What is a Political Fusionist?

There never seems to be an end to the unfamiliar terms associated with studying political communitarianism. This is a real obstacle for Americans choosing to learn more about their new system of governance and the new laws that uphold the system. The main problem remains that so few writers will write anything about it. It's just one of those terms that Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton can throw out there as if we are all just supposed to somehow know what it is.

Is communitarianism the FUSION between communism and capitalism?

Since my ACL work has come under attack by American Counter Revolutionary Terry Hayfield (and his weird little group of borglike drones calling themselves Fusionists at leftrightunite.com), I've spent a few hours reading up on the fusion theory that united the Libertarians with the Conservatives after WWII. It appears that fusionism is the arranged marriage between communism and radical Right Christianity, all brought to us courtesy of "ex" comunist Fred Meyer and his clone William Kristol.

Here's a few sources I found to begin my studies into yet another convoluted idea that merges the left with the right and leads us all into the communitarian synthesis. (Is there any angle the world government planners missed?)

1. The New Fusionism, by Joseph Bottum
Copyright (c) 2005 First Things (June/July 2005).
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/daed.2007.136.4.5

2."A Radical Economics? Capitalism and the Quest for Community"
Saturday, Nov 17, 2006,by Allan Carlson, Ph.D.
Lecture for The Spring Leadership Conference Intercollegiate Studies Institute Indianapolis, IN 15-16 April 2005
http://www.profam.org/docs/acc/thc.acc.050415.rad.eco.htm

"“Fusionism,” many pundits say, defines modern American conservatism. The “fusionist” model sees cultural traditionalists devoted to family, community, and heritage fused ideologically to free-marketeers and free traders, forming a vibrant intellectual and political coalition. To understand this “fusionist” paradigm, its creators would have us envision traditionalist man-of-letters Russell Kirk rowing along with libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises in a two-man scull, exhibiting one purpose and showing mutually grateful and admiring smiles.

"Beneath “fusionism” lies the deeper assumption that both cultural traditionalism and market economies are in some way natural. Traditional culture, this theory has it, rests on the innate human bonds of family, kin, and neighboring, and reflects the hard lessons of human experience. For its part, the market economy expresses a “spontaneous order” also derived from human nature; enter here Adam Smith’s “bartering savage,” that primitive a fellow always seeking a good trade.

"And so, the “fusionist” Conservative Canon includes von Mises’ book, Human Action, alongside Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. It includes economist Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom alongside Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, our subject today."

4.http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.807/article_detail.asp

5.http://www.mises.org/story/2099

6. http://www.libertypost.net/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=47839&Disp=230&Trace=on

Now I finally understand WHY the final Hegelian "conflict" is going to be between Libertarians and Communitarians, and how Ron Paul's candidacy will help bring us to the final communitarian-libertarian synthesis.

On another separate but similar vein, why would Anthony Sutton write about the Hegelian Dialectic and the bogus left v right idea without ONCE telling us the NAME of the final synthesis? Just as Hayfield and his mindless followers insist I am a disinformation specialist because I don't identify (with?) the Marxist idea of Permanent Revolution, so too could I insist he is disinformation because he doesn't identify communitarianism as the ultimate synthesis.

Clearly Americans are NOT supposed to ever know what a communitarian society is. We can only accept it as inevitable. Now I see why every "expose" from Prison Planet to Daneen Peterson omits the ONE term that would TIE IT ALL together. Shhhh...

[begin quoted article]

Antony Sutton on "Left" versus "Right" and the Hegelian dialectic in American politics

From Alex Jone's Prison Planet, http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_sutton.html

Anthony Sutton July 9 2003 (this date is a bit odd since Sutton died in 2002)

How can there exist a common objective when members [of The Order of Skull and Bones] are apparently acting in opposition to one another?

Probably the most difficult task in this work will be to get across to the reader what is really an elementary observation: that the objective of The Order is neither "left" nor "right." "Left" and "right" are artificial devicces to bring about change, and the extremes of political left and political right are vital elements in a process of controlled change.

The answer to this seeming political puzzle lies in Hegelian logic. Remember that both Marx and Hitler, the extremes of "left" and "right" presented as textbook enemies, evolved out of the same philosophical system: Hegelianism. That brings screams of intellectual anguish from Marxists and Nazis, but is well known to any student of political systems.

