GOD BLESS THE CRUCIBLE:

How and Why American Communism Failed: One historian’s about-face on the Communist record (Ronald Radosh, Aug 02, 2024, The Bulwark)

WHAT MAURICE ISSERMAN HAS ACCOMPLISHED in this well-written and superb history of the American Communist Party is a fresh assessment that will force many who have previously studied the party to revise some views. Fellow-traveler historians rejected any critical views of the party’s role, and argued that Communists valiantly fought to expand American freedom and dismissed the accusations of espionage against party members as unwarranted McCarthyite attacks. Even the historian Eric Foner argued that “the tiny Communist Party hardly posed a threat to American security” and that its members were guilty of “nothing more than holding unpopular beliefs and engaging in totally legitimate political activities.” Isserman has put an end to the argument of those who still believe in the Communist Party’s total innocence.

In contrast, the anti-Communist liberal Sidney Hook famously wrote first in a 1950 article in the New York Times titled “Heresy, Yes—But Conspiracy, No,” later expanded into a book by the same title, that the CPUSA was a conspiracy on behalf of the Soviet Union under Stalin and hence its members could not be judged by the standards used to discuss arguments made by advocates of other doctrines. The Communist teacher, for example, was not expressing a heretical idea; he was under Communist Party discipline and was in fact advocating for revolution and subservience to policies of the Soviet Union, thus was not engaging in ideas that could be freely debated. Even those who had no connection with espionage, in Hook’s eyes, were part of the conspiracy.

Isserman establishes that in fact, many American Communists struggled to wage a good fight for things like full civil rights for black Americans at a moment when others either gave it mere lip service or supported Jim Crow laws. Yet these same Communists who often made sacrifices to expand American democracy would, when instructed, betray their own country and become spies for the Soviet Union.

In fact, the party frequently put aside its principles—egalitarian, revolutionary, or otherwise—for the sake of political expediency. During World War II, the party was so loyal to the Roosevelt administration that it gave its tacit support to the internment of Japanese Americans, even though American Communists of Japanese descent were among those rounded up and imprisoned there. Similarly, the CPUSA approved of the Justice Department’s successful prosecution of a group of Trotskyist leaders of the Teamsters Union in Minnesota under the Smith Act, which criminalized advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government by force and violence, and later cheered any government crackdown against anti-war groups. The Trotskyists, unlike the CPUSA, viewed the American war effort as an imperialist act of aggression. Ironically, during the postwar Red Scare, major CPUSA leaders were convicted under the same law.

THE RULE OF LAW REQUIRES LAWS:

Looking at Loper Bright More Broadly (Jim Harper, 7/31/24, AEIdeas)

Loper Bright restored courts’ authority to determine the law, as opposed to giving agencies the power to decide what their authorizing statutes mean. This, Lyons rightly says, will pose challenges to “FCC initiatives that capitalized on ambiguous language to accomplish the agency’s policy objectives.”

He’s right, and it is amazing to observe that net neutrality regulation—the law governing the provision of internet service—has been a political ping-pong ball. It has absurdly changed (or threatened to change) with each change of political control in the White House. In what kind of banana republic does the law change simply with the election of one candidate or another? That is no “rule of law” country.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS ONE TRUE LOVE:

What Is Love? A Philosopher Explains It’s Not A Choice Or A Feeling − It’s A Practice (Edith Gwendolyn Nally, Aug 1, 2024, Discover)

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato thought that love might cause feelings like attraction and pleasure, which are out of your control. But these feelings are less important than the loving relationships you choose to form as a result: lifelong bonds between people who help one another change and grow into their best selves.

Similarly, Plato’s student Aristotle claimed that, while relationships built on feelings like pleasure are common, they’re less good for humankind than relationships built on goodwill and shared virtues. This is because Aristotle thought relationships built on feelings last only as long as the feelings last. […]

Plato and Aristotle both thought that love is more than a feeling. It’s a bond between people who admire one another and therefore choose to support one another over time.

