I don't need your charity!

Another thing I was wondering about, DM, is that you keep mentioning "charity" in your comments to the last post, which you also mentioned in regards to Rorty earlier, and I'm wondering, who said anything about charity, anyways? Is this the neo-Marxist pejorative for liberal redistributive policies?

Charity is, of course, the right wing answer to poverty: No need for the government to help the poor, churches will take care of them, thousand points of light and all that. But it's not an argument that I've ever really seen made by the progressive left.

Typically, the arguments made for redistribution of income/efforts to decrease inequality are that I see getting made are:

1. A social justice argument: The wealth of this country isn't the sole result of any individual capitalist or manager's decisions. Whatever wealth they make is made possible by the people who do the work and all the people (teachers, policemen, construction workers, etc) who make this a functioning society with educated citizens, (mostly) fairly enforced laws and solid infrastucture. Without this social capital, capitalism wouldn't be able to function, so whatever wealth is created needs to be shared by everyone that made it possible.

2. A social compact/fraternity argument: We're all Americans, part of a community, and just like a family has obligations to care for the other members of their family as members of that family, so too all Americans have obligations to care for other Americans as members of their community. A lot of us progressives would like to see that sense of community eventually extended to all people in the world, obviously a tall, maybe impossible, order. And...

3. a utilitarian argument (the flip side of the social justice argument): Society functions better when inequality is minimized and you don't have some groups resenting the wealth or opportunities of others and possibly plotting to take that wealth by force; business does better and more innovation occurs when you've got a healthy, happy, well educated population; it's more cost effective to pay for health care, education, etc. up front for everyone than to pay to incarcerate people, treat the diseases of poverty, etc. down the road.

Of these, I think that the first comes pretty close to saying the same thing, in the end, as your description of Marx in your comment on the last post. While it arrives at this conclusion somewhat differently, the conclusion is still that the capitalist is not entitled to the value created by the laborer. The second argument comes closest to being "charity" but also has, I think, the strongest emotional appeal. This is important as the more we think of and feel ourselves to be "all in this together," the harder it is to think of ourselves as isolated individuals competing for limited resources and thus entitled to whatever we can acquire through this struggle. The third argument has the advantage of being empirically verifiable in a lot of ways: We can actually do research that shows how redistributing resources leads to less crime, greater productivity, better health, etc. down the line.

I don't know how you would evaluate these arguments "on the basis of the degree to which they eliminate the exploitative relationship between owner and worker" but I think that they provide a solid basis on which to argue and develop policies against inequality in our society without bringing in Marx and all the negative baggage that Marxism carries with it. Which, again, is why I'm still unclear on what, exactly, Marx is supposed to provide that I can't get elsewhere.

One more go-round, re: Secularism?

I'm guessing the secularism debate here has mostly run its course. If anyone is interested in reviving it, though, this article by Mark Lilla, a humanities prof. at Columbia from the New York Times magazine, while not without its faults, is a decent, very quick overview of the history of church-state separation in the west and some current challenges it faces. It touches briefly on what I see as one of the biggest problems with mixing politics and religion: Religion is most compelling when it's least democratic.

Describing the mild-mannered Protestantism dominant in Germany in the late 1800s, Lilla states: "Liberal theology had begun in hope that the moral truths of biblical faith might be intellectually reconciled with, and not just accommodated to, the realities of modern political life. Yet the liberal deity turned out to be a stillborn God, unable to inspire genuine conviction among a younger generation seeking ultimate truth." This younger generation, especially after the pointless slaughter of World War I, "...craved a more robust faith, based on a new revelation that would shake the foundations of the whole modern order...When faith in redemption through bourgeois propriety and cultural accommodation withered after the Great War, the most daring thinkers of the day transformed it into hope for a messianic apocalypse — one that would again place the Jewish people, or the individual Christian believer, or the German nation, or the world proletariat in direct relation with the divine."

While the situation today is nowhere near as grave as in 1920s Europe, we're still stuck, as I've said before, with a bland, vague "faith" on the one hand and an intolerant, authoritarian fundamentalism on the other. When I think about what religious belief does for people then the fundamentalist or apocalyptic version makes more sense as religion to me (and apparently I'm not the only one as Evangelical and Pentacostal churches are winning converts away from Catholicism and mainline Protestantism all over the world, and Islamic fundamentalism is gaining on its mellower forms), but as a model for governing a diverse, modern society they're horrible.

Debating Policy

DM thinks it’d be helpful to discuss the actual policy proposals on poverty of some of the Democratic candidates as a way of both seeing what the mainstream left has to offer and to compare it to possibly more dramatic neo-Marxist ideas…well, John Edward’s poverty policy is here and here’s his page on “Working Families,” which covers labor policies. There’s also relevant policy stuff on the website under the several other headings as well. Obama’s (not as detailed) policy page on poverty is here . This is the most relevant page off of Hillary’s website, which seems to focus at least as much on her record as her proposals, which I suppose is fitting given that a big part of her campaign narrative is that she's one of the most experienced candidates in the field. Debate on some of these proposals can be found here and here; this is, I think, an interesting and relevant way of comparing the candidates. I didn’t find as much on Hillary or Obama’s domestic policy proposals, which is probably partly due to their not offering up as much in the way of concrete proposals and partly due to the fact that policy doesn’t get discussed nearly as much as the “horserace” between the candidates. Anyways, that was also after a not very exhaustive search. I’m sure I’m not the only one here who knows how to use Google, so feel free to waste your own damn time and add to the links I’ve provided.

Anyways, while I’m not opposed to discussing and comparing the candidate’s policy programs on poverty or any other topic, there are some real limitations to the usefulness of that discussion. For one, as you’ll see if you read the campaign websites above, the level of vagueness and generality is kept pretty high. In part this is to keep from giving your opponents anything too concrete to use against you. Then there’s the fact that a lot of what matters in a given policy is going to be the fine print, the technical details regarding funding, implementation, etc. that only professionals in the field (or people with far too much time on their hands) can really sort through. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable and interested in this stuff, but I still can’t really make much sense of the advantages or disadvantages of the different health care proposals, for example. Like most people in this situation, I turn to the opinion of those who spend more time thinking about these things than me who seem to share my values and get things right more often than not. Another limitation to the policy debate is that while the President proposes what he or she’d like to see happen, it’s up to the congress to actually write the law putting the policy into effect, and a lot can happen at this level to alter the fine points of a policy. Democrats most likely won’t have a filibuster proof majority in the next congress, so they’ll have to make compromises with Republicans to get any bills passed. So with all that in mind, I think that looking at a candidates policy proposals tell us more about where their priorities and values are than what will actually become law if they’re elected, which is fine: knowing a candidates priorities and values--and whether they have the competence to enact their agenda--is probably worth almost as much as a set of detailed proposals anyway.