The dialectical process did not originate with Marx as Marxists claim, but with Fichte and Hegel in late 18th and early 19th century Germany. In the dialectical process a clash of opposites brings about a synthesis. For example, a clash of political left and political right brings about another political system, a synthesis of the two, niether left nor right. This conflict of opposites is essential to bring about change. Today this process can be identified in the literature of the Trilateral Commission where "change" is promoted and "conflict management" is termed the means to bring about this change.

In the Hegelian system conflict is essential. Furthermore, for Hegel and systems based on Hegel, the State is absolute. The State requires complete obedience from the individual citizen. An individual does not exist for himself in these so-called organic systems but only to perform a role in the operation of the State...

So who or what is the State? Obviously it's a self-appointed elite. It is interesting that Fichte, who developed these ideas before Hegel, was a freemason, almost certainly Illuminati, and certainly was promoted by the Illuminati. For example, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Abaris in the Illuminati code) pushed Fichte for an appointment at Jena University.

Furthermore, the Illuminati principle that the end justifies the means, a principle that Quigley scores as immoral and used by both The Group [Millner / Rhodes Round Table] and The Order, is rooted in Hegel.

...Most of us believe the State exists to serve the individual, not vice versa.

The Order believes the opposite to most of us. That is crucial to understanding what they are about. So any discussion between left and right, while essential to promote the change, is never allowed to develop into a discussion along the lines of Jeffersonian democracy, i.e., the best government is least government. The discussion and the funding is always towards more state power, use of state power and away from individual rights. So it doesn't matter from the viewpoint of The Order whether it is termed left, right, Democratic, Republican, secular or religious - so long as the discussion is kept within the framework of the State and the power of the State.

This is the common feature between the seemingly dissimilar positions taken by members - they have a higher common objective in which clash of ideas is essential.

...

The operational history of The Order can only be understood within a framework of the Hegelian dialectic process. Quite simply this is the notion that conflict creates history.

From this axiom it follows that controlled conflict can create a predetermined history. for example: When the Trilateral Commission discusses "managed conflict", as it does extensively in its literature, the Commission implies the managed use of conflict for long run predetermined ends - not for the mere random exercise of manipulative control to solve a problem.

The dialectic takes this Trilateral "managed conflict" process one step further. In Hegelian terms, an existing force (the thesis) generates a counterforce (the antithesis). Conflict between the two forces results in the forming of a synthesis. Then the process starts all over again. Thesis vs. antithesis results in synthesis.
...

For Hegelians, the State is almighty, and seen as "the march of God on earth." Indeed, a state religion.

...

We trace the extraordinary Skull and Bones influence in a major Hegelian conflict: Naziism vs. Communism. Skull and Bones members were in the dominant decision-making positions -- Bush, Harriman, Stimson, Lovett, and so on -- all Bonesmen, and instrumental in guiding the conflict through use of "right" and "left." They financed and encouraged the growths of both philosophies and controlled the outcome to a significant extent. This was aided by the "reductionist" division in science, the opposite of historical "wholeness." By dividing science and learning into narrower and narrower segments, it became easier to control the whole throught the parts.

In education, the Dewey system was initiated and promoted by Skull and Bones members. Dewey was an ardent statist, and a believer in the Hegelian idea that the child exists to be trained to serve the State. This requires suppression of individualist tendencies and a careful spoon-feeding of approved knowledge.

...

This manipulation of "left" and "right" on the domestic front is duplicated in the international field where "left" and "right" political structures are artificially constructed and collapsed in the drive for a one-world synthesis.

College textbooks present war and revolution as more or less accidental results of conflicting forces. The decay of political negotiation into physical conflict comes about, according to these books, after valiant efforts to avoid war. Unfortunately, this is nonsense. War is always a deliberate creative act by individuals.

Western textbooks also have gigantic gaps. For example, after World War II the Tribunals set up to investigate Nazi war criminals were careful to censor any materials recording Western assistance to Hitler. By the same token, Western textbooks on Soviet economic development omit any description of the economic and financial aid given to the 1917 Revolution and subsequent economic development by Western firms and banks.

Revolution is always recorded as a spontaneous event by the politically or economically deprived against an autocratic state. Never in Western textbooks will you find the evidence that revolutions need finance and the source of the finance in many cases traces back to Wall Street.

