Communitarianism - Academic Analysis

Somebody removed all references to the ACL from the wikipedia page on communitarianism! I just re posted myself and the Anti Communitarian Manifesto under "opposition." We were on that page for years, all the older copies of that page had a direct link to the ACL. We have the only existing, published anti thesis against communitarianism and we were removed from the opposition category! We've also gained a lot more academic recognition since we first published. It looks like our argument is just TOO CREDIBLE to be allowed in the non debates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism#Opposition

It's been a very strange year. One thing I've noticed a lot more lately is the number of law firms showing up at our websites. After I published the articles about our local WISE ones and their enlightened god, it seemed to me I was being steadily scrutinized. It hasn't stopped either.

But, I never really concern myself with the issue of libel or "equal time" since I've always posted more of the comms side than my own. I only use direct sources in my articles, and I never say anything about the comms that they haven't said first. My journalism training was old school. I operate under the assumption that I can print anything I want about anyone as long as it's true. As the non Zionist gatekeeper of my media empire, I also make the calls on what to print since I'm the publisher and owner, and I have no advertisers I kowtow to. Of course this also means I often go without basic life essentials and could eventually starve to death because of my principles, but I'd rather die free than live forever in servitude to my inferiors.

The ACL, like my blog, uses mostly all direct links to source docs. The facts are always better than anything I could make up anyway. But I also think the blatant truth about the globalists is what stops people from commenting about what I write, because a lot of people are convinced that if they maintain anonymous silence they will be protected from the global communitarian program. I've been told more than once by family members and former friends that if I get arrested and shot it will be my own fault! Land of the free and home of the brave... what a joke.

Found an old revived thread about Cass Sunstein's position as Obama's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Czar and did a search for "Cass Sunstein Communitarianism". This was the first return:

COMMUNITARIANISM
http://www.novelguide.com/a/discover/eamc_02/eamc_02_00539.html

Communitarianism is a political philosophy that emphasizes the good society's need for strong bonds of community, civic virtue, solidarities of CITIZENSHIP, and public deliberation about moral issues. It generally offers its vision as an alternative to contemporary LIBERALISM, criticizing liberals for overly emphasizing doctrines of individual autonomy at the expense of nurturing the social allegiances that give depth and substance to an individual's identity. Communitarians hark back to the traditional republican political theory which crucially taught that democratic freedom is accomplished not so much by leaving persons alone as by fostering the virtue it takes to govern according to the common good rather than self-interest.

As a matter of CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION, communitarians object to prevailing legal trends that insist government must be neutral as among the competing views and values of citizens. For instance, in FIRST AMENDMENT cases, the DOCTRINE of content neutrality means that government cannot regulate speech merely because it judges the subject matter of the speech to be unimportant, unworthy, or imminently dangerous. But communitarians argue that the lofty purposes of the First Amendment are trivialized when the public interest in FREEDOM OF SPEECH about commerce or sex is equated with the public interest in free speech about politics. For communitarians, freedom of speech is basic precisely because open, democratic government is impossible without it. The same heightened public importance is absent when courts analyze COMMERCIAL SPEECH or sexual speech and courts go too far, argue communitarians, when they read the First Amendment as if its purpose were to protect the individual's personal interest in self-expression. To interpret the First Amendment as if the Framers were neutral as between the importance in a democracy of free speech about politics and free speech about the price of commercial products is to trivialize free speech and to misread the Constitution as exalting protection of individual self-expression into a sovereign, absolute value.

Many communitarians also object to interpreting the FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT DUE PROCESS clause as granting implicit constitutional status to a RIGHT OF PRIVACY, asthe Supreme Court did in ROE V. WADE (1973) and subsequent cases protecting a woman's right to choose ABORTION. The same purported right of privacy is at stake in cases involving state regulation of SEXUAL ORIENTATION and assisted suicide (or the RIGHT TO DIE). The problem communitarians have with the privacy cases is not necessarily with the results reached but with the legal reasoning that insists constitutional analysis must bracket or put aside any substantive moral discussion of the public good at stake when individuals make private choices. In regard to abortion in particular, communitarians thus would prefer to reframe the issue along lines suggested by Justice RUTH BADER GINSBURG, who has argued that abortion regulations should be analyzed in reference to legal principles prohibiting SEX DISCRIMINATION as a violation of democracy's commitment to equal respect for all persons.

Communitarians also distinguish between two senses of citizenship implicit in the Constitution. One is the liberal view of citizens as individuals who enjoy the protection of legal rights against the state. The other is a stronger, republican vision of citizens who enjoy the legal status of participating in democratic self-governance and the rights and responsibilities of public service. This participatory notion of citizenship stands behind the constitutional status of TRIAL BY JURY of Article III and the Sixth Amendment's stipulation that criminal juries must be chosen from the district within a state where the crime occurred. The battle to amend the Constitution to protect the so-called jury of the "vicinage" or community affected by the crime, communitarians point out, was waged along civic republican lines and shows a continuing commitment among many in the Founding era to preserve opportunities for local communities, through the jury system, to participate in shaping governing principles of law. Likewise, the SECOND AMENDMENT embodies a philosophy of localism insofar as it protects state militias and the right to bear arms in them against the dangers of a single, standing national army. Historically, communitarians have also defended the constitutionality of the military draft (as in the SELECTIVE SERVICE ACTS) by stressing the Framers' commitment to the civic duty and public service obligations of democratic citizens.

When it comes to issues involving the state and religion, communitarians more readily accept the liberal view that RELIGIOUS LIBERTY should be the same everywhere in the United States, protected by federal courts against local, majoritarian preferences. For instance, communitarians' view of open and egalitarian communities premised on participatory opportunities for all leads them to accept the leading Supreme Court cases prohibiting public SCHOOL PRAYERS, which rest on the principle that public schools best educate children to be democratic citizens when they teach children both to respect RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY and to share civic ties despite those religious divisions.

Finally, communitarians balk at the increasing judicialization of politics, a process whereby resolution of core issues about justice and liberty is removed from the power of the people and entrusted to unelected federal judges. The result is dimunition of democracy and the disempowerment of citizens and their representatives. Communitarians concede that individual rights sometimes trump majority power in our constitutional government and that courts therefore need to enforce constitutional guarantees even against the contrary will of political majorities. But communitarians believe that a better balance can be struck between the rights-based liberalism that controls constitutional interpretation currently and the older, civic republican ideals of the Framers, ideals that stressed public duty as well as private rights and that praised participation in self-governing communities, rather than the protection of individual against community, as the key to political liberty.

JEFFREY ABRAMSON
(2000)
Bibliography

ABRAMSON, JEFFREY 1994 We, the Jury: The Jury System and the Ideal of Democracy. New York: Basic Books.

ETZIONI, AMITAI, ed. 1995 New Communitarian Thinking: Persons, Virtues, Institutions, and Communities. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

——, ed. 1998 The Essential Communitarian Reader. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefeld.

GLENDON, MARY ANN 1991 Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: Free Press.

SANDEL, MICHAEL J. 1996 Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

SMITH, ROGERS M. 1997 Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.

SUNSTEIN, CASS R. 1999 One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism and the Supreme Court. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

TAM, HENRY BENEDICT 1998 Communitarianism: A New Agenda for Politics and Citizenship. New York: New York University Press.

TUSHNET, MARK V. 1999 Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
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