This “NYT article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/europe/18iht-women.html on Germany is a useful book-end to the discussion on diversity of European models etc.
NEUÖTTING, GERMANY — Manuela Maier was branded a bad mother. A Rabenmutter, or raven mother, after the black bird that pushes chicks out of the nest. She was ostracized by other mothers, berated by neighbors and family, and screamed at in a local store.
She felt ostracized after signing up her 9-year-old for lunch and afternoon classess — and then returning to work. “I was told: ‘Why do you have children if you can’t take care of them?’” she said. Her crime? Signing up her 9-year-old son when the local primary school first offered lunch and afternoon classes last autumn — and returning to work. … Ten years into the 21st century, most schools in Germany still end at lunchtime, a tradition that dates back nearly 250 years. … Ten years into the 21st century, most schools in Germany still end at lunchtime, a tradition that dates back nearly 250 years. … For several mothers, their great-grandmothers’ maxim, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” — children, kitchen, church — holds true, even if, as Mr. Haugeneder says, “increasingly it is a way of life people can’t afford.”
As the article makes clear, this norm is weakening. But as is equally apparent, there are large swathes of Europe that are quite conservative, and their conservatism has often been supported precisely by the forms of intrusive state regulation that American conservatives get upset about. Not only school hours but shop opening hours, aspects of the welfare state etc have helped support the traditional division of labour between the sexes in Germany, in which women have tended to stay at home, while men go out to work.
American conservatives like “Ross Douthat”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/21/buergerlich/#more-6233 often like to portray Europe as a wasteland populated by deracinated monads, whose traditional communities have been squashed by the overwhelming power of the nanny-state. In fact, the German nanny-state has done more to support these communities than to squash them.
Even five years ago, all-day schooling in Neuötting seemed unthinkable, Mayor Peter Haugeneder said. There is a crucifix in his office, in every classroom of the Max Fellermeier school and even in the Spanish-themed restaurant run by the gay butcher.
Bavarian state law effectively mandates that all schoolrooms have crucifixes on their walls, representing the majority culture – Judge Roy Moore eat yer heart out. I’ve often thought that Douthat would actually be much happier as a supporter of the Bavarian CSU than an American style conservative – but there isn’t much room for non-market oriented conservatism in this country (unlike Europe, where there is a considerably greater diversity of conservative movements and parties).
{ 107 comments }
alex 01.19.10 at 6:36 pm
Bavaria, huh? Well, we all know what started there back in ’23.
Jake 01.19.10 at 6:40 pm
The article is rather repetitive.
The Raven 01.19.10 at 6:45 pm
Every now & again libertarians start making sense. Whoa!
mds 01.19.10 at 7:45 pm
Oh, just wait a few minutes, and the feeling goes away.
I smell a situational comedy setup. I’d call it “Deracinated Monads.”
Still, it is interesting to see the consistency in this kind of conservatism, as opposed to the “family values” crowd in the US that opposes things like meals for poor preschoolers. And I’d be willing to take the risk on more social democracy here, even so.
alex 01.19.10 at 8:30 pm
Bavaria – rural Bavaria, especially – isn’t Germany.
Also not convinced by crucifices as proxy for religion.
Look at church attendance rates, they’re low (even in Bavaria as a whole).
Omega Centauri 01.19.10 at 8:36 pm
Maybe this is the sort of thing that is needed to keep the country folk from rebelling against liberalism. At this point I’d easily pick Germany over the US.
Simeon 01.19.10 at 8:43 pm
I think the article as well as the comments come out of a certain ignorance, or at least narrowness of view. The schools run only until lunch time it is true, but they run for about 10.5 months per year.
Shorter days, longer year. There is no reason to believe that keeping children in school longer each day will do anything good. The rise in prescription drugs for our children for mental health issues is a result of children cooped up too long each day and then being over exposured to television and video games.
It is not progressive to keep the kids occupied while mommy and daddy earn enough for a fourth flat screen tv or a second trip to Disney Land this year.
Our long school days here in the grand US of A have produced less than stellar results.
Our culture seems to be about handing our children off to others, so that we can work more hours. These children see too many nannies and day care workers and not enough mothers and fathers.
We should be working toward a society where one parent can stay at home longer with a child. It should be considered a positive virtue to want to. And we should pass the laws to enable this, as society benefits; and we should understand that there is something wrong when it is impossible to do this because of financial pressures.
hix 01.19.10 at 8:51 pm
My mother had to suffer under that system, she worked part time. Was quite stressfull for her to get home as fast as possible to cook. The school lunches and afternoon classes offerend now are very low quality, due to a low budget and a lack of infrastructure. Theres just no infrastructure at schools to do more than go in at 8 am to learn and leave at 1pm. Grammar schools have mandatory afternoon classes now every day but no canteen.
“Every now & again libertarians start making sense. Whoa!”
No, the Bavarian school system is far better in line with their ideology. The market will take care of the canteen and afternoon classes, so let the government just do the most basic education!
JulesLt 01.19.10 at 8:52 pm
Some points about German life seem to be far more logical to me as an outsider – i.e. it seems sensible to stagger school, office and shopping hours – and that also seems to have reduced the affect of supermarkets.
i.e. that in families where both partners work 37.5 hr working weeks, in the kind of new build estates that are located away from traditional high streets, the only (food) shops that are open after work are supermarkets. Whereas the German approach means there are often a couple of hours after office work finishes in which to shop – and, at least within cities, it is generally possible to do the majority of your grocery shopping locally and on foot.
A more interesting question is whether there is something worth preserving out of this conservatism. I would be the last person to say that women should stay at home looking after the children, but it is concerning that we are reaching a point, in most European countries, where it is ceasing to be a choice, but a necessity – and to a degree this is another factor, along with falling family sizes, that has masked rising class inequality – our aspirations suit those of capital.
hix 01.19.10 at 9:20 pm
No, just forget that picture of German life. The vast majority does not life at some place where they walk to stores. Stores in walking areas are more likely to be high priced for some entertainment shopping or some fast shopping by those that life in the very expensive innner city flats arround them. Not representative. Most Food shopping is done at discount stores that are built US style with big parking lots and where almost everyone arrives by car.
Russell Arben Fox 01.19.10 at 9:50 pm
I’ve often thought that Douthat would actually be much happier as a supporter of the Bavarian CSU than an American style conservative – but there isn’t much room for non-market oriented conservatism in this country (unlike Europe, where there is a considerably greater diversity of conservative movements and parties).
This is a discussion I can remember Harry and I have, a long ways back, and of course you’ve brought it up a few times before yourself. It’s a point that warrants continual repeating though, or so I think: social democracy/Christian socialism is profoundly conservative, and in a very good way. Specifically, in a way that relates to JulesLt’s point above: by maintaining–through taxation and regulation, as necessary–a stable, dependable infrastructure of social and health services, many Western European states do more to make it possible for people inclined to pursue more “traditional” forms of life to be able to do so, rather than sacrificing their traditions to the demands to the work week and the marketplace.
Hix is, of course, also correct: the various sumptary laws which help hold many of these arrangements in place have fallen by the wayside in many parts of Germany, as elsewhere. But they haven’t disappeared entirely, and the point of the argument still holds.
hix 01.20.10 at 2:55 am
I dont think the largely car oriented discount stores that dominate German food retail have any problem with the opening hour regulations. On the contrary, the stores are relativly small and rely on a high labour utilisation. Aldi didnt even open on Sundays in the US for quite a while. They are far more typical German than butchers or general small food stores which can be found in many countries to a similar extend. So i fail to see any threat to traditional German lifestyle or sth like that. My problem was just the idear that Germans would do much food shopping by foot .
Considering the comment of Simeon: The German school system also does rather bad in international comparison tests. The nordics countries on the other hand do very good and they are very much oriented towards lots of subsiced childcare from an early age and full day schools which encourages both parents to work full time.
jeremy 01.20.10 at 3:35 am
russell, reading your link over at “in medias res,” i see we share a good many of the same sensibilities, although if you think there’s hope in attempting some kind of social democracy/christian socialism here in the states (at least on the federal level), i’d say you’re nuts. if you’re calling for genuine local action, sure, i’m with you.
Geoff Robinson 01.20.10 at 6:27 am
Peter Lindert’s work suggests that it was not until after WW2 that Catholic conservatives tried to compete with the left on social policy, before 1945 their social policy was a muddled anti-liberal corporatism often intermixed with old fashioned Jew baiting.