Consequently it can be argued that our Western history is every bit as distorted, censored, and largely useless as that of Hitler's Germany or the soviet Union or Communist China. No western foundation will award grants to investigate such topics, few Western academics can "survive" by researching such theses and certainly no major publisher will easily accept manuscripts reflecting such arguments.

[end quoted article]

GerTee Prototype - A YouTube Video

Is the HPV Vaccine killing American girls?

Judicial Watch Uncovers New FDA Records Detailing Deaths in 1,824 Adverse Reaction Reports Related to HPV Vaccine

http://judicialwatch.org/judicial-watch-uncovers-new-fda-records-detailing-deaths-1-824-adverse-reaction-reports-related-hpv-

More related information from:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=15040366&dopt=AbstractPlus

Vaccination and other altruistic medical treatments: should autonomy or communitarianism prevail?
Pywell S.

Faculty of Law, University of Hertfordshire, UK.

"The publication of a report into a case where an organ donor's constraints on the race of potential recipients raises questions about whether respect for autonomy or communitiarianism should prevail in altruistic medical procedures. This article briefly reviews how autonomy and communitarianism are balanced in cadaveric and live organ donation, bone marrow donation, gamete donation, blood donation and vaccination. It criticizes vaccination policy for ostensibly respecting patient autonomy yet in practice compromising that autonomy in various ways. Vaccination is properly viewed as an altruistic medical procedure because some vaccines are of more good to society than to the vaccinee, who runs associated health risks. The conclusion is that there is a spectrum of attitudes to the value of autonomy, depending principally upon the invasiveness of the procedure. In most cases the autonomy-communitarianism balance is satisfactory, but this is not so in respect of cadaveric organ donation and vaccination. The article proposes that cadaveric organ donation should be governed by the communitarian law of well-publicised presumed consent. It proposes two alternatives for vaccination: that vaccination should be compulsory or, preferably, that procedures be modified so that parents have real autonomy in their decisions whether to vaccinate their children."

PMID: 15040366 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Local news station confirms barium in chemtrails

Our friend James has spent years studying health-related subjects. When we lived in Seattle he introduced us to several "controversial" areas of of research. Almost everything he gave me I discarded as "unuseable." One by one, I began looking at the issues he brought to my attention, and not suprisingly, they were all, as it turned out, very important areas that I eventually discovered elsewhere. Weird how we never want to listen to the people we know best. So, this blogpost is dedicated to James, offered with all the humbleness in my heart.

P.S. Jer, remember Jim making such a fuss about this all the time and making us look up as they crisscrossed Seattle skies? Check out the comment regarding this expose of chemtrailse by

oishiiloops Show Hide Marked as spam

"i just called the news station because they missed a valuable peice of information -

""Chronic barium intoxication disrupts sulphated proteoglycan synthesis: a hypothesis for the origins of multiple sclerosis.""

From peeklib at YouTube: posted November 10, 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okB-489l6MI

Dave Hodges, Arizona Constitution Party-plagiarizer

The Director of the Arizona Constitution Party is a fraud. Not only has he plagiarized my research and writing about communitarian law, he took it one step further last night after I emailed him and asked him to explain how we came up with the exact same conclusions.

One of my articles at the old ACL was called "What is Communitarian Law," it said:

"This new law circumvents national law via a program of "balancing,"

Here's the link to Dave's article at Freedom's Phoenix:
http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Editorial-Page.htm?InfoNo=011695

He opens with a graph that includes this:

"This new legal system circumvents, or reinvents, national law via a program of "balancing""

So, here's what I wrote to him last night:

Dear Dave Hodges,
Please tell me how you ended up with the same research I have posted at the ACL under communitarian law: http://nord.twu.net/acl/commlaw.html. I was not aware that anyone else was doing the same research as I am, and I would love to share sources. As you know most Americans insist communitarian law doesn't exist (see my discussions on including the law at talk wikipedia under communitarianism). Ask Daneen Peterson about my work on EU and NAU law when you interview her this Sunday. Interesting too is how your article follows the exact line of thought I presented in my Jan 2006 article on CAFTA, the EU and Communitarian Law at http://www.newswithviews.com/Raapana/niki.htm. We're obviously on the same page and share many of the same sources. I'm curious how you reached your conclusions.

