What is Communitarianism?

[Jester]

Yes, I agree it is not news. I guess what is new to me is the coalescing of political thought from Democrat to Republican around this "Third Way" which has become a destructive force for individual liberty. My father was a union Blue Dog democrat, and my mother was a Eisenhower Republican. Their common politic bond was on the rights and responsibilities of the individual. This third way is contrary to any politics I knew growing up.

Perhaps, but it's hardly new politics on any global standard. The distinction between individualist and collectivist politics is as old as the hills. To give just one analysis, Samuel Beer's classic book "British Politics in the Collectivist Age" describes exactly this issue, but at a century's remove. It is at least as old as the Roman Republic, and probably much older.

Right. There is no conspiracy. It is out in the open, at least in the halls of academia and permeating the worlds governments and the UN. Being that people do not outright label themselves as "Communitarians", but rather chose non-descriptive party labels like Democrat or Repuplican makes opposing their ideologies more difficult. People vote along party lines thinking, "Democrats stand for this which I'm for, and Republican stand for this, which I'm against." When that line of thinking is total crap, then what we have is a deluded electorate and a political party system which has so commingled itself as to become meaningless.

That might have made some quantity of sense from, say, 1988 to 2001, but the last 7 years of Bush's term have surely taught us that, whatever else may be true, the two parties do not have the same vision for the US in some very, very important respects. Not least, this is true because Bush demonstrated (once "compassionate conservatism" had been buried in a shallow grave on Sept. 12, 2001) that he and his administration were about as Communitarian as the Chinese Communist Party are Anarchist.

Well, I was specifically looking at Clinton, so that is why much of what I've posted is dated. Here is something more recent from Dr. Etzioni (the Father of Neo-Communitarianism) about Obama on the Huffy post.

I don't think it's particularly surprising or relevant that the self-proclaimed leader of this movement both sees his own ideas in the see-what-you-want-to-see president, and also wants to publicly connect himself and his movement with the most popular political figure since Reagan. Whether Obama gives two figs for this fruit or not, I have no idea. I can't tell anything from Etzioni, except that he is very fond of his own ideas.

-Jester