Maybe, then, love isn’t totally out of your control.

A RELIGION OF FORM, NOT SUBSTANCE:

Nineteenth Century French Catholics’ Challenge to Integralism (Jennifer Conner, 2023, Hillsdale Forum)

But not all nineteenth century Catholics felt that liberalism, and the tolerance it brought with it, was getting in the way of the common good. For these Catholics, liberal policies were the guarantors of the Church’s freedom, and a free Church ultimately brought about the common good. Freedom of the Church was a major concern in restoration France. The Concordat signed by Napoleon was still in effect, making Church officials salaried employees of the state and obliging clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the French state. Historic Church lands were still in the possession of the state and the state monopolized education. The Church and state seemed to be working closely together, but it was hindering the Church.

In the newspaper L’Avenir, Henri Lacordaire argued that the Church needed “to rid itself of all solidarity with a power [the French state] which was not animated by [the Church’s] spirit, and to seek the exercise of the freedoms promised to every citizen.” Lacordaire argued that the French state was not acting in consonance with the Church’s best interests. Critically, his proposed solution is not immediately conforming the state to serve the Church’s interests but rather granting proper freedoms for every citizen. In his view, the state ought to allow the Church to function freely and fulfill its mission. This approach hearkens back to Augustine’s claims in City of God that the task of the state is to maintain peace so that the Church can function. This is very different from Vermeule’s integralist model. Rather than an elite religious group enforcing very particular moral standards from the top of the government, the state would promote tolerance and allow the Church to educate the citizenry and care for their souls. Only then would the people be virtuous, and when their virtuous interests were represented by their government, the laws would become more virtuous in turn, and serve the common good.

In Lacordaire’s view, as long as the state had, in principle, the power to suppress individual rights for the purposes of promoting Catholic ends, it also had the power to oppress the Church. The French state seemed to benefit the Church by bankrolling its officials, but the salaries came with strings attached, including state interference in Catholic education. Lacordaire took umbrage with this particular infringement and, with the help of Lamennais and Montalembert, opened an unsanctioned Catholic school for boys in Paris. Shortly after its opening, state officials came to close the school and seize the building. Lacordaire was forced to send the boys home and he only barely retained the building by claiming it as his residence and pointing to his sleeping mat in the corner of the classroom.

The solution, for Lacordaire, was not a return to an integrated Catholic monarchy, but to promote the separation of Church and state. The Church, he argued, “always had the words reason and liberty on her lips when the inalienable rights of the human race were threatened.” Lacordaire might have been inclined to agree with Joseph Ratzinger’s later explanation of liberty as “having to do with being given a home.” It was through the Church that an individual could reach his true home and true liberty, and in order to fully participate in the Church — to receive a Catholic education, for example — the state ought to adopt a policy of tolerance. Thus there are two kinds of “liberty” at play here: the one is the theological liberty of membership in the Church, and the other is a sort of political tolerance, or willingness to allow a political regime to remain agnostic on certain questions, at least temporarily.

Crucially—here Lacordaire’s liberalism differs from a kind of libertarianism which admits no vision of a common good—the separation of Church and state does not mean that religious values must always remain absent from the law. Ultimately, once individual souls have been gathered into the Church, their moral interests will be represented in popular government and therefore the positive laws of the state will accord more closely with morality. This is a process to be undertaken and it relies upon the conversion of souls; it is not a top-down fix predicated upon an all-knowing religious elite at the top of government foisting their views upon the hoi polloi.

When Lacordaire took Alexander de Tocqueville’s vacant seat in the Académie Francaise, an American reporter remarked that it was strange to see “a man so thoroughly imbued with the worship of the Catholic religion defend, before the world…liberty and equality.” As Lacordaire took the seat dressed in full Dominican habit — he had helped refound the Order of Preachers in France after its abolition during the Revolution — he saw no contradiction. At his induction, he delivered a powerful address affirming the consistency of sincere faith with tolerance, proclaiming his wish to “die a repentant religious and an unrepentant liberal.”