Cordially,
Niki Raapana
Anti-Communitarian League

About an hour after I emailed him, a brand new member at leftrightunite.com left a cryptic comment on my profile. (It's still there.) I sent him a message asking if he was harassing me, and he replied "Define harassment," and pasted in 2 links to Christian researchers writing about Hegel. I checked his profile after I read the links. bush_is_a_moonie claims to be a man named Dale from Phoenix, Arizona. Hmmm. His only friend is, gee, a member of the Constitution Party. So then a little while later I went back to his article and somebody had posted a comment. I opened the link and, what do you know.. it was supposedly from me!

Comment by: Tent Lady Party: None Send Email
Entered on: 2007-03-19 10:03:58
Dave, this article is fantastic. It's wonderful to read how others grasp the horrendous implications of the new law and what it means to Americans. Thank you! I'm sorry it took me so long to find it. Please stop by the ACL when you have a chance, I think you'll find a lot of material there that you may be able to use in your future articles about communitarian law and policies.

http://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Read-Comments.htm?InfoNo=011695

I just began using the "handle" Tent Lady after I finished nikiraapana.com a couple months ago, and I changed my blog name to Tent Lady from niki r just last week! So even if I had written him an email last March it would NOT have been signed Tent Lady. I vaguely remember writing this to somebody, probably Nancy Levant after I found her work at sierratimes.com.

So here's a guy with zero original research anywhere online who apparently just somehow knows all kinds of things that it took other researchers years to study and compile. He gives us 2 references for his article and cannot explain where he got any of the other information. I'm guessing there are other writers who will find his knowledge fascinatingly similar to their work.

Definition of Plagiarize- Websters Online- Main Entry:

pla·gia·rize

Pronunciation:

\ˈplā-jə-ˌrīz also -jē-ə-\

Function:

verb

Inflected Form(s):

pla·gia·rized; pla·gia·riz·ing

Etymology:

plagiary

Date:

1716

transitive verb : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source intransitive verb : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

— pla·gia·riz·er noun

From the U.S. Copyright office: Can I Use Someone Else’s Work? Can Someone Else Use Mine? http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html#howmuch

"Uploading or downloading works protected by copyright without the authority of the copyright owner is an infringement of the copyright owner's exclusive rights of reproduction and/or distribution. Anyone found to have infringed a copyrighted work may be liable for statutory damages up to $30,000 for each work infringed and, if willful infringement is proven by the copyright owner, that amount may be increased up to $150,000 for each work infringed. In addition, an infringer of a work may also be liable for the attorney's fees incurred by the copyright owner to enforce his or her rights."

"Whether or not a particular work is being made available under the authority of the copyright owner is a question of fact. But since any original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium (including a computer file) is protected by federal copyright law upon creation, in the absence of clear information to the contrary, most works may be assumed to be protected by federal copyright law."

Copy of Dave's article below:

The Loss of the American Constitution: Constitutional Law vs. Communitarian Law (Part Two)

Communitarian Law, also known as "acquis communautaire", is being implemented by regional and local governments, including the United States, affiliated with the emerging global government (e.g., Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), European Union (EU), North American Union (NAU), etc.). This new legal system circumvents, or reinvents, national law via a program of "balancing" the old with laws with the new system of justice in a process referred to as "harmonizing". This new Communitarian legal system is often implemented by a small group of self-appointed, elite decision-makers who achieve consensus, not by voting. This Communitarian system is neither democratic nor transparent.

The development of Communitarian law of the European Community (i.e., the EU) has been largely molded by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In the landmark case of Van Gend en Loos in 1963, the ECJ ruled that the European Community is bound by Communitarian, not national law, as the court stated, "This constitutes a new legal order of international law for the benefit of which the states have limited their sovereign rights albeit within limited fields." Essentially, this decision gave international treaty precedence when treaty principles conflict with national law. This is precisely what the United States agreed to when CAFTA was passed in June of 2005. CAFTA is illegal because it champions Communitarian law at the expense of what is supposed to be our supreme law of the land, the United States Constitution. Therefore, every Congressman and Senator who signed CAFTA is guilty of treason because the provisions of CAFTA supersede American administrative law as well as United States Constitutional law (e.g., the provisions of CAFTA's Codex and CANAMEX, etc).

