Fox News He was not very popular among his fans during the 2020 elections. Therefore, he tried to win back viewers with new productions. In a nod to a return to core values, host Greg Gutfeld cited a clearly speaking poll on the April episode: Most Americans still want “lower taxes and tighter government.”
In the course of the conversation, collaborator Jonathan Morris, a former Catholic priest, was asked to give the audience what he called a “small lesson” on the topic of “dependency.”
Interestingly, Gutfeld, who was generally an intelligent and cunning observer of politics and culture, seemed unfamiliar with the term introduced by Morris. “Wonderful! Repeat it,” he asked.
Morris went on to explain that the principle of subsidiarity meant that interventions aimed at changing and improving the human condition should generally be taken at the level of society closest to where they would have the greatest impact.
The idea developed as part of the Catholic Social Doctrine, which states that “what individuals can achieve on their own initiative and effort should not be taken away by a higher authority.” As an organizational principle, it means that civil matters must be dealt with at the lower, smaller, or less central administrative level. Where possible, cultural and political decisions should be made locally and not by a remote central authority.
The pinnacle of an indispensable civic principle
To the right of the large political center, conservatives and classical liberals tend to hold the principle of subsidiarity high. Even before the European Enlightenment, the medieval Catholic Church managed to limit the power of absolute monarchs. Charlemagne, king of the Franks and emperor of the West in the early ninth century, ended up sharing power with the Vatican and many other national kingdoms, principalities, free cities, and ecclesiastical states. Countless organizations such as cathedrals, monasteries, guilds, colleges, and hospitals, also operated below the political level throughout the Middle Ages.
In all likelihood, the Anglo-American colonists reached the pinnacle of the principle of subsidiarity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the American Republic, formed after 1776, decentralized entities became a bulwark from the restriction of government and personal liberty.
Alexis de Tocqueville, who came from France in 1831, made a fundamental analysis of early American freedom, to make a broad examination of “Democracy in America”. He believed that a truly pluralistic and democratic society had developed in the American colonies over the course of three centuries.
On the subject of dependency, de Tocqueville writes:
“Americans of all ages, all attitudes in life and all manner of disposition, always form associations. There are not only business and industrial associations in which all participate, but other associations of a thousand different kinds: religious, moral, earnest, useless, very general, and very limited, and so great and so small. Americans gather to party, to establish seminaries, to build churches, to distribute books, and to send missionaries to antithesis. Thus are hospitals, prisons, and schools. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or spread a feeling of encouraging a great example, they form a union. At any rate, at the head of every new institution, where in France you will find the government or in England a provincial lord, you will surely find in the United States an assembly.”
The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution supports this spirit of decentralization by ensuring that “the powers which are not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor which are prohibited to the States, are reserved to the States or the people respectively.” The legacy of the “rule of law” also guarantees important freedoms for civil society below the level of the nation-state.
In short, the principle of subsidiarity was central to America’s emergence as the freest and most prosperous nation in modern history.
The Marxist Challenge to Civil Society
De Tocqueville, who considered himself a center-left man from a nineteenth-century French viewpoint, completed the final volume of Democracy in America in 1840. His work remains one of the last to fully endorse freedom and pluralism. creation world.
In 1848, opposition to the principle of subsidiarity began to develop with the publication of the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For the next 170 years, the Marxists tried aggressively to take control of the world’s most important institutions. In 2021, they control the vast narrative of national governments from Beijing to Washington.
The left, generally understood as those who favor some form of socialism, does not view subordination favorably. American progressives see decentralization as an obstacle to the development of the modern welfare state.
In 1976, recognizing the creeping challenge of cultural Marxism, American scholars Peter Berger and Richard John Newhouse published a short book called to empower people. Berger and Newhouse have argued that “mediation structures,” such as the family, neighborhood, church, and voluntary civic associations, are crucial institutions, and weakening them could spell disaster for American democracy. Their fears have been fully justified by the emergence of a awakened and dominant Marxist culture that has divided America against itself and threatens the very fabric of the nation.
Today, schools, universities, civil service agencies, the media, entertainment companies, major publishing houses, charities, international corporations, many churches, and even courts have succumbed to the current version of central Marxist ideology. The former liberal-conservative custodians of our mediation structures have generally abandoned reclaiming control and adopted a politics of consensus.
Time for truth and action
In the late 1970s, William E. Simon, businessman, philanthropist, and the 63rd US Secretary of the Treasury, said that America has grasped the “time of truth” and “the time for action.” Simon’s direct appeal to the people contributed to the victory of Ronald Reagan and the tremendous spirit of renewal in America and the West.
In the current context, the dependency principle faces another major challenge. Although Marx spoke of the abstract and post-revolutionary extinction of the state, Marxist leaders rarely transcended the totalitarian temptation of the so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
In the months leading up to the 2020 election, Joe Biden pledged to become the most progressive president in US history. This was seen by a number of Americans as a legitimate reason to support him by any means necessary.
As a result, the expected Marxist drive to isolate, divide, eradicate and punish political opponents is well underway in the United States. Again, the traditional loyalties of family, neighborhood, legion, church, and voluntary associations will be discouraged in favor of independent relations with abstract federal bureaucracies and impersonal welfare state agencies.
Deprived of the “mediating structures” necessary for human flourishing, ordinary people will increasingly disengage from the virtues of trust and reciprocity that are essential to a well-ordered civic and family life.
This will be the future of our children in the realms of “awakening”, places where a comprehensive system of ideologies is imposed by central education authorities and political consensus must be ensured from coercion and fraud; Unsustainable for the most part, but remarkably difficult to break down.
William Brooks is a Canadian contributing writer to the Epoch Times from Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is currently the editor of “The Civil Conversation” for the Canadian “Civitas Society”.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Epoch Times.
Article in English: Marxists view ‘dependency’ dimly.