Phil 01.20.10 at 9:37 am
social democracy/Christian socialism is profoundly conservative, and in a very good way
Yes, up to a point – comments like Omega Centauri’s have me tearing my hair, because I’m pretty sure that large tracts of the ‘liberalism’ [s]he has in mind are nothing of the sort, in a European context. Upholding shorter working days and fair wages in the name of social solidarity is profoundly conservative – it’s conserving something that was eroded by the rise of capitalism. (Perhaps that’s ultimately what makes the US ‘different’ – it doesn’t have a pre-capitalist past. Possibly one or two other factors.)
But sometimes conservatism is just conservative. Last November the European Court ruled against mandatory crucifixes in schools, following a case brought by an Italian secularist. Virtually the whole spectrum of Italian politicians have reacted to the ban in terms which would put them way over on the Right in either Britain or the US – the main arguments are that the cross may be a Christian symbol but it should be respected as a central part of Italy’s national heritage, and (more ambitiously) that the cross isn’t a Christian symbol but a universal symbol of human equality and suffering. If you heard that kind of thing from a party leader in Britain, they wouldn’t stay party leader for very long.
Russell Arben Fox 01.20.10 at 12:53 pm
Jeremy,
If you think there’s hope in attempting some kind of social democracy/Christian socialism here in the states (at least on the federal level), I’d say you’re nuts. If you’re calling for genuine local action, sure, I’m with you.
I’ve more or less come to agree almost completely with this. I don’t deny the importance of welfare, civil rights, and other liberal/egalitarian legislation on the national level, as a way of setting a general foundation for all citizens to build their lives upon. But any real reform in the direction of popular democracy–with all its “conservative” implications–will almost certainly have to happen locally; the U.S. is too large, and too dependent upon corporations which use that size to their advantage, to articulate (and motivate voters on behalf of) a social ethos that can go from New England to the South to California and back again.
Phil,
Upholding shorter working days and fair wages in the name of social solidarity is profoundly conservative – it’s conserving something that was eroded by the rise of capitalism.
Very well said.
[Their] main arguments [were] that the cross may be a Christian symbol but it should be respected as a central part of Italy’s national heritage, and (more ambitiously) that the cross isn’t a Christian symbol but a universal symbol of human equality and suffering. If you heard that kind of thing from a party leader in Britain, they wouldn’t stay party leader for very long.
I don’t quite get your point here: is it that such arguments wouldn’t be accepted in Britain because they are too culturally conservative/communitarian (“national heritage” and all that), or because they are insufficiently so (“universal symbol,” etc.)? In the U.S., following Jeremy’s point above, I could see the first interpretation causing someone who so argued trouble in some “blue” metropolitan areas, while the second interpretation could haunt someone who made the argument in the parts of the South, Midwest, Great Plains and Southwest. Which is it in Britain (or would it be both there, also)?
Ingrid Robeyns 01.20.10 at 1:09 pm
Countries with welfare states that provide strong incentives for one parent (read: the mother) to stay home with the child and/or that provide significant negative incentives/hurdles for both parents to be able to hold jobs (not necessarily full time jobs), have some of the lowest fertility rates. In other words, for many (not all) women, this perspective is so unattractive that they prefer to be childless instead (Germany has in fact one of the lowest fertilityrates in Europe). If people who don’t want children don’t have children, then that is a very good thing (cultural pressures to reproduce are horrible imo), but it is sad if people who would like to have a family don’t have one because the welfare state doesn’t facilitate them and/or if the traditions make the price too pay too high for particular groups (as is the case in gender-conservative cultures).
I think most people flourish best if they can combine activities in different spheres of life, and full time caring can really drive a person nuts. According to UNICEF the happiest children in the world are the Dutch children, and the Dutch model is one with lots of part-time work – mostly for women but also for men (low in comparison to the percentage of part-time working Dutch mothers, but the highest if we compare with working-age men around the world).
Glen Tomkins 01.20.10 at 1:23 pm
The point that I take away from this is that it doesn’t seem necessary in Germany for both parents to work on the money economy for their households to succeed. Surely that is a great good thing, compared to the USA.
Sure, the downside is that the work of living that is done off the economy, at home, seems to go by default along old gender stereotypes. So work on breaking down the gender stereotypes, not on breaking down the wholly salutary theory and practice that both parents do not need to work for a paycheck, certainly not full-time or for their entire adult lives. That’s not progress.
Work can be stimulating and inherently rewarding, or the opposite, whether it’s work on the economy for a paycheck, or work at home. Everyone should be given the maximum freedom to find work that that is rewarding to them. That involves neither gender being cut off from either form of the total work of living, but it also involves not letting economic forces cut off everyone from the opportunities for rewarding work off the economy.
Phil 01.20.10 at 1:32 pm
Glen – you didn’t work as a nurse in the late 70s (in Britain), did you? Low probability, I know, but it’s an unusual name, and it’s going to bug me if I don’t ask.
ogmb 01.20.10 at 1:42 pm
When my friends ask me about Bavaria I just tell them it’s the Texas of Germany…
JoB 01.20.10 at 1:54 pm
Ingrid and Glen, you’re both right. It should be natural for children to be taken in public care in which case both parents can work but progress allows neither have to work. In the prevailing modern attitude people are still regarded half criminal if they put a kid in daycare whilst not actually doing something with that time. I’m sure kids are better off when exposed to a more diverse environment than the one they have at home.
Doug 01.20.10 at 2:28 pm
The German school year also features long vacations … two weeks here, three weeks there, another two somewhere else. It’s not the honking big summer vacation of the US, but for parents working full time, it adds up to a lot.
The difference that I found aggravating was the difference between enabling people to live in certain ways, and having the power of the state mandate that you live in certain ways.
Russell Arben Fox 01.20.10 at 3:16 pm
[I’m reposting this with the spelling changed, because Chris thinks that maybe my use of sozialism, correctly spelled, is blocking my responses.]
Jeremy,
If you think there’s hope in attempting some kind of sozial democracy/Christian sozialism here in the states (at least on the federal level), I’d say you’re nuts. If you’re calling for genuine local action, sure, I’m with you.
I’ve more or less come to agree almost completely with this. I don’t deny the importance of welfare, civil rights, and other liberal/egalitarian legislation on the national level, as a way of setting a general foundation for all citizens to build their lives upon. But any real reform in the direction of popular democracy—with all its “conservative†implications—will almost certainly have to happen locally; the U.S. is too large, and too dependent upon corporations which use that size to their advantage, to articulate (and motivate voters on behalf of) a sozial ethos that can go from New England to the South to California and back again.
Phil,
Upholding shorter working days and fair wages in the name of sozial solidarity is profoundly conservative – it’s conserving something that was eroded by the rise of capitalism.
Very well said.
[Their] main arguments [were] that the cross may be a Christian symbol but it should be respected as a central part of Italy’s national heritage, and (more ambitiously) that the cross isn’t a Christian symbol but a universal symbol of human equality and suffering. If you heard that kind of thing from a party leader in Britain, they wouldn’t stay party leader for very long.
I don’t quite get your point here: is it that such arguments wouldn’t be accepted in Britain because they are too culturally conservative/communitarian (“national heritage†and all that), or because they are insufficiently so (“universal symbol,†etc.)? In the U.S., following Jeremy’s point above, I could see the first interpretation causing someone who so argued trouble in some “blue†metropolitan areas, while the second interpretation could haunt someone who made the argument in the parts of the South, Midwest, Great Plains and Southwest. Which is it in Britain (or would it be both there, also)?
Russell Arben Fox 01.20.10 at 3:20 pm
The difference that I found aggravating was the difference between enabling people to live in certain ways, and having the power of the state mandate that you live in certain ways.
How exactly did you experience that difference, Doug? I’m curious in part because I’m not sure if you’re referring to some German policy that you felt crossed the line from empowering particular choices to restricting people to those same choices, or if you were comparing German policies to American policies, or what.
alex 01.20.10 at 4:28 pm
On the Italy/crucifix/Britain point, I think the main reason it would fail is that it’s such obviously laughable pandering bullshit, which stout-hearted English yeomen are only prepared to tolerate when used to argue for invading distant countries of which we know nothing.