In summarizing the recent court ruling which reaffirmed the supremacy of Communitarian Law, within the European Union, over previously sovereign national law, professor Ján Mazák, President of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic, stated that several precedents were set forth by a 2004 court ruling which established the supremacy of international Communitarian law over nation-state legal systems through the establishment of the following set of principles:

1. "Legally binding acts of the European Communities and of the European Union (EU) shall have precedence over laws of the Slovak Republic (Authors note: This also applies to all European nations).
2. The primary rule is that the national courts of member states are obliged to apply directly to those communitarian standards which fulfill the communitarian conditions of the immediate applicability.
3. The duty of the national courts, and other public authorities, to apply preferentially the applicable Communitarian rules prior to the incompatible national rules means that the national courts in case of such a conflict always have to apply the Communitarian rules and at the same time they have not to apply or not to take into consideration the national regulation which is incompatible with these rules". (1)

Private individuals, under the Communitarian system of law have rights. However, unlike the American Constitution, individual rights are not granted by God, nor are they inalienable. Under Communitarian Law, individual rights are granted by government so long as it is in the common interest to do so. Inalienable rights, granted by God, can never be taken away by government. However, if government can bestow individual liberties, it can just as easily take them away! This is the fundamental danger facing all Americans as we move headlong into this emerging, Communitarian system of justice through our continued participation in CAFTA and the NAU.

EU Communitarian laws pretend to blend individual liberties along with the "safety" of the community. This is based on the exact same premise as the Military Commissions Act, the Homeland Security Act and the Patriot Acts. The similarities with EU Communitarianism are striking. Despite the fact that there is a new wave of American legislation which is paralleling the Communitarian based legislation being implemented across the Pond, most Americans refuse to see the similarities because between the EU's slide into a Communitarian controlled region and what is happening in America under CAFTA and the NAU. Americans simply do not want to believe that our political leaders would ever circumvent the Constitution. However, Americans should pause and ask themselves how constitutional is it when Communitarian law never defines WHO should decide what is in the best interest of the community? Also, exactly who, or what, constitutes the "community" is not clear, either. Is the "community" the new regional state of Canada, Mexico and the United States (i.e., NAU)? Could it be the member nations of CAFTA? Is it the United Nations? The definitive answer is not clear. With the continued advocating of massive guest worker programs, which will conceivably bring millions of foreign workers to America, and the continued exodus of American manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, it is safe to say that the community that will be protected by the new Communitarianism will not be the American middle class.

The United States is witnessing the supplanting of our national sovereignty with massive regional governmental overlays which are being implemented in almost total secrecy and whose ultimate impact cannot fully be measured at this time. However, there is one thing that you can bet on, when something is done with this much secrecy; it cannot be good for somebody. And we, you and I, are more than likely that somebody!

When did Congress give President Bush the authority to place the United States into a regional government (NAU)? If the NAU is so good for Americans, then why are the meetings held in secret? Where is the media coverage and subsequent outcry from traditional supporters of the American Constitution? Why aren't these nation-altering trade agreements, based upon Communitarian rule, front page news in this country? Why does CNN's Lou Dobbs continue to be the lone media voice in the night covering these critical issues? Where are the Fox News and CNN legal scholars explaining what these Communitarian based trade and regionalized governmental agreements mean for the United States and the future of her citizens? The NAU agreement becomes finalized and will be fully implemented by the end of 2007!

What is increasingly clear is that the decision makers, for the "free trade agreements" based on Communitarian law, are beyond the reach of the American public as they are never elected. This shadowy group is very much intent on rendering the United States Constitution into a state of total obsolescence and replacing it with the Communitarian legal doctrines emanating out of the European Union.

The Europeans seem to be much more aware of what is befalling their nations than are their American counterparts. At the polls, the Europeans (e.g., the Dutch and the French) are overwhelmingly rejecting the EU arrangement! Sadly, Americans do not even begin to understand what we are in the process of losing. American ignorance will continue to be bliss until Joe Six Pack awakens to a society where he is working for far less and under a far different set of circumstances including the present ability to protest.

