The official web site of A.H. Lloyd

One of the strangest aspects of American conservatism is its fanatical devotion to capitalism.  It really seems to be the highest value for a great many people who otherwise consider themselves righteous Christians.

It’s like there is a circuit in their minds that shorts out whenever the Pope (any Pope!) remarks that poor people should be able to eat, drink, heave health care, etc.

Now I get it, I was once like that.  Full-on “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,” and quoting scripture about “those who do not work, do not eat,” but that’s not what is being said.

In his recent encyclical, Pope Leo explicitly denounced state welfare as separating us from the dignity of work.  It’s like they cannot understand two things can be true at once: you should care for the poor.  Also: state welfare does not work.

There used to be a thing called Christian charity, the obligation to give alms to care for the widow, the orphan, the infirm.  It’s all over the Bible, and prominently featured in the gospels.  Why is urging greater use of charity now Communism?  

The answer is that Americans have been heavily shaped by Protestantism, particularly Puritanism, which was Calvinist in its outlook.  If you were poor, destitute, suffering, well that showed you were not part of the Elect.

This ties into the ongoing attacks by conservatives on “Postliberalism,” which is basically a return to the notion of the Common Good and Catholic social teachings. The notion of a Common Good goes back to ancient Greece, and it is references in our founding documents. It’s a pretty simple concept: individual liberty is important, but not if it harms society as a whole. Thus, from the very beginning of the country there were limits on behavior and speech. Blasphemy, obscenity and slander were not included in free speech because they caused societal harm.

In the mid 20th Century, these laws were struck down in favor of an ahistorical abstract notion of individual liberty unbounded by societal constraints. Traditions, values, and religion were viewed as impediments to achieving ultimate personal freedom.

The results have been disastrous. Marriage was reduced to a legal contract between a variable number of people of variable sexes. The concept of sex itself was questioned. Children – both born and unborn – have become commodities that derive their value not from their humanity but by what adults are willing to pay for them. Abortion up until the moment of birth, renting wombs, and unconventional parenting arrangements are now accepted as necessary to preserve individual rights to find happiness rather than the moral outrages that they are.

The truth is the liberalism – and that includes classical liberalism – has failed in the most important test of all: preserving the future of humanity. Birth rates have collapsed, marriage has disintegrated and the highest orders of society struggle to define elementary concepts like what women are.

In addition to infanticide, coerced euthanasia is now being pushed worldwide as an essential individual right. The lesson in all of this is that without a common morality, a common conception of “good,” society quickly descends into a murderous nightmare.

One of the things I learned in researching the Spanish Civil War and writing Long Live Death was that there is a “libertarian” form of Marxism: Anarchism. People often use “anarchy” to describe a complete absence of governing structures, but what it really means is that the state is abolished and replaced by something else, such as worker collectives or corporations.

Anarchists believe that the state is a tool of capitalist oppression, and that in order to achieve “true socialism,” the state itself must be abolished and replace with worker collectives, which conflicts with Leninism, which takes over the state and then uses its power to achieve the dream of socialism.

The upshot is that it is possible for a regime centered around individual liberties to become oppressive when competing rights come into conflict. We saw this during Covid where individual autonomy and freedom of movement was declared inferior to a “right not to get sick.”

The transgender madness was very similar – a right to a personal identity was held more important than a right to one’s own religious beliefs and even of reality itself.

Another problem with prioritizing individual liberty over the Common Good is the tendency for profit to be seen as a sacred duty. If I have a limitless right to do what I want with my money, I can close a factory and destroy an entire community just to squeeze slightly higher profits with cheap overseas labor.

This is the “corporate raider” mentality, someone we were told was actually doing good by making “the market” more efficient, but it was really just about people getting richer at other’s expense. Now if I’m sounding like a leftist, that’s in part because the largely Protestant Christian right basically sold out and is now at the point where any language urging the Common Good is assumed to be Marxist.

The fury of corporatist conservatives over the use to tariffs to protect and increase American jobs was illustrative. Tariffs are part of the foundation of this country and once was a primary source of government revenue. The Republican Party was founded in large part to protect American industry and wages from foreign competition by was of tariffs.

Yet the critiques of tariffs are both conflicting and ignorant. No, taxes cannot cause inflation. No, it is not necessarily paid by the customer because foreign businesses and governments may opt take less profit in order to retain market share.

It’s interesting that people who claim to be “Originalists” are so ignorant of this aspect of our nation’s history.

Because Christian conservatives have become skeptical of charity, it has largely been taken over by the left and turned into a massive vehicle for self-dealing. One of the key points of Pope Leo’s encyclical was pointing out that government welfare programs are immoral. Paying someone not to work deprives them of the value of labor, and often leads them to despair, addiction and crime.

It should also be clear that the Common Good is not limitless, it is bounded by Christian moral teaching, so arguments that it amounts to collectivism are either insincere or ignorant. The point of the exercise is to re-center American culture and political discussion to place more considerations above legalism and economics, which is how it used to be.