Phil 01.20.10 at 5:01 pm
Russell – as alex said, the problem with the ‘universal symbol’ argument in Britain would just be that nobody would believe it was the *real* argument. (I can’t take it seriously myself.) The ‘national heritage’ argument is one that a lot of people here would agree with – and they’d have some historical justification, insofar as arguments about ‘heritage’ are ever really about history – but hardly anyone would want to make a fight of it, the major churches least of all. There’s an odd but genuine inclusiveness to British nationalism, which I think goes back partly to the abolitionist movement but mainly to the British Empire itself – benighted heathens they might be, but they were subjects of Her Majesty for all that.
mpowell 01.20.10 at 6:17 pm
Ingrid @ 16,
Is there anything wrong with Germany’s lower fertility rate? It seems like we could probably use fewer people on the planet, not more, and if they can come up with a way to do that without breaking their economy, maybe that’s actually a good thing. One oversimplified way of looking at the problem is that there are pros and cons of having kids and the state can adjust the extent to which the costs are borne by society until they get a socially desirable fertility rate. Just saying that more people who wants kids should have it made easier for them to be able to have them does not actually demonstrate a social injustice with Germany’s particular set up.
Walt 01.20.10 at 7:47 pm
In the future, you’ll be able to recognize Crooked Timber commenters because of their inability to spell sozialism.
JoB 01.20.10 at 8:19 pm
26- I guess there is nothing wrong with it if it is the outcome of a political consensus. If on the other hand it is the unintended outcome of a taboo subject, I don’t think it is OK.
Japan is maybe a better example. I don’t think the world’s a better place because many Japanese women avoid pregnancy to avoid poverty and/or lifelong dependence.
It would certainly be good to have less people on the globe. But well educated, affluent Westerners are probably not the best place to start, a.o. because they show the natural drop in fertility rates of a developed, egotistical non-socially conservative rich people.
Doug 01.20.10 at 8:20 pm
23: One of the continuing issues was when to shop for a family of five. Shopping hours are still nationally mandated, though some urban areas make more use of the flexibility available. Munich made the least use of any major metro area.
My employer moved from being a ten-minute bike ride from our home to being a near-hour U-bahn commute. So my typical day went: leave house by 8 to deliver kids by bicycle to two separate daycare (Kinderkrippe 1-3 yrs and Kindergarten 3-5 yrs) places, board U-bahn by 9 if all goes well, hit desk by 10. Thank goodness for a flexible employer. Getting everything done in 8 hours and taking no lunch break, that put me home at 7pm. Shopping was then available for one hour, at the cost of returning to sleeping kids. (To say nothing of not relieving my better half, who had had all the kids for some hours at that point.) For he, it was reversed: leave employer by 3:30 (again thank goodness for flexible employer) to pick up kids from daycare. That means — again assuming no lunch break and only 8 hours of stuff to do — start at 7:30, so leave house by 7 at the latest. Shopping is then theoretically available after picking kidlets up from daycare, but good luck doing that with three kids under five.
The upshot of that kind of schedule during the week is that all shopping is done on Saturday because national law mandates that stores are closed on Sunday. And the upshot of that is that any recreation you want to undertake is done on Sunday. Pushing very typical family activities into these time slots also results in significant deadweight losses of waiting in long lines nearly everywhere and sitting in serious traffic jams. So right there, you have the state mandating that you will fill your larder before 8pm, and (in effect) that you will take any recreation on Sunday. I hate to think what shift workers have to put up with.
Daycare is very seriously oversubscribed in Munich: for the public place in our neighborhood, there were 700 applications for 70 slots. (The system is full of absurdities, too: you can only register for a slot by going in person during one or two designated hours each week. Want to register in several different places? Visit each one, and usually the registration time is the same couple of hours everywhere. Isn’t that great for working families?) We got into a semi-socialist place (Arbeiterwohlfahrtorganisation) because the then-director wanted to have an internationalized group of children; she, too, had a huge binder of applications for a small-ish number of slots. Daycare might be good and plentiful and affordable somewhere in Germany, but I sure don’t know where. Lack of same means that it’s Kinder and Küche (they’re not so much with the Kirche, even in Bavaria) for somebody if there are kids involved.
I actually looked into the business of daycare a little bit, because the numbers seemed attractive. I mean, if 90 percent of demand is going unfilled, there’s gotta be some money to be made, right? Turns out that the bureaucratic hurdles to setting up a facility in Munich were huge. The University of Munich (enrollment ca. 50,000) needed two full years to set up a Kinderkrippe for children of staff. Two years! And how many places did this facility provide for the University’s staff? Twelve. That could keep the kids until 2pm. Effectively blocking daycare means mandating that family look after the kids.
Sorry this is so long, but the details tell the tale.
Doug 01.20.10 at 8:22 pm
23: Uh-oh. I seem to have used the forbidden word, and my comment is in moderation. It’s a long one. Maybe Henry will have a look and set it free…
piglet 01.20.10 at 9:18 pm
Remember the first rule of reading the NYT: never trust anything they write about Europe.
This “Raven mother” is an old old cliché. It is absurd to paint this as contemporary reality. Ok so they went deep into rural Bavaria to find somebody willing to make that kind of statement. They wouldn’t have found anybody in Munich (which is part of Bavaria after all). It is certainly true that organizing child care is a challenge for young German parents but that is also true in the US.
I agree with Henry’s general observation that European conservatism is in fact about “conservative” values whereas US conservatism revolves around totally unconservative capitalist ideology.
Russell Arben Fox 01.20.10 at 9:30 pm
#29: Doug, I will wait patiently…
bianca steele 01.20.10 at 9:49 pm
Edited:
Henry, you may be right about Ross Douthat. But I seem to remember reading, as a Harvard undergraduate he considered himself a Monarchist, if not an Ultramontanist outright, which AIUI is not an outcome wished by the Christian Soz’sts, and only moved to the left because he was persuaded his position was impractical and therefore irresponsible. How would he explain it to his Mom and Dad?
scathew 01.20.10 at 10:22 pm
American conservatives (I am a Yank, incidentally) don’t believe in government intervention only when it suits them. It’s also how they believe in “states rights” – they believe in them until some state like California makes too high fuel efficiency standards, legalizes marijuana, or allows euthanasia – then suddenly states rights don’t matter.
Ideological bents like “no market intervention” are just dogmatic jingoes to keep the troops in line. When it suits the oligarchy the rules are happily broken (remember, the bank bailouts came from conservatives originally, not Obama – but that’s long forgotten).
Political hypocrisies, both Republican and Democrat, are easily glossed over in Orwellian language and tribalist leanings. The “other side” is always the bad guys and the cause of all evil, even though increasingly neither looks very different, and neither can produce a coherent narrative. In the end as far as I’m concerned, it all looks like a slow but steady march toward totalitarianism.
Given how programmed from a young age we are to ignore the bi-partisan schlock that “America is the greatest country in the world”, not to mention our unquestioning worship of the confused mess that is the Christian bible (of which 95% of profess to follow), it’s no surprise that the blatant contradictions in policies are missed. We can say in one day that we want to bring the “light of democracy” to Iraq and the next day shun the Palestinians because they foolishly elected Hezbollah to represent them. Self delusion, or rather self-brainwashing, is the American way.
As a final note, though I am a raving liberal, I do believe that what you describe is also no surprise because in the end the crazy left and the crazy right come round circle – it’s all about power, control, and paranoia. Moreover, if any country has proven themselves to be such a mix, it’s Germany.
scathew 01.20.10 at 10:23 pm
PS: I will also note, laissez-faire is all great until porn, abortions, and drugs are involved, and then curiously market systems don’t work!
piglet 01.20.10 at 10:40 pm
“It would certainly be good to have less people on the globe. But well educated, affluent Westerners are probably not the best place to start”
Actually they are the best place to start since they are the ones who put most pressure on the planet.
I agree however that Scandinavia is a better model with respect to child care than Germany. Incidentally, I grew up in a Bavarian village that had a Kindergarten which all children attended from about age 3-6 (I believe this would be called preschool in US?). It has existed since the 1920s, of course church-run, and was a happy experience. This was a very conservative, traditional, catholic community. How could that be?
Most of the mothers were not in employment but their farm and garden workload in addition to housework and childcare (most men were full time employed and part time farmers, and the division of labor was traditional) made the Kindergarten a necessity.