Philosophical arguments which serve to lessen the absolute power of American civil liberties are beginning to surface in this country. For example, in a very clever twist of the facts, many constitutional scholars now claim the Bill of Rights was constructed as a communitarian-based document in an attempt to neuter our civil liberties. For example, famed sociologist, Amatai Etzioni, insists the 2nd Amendment was written with a "communitarian clause." Therefore, according to the self-appointed spokesperson for Communitarian's in the United States, Etzioni states that your right to bear arms is dependent upon some elite group which will decide what is in the best interest of the community. (2) And thanks to the United States Supreme Court and the Kelo decision, your 5th Amendment right to own property is contingent upon your municipal leaders not being desirous of your property and what it could mean to a politically connected developer or a politician's desire to increase tax revenues through the conversion of your property to a bigger money-maker (e.g., resort hotels, condominiums, etc). After all, to do so, would result in the betterment of the "community". To strip private property owners of their right to own and control their personal property in the name of what is best for the community is a classic communitarian concept. And the overwhelming majority of the mayors and city councils, 209 of them to be exact, have fully embraced this Communitarian notion of property rights. In later articles, I will explain how these Communitarian policies are being ushered in by your mayor under the banners of "Smart Growth", "General Plan Amendments", "2020 Growth Plan" and "Sustainable Development".

In Arizona, voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 207 which prevents municipalities from seizing private property and bestowing the property to another private interest. The mayors and city councils from the Arizona League of Cites and Towns employed every piece of misinformation designed to fool the voters into defeating the measure. However, Arizona, in a victory for individual liberties, approved the measure by a 2 to 1 margin. I fear that this may be a short-lived victory as mayors and city councils are quickly deciphering the measure in an attempt to, once again, defeat the will of the people in the courts which are increasingly using "community interests" as the basis for many of their decisions. Arizona's Proposition 207, and Arizona's cities opposition to it, is a classic case of Communitarian law vs. Constitutional law.

Parts one and two have provided the data which demonstrates how the American Constitution is being neutralized and supplanted by Communitarian law. This, of course, leaves the average American defenseless against their government. Now it is time to get personal. Part three will begin to examine the winners and losers of the Communitarian trade and governmental overlay agreements and what they will likely mean to you and your family.

An Amero for your thoughts?

References

(1) Presentation by Dr Jan Mazak, President of the Slovak Constitutional Court, October 21, 2004,
http://www.us-rs.si/pcceu/index.php?flash=2&sv_path=589,743.
Retrieved May 1, 2006.

(2) Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society. New York: Touchstone, 1993.

++++++++

Here's a Nancy Levant article which may be a partial source for Dave's plagiarized piece: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=18642

Speaking of Nancy Levant.. what the heck happened to her? We haven't heard from her in months. Please contact me if you have any news on how she's doing. Nancy is a lot like me, she gave up nearly everything she had to research and write for America... and got nothing in return. Our sacrifices make what Dave Hodges has done even more disgusting.

GovernAmerica.com-interview

My interview with Vyzygoth should be available at his site on Monday. http://www.vyzygoth.com/

Another well-informed radio host, our friend Darren Weeks, invited me back on his show. Listen in at GovernAmerica on Nov 12 or 13th. www.governamerica.com.

Is Hillary Clinton a Communitarian?

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." --Hillary Clinton at Boxer fundraiser, 6/29/04

(http://www.aapsonline.org/newsletters/nov07.php)

Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is introducing the communitarian synthesis to Americans. Here's some of my initial research tonight... I'm going to have to write an article on this now.

"The word she kept coming back to was “partnerships.” She described an array of different social entities — individuals, the federal government, insurance companies, doctors and hospitals — coming together and exercising shared responsibility for creating a better system."

"But Clinton, at her most hopeful moments, is a communitarian. When she’s asked to describe a system that works, she describes diverse people coming together around a big table to reach a consensus."

" But the Clinton plan does have the weaknesses of the communitarian approach. She creates a magic circle of companies, providers, government entities, all interlocked in a system to provide health security. But there will still be forces outside the magic circle that will be adapting and innovating in ways that might upset the plan." Hillary Clinton, From Revolution to Evolution, by David Brooks, Sept 2007. http://screwsubwalls.blogspot.com/2007/09/hillary-clinton-from-revolution-to.html

"But then she seems to imply she's not surprised that's the case down South, but given the "quality," "openness" and "communitarianism" of Iowa she is surprised that's the case in Iowa."

