed.

Which would require changes in the law.

And that takes us back to politics.

Nearly every living American, and Canadian for that matter, would agree that a major portion of the problems their nations face today are ones manufactured by politics.  The current economic order, as noted, is politically vested.

The United States has slid into a political decline of epic proportions, and its noteworthy that this came about after Ronald Reagan attacked and destroyed the post 1932 economic order which provided for an amplified type of American System in which there was, in fact, a great deal of involvement in the economy and the affairs of corporations, as well as a hefty income tax on the wealth following the country's entry into World War Two.  It's never been the case, of course, that there was a trouble free political era although interestingly, there was a political era which is recalled as The Era of Good Feelings due to its lack of political strife.  

That era lasted a mere decade, from 1815 to 1825, but it's instructive.

The Era of Good Feelings came about after the War of 1812, which was a war that not only caused internal strife, but which risked the dissolution of the nation.  Following the war the Federalist Party collapsed thereby ending the bitter disputes that had characterized its fights with the more dominant Democratic-Republican Party.. . . . huh. . . 

Anyhow, President James Monroe downplayed partisan affiliation in his nominations, with the ultimate goal of affecting national unity and eliminating political parties altogether.

Borrowing a line from the Those Were the Days theme song of All In the Family, "Mister we could use a man like James Monroe again".

Political parties have had a long and honorable history in politics. They've also had a long and destructive one.  Much of their role depends upon the era.  In our era, for a variety of reasons, they are now at the hyper destructive level.

They are, we would note, uniquely subject to the influence of money, and the fringe, which itself is savvy to the influence of money.  And money, now matter where it originates from, tends to concentrate uphill if allowed to, and it ultimately tends to disregard the local.

"All politics is local" is the phrase that's famously attached to U.S. politics, but as early as 1968, according to Andrew Gelman, that's declined, and I agree with his observation.  Nowhere is that more evident than Wyoming.

In Wyoming both the Republican and the Democratic Party used to be focused on matters that were very local, which is why both parties embraced in varying degrees, The Land Ethic, and both parties, in varying degrees, embraced agriculture.  It explains why in the politics of the 70s and 80s the major economic driver of the state, the oil and gas industry, actually had much less influence than it does now.

Things were definitely changing by the 1980s, with money, the love of which is the root of all evil, being a primary driver.  Beyond that, however, technology played a role.  The consolidation of industry meant that employers once headquartered in Casper, for instance, moved first to Denver, then to Houston, or were even located in Norway. As the love of money is the root of all evil, and the fear of being poor a major personal motivator, concern for much that was local was increasingly lost.

The increasing broad scope of the economy, moreover, meant that there were economic relocations of people who had very little connection with the land and their state.  Today's local Freedom Caucus in the legislature, heavily represented by those whose formative years were out of state, is a primary example in the state.  Malevolent politics out of the south and the Rust Belt entered the state and are battled out in our legislature even though they have little to do with local culture, lands or ethics.

Moreover, since 1968 the Democratic Party has gone increasingly leftward, driven at first by the impacts of the 1960s and then by its left leaning elements.  It in turn became anti-democratic, relying on the Supreme Court to force upon the nation unwanted social change, until it suddenly couldn't rely on the Court anymore, at which time it rediscovered democracy.  At the same time Southern and Rust Belt Populists, brought into the Republican Party by Ronald Reagan, eventually took it over and are now fanatically devoted to anti-democratic mogul, Donald Trump, whose real values, other than the love of money and a certain sort of female appearance, is unknown, none of which maters to his fanatic base as they apply the Führerprinzip to his imagined wishes and he responds.

We know, accordingly, have a Congress that's completely incapable of doing anything other than banning TikTok.

Distributism by design, and Agrarianism by social reference, both apply Catholic Social Teaching, one intentionally and one essentially as it was already doing that before Catholic Social Teaching was defined.  As we've discussed elsewhere, Catholic Social Teaching applies the doctrines of Human Dignity, Solidarity and Subsidiarity.  Solidarity, as Pope John Paul II describe it In Sollicitudo rei socialis, is not “a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of others. It is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good”.  Subsidiarity provides that that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.