Nowadays, there is a right to a subsidized Kindergarten place for all children in Germany. But it is true that most, as well as most schools, are only half day institutions. This is in fact a long time tradition that is hard to change. I definitely enjoyed not spending all afternoon in school. My mom, not so much. It would be worthwhile to study what historic accidents led to that outcome. The relationship between individual and state in Germany is more complex than most of you think. This may sound unlikely given the Nazi history but Germans do have strong reservations about the state looming too large in their lives. School uniforms as well as flag-waiving patriotism (pledge of allegiance and what-not) in school would be unacceptable to most and probably lead to revolts. Things like that also made the East German state look bad. It is interesting that the U.S. with all its anti-government rhetoric supports a school system that looks almost totalitarian from a German perspective.
The term “subsidiarity” is very important in German government theory. It means that “matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority” (wikipedia). This is not easy to explain but I have a feeling that Anglo-Americans would understand Germany better if they understood this principle (which btw is not the same as “states rights” or “small government”. For example, one reason why a certain public role for the churches is tolerated lies in the theory that the churches provide an ideological counterweight to state power (in the debate over the crucifix, it was pointed out that the Nazis were the first to remove the crucifix from schools). Theoretically I am all secularist but in practice I’m not so sure whether the American (or French) approach of strict separation isn’t actually working against secularism. You probably don’t even know this but German puplic schools offer church-sponsored religious education and Universities have departments of “theology”. Ouch! Yet German secularists don’t usually get worked up about this as much as American secularists may get worked up about a Christmas tree in a public place (which goes without saying are ubiquitous in Germany). And, as a die-hard atheist I have to say I miss church bells.
hix 01.21.10 at 12:44 am
Well , i do get worked up. And if the majority were not so brainwashed and uninformed about church power in Germany they would get worked up too )-:.
For example normal labour laws dont apply to employees at the many church run monopolies. Want to marry a second time? Say goodbye to your job.
piglet 01.21.10 at 1:40 am
Yeah, that is a scandal. Although I’m not sure whether this is different in the US. If a church fires you for not complying with its moral stipulations, could you sue for discrimination? Perhaps if the church is publicly subsidized. What I was saying however is that U.S. secularists tend to get worked up about largely symbolic issues that would hardly register in Germany and I question whether this isn’t counterproductive.
Jack Strocchi 01.21.10 at 2:03 am
alex@#1
Godwins Law violation. Immediate loss of argument. Fail
Jack Strocchi 01.21.10 at 2:10 am
Christian social democracy is the anti-thesis of post-modern liberalism.
Christianity provides corporal administration of the cultural sphere.
Social Democracy provides corporal administration of the economic sphere.
Once those sources of ideological nonsense have been neutered it is possible for normal working families to get on with the ordinary business of life.
Chancellor von Bismark realised this long ago but of course he could not be right about anything, could he?
piglet 01.21.10 at 2:47 am
You overreach a bit when you claim Bismarck for “christian social democracy”. One does wonder however what differentiates Bismarck from modern day US “conservatives”. Would knowing that social health insurance was introduced by a conservative statesman 130 years ago change the perception of GOP-voting Americans? I am surprised this fact is never ever mentioned here.
jeremy 01.21.10 at 3:28 am
russell: thanks for responding, and apparently somewhat agreeing. an interesting conversation would center around why it’s so hard for many communitarians (of all parties) to give up the dream of a strong, united, egalitarian federal/national community and start investing at more local levels. especially since a good portion of these people are usually the first to question tower-of-babel ambitions at the global scale. what is it about the nation-state that is so alluring? to me, it’s a clear artifice of convenience. i say let it stand if it must… but why build it stilts?
S. Turner 01.21.10 at 6:14 am
I’m heartened by the correct use of the term ‘conservative’ when referring to the practice of shunning mothers who go back to work. The practice of returning or going to work after a baby is shaped by the values of individual freedom and gender equality. These values are liberal. Conservatives value the good of the community and traditionally or what they sometimes see as biologically delineated relationships between males and females.
Lots of people typically described as liberal are actually economic socialists. Some economic socialists are socially liberal but some are conservative about social values.
It’s not just Americans that are mixed up about the meanings of these terms. It’s almost everyone these days. Not being able to use a word properly in a sentence. That was the test when I went to school of whether you understood the meaning of a word. If you failed the test, that did not give you a right to say the word had no clear meaning.
Doug 01.21.10 at 7:09 am
“what is it about the nation-state that is so alluring?”
Power.
alex 01.21.10 at 8:28 am
Jack @40, you took your time. In this case, however, I think you’d find on examination that it’s also relevant, which makes a difference.
JoB 01.21.10 at 8:39 am
I add my opposition to the notion of good Christian conservatism as to socio-economic stuff. I grew up in the midst of good rural Christian conservatism in Europe. It’s all about mediocrity & obedience & stuff (and how decadent modern culture is, and how ashamed we should be about, everything really).
37- that seems an attractive retort but surely you don’t want to associate our sustainability with poverty and being uneducated? No, zero growth in developed countries, coupled to contraction of natality in developing countries is a good path. And not only for the environment. Mainly for those that will have a chance of developing more rapidly.
Walt 01.21.10 at 9:44 am
Godwin’s Law violation? I haven’t been paying attention. Is it still 2003?
Ted 01.21.10 at 9:48 am
piglet
I dare say modern US conservatives would see Bismarck as kin on the issue of health care. After all, Bismarck’s health care legislation made health insurance for workers compulsory, but to be paid for by both the employer and employee; precisely the situation in the US of 2010.
Ted 01.21.10 at 9:52 am
Neither Christian Socialism nor Nordic Social Democracy is possible in modern secular multicultural societies such as the US, UK, and Australia.
Ted 01.21.10 at 9:54 am
Neither Christian Soc1al1sm nor Nordic Soc1al Democracy is possible in modern secular multicultural societies such as the US, UK, and Australia.
Doug 01.21.10 at 9:58 am
48: Where is the compulsory part of health insurance that conservatives are fighting for in the US in 2010? I’m sure not seeing it.
JoB 01.21.10 at 10:08 am
47: updated Godwin’s law – terminus is multicultural/politically correct/freedom of speech
derek 01.21.10 at 10:44 am
“Actually [well educated, affluent Westerners] are the best place to start [having less of] since they are the ones who put most pressure on the planet.”
Not if your goal is to have fewer, but more affluent, people on the planet. Sure, reducing the number of affluent people lets you pack more, but poorer, people on to the planet, for the same environmental impact. But the environmental impact won’t stay the same, because one thing we know even the poorest people can do is have children, so the effect of us all tightening our belts with the goal of sustaining a higher population is a yet higher population still, requiring yet more belt-tightening. That ends in poverty for people *and* catastrophe for the planetary environment.
john c. halasz 01.21.10 at 10:57 am
@41:
“Christian social democracy is the anti-thesis of post-modern liberalism.
Christianity provides corporal administration of the cultural sphere.
Social Democracy provides corporal administration of the economic sphere.
Once those sources of ideological nonsense have been neutered it is possible for normal working families to get on with the ordinary business of life.”
“corporal administration”- Isn’t that just Godwin’s Law in unconscious, inverted form?
Glen Tomkins 01.21.10 at 1:15 pm
Phil — Sadly, I can’t claim either to be a nurse (I’m just a doctor, so the nurses will tell you that I don’t actually work for a living), or a Briton, but I am descended from a Royal Navy deserter. The unusual spelling of the last name seems to have arisen from some remote ancestor being too lazy to keep writing that “h” and that “p” every time he had to sign his name.
There’s a pattern there. As to which pattern, laziness vs common sense — the jury’s still out.
scathew 01.21.10 at 2:48 pm
Godwin’s Law? Well, Godwin has a point, but we are talking about Germany here and their (strange) politics, so I think the conversation gets a pass.
As others have alluded to, Godwin’s Law is essentially a form of political correctness, which generally is not conducive to a free flow of ideas. Moreover as Western governments increasingly display totalitarian bents (usually in combination with strong conservative undercurrent), the comparison is nearly unavoidable. For instance, it is hard not to view the actions of the Bush administration in terms of societal militarization, use of torture, indefinite detention, suspension of habeas corpus, etc. without the analogy coming to mind (though “Orwellian” might be a better one).
In the end while certainly often overused and misused, since it is a strong example of where we don’t want to go, and certainly could go without diligent efforts, I believe it has its place at times and the dogmatic undercutting of its use by a simple law is probably ultimately unproductive.