Quoting Clinton directly:
""I think Iowa poses a special burden, or a special obstacle to me because when you look at the numbers, how can Iowa be ranked with Mississippi? That's not what I see. That's not the quality. That's not the communitarianism, that's not the openness I see in Iowa."" http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2007/10/what-is-hillary.html

One response in the comments to the above post:
"Posted by: James Danley | Oct 23, 2007 4:44:37 PM

""communitarianism"???? WTH?
They really need to stop making up new words. There are a lot of people who haven't mastered their, they're and there yet. Communitarianism? Come on."

And here's a long discussion of what Hillary "means" from: http://race42008.com/2007/10/26/%E2%80%9Clet%E2%80%99s-talk-about-communitarianism%E2%80%9D/

And Johnathan Martin's blog:http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/1007/Hillarys_Mississippi_comments.html

See also:
Security and Opportunity for the Twenty-first Century, by Hillary Rodham Clinton
From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007 http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20071101faessay86601/hillary-rodham-clinton/
security-and-opportunity-for-the-twenty-first-century.html

Here's Etzioni explaining what she means by her above article: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2299520/22988412

and from the Hoover Institution: http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3585126.html

"They called themselves "New Democrats," and much of their intellectual inspiration came from a school of political theory called communitarianism. Communitarians argued that man fundamentally is not a rights-bearing, property-seeking individual, but a social being who flourishes in stable associations and communities. Communitarians criticized both liberals for placing too much faith in bureaucracy and conservatives for stressing the power of the marketplace; they claimed that bureaucracy and the marketplace together had displaced the community as the locus of American life.

"In the communitarians' view, 19th-century America offered the ideal model of community, with an active citizenry working locally to address shared concerns. Late 20th-century America, however, had witnessed the growth of big government and big business, which served to isolate and atomize Americans. The weakening of families and local community institutions, the communitarians warned, was beginning to erode fundamental elements of the American way of life.

"According to the communitarians, the growth of bureaucracy, the instability of marketplace relationships, and an explosion of self-interested behavior -- increasing litigiousness is just one indicator -- all signaled a decline of the responsibility to community that is the essence of citizenship. Communitarians reminded us that it is civil society, not the marketplace or the bureaucracy, in which Americans interact and flourish. And it is civil society, they proclaimed, in which America's increasingly inaudible moral voice lies, for here is where the institutions that shape moral character are to be formed."

Are there any other communitarian candidates in 2008?

In the words of the guru Amitai Etzioni, Bush's Senior Communitarian advisor, at http://aladinrc.wrlc.org/bitstream/1961/4030/1/Democrats+represented+by+Communitarians.doc.:

"If the current lineup holds, the Democrats will be represented by a communitarian if Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama becomes the presidential candidate. Hillary’s communitarian leanings have been long known. They are especially well spelled out in her book It Takes A Village. She also delivered the keynote address at the 1996 meeting of the Communitarian Network, and met frequently with communitarian thinkers, especially William Galston.

"Barack Obama showed great familiarity with communitarian ideas and thinkers during a meeting at the home of Susan Ness and Larry Schneider. However, given that this was a private meeting, I considered it inapposite to quote what he said. Luckily, at least for communitarianism, his new book The Audacity of Hope, lays out his communitarian leanings in clear and strong terms:

If we Americans are individualistic at heart, if we instinctively chafe against a past of tribal allegiances, traditions, customs, and cases, it would be a mistake to assume that this is all we are. Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends. We value the imperatives of family and the cross-generational obligations that family implies.

We value community, the neighborliness that expresses itself through raising the bar or coaching the soccer team. We value patriotism and the obligations of citizenship, a sense of duty and sacrifice on behalf of our nation. We value a faith in something bigger than ourselves, whether that something expresses itself in formal religion or ethical precepts. And we value the constellation of behaviors that express our mutual regard for another: honesty, fairness, humility, kindness, courtesy, and compassion.

