What is Communitarianism?

[kandrathe]

I can't say I see Bush's doctrines post-2001 as an extension of the "compassionate conservative" doctrine at all. What seems much more fitting to me is that the airy-fairy centrist-sounding "compassionate" meme was essentially an advertising scheme to return to Reagan-era politics. Once 9/11 "changed everything", the facade became entirely redundant, or even a liability, and the neoconservative hawks moved into the limelight. The public, by that point, had become much less interested in post-partisan huggy-feel-good crap, and much more interested in muscular, testosterone-laden "with us or against us" governance. The erosion of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms under the PATRIOT act were justified entirely on the second philosophy, not the first.

Yes, I agree in principle. I still think the "thousand points of light" agenda was in play with extending government funding to religious and other communitarian causes that previously had operated without government. The extension of Medicare part D, the Federal funding of prescription drugs. Many private colleges I worked with during the Bush years bowed to or contemplated getting into bed with Federal grant monies and the strings attached (meaning mostly secular intrusion).

And, and I'm sure you could guess, I certainly do not agree that locking people up without Habeas Corpus, violating privacy through wiretapping and illegal search and seizure, or kissing the Geneva Conventions goodbye are in any sense "just as chilling" as some milquetoast suggestions that maybe the individual is not the first, last and only concept in liberty.

It is my fault, I am probably comparing apples to oranges there, in that the results of the Patriot Act, or Bush executive power grab (under the auspices of a perpetual war on terror) is not comparable to merely a collectivist philosophy. What I'm trying to say is that authoritarianism by left or right is ugly, which on the one hand is all the things you cited and on the other results in such things as the Khmer Rouge killing fields. All done for the greater good, and both sides are in opposition to individualism.