I understand the desire not to lessen it’s meaning (I don’t think it has been lessened honestly, but I am not a Jew so perhaps I cannot comment), but 20 million Soviets died in Stalin’s purges, and no one suggests that we don’t compare to Stalanism or Communism (and certainly the term “Communist” is equally abused).
alex 01.21.10 at 2:57 pm
There are those who would say that the first Godwin is in the original article:
‘…their great-grandmothers’ maxim, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche ’
Hmm, where have I heard that phrase before? [Even if the writer gets it the wrong way round].
Russell Arben Fox 01.21.10 at 3:08 pm
Jeremy (and Doug),
What is it about the nation-state that is so alluring? To me, it’s a clear artifice of convenience. I say let it stand if it must… but why build it stilts?
Obviously, Doug is correct that the nation-state becomes a locus of communitarian thinking (as well as most other forms of political thinking, including liberal egalitarianism; the long and on-going debate about how Rawls does or does not fit his theory of justice to a world of national borders is just one example) because the governments of centralized national entities are the ones which, with few exceptions, having been wielding real political and economic power over the past three or more centuries. But that answer itself opens up others: why did self-identifying “national” entities with their governments end up with the power, as opposed to more regionalized or federated ones? Perhaps, as you say Jeremy, it’s just the artifice we historically ended up with, for any number of structural reasons, and so one might as well work with it. But I do think that the work of any number of scholars–David Miller, Benedict Anderson, Adrian Hastings, Anthony Smith, etc.–point towards some rather deep and pervasive reasons (mostly linguistic, but also ethnic and religious) why certain “power” community formulations historically obtained and continue to endure (“Japan” or “Mexico”–or, more controversially, “Quebec” or “Scotland”), and other, more local ones, haven’t. That’s not an excuse for saying that attempts to instantiate a strongly sozialized ethos always should be done nationally; as I said before, I’ve become convinced that they shouldn’t. But on the other hand, it’s not as though the nation-state is some obviously and always artificial arena within which attempts at building (or “conserving”) sozially informed practices and laws are on their face illegitimate.
Billikin 01.21.10 at 3:12 pm
“Ten years into the 21st century, most schools in Germany still end at lunchtime, a tradition that dates back nearly 250 years.”
Excellent idea!
What if we tried that for high drop out schools in the U. S.?
matsig 01.21.10 at 3:19 pm
Ted @49 & 50: I’ve been hearing this claim a lot, but I’ve never quite understood it. Sweden is (of course, being Swedish, I might be biased) normally considered a modern society, and it is most definitely a secular society. According to the latest census, some 10% of the population were born outside of Sweden, and roughly 25% have at least one parent who was born outside of Sweden, which I believe makes us a fairly multi-cultural society as well.
I must conclude, that either we’re not really as modern, secular and multi-cultural as we think ourselves, or we are not a Nordic Soc1al Democracy. Having met at least a couple of American liberals, I believe there might be something to the last claim, but still…
Since I’ve been hearing this claim quite a lot, I’m supposing there is some research behind it, could you provide me with some references? And preferably ones based on actual empirical research rather than purely theoretical stuff?
Russell Arben Fox 01.21.10 at 3:22 pm
Doug,
Where is the compulsory part of health insurance that conservatives are fighting for in the US in 2010? I’m sure not seeing it.
That’s a really interesting question, actually. I suppose the heart of any answer which will actually explain how things work in the U.S. has to begin with the identification many American libertarians (or economic libertarians, or the so-called “conservative” establishment which pushes such) have made between entreprenuers (the individual market operator) and the corporation. Big corporations are just more “business,” and “business” is the business of America and American freedom, etc., etc. So the Bismarkian–and arguably in some sense “socialist”–practice of making health insurance a structural feature of employment, with the health insurance industry aligning itself with employers, seems like a defense of the free market to many conservatives, when of course what it is is, in practice, the defense of a bunch of highly controlling local monopolies. (Under our current insurance plan, we had to drive two hours across the state to get to a doctor that could look at my daughter’s back to check her for MS, even though there are plenty of doctors who could have done it here in Wichita.)
So, in defending the status-quo, many conservatives and so-called libertarians are defending a kind of monopolistic market compulsion, and they’re mostly okay with that. So long as it isn’t the government doing it, they seem fine with it. (Of course, that ignores the Veterans Administration, Medicare, etc., but no one ever said these folks were coherent.)
Russell Arben Fox 01.21.10 at 3:23 pm
[Ack! I did it again! Trying once more…]
Doug,
Where is the compulsory part of health insurance that conservatives are fighting for in the US in 2010? I’m sure not seeing it.
That’s a really interesting question, actually. I suppose the heart of any answer which will actually explain how things work in the U.S. has to begin with the identification many American libertarians (or economic libertarians, or the so-called “conservative†establishment which pushes such) have made between entreprenuers (the individual market operator) and the corporation. Big corporations are just more “business,†and “business†is the business of America and American freedom, etc., etc. So the Bismarkian—and arguably in some sense “sozialistâ€â€”practice of making health insurance a structural feature of employment, with the health insurance industry aligning itself with employers, seems like a defense of the free market to many conservatives, when of course what it is, in practice, is the defense of a bunch of highly controlling local monopolies. (Under our current insurance plan, we had to drive two hours across the state to get to a doctor that could look at my daughter’s back to check her for MS, even though there are plenty of doctors who could have done it here in Wichita.)
So, in defending the status-quo, many conservatives and so-called libertarians are defending a kind of monopolistic market compulsion, and they’re mostly okay with that. So long as it isn’t the government doing it, they seem fine with it. (Of course, that ignores the Veterans Administration, Medicare, etc., but no one ever said these folks were coherent.)
JoB 01.21.10 at 3:33 pm
53- yes, I should have said that. Wealth and education are the best birth control there will ever be.
alex 01.21.10 at 3:35 pm
There’s still a ‘c’ in ‘Bismarck’, y’know.
Detlef 01.21.10 at 3:50 pm
@48 Ted wrote:
I dare say modern US conservatives would see Bismarck as kin on the issue of health care. After all, Bismarck’s health care legislation made health insurance for workers compulsory, but to be paid for by both the employer and employee; precisely the situation in the US of 2010.
Ohh?
Where is the compulsory part in the USA?
Not to mention a largely non-profit system highly regulated?
Wouldn´t they call that “socialism”? :)
@30 Doug wrote:
One of the continuing issues was when to shop for a family of five. Shopping hours are still nationally mandated, though some urban areas make more use of the flexibility available. Munich made the least use of any major metro area.
Correction.
Shopping hours are state mandated since 2006.
I believe Bavaria is (the only state?) still using the “old” federal shopping hour regulation.
The supermarket in my village near Heidelberg (state of Baden-Wuerttemberg) for example is open from 8 in the morning till midnight Monday to Saturday.
(Baden-Wuerttemberg is one of the “6×24” states. You can open your shop 24 hours 6 days from Monday to Saturday.)
ogmb 01.21.10 at 3:59 pm
alex@57 Hmm, where have I heard that phrase before?
Godwin’s Law = “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Kaiser Wilhelm II. approaches one”??
piglet 01.21.10 at 6:31 pm
Ted: “I dare say modern US conservatives would see Bismarck as kin on the issue of health care. After all, Bismarck’s health care legislation made health insurance for workers compulsory, but to be paid for by both the employer and employee; precisely the situation in the US of 2010.”
That is the one response I absolutely didn’t expect. Could you name a single US conservative/GOP figure who would even remotely entertain a Bismarckian reform? That would be exciting. Unfortunately you (and 61) are mistaken about the nature of Bismarckian health insurance. It is absolutely not comparable to the US status quo, on the contrary, it is way more progressive than anything that has been on the table in the U.S. this past year.
The Bismarckian health insurance system that is still in place in Germany with relatively few adaptations is based on universality, solidarity, and insurance mostly provided by public, non profit (but not directly governmental) entities. Does that looks like “the situation in the US of 2010” to anybody? It is financed through a payroll tax and, as an extra feature, covers spouse (if not employed) and underage children at zero extra cost.
