What is Communitarianism?

[kandrathe]

I do find these offshoot topics to be very intriguing though, especially how religion fits into the scheme.

Well, yes, religion, ecology, education, elderly, police and fire protection and really all aspects of "civil society" can be bundled within this communitarian blanket. What makes it socialistic is the State control of what otherwise would be private enterprise. If you were to have the State assume control of all civil society, we would call that outright communism.

In our city we have a tree preservation law which requires the replanting of similar trees for every 1" diameter of a tree felled. So if you cut down a 30" diameter oak tree, you are required to plant some number of replacement oak trees in proportion to what you cut down. This would from a libertarian sense, be a pretty serious violation of property rights. Perhaps a person wishes to have nothing but lawn with zero trees. A community value therefore is that our city is mostly forested, and our communities law is enforced to keep it that way.

Another, more serious consideration might be given to water rights, or the use of an aquifer. Many thousands of people use the same underground water reserves, so say one persons contamination would affect the entire community. So, we have regulation on shared natural resources. So, at the local level, not many people have many issues with some level of communitarianism. And, "it takes a village" makes some sense.

But, what people like Dr. Etzioni do is then generalize this concept to the national or global level. So, say here in Minnesota we have an excess of water, but maybe Mexico has a drought, so the communal "right" thing to do would be for us to pack up some of our water and ship it to them. This is where some people would decide what is "right" and what I think would emerge would be the "tyranny of the common good".

An example of this type of tyranny would be the recent Supreme Court decision (Kelo v. New London) which ruled that the use of Eminent Domain by a city for improving the tax base was a legitimate taking by that city. This is a particularly troublesome decision which opens the way for any City or State to seize any property for the sole purpose of trying to generate higher tax revenues. The individuals rights (property rights) were secondary to the need for that community to generate more revenue.

Consider the implications of this quote, "When we got organized as a country and we wrote a fairly radical Constitution with a radical Bill of Rights, giving [sic] a radical amount of individual freedom to Americans, it was assumed that the Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly... that they would work for the common good, as well as for the individual welfare... However, now there's a lot of irresponsibility. And so a lot of people say there's too much freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit it." -- Bill Clinton, April 19, 1995

These Neo-Communitarians (whomever they may really be; Bill and Hillary Clinton? Bush? Blair? Gore? Obama?) distrust and dislike voluntary communities. The Robert Bellah (the one to which Bill Clinton gave the Medal) that I mentioned above has written extensively that the only true community is one created and controlled by a democratically elected political power, which also happens to mean that of the largest political unit possible whether that be State, National, or Global. To him, small units, whether voluntary associations or smaller units of government, do not represent enough of "we the People" to properly represent the "General Will" (Rousseau) of the community. This is a chilling shift in the view of the benevolence of democracy and of large government. What it shows is that these Neo-Communitarians are not basically advocates of ad-hoc real communities, but they are statists and collectivists who confuse their own benevolent intentions, if they were in power, with what such a government would be like operating under the incentives for corruption that are created in the sort of unrestrained and absolutist, indeed totalitarian, government that they desire. Just as with Neo-Con's, no one came out and said, "I'm a Neo-Con". But, after a decade of Neo-Con tampering with the world one must ask, "If you knew in 1990 what you know now, would you have done anything differently?"