In every society (and in every individual), these twin strands- the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity- are in tension, and it has been one of the blessings of America that the circumstances of our nation’s birth allowed us to negotiate these tensions better than most. (Obama, p. 55)

There are many other communitarian passages in the book. The special importance of this one is that it shows that Obama is what is varyingly called a neo or liberal or responsive communitarian. These communitarians (among which I count myself) differ from East Asian or authoritarian communitarians in that the latter see community as trumping individual rights in the name of the greater whole, while neo communitarians see a tension between the common good and rights—which needs to be worked out case by case. But neither trumps the other conclusively. In effect, on this key point the parallelism between the Obama text and the communitarian platform is truly remarkable and very welcome indeed. The response communitarian platform, excerpted here, is very much in accord with Obama on a number of issues:

"A communitarian perspective recognizes that the preservation of individual liberty depends on the active maintenance of the institutions of civil society where citizens learn respect for others as well as self-respect; where we acquire a lively sense of our personal and civic responsibilities, along with an appreciation of our own rights and the rights of others; where we develop the skills of self-government as well as the habit of governing ourselves, and learn to serve others– not just self."

From the midwest populists at http://www.midwest-populistamerica.com/articles/threats-to-civil-liberties-arising-from-virginia-tech/:

"Modern efforts to criminalize mental dysfunction have a long history dating back to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany and are typically part of a broader right-wing agenda of oppression and euthanasia. But in the United States, the primary advocates of criminalization are the forcible disarmament cult and the Communitarian movement, members of which universally (and often vehemently) claim to be leftists and/or “progressives.”

"The Communitarians have argued for at least two decades that diagnosis of mental illness should instantly terminate not only all one’s civil rights but also strip one of all privileges as well, driver’s licenses included, after which the victim of such determination could then theoretically earn back the abolished rights and privileges in carefully supervised increments. Toward this end the Communitarians — who despite their leftist disguise and innocuous-sounding name are radical Skinnerian fascists of the harshest sort — are demanding creation of a national registry of mental patients. Deliberately established and maintained as a powerfully oppressive tool of social control, this roster of official pariahdom would include the names of anyone now or ever in any form of mental health treatment, regardless of the relative mildness or severity of the condition for which they are being treated. (Google “communitarians” and scroll at will for additional information.)

"Despite its huge contempt for the Constitution, the Communitarian faction is but one small portion of the forcible disarmament cult, but it is probably disproportionately powerful. Its intellectual prowess is considerable, and it often assumes a behind-the-scenes leadership role, focusing on the development of strategy, tactics and ideology. Another venue of profound Communitarian influence is the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. It was the Communitarians who provided the Clintons and their cronies with the ideological justification for the Democratic Party’s abandonment of New Deal principles and its subsequent wholesale betrayal of the working class. The Communitarians’ grasp of Orwellian principles is also very evident in the present-day effort to redefine forcible disarmament as “gun safety” and the present tactic of concealing disarmament schemes behind apparently friendly but patently false gestures toward firearms owners."

Checked out Hillary's offical page on Health Care Reform. Not a word about communitarianism anywhere on her site. Has anyone in the media asked her to define it yet? Americans are going to elect another communitarian president without a clue what it is. What a horrible joke.

My interview with Vyzygoth went very well. It will be available at his site on Nov 12. I'll be a guest on Darren Weeks this weekend. I'll post the time tomorrow.

In the meantime, we could all ponder this:

"Over the past few years, however, the Bushes and Clintons have made a kind of peace, with Clinton and the elder Bush raising $1 billion for tsunami relief in Asia and with Clinton generally muting his criticism of the current Bush White House. As these two formidable families continue to find more common ground, there are echoes not only of Hillary Rodham Clinton's communitarian book, It Takes a Village, but also of George H. W. Bush's "a thousand points of light" campaign to promote volunteerism during his presidency. And there is another connection-to Jimmy Carter's post-presidential work of fighting disease and poverty." Sometimes, It Only Takes a Bit of Goodwill By Kenneth T. Walsh, US News and World Report, Posted 9/24/06 (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/060924/2week.htm)

And this:
"And what is the opposite of libertarianism? Libertarians would say fascism. But in the American political context, it is something infinitely milder that calls itself communitarianism. The term is not as familiar, and communitarians are far less organized as a movement than libertarians, ironically enough. But in general communitarians emphasize society rather than the individual and believe that group responsibilities (to family, community, nation, the globe) should trump individual rights." Libertarians Rising, by Michael Kinsley, Time Magazine, Oct 18,2007 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1673265,00.html)