There is also no aligning of the health insurance industry with employers. Under that system, employers pay contributions but they have nothing to do with the providers (there are minor exceptions – so-called Betriebskrankenkassen). Insurance is not tied to a job but rather to employment in general. The only significant problem is how to cover the self-employed (the unemployed, welfare recipients, and retired people are separately covered). In Bismarck’s time, the concern was obviously for dependent workers.
piglet 01.21.10 at 6:40 pm
In case it hasn’t come across, my point actually was this: U.S. conservatives are fighting health care reform by portraying it as a socialistic policy. Would it make a difference if the public were educated about the conservative origins of public health insurance? I am simply surprised that liberals don’t use this argument. Maybe it’s sheer ignorance, or perhaps mentioning Bismarck is avoided because it sounds German? I am genuinely curious for an explanation.
Doug 01.21.10 at 8:15 pm
66: Thanks, Detlef. That’s progress in the slow boring of a hard board that shouldn’t be there in the first place.
62/63: Indeed on the mini-monopolies, Russell. And plenty of employers either don’t offer health insurance or offer something woefully inadequate. Is there a conservative push to defend employer-based health insurance? I don’t read enough conservatives to really know…
bianca steele 01.21.10 at 8:37 pm
piglet@69
That’s a fascinating question. There are so many different kinds of conservatives in the US that it’s hard to say–evangelicals, defenders of the profit motive and the virtues of the business executive, “crunchy cons” who push locally grown produce and withdrawal from the dominant consumerist culture–but the thought that comes to mind first is that Jonah Goldberg already headed that one off at the pass.
bianca steele 01.21.10 at 8:44 pm
Getting back to Ingrid’s point about childcare: at the same time more highly paid men in the US have been married to highly educated women with their own careers, the number of hours worked by office workers at all levels has been increasing (and often not by the choice of the worker). Discussion of this point, in a political context, is often from a feminist perspective opposed to such an intense focus on work at the expense of family and personal life, and occasionally the opposite: a men’s-movement perspective focused on the terrible pressures that are placed on men who are required more than women are to prove themselves in the working world. The future Russell Fox proposes doesn’t seem that it would be especially appealing for the defenders of either perspective.
piglet 01.21.10 at 9:09 pm
“There are so many different kinds of conservatives in the US” – funny thing is, in the public discourse there is only one kind of “conservative” and that opposes health care reform. Again I am genuinely curious for an explanation and not for sarcasm (if that is what it is).
novakant 01.21.10 at 9:28 pm
Bavaria – aaaarrrrgh! Is there a Bavarian separatist movement I could join somewhere?
Or what do you call the process of a country disassociating itself fully and for good from a pesky region full of ignorant country bumpkins and corrupt gschaftlhubers – which is my real mid-term goal: Bavarians for Bavarians – but leave the rest of Germany well alone!
I propose some sort of West-Berlin type exclave status for the wonderful city of Munich which is full of hilarious gay people and they also make films as well as the best cars in the world there.
novakant 01.21.10 at 9:33 pm
I meant: “Bavaria for Bavarians!” of course – they drive me nuts …
bianca steele 01.21.10 at 9:38 pm
No sarcasm was intended, and I apologize if I was misunderstood.
This is not true on any level: in the public discourse, there is only one kind of “conservative” and that opposes health care reform.
In US politics, conservatives are opposed to what they think of as the liberal status quo, one way or another. Culturally, they are opposed to change–but not to change in centralized government institutions, rather to change in their own private ways of life (which are as diverse as their national origins).
“Business conservatives” see business as a tradition stretching back hundreds (if not thousands) of years, undermined by welfare-state thinking and 1960s-era social change. Religious conservatives look back to about the same, 1890s-1920s period and see a time when the US was supposedly run according to moral principles, and they were allowed to run their communities as they liked, whether their ancestors were “native” white Protestants or immigrants from Southern Europe or wherever. These people have little in common except opposition to what they feel to be the dominant political, social, and cultural trends–not their own culture, which they think is just great, but anything that seems to force them to change, or to take into account voices different from the ones their grandparents listened to. They don’t all want the same thing going forward (which is why the Republican party is most likely falling apart).
Some of them probably think, maybe for pragmatic reasons, that universal health care is a good idea–some of those might prefer not to call themselves conservatives, but I don’t see why not.
hix 01.21.10 at 10:09 pm
Welcome to German sub national nationalism in its ugliest form, the demonisation of some other region :-).
No, actually its not funny, just stupid.
Ted 01.21.10 at 10:36 pm
Much of the problem here is the imperialism of American misuse of the word ‘liberal’. While the rest of the world uses ‘liberal’ to mean individual negative freedom, and the opposite of socialism, Americans use it as a fig-leaf for soc1al1sm. So they have all these conceptual blockages and contradictions, as the attempt to unpack what a modern American conservative actually represents. You get everything and everybody from PJ O’Rourke to Pat Robertson classified as ‘conservative’ while soc1al1ists and campus speech-code stormtroopers are regarded as ‘liberals’. Go figure.
Jack Strocchi 01.22.10 at 1:31 am
john c. halasz@#55
I coined the term “corporal” to create an antithesis (or complement) to the term “liberal”. There is no generally accepted term in ideological discourse to denote the anti-thesis or complement to liberalism, a revealing failure in political theory. “Illiberal” or “authoritarian” are obviously inadequate and tendentious.
I suggest the term “corporalism” to denote social arrangements that facilitate institutional authority. Liberalism, by common consent, denotes social arrangements that facilitate individual autonomy.
Corporalism refers to the integrated organization rather than differentiated individuation. It obviously alludes to hierarchy and sanction, two fundamental aspects of social order.
The advantage of “corporalism” as a concept is that it covers the use of authoritative power across several domains of social interaction. A corporalist can consistently argue for drug prohibition, censorship, nationalisation, Tobin taxes, carbon taxes, closed borders , taxes on obesity etc
One does not have to be a Nazi to believe that individual autonomies are not doing a very good job.
engels 01.22.10 at 1:49 am
Taxes on obesity? What exactly do you have in mind?
engels 01.22.10 at 1:55 am
I mean, are we talking tax inspectors armed with weighing scales here?
Jack Strocchi 01.22.10 at 2:20 am
We already “tax” obese people by charging them higher health insurance and for two seats in airplanes. It would be a better idea to do this up-front to discourage the process from the on-set.
S. Turner 01.22.10 at 2:46 am
Re: “There is no generally accepted term in ideological discourse to denote the anti-thesis or complement to liberalism, a revealing failure in political theory. “Illiberal†or “authoritarian†are obviously inadequate and tendentious.”
What about ‘conservatism’? Liberalism promotes individualism, progress and toleration, its three central values. Conservatism is logically the reverse: communitarianism, tradition and shared values.
I see no reason to avoid generalizing when it is in the direction of clarifying our common effort at political discussion, debate and action.
Jack Strocchi 01.22.10 at 4:29 am
S Turner@#84
I am all for “clarifying our common effort at political discussion”. But the main terms used in US political debate are worse than useless, indeed they are nonsensical given current patterns of usage.
Liberalism may also promote “progress and toleration”, pluralism, justice and cuddles before bed-time for all I know. But if it does not promote “individual autonomies” then there is nothing to distinguish it from any other number of civic ideologies, all of which prioritize group agencies over the individual agent. And some form of authority over autonomous behaviour.
The degree of “progress and toleration” that liberal social arrangements may contingently promote depends utterly on the progressiveness and tolerance of a given jurisdiction’s constituent individuals. GIGO There are plenty of instances of notionally liberal states that have “got religion”, so to speak, and become intolerant towards internal dissent (McCarthyite witch hunts, the persecution of James Watson’s and so on.)
There is no adequate ideological concept to denote the antithesis, or complement, to liberalism. That is, there is no word to denote an ideological preference for liberal institutional authority over [?] individual autonomy.
I suggest the term “corporalism” as it denotes a hierarchical social organization equipped with sanctions. This covers a multitude of sins, from the National Health to the Nazi Party.
This conceptual lacunae is an indictment of the pathetic standard of political theory. Especially when you consider that socio-biologists are now reviving group selection as an evolutionary mechanism.
jeremy 01.22.10 at 6:59 am
russell @59
i’m with you.
as i’m sure you’d concede, however, the united states of america isn’t quite in the same camp as japan or mexico, or the majority of the european nation-states you (and i) admire for that matter, with regards to a singular national identity. and i fear what that national identity might amount to, were our most zealous nation-state representatives to succeed in getting what they wished for; something fairly milky i presume. maybe tainted kool aid?
Doug 01.22.10 at 9:00 am
74: The possibly apocryphal motto of Franconian independence groups is “Frei statt Bayern.”