We are a long ways from all of that, right now.

Politically, we're in a national political era that is violently opposed to solidarity and subsidiarity.  Supposed national issues and imagined remote conspiracies, dreamt up by political parties, swamp real local issues.  Global issues, in contract, which require a competent national authority, or even international authority, to deal with, cannot get attention as the masses are distracted by buffoons acting like Howler Monkeys.

Destroying the parties would serve all of this.  And that's a lot easier to do than might be supposed.

And more difficult.

Money makes it quite difficult, in fact.  But it can be done.

The easiest way to attack this problem is to remove political parties as quasi official state agencies, which right now the GOP and Democratic Party are.  Both parties have secured, in many states, state funded elections which masquerade as "primary elections" but which are actually party elections.  There's utterly no reason whatsoever that the State of Wyoming, for example, should fund an internal Republican election, or a Democratic one.

Primary elections are quite useful, but not in the fashion that most state's have them.  A useful example is Alaska's, whose system was recently proposed for Wyoming, but which was not accepted (no surprise).  Interestingly, given as the state's two actual political parties right now are the Trumpites and the Republican remnants, this a particularly good, and perhaps uniquely opportune, time to go to this system.  And that system disregard party affiliations.

Basically, in that type of election, the top two vote getters in the primary go on to the general election irrespective of party.  There doesn't need to be any voter party affiliation. The public just weeds the number of candidates down.

That is in fact how the system works here already, and in many places for local elections. But it should be adopted for all elections.  If it was, the system would be much different.

For example, in the last House Race, Harriet Hageman defeated Lynette Grey Bull, taking 132,206 votes to Gray Bull's 47,250.  Given the nature of the race, FWIW, Gray Bull did much better than people like to imagine, taking 25% of the vote in an overwhelmingly Republican state.  Incumbent Lynn Cheney was knocked out of the race in the primary, being punished for telling the truth about Дональд "The Insurrectionist" Trump.  But an interesting thing happens if you look at the GOP primary.

In that race, Harriet Hageman took 113,079 votes, for 66% of the vote, and Cheney took 49,339, for 29%.  Some hard right candidates took the minor balance. Grey Bull won in the primary with just 4,500 votes, however.

I'd also note here that Distributism in and of itself would have an impact on elections, as it would have a levelling effect on the money aspect of politics.  Consider this article by former Speaker of the House Tom Lubnau:

Tom Lubnau: Analyzing The Anonymous Mailers Attacking Chuck Gray


A person could ask, I suppose, of how this is an example, but it is.

Back to the Gray v. Nethercott race, Ms. Nethercott is a lawyer in a regional law firm. That's not distributist as I'd have it, as I'd provide that firms really ought to be local, as I discussed in yesterday's riveting installment.   But it is a regional law firm and depending upon its business model, she's likely responsible for what she brings in individually.  Indeed, the claim made during the race that she wanted the job of Secretary of State for a raise income was likely absurd.

But the thing here is that Nethercott, as explained by Lubnau, raised a total of $369,933, of which $304,503 were from individual donations.  That's a lot to spend for that office, but it was mostly donated by her supporters.

In contrast, Jan Charles Gray, Chuck Gray's father donated a total of $700,000 to Chuck Gray’s campaign, Chuck Gray donated $10,000 to his own campaign and others donated $25,994.

$700,000 is a shocking amount for that office, but beyond that, what it shows is that Nethercott's supporters vastly out contributed Gray's, except for Gray's father.  In a distributist society, it certainly wouldn't be impossible to amass $700,000 in surplus cash for such an endeavor, but it would frankly be much more difficult.

To conclude, no political system is going to convert people into saints.  But it's hard to whip people into a frenzy who are your friends and neighbors than it does people who are remote.  And its harder to serve the interest of money if the money is more widely distributed. Put another way, it's harder to tell 50 small business owners that that Bobo down in Colorado knows what she's talking about, than 50 people who depend on somebody else for a livelihood a myth.

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Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer up your pants.*

Lex Anteinternet: Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A littl... : Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 66th Edition. A little song, a little...