What is Communitarianism?

[Jester]

Is finding common ground so bad, where it can be found? Must it all be polemics?

I have no problem with finding common ground. I have a problem with the idea that relentless centrism will yield the solutions to the world's problems. The best answers to problems are no more likely to be found in the overlap between the two major parties than one's lost keys are likely to be under the lamppost.

Not sure why you don't ascribe to family, tribe, clan, it's the fundamental social unit for most of recorded history. It is what the concept of nation aggregates up from. Nations doesn't scale up all that well, of course, but it does somewhat.

Most of recorded history has been a miserable, oppressive bloodbath, and insofar as we have pulled away from that at all, it has been in the teeth of the idea that the family, tribe, clan, and especially the nation-state-as-extended-tribe is the fundamental social unit. The safest, most prosperous and most tolerant areas of the world are the places where these things are least influential, and the meanest, most violent, and most repressive are those where they hold the most sway.

As to Distributism, I too find the imbedded Catholic/Papist foundation troublling, and also, given the Mondragon experiment's local/clannish foundation, am pretty sure it would, even in successful practice, reach the scalability limit and not be able to go any further.

I agree. The Basques have a marvellous and unique culture, and wow can they cook, but it is theirs, and not everyone's. What works for them would have to be heavily adapted, at the very least, if it were to be extended or transplanted.

The OP concept, it seems to me, wishes create some "ex nihilo" as proclaim their virtue in absence of any evidence of success in either temporal, or scalable, frames of reference.

I don't understand this sentence.

-Jester