Jack Strocchi 01.22.10 at 11:22 am
S Turner@#84
Conservatism is not the (ideo-)”logical reverse” of liberalism. It is an ontological, not ideological, philosophy generally concerned with the conservation of identity, Oakeshott, “On being conservative”.
Does this sound like it has anything to do with ideology?
The antithesis of conservatism is what Hayek called “constructivism”, by which he meant the conscious differentiation of fashionable identities, rather than unconscious integration of traditional identity.
Conservatism tends to be “communitarian”, depending on the accumulation of social capital. In a healthy community there will be a strong disposition to conserve current social arrangements, eg Japan. An unhealthy community will be constantly buffeted by the latest fads and fashions and suffer from periodic bouts of anomie.
Conservatives definitely prefer the (lineal) inheritance of tradition as opposed to the (lateral) imprinting of fashion. You cant go wrong with a classic. And nothing dates more than a tragically obsolete fashion. Look at the eighties.
Walt 01.22.10 at 11:36 am
Isn’t it pretty to think that Oakeshott’s description of “conservativism” applies to actually-existing conservatives?
engels 01.22.10 at 12:59 pm
So seriously you want the IRS weighing everybody in America and charging them X dollars for every pound they are over a certain threshold?
bianca steele 01.22.10 at 2:47 pm
I propose a concept for liberalism, then, that may satisfy both Turner and Strocchi: a “conservative” community (i.e., with its own local rules etc.–those elaborated at more length in the standard sources) tolerated within a global system that is, overall, conservative in the “traditional” sense. If this doesn’t fit what both of them have said, I don’t see what the problem is.
engels 01.22.10 at 3:09 pm
And would there be tax breaks for those who needed the extra pounds for their occupation, eg. opera singers, sumo wrestlers?
piglet 01.22.10 at 4:16 pm
Bianca, you disagree with me but I am not convinced at all. I was talking about the public discourse. I am reading the papers and listening to the discourse and I do not see any evidence of “conservative” nuance in the question of health care reform. In fact, opposition to HCR seems to be the one uniting theme in the US right at the moment. If you have evidence to the contrary, please let us know.
bianca steele 01.22.10 at 4:50 pm
piglet,
I misunderstood what you were saying when you said “in public discourse.” If your reading of media coverage of the US leads you to form the impression that everyone is opposed to health care reform, and you don’t believe me when I say your impression isn’t accurate, there probably isn’t much I can say to change your mind.
Alex 01.22.10 at 5:23 pm
There are so many different kinds of conservatives in the US that it’s hard to say
Getrennt marschieren, vereint schlagen!
The point of which, according to Martin van Creveld, was that if you organised your army in independent corps that all followed a different route on the march, they would be able to strip the landscape of everything edible without getting in each others’ way. Otherwise, the first echelon would have eaten everything by the time the second passed through, etc. So Napoleon tended to arrive on the battlefield well-fed and with many thousands more men than his enemies, at the end of a very very wide swath of devastation leading back to the French border.
Actually, that sounds quite a lot like American conservatives.
piglet 01.22.10 at 5:56 pm
Bianca, please stop that.
“If your reading of media coverage of the US leads you to form the impression that everyone is opposed to health care reform” … I didn’t say or imply that.
My thesis, in precise terms, is that there are no relevant participants in the US public discourse that identify themselves as conservative and that support some serious form of health care reform, let alone anything close to a Bismarckian model. My reading of the public discourse here may be incomplete but so could be yours. So if you want to debate the case as opposed to keep repeating that I got it all wrong, please state your thesis and provide evidence for it.
piglet 01.22.10 at 6:07 pm
“I propose some sort of West-Berlin type exclave status for the wonderful city of Munich which is full of hilarious gay people and they also make films as well as the best cars in the world there.”
Not to mention the fabulous nude beaches right in the middle of the city. Bavarians – and that includes Muenchner for better or worse – are conservative by some metrics but reality is always more complicated.
piglet 01.23.10 at 12:09 am
Jack Strocchi 01.22.10 at 2:20 am “We already “tax†obese people by charging them higher health insurance and for two seats in airplanes.”
We? You and me, we are taxing obese people? By charging higher health insurance rates? No wonder we are all messed up about conservatism and liberalism if we don’t get the difference between taxation and insurance discrimination.
Jack Strocchi 01.23.10 at 3:13 am
piglet@#98
Well, I did place the word “tax” in scare quotes, to indicate a certain facetiousness in construction. But one can never under-estimate the earnestness of some folk.
Ted 01.23.10 at 4:08 am
The opposite of conservative is not “liberal” FFS, it is ‘radical’. Far from being polar opposites, liberalism and conservatism are, in fact, perfectly compatible.
Ted 01.23.10 at 4:20 am
Most of the cancer in American public discourse can be traced back to the success of Communists in misappropriating the label “liberal” for themselves, once they decided to rejoin the Democrats. Their sleazy cynical success in successfully labeling real liberals as “neoconservatives” still poisons the American civic well today.
Jack Strocchi 01.23.10 at 7:23 am
Ted @#78
I agree that the US usage of the term “liberal†and “conservative†are unhelpful verging on the idiotic. These two terms should simply be replaced by Left-wing (empowering the lower-status) and Right-wing (establishing the higher-status).
The characterization of the US Left-wing as “liberal” is often directly contrary to the traditional meaning of liberalism (which refers to the empowering individual autonomies). It is hard to see how “campus speech-code stormtroopers†could be classified as liberals. Gun-control is also supported by supposed “liberals”. But this is a utilitarian, not libertarian, policy. The same goes for health care reform and financial regulation. Eminently sensible perhaps, but not liberal.
But the characterization of US Right-wingers as “conservatives” makes even less sense. GW Bush promoted (abortive) revolutions across the several domains of state policy:
– fiscal (structural deficits);
– financial (reckless sub-prime lending) and
– factoral (amnesty for “undocumented workers”) .
Oh and there was that best-forgotten attempt to make-over the Middle East.
It is also silly to counter pose “liberal†to “conservativeâ€, as if no liberal ever wished to conserve liberal institutions. Or no “conservative†ever hankered after liberty.
But there is a sense in which modernist Left-wingers and Right-wingers can both be “liberal”. Social democratic Left-liberals aim to empower individual autonomies by giving the lower-status free and fair individual access to community services. By complement, free-market Right-liberals aim to empower individual autonomies by giving the higher-status free and fair access to proprietary goods.
The opposite of a liberalism is not conservatism or “authoritarianism” It is what I call “corporalism†which is the social philosophy that kicks intractable social problems upstairs to a higher institutional authority, assuming individual autonomies have made a hash of it. This is simply a recognition of the fact that when sub-sidiarity fails one must resort to super-sidiarity.
“Corporalism” obviously reeks of despised Catholic social thought. However one could do worse than being on the same side as the Roman Empire, Thomas Aquinas etc
Ken Thomas 01.23.10 at 7:56 am
Interesting discussion, I might say– particularly as (DetLef and a few others excepted) it seems, like the original article, to have little to nothing to do with the reality of modern Germany.
What, exactly, are the hours of a typical US-American primary school? Hmm?
The picture painted above, simply, draws from one single example, in a rural and particularly… closeminded (not conservative) area, and turns it into a globalizing picture of Germany. No No No. I know no one, in Heidelberg or Mannheim, Koeln, … yes there are people who live like this, there are places, but it’s not the norm. Germany is far more complex, and the article draws an inaccurate picture in order to be, simply, sensationalist. (Hello New York Times).
Conversely, you could find the same in the United States– a town in the South, or in the Central Valley of California, or in Illinois or Iowa (I can go on!) that is more like this, than not– and women and mothers with similar experiences.
Yes, motherhood is valued in a different way in Germany, and in Europe, than in the US. So is fatherhood. I don’t what this has to do with “conservatism,” at least as laid out above– I know far-left socialists and Greens, in various countries, whose dedication to their children is far different than that, in the US.
I say “different,” because until you get into details– surely generalizations such as “more liberal” or “more conservative”– you’re applying US labels, and US judgments, to a society that isn’t the US.
Munich? Have you tried to by groceries in London after 21:00? Yes, there are laws regarding hours– and their history and reasons and reality are complex– and there are blue laws in Massachusetts and California and throughout the US, as well. Ever tried to shop in small town in MA over a Catholic holiday?
I will grant that those of you, who talk about social systems supporting sogennante ‘traditional’ way of life (that sounds so Berkeley!) (and so US!) are onto something. (And there are a number of very good observations on this above). We would to reach deeper into actual examples and places and times and pieces of history, to understand this– but I’ll be somewhat dismissive, and say it is largely the left and liberals, who have established this in some of the European nations, and that the conservatives in the US, would never stand for it.
That is a terrible gloss– one has to build some understanding, of the economic system of Germany and other states, of the political economy, to grasp it. (Here, Europe is struggling; it does not have the economic liberalization and flexibility of the United States; in many German cities, you have to spend four years in apprenticeship, assigned by the State, to become a waiter or waitress; and then there is the issue of political corruption in State contracts.)
No discussion has occurred here, about the substantive difference in educational systems and pedagogy, between the US and Germany (just for instance), including the workload, and its nature, responsibility; homework; class structures and issues; and the like. There are major differences; they are entirely different systems and approaches.
In the end– we Europeans have different values, different cultures, different ways of doing things– and now, under Schengen, are conducting a new experiment with democracy. We are not reducable to a reflection of the United States; neither can we be explained, it the terms used by the cultures of the US– or for that matter, in English alone.
It would thus be quite nice if you United-State-ists could travel outside your cultural bubble a bit, occasionally, and learn something about something other than yourselves. Einverstaenden?
S. Turner 01.24.10 at 12:36 am
Attacking the Person as well as Guilt by Association are fallacies of reasoning regardless of their post modern credentials. Nevertheless, it seems the only actual disagreement I have with the postors here is over our respective uses of the term ‘conservative.’
Thank you Jack, for reminding me not everyone is a Canadian. And thank you Ken, for reminding us all of how easy it is to overlook the fact not everyone whose values conflict with continental European values is an American.
In Canada, as I noted earlier, the term ‘conservative’ refers to social values and is the name of one of our two principal political parties, The Conservative Party of Canada. This conservative liberal value distinction falls mainly in line with the British Tory Whig tradition.
If I claimed or tried to claim this is how the terms are used by everyone, I apologize since that is clearly false. Rather, I mean to say it is how some peoples use or at least used the terms liberal, conservative, capitalist and socialist. And people who have no definite pre conceived ideas about what these terms mean seem to ‘see the light’ when presented with concise, logically coherent and generally reliable definitions. As they deploy the terms, these basic foundations of their political ideas are adapted as needed.
My point might be more normative than is polite ’round here. But I don’t think public discourse which is effectively tied to its purpose can avoid shared vocabulary. I don’t think this necessity is ideological unless everything is ideology. Rather, I think it is logical and practical.
I think the shunning of young mothers by other women is a serious social issue regardless of why they are shunned. They are shunned for staying home and for going out to work. They are shunned for not having children and having too many. They are shunned for leaving their husbands and for staying with them.
The reasons for the practice are related to many factors impacting social and political relations.
Ken Thomas 01.24.10 at 10:57 am
S. Turner (and all):
Thanks for the reply– I hope my overinflated statements, got somewhere at least.
In my response, however– perhaps I should reveal nationality and history– I feel I’ve adopted the fantastic, constucted– fictional!– imagery of the original article. (And perhaps made some harsh statements, about a city whose citizens, I don’t know.)
Shunning of women, in various ways… of course it occurs worldwide, in various cultures. (Several collegues and friends at Berkeley, explore it in Indian cities, “just to touch the tip of the iceberg).
But without a deeper understanding of the specifics… you all must realize, this is one of the few times I will agree with Clifford Geertz… do we know, for instance, that a man in this German town, would not have been treated exactly the same, for all intents and purposes?
I don’t know: it seems to me, certainly possible. I just don’t know. In the cities where I have a little familiarity– if we to talk about Heidelberg, much less Mannheim– and the surrounding locales– I can at least see it, happening to a man– that is, a man facing public comments, in such a situation.
I might say “Germans can be very direct– ” but I’m not sure if I would be conveying substantive information, or stereotype or worse.
As far as the Neiderrhein region– I sure see a lot men with their children and caring for children and taking their children to and from school– maybe not as many men as women, but it seems highly noticeable after being in the United States– though I haven’t made a substantive study of any type. (It could very well be the case that US men spend more time with their children, in private settings).
But the kind of comments that the NYT article works from– they would not stand up, to any kind of ethnographic standard, by far. I don’t think we can approach them, with anything but doubt and skepticism. And it worries me, quite a bit, at how easily I seem to have taken these representations up, while trying to resist and criticize).
(I’m not saying that ‘resistance is surrender:’ I’ll leave that sort of statement, to one of my favorite Slovenian cousins).
These terms, liberal and conservative– as you note, they’re in flux, their meanings aren’t as clear– and there’s a level of obfuscation in, something like what we might call “the discursive field.”
Here in Mexico City– where I am today– I’ve written elsewhere– during the Obrador campaign– the discourse of the United States, (so far as the United States bothers to pay attention to Mexico) wanted to tell the story in terms of ‘left and right’ in the US.
The problem was– those terms just wouldn’t fit. Obrador was painted the leftist– indeed he is, in the terms of Mexican, perhaps Latin American discourse– but, for instance, economically he was far closer to ‘neoliberal’ (in a way that maps to the far Right, or ‘libertarian’ movements in the US); Calderon, and the PAN, while the “right” in Mexico, (and in some ways mirroring politicies of the ‘right’ or Republican Party in the US) — also has a side, and a series of policies and decisions, that seem more aligned to the left as it is seen from the US– and certainly a side that is very, very unaligned with Republican conservatism in the US. “Controlled economy,’ for one– though that controlled economy may not have much time left.
If you delve deeper– into the endless details of the picture and situation– this isn’t meant to be an analysis of Mexico or Mexico/US relations– the point is, contradictions keep arising. “Left” and “right”, “conservative” and “liberal,” do not mean the same thing in the US and Mexico– they are different cultures, they work differently; historically and practically, the terms have been and are used differently; you can’t move from one culture to the other, and have a 1:1 mapping, ‘the same,’ the same meanings.
You have to learn what each means, in each context. Though of course… there are many who assume the correspondence between cultures and language systems (equality, or lack of difference): and that error is a phenomena in itself, with a history and its effects, worthy of study. (If not a little counter-education!)
This is similar to your point about… what seem to be something such as ‘independent observers’ (Aristotle’s mountain pops into mind) (I’d like to see more elaboration) … who are not invested in (or trapped inside the language games of) the terms, who see a more definitional or ‘practical’ reality. (Rorty or… Emerson and Pierce?)
I’m not so sure it’s so easy to escape ideology, however: as I used to scream at Allan Pred: everything is ideological! Ideology runs to… the streets and squares; the design of windows.
Oh I am sounding like my Slovenian cousin. Next thing you know, I’ll be barking that the world deserves more than neoliberalism, and that the people at LSE and the WTO and the IMF are “the enemy…”
Ah, cultural misunderstandings.
piglet 01.24.10 at 5:54 pm
Jack Strocchi: I still don’t get the meaning of your “corporalism”. Is it in any way related to corporatism?
““Corporalism†obviously reeks of despised Catholic social thought.” Are you referring here to catholic social teaching, if yes how is it related?
Hungover Guy 01.25.10 at 10:52 am
As much as I can understand right now, I think you’re right!
S. Turner 01.26.10 at 2:46 am
Thanks Ken. Your para:
“The problem was—those terms just wouldn’t fit. Obrador was painted the leftist—indeed he is, in the terms of Mexican, perhaps Latin American discourse—but, for instance, economically he was far closer to ‘neoliberal’ (in a way that maps to the far Right, or ‘libertarian’ movements in the US); Calderon, and the PAN, while the “right†in Mexico, (and in some ways mirroring politicies of the ‘right’ or Republican Party in the US)—also has a side, and a series of policies and decisions, that seem more aligned to the left as it is seen from the US—and certainly a side that is very, very unaligned with Republican conservatism in the US. “Controlled economy,’ for one—though that controlled economy may not have much time left,”
…needs to define the values it refers to in order to know whether the reasoning makes sense and if it does, whether the substantive claims you are making can be justified. I think the exercise would be fun if not useful.
Here, let me start. “Obrador was painted the [person who believes in equality of outocome regarding the distribution of basic goods, protectionist measures to facilitate local employment and cooperation rather than competition as the principal means of increasing overall welfare,…”].
Comments on this entry are closed.