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| Communitarianism:
Anatomy of a Stupid Idea by  |
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| I submit to the reader
that while he may or may not have heard the word Communitarianism or
heard it voiced as a political philosophy, by reading this article up
to paragraph three he will find that he was already familiar with the
stink of its intellectual pollution, and now knows that to call
it. If you have already heard of Communitarianism, this article
will suit you as well. The prime smokestack for Communitarianism is Norton Garfinkle (at George Washington University Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies) who was of course educated at Columbia University. He is a darling of News Hour (via Yale), Bloomberg and NPR. He frequently teams up with other New School for Social Research (Greenwich Village) experts and others from the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute. Garfinkle is also Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Lamaze Institute for Family Education, showing his need to be a meddling middleman in the human condition from the fetal stage up to the world political stage, telling people everything from how to breathe to how to participate in civilization. The dubious Communitarian mission is to "build the good society based upon the core values of the American people as defined by the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights." That should strike the reader as an weak alloy of Platonism and Americanism. One should, if he has his wits, also be struck by the thought that the phrase "The Good Society" must have been ripped off from somewhere. Here: "The focus of The Good Society is on the institutions of America, or on the patterned way in which Americans live their lives together, and how they can be used and altered to encourage a better way of life." That is a quote from The Good Society. (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton). It oozes long-winded neo-Marxist sociology. It smacks of Things to Come. One might also think of the weirdos at Johns Hopkins University. It is a no-brainer to say that "The Good Society" is a critical meme which quickly segues into economic and specifically socio-economic criticism, and more specifically Platonist Utopianism and the belief that modern civilization must be changed radically in line with a Marxist-Spartan hybrid. In keeping with Platonist Utopianism two things must be conserved: 1) Fantasy must take precedence over reality, 2) Philosophers must be tyrannical idea-idiot kings ex machina. Communitarians as hermaphrodites meld the masculine and the feminine desires, one, to insert something (in this case 'community') into all politics, and two, to harmonously resolve, albeit irrationally individualism and the needs of mother hen to ensure the safety of the brood. I will elaborate on this more, but the shorthand analysis is that Communitarians want to insert New Marxism everywhere and syncretize Capitalism and Communism along a post-Cold War Henry Kissenger / Armand Hammer / George Soros vector. For the politically ignorant, that means combining Capitalism and Communism with Social Engineering and using large wealth to manipulate economic systems and media via think-tanks and large trusts. These are bodies resembling Corporations. Communitarianism is not a "growing trend." It is, however a big trend and it is powerful. It is a fringe political philosophy repackaged from Converso Lutheranism, Schachtmanism and Sorbonne and London School of Economics thinking, all of which are equally piped into Columbia University, the school most always often to blame for anything stupid of this nature. In a way, the thinking is not divorced from the ideas of Ernst Mach, as illustrated by the quote:
Thus do Communitarians found their premise on the idea that communal (e.g. tribal) systems cannot long persist in an environment of strong egoism. There they depart from what is a potentially sound point onto an interminable ray which procedes toward engineering a maximally communal environment, proceeding well beyond what is optimal into what becomes Oligarchic Collectivism. (Orwellian) In their case, the collective (group will) of the oligarchy (small body of rulers) is the combined directives and priorities of unelected persons and committees in the universities, councils, and networks that have accumulated maximum wealth, PhDs, and political power. Rather than resembling a meritocratic dictatorship, it resembles "burrowing from within." One professor here writes a revisionist analysis of the Founding Fathers along Communitarian principles, another economist there features repeatedly on PBS, confusing the public on the state of the economy and the secret devaluation of US currency, yet another industrial magnate way over there helps China prosecute internet users or causes a cascade of British currency dumping. Amitai Etzioni, Garfinkel's intellectual influence and contemporary, real name is Werner Falk. He is an Israeli-American sociologist and a founder of the communitarian movement in the early 1990s. He is principally responsible (that means to blame) for the Unamerican neo-conservative garbage that "we have to balance rights and responsibilities and autonomy and order." Most of these stupid ideas originate in individual men who can be identified and challenged. Etzioni/Falk was educated at Hebrew University, and the association I would like to make here is Wolf Blitzer aka Ze'ev Barak, e.g. Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Hebrew University, AIPAC, pseudonymous works, aliases, and Jabotinskyites. In short, Amitai Etzioni falls squarely within the matrix of Cultural Criticism described by Kevin Macdonald, that is jew-dominated works of gentile-critical academic dishonesty. Oooh! Bad words! The aforementioned does not form the whole fabric of Oligarchic Collectivism as embodied by Communitarianism, but it is gigantic subcomponent. If we were to fixate not on Jews but rather on totalitarians, the same names would pop up in the membership roster. Another way of saying this is that the specific totalitarian aims of Communitarians, disguised as fighting the tyranny of capital and the advocacy of civic duty, are more than coincidentally tied to a small cabal of semitic soccer moms. Communitarianism, which falls under the category of "Third Way Radical Centrism" is not therefore an objectively true, wild west, come one come all, unmonopolized idea-store or infoshop in the allegedly free market of ideas. It is an intellectual club with agencies, promoters, venues, and contacts. I revoked my end of high-school proclamation that "I am a Radical Centrist" (next stop after "non-leap of faith existentialist") when I heard the likes of Tony Blair proclaim the same, and discovered that he is financed by the Christian Socialist Democrats. (I am neither a Christian nor a Socialist). I encourage people like myself as I was coming out of high-school and entering college to find a different name for ourselves. Etzioni/Falk's ideas represent the continuation of the ideas of Martin Buber which are the continuation of Kantian ethics along a semitic line of reasoning focused primarily on the remediation of the perceived social ills of isolation and dehumanization in modernity that result from criticizing human relations along a purely analytical, materialist line. I was exposed to this opinion by proponents of Albert Camus and New Criticism in high school. In other words, Buber is backpedalling on Logical Positivism according to Kantian ethical criteria. For midlevel dummies, that means a personal European Jewish crisis of social fission leads to Buber's reading of Kant, Kirkegaarde and Nietzsche. For extreme dummies, that means replacing conventional Judaism with a return to the basic idea of good and evil, a universal belief in what constitutes good and evil, a small backlash against materialism, a rejection of Christianity but an embrace of secular Judaism, and an attempt to harmonize absolutism with relativism. To this one adds, Zionism and cultural criticism and builds one's way up to Middle Path radicalism, e.g. a groupthink tyranny of Myers-Briggs type ISFJs or Ethical Sensory Introverts. Etzioni/Falk was also a professor at Columbia for two decades and a member of Brookings Institution. His official title is Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University. He is a grand pisseur of Communitarian works, critical of the Patriot Act, but importantly, NOT CRITICAL from outside the position of Schachtmanism or Oligarchic Collectivism. He is like Goldstein. Reread 1984. The European version of this kind of organization, The Social Capital Foundation (SCF) in Brussels originates with Jane Jacobs, and thus again Columbia University. SCF also originates with Pierre Bourdieu, therefore the fusion of the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein with Karl Marx and Max Weber; thus 1) a heavily starched crypto Jewish logical harangue which conserves relativism 2) meets the desire to erode capital and is 3) morally excused by the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The misapplication of all these ideas would be defended by "the community" ostensibly on the expertise of the Tin Man by virtue of his enormously large heart, the Scarecrow by virtue of his intelligence, and the Lion by virtue of his Courage. (Baum) Etzioni/Falk is responsible for the continuation of the Clean Break Strategy for Securing the Realm (mineral extraction and assassination) by transposing it from a moralist democratizing mission into a moralist communitarian misson described as the protection of "the" community from violence. Thereby do his criticisms of the Patriot Act and the Mideast War not issue from a position outside the Clean Break Strategy but rather are an attempt from within to soften and massage the same strategy into a collectivist consensus. You would find these opinions in an organ such as The Washington Post, extolling the "please bear with their form of democracy as they transition" editorial plea. Etzioni/Falk's target human silly putty and primary outreach victim is the "Illiberal Moderate" e.g. Radical Centrists drawn from every single fanatical base, who can agree at least upon Communitarian principles such as "I don't want to die, I need a job, and I don't want to be religiously persecuted." Yet this in principle rational political philosophy non-coincidentally finds itself in support of the American Enterprise institute, AIPAC, Zionism, national ID cards, and digital surveillance, aiming to radically manipulate and alter both Muslim Ummah life and American Commonwealth life in accordance with the will of a small group of people who issue books with spooky titles like: The Perversion of Autonomy: The Proper Uses of Coercion and Constraints in a Liberal Society. (Gaylin, Jennings) Returning to Communitarians and The Institute itself, they propose to be for a number of certain things including "strengthening Marriage" by making it more "peer-based" and "child-centered" and "fostering a [two parent] family-friendly environment" In principle, very modern, good, sensible stuff including welfare reform, flex-time, and family leave. In practice, The Institute endorses tax coercion, shaking more state controlled child support extractions out of "deadbeat dads," increased IRS wage docking, and hijacking the "family values" platform to construe it to mean market control and managed economy. They endorse church and state mandated prerequisite social education courses and sensitivity training for soon to be married couples. As stated in "The Communitarian Position Paper on The Family," the Communitarians want to "put an end to premature sexualization" which largely means putting an end to gentile standards of beauty for women, and the egoistic self-indulgence of sexual enjoyment, an idea that everyone from The Catholic Church to Sigmund Freud has tried desperately to throttle, but in this case particularly offends hairy women with crooked faces. "All sexual education efforts must stress personal and social responsibility." Note how condoms take precedence over romance. Note how this differs subtly from the idea that sex is primarily enjoyable but requires a few caveats and precautions. Then note how the Communitarian position on sex MERELY differs subtly from the Junior Anti-Sex League and the Abstinence Only factions' idea that sex is evil, and even deadly to The Community. The Communitarians seek to remedy this by brainwashing children through their PBS cartoons:
Thus will your 3 year old children not only be taught to embrace Spanish with Maya and Miguel, to avoid excessive literacy and embrace autism with Elmo, and to watch the hypnotic sparkles with the Teletubbies, but also to wear a condom in kindergarten. In the Position Paper, Communitarians cite a crisis of faith, a lack of contemporary heroes, the need for a cultural shift away from "excessive individualism," and "our children in peril" from a lack of intense nurture side civic engineering. How many times have we heard this crap before? Signatories: Bellah, Blankenhorn, Brandl, Cisneros, Cohen, Elshtain, Etzioni, Fishkin, Friedan, Hirschman, Levine, Mankiewicz, Marx, Riesman, Rossi, Ruckelshaus, Schmoke, Selznick, Siegel, Strauss, Yankelovich!
YAH! Which morals? What proven track record? That of denuded but not denatured Judeo-Christianity: humanism, tolerance, non-violence, truth-telling, democracy, labor theory of value, and the belief that what the school instructs as morality is not somehow consensus totalitarianism and authoritarianism. These freaks have found a way:
BULLSHIT. If that were true, then why are people at a think-tank taking great pains to contrive and insinuate a basic moral education whose current version does not violate church-state separation? Because they have pissed people (parents) off in the past. Because there is no low enough pasteurization point for simmering bullshit to ensure that the neighborhood's cultural virus is killed while the kibbutz's cultural virus is preserved. A Sword of Damocles, the separation of church and state does -and must- cut both ways. Imagine: "I worked in a factory that manufactured high school textbooks. I stole a piece here, a piece there. When I got them home and assembled them, I found that the parts made a machine gun." With regard to community policing: "Communitarians have long stressed the importance of the community as a powerful 'third force' operating in the middle terrain between the individual and the government." Here is the nefarious middle ground where "Community Standards" manufacture the Third Column dictatorship of blunted edges, quieted cookouts, and dimmed Christmas Lights. Consider that in China, "community policing" is used to prevent women from reproducing. It consists of angry letters slipped under one's door, repeated knocking, heavy coercion, and finally, a punch in the belly by some old hag. In the USA, it's notices telling you when you may do your laundry, wash your car, smoke your cigar, drink your beer, organize an assembly, or what you may wear or carry on your person. Nine tenths of all violations of our Bill of Rights occur under Communitarian legal interpretations (such as community safety or principles of unity) not fascistic or capitalist pretexts. Like Wo-Chi-Ca, or Elohim City, the Communitarians have their camp educated revisionists who garb themselves in the three corner hats of the Founding Fathers, misreading Universal Brotherhood as telling "The People" what they can and cannot do, even though each constituent of The People is undeniably A Person. Communitarians on diversity: "overcoming racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural differences. Tribalism and separatism are on the rise." Allegedly on the rise! Perhaps stimulated reaction formations of ethnic identity are what is on the rise. This is another use of the specter of "the growing trend" as a persuasive advertising tool which necessitates the product Communitarians are selling. Communitarians have attempted to solve two "dilemmas" originating in the Soviet breakup of 1989. [1) How to combine Capitalism and Communism 2) how to combine balkanization and homogenization] in a way that allows Jews to retain their Jewish identity in its economic, cultural, and racial priorities while rolling with the punches of history and assuming some sort of authoritative position as arbiter or broker of the new managed consensus. The highest manifestation of this at the time of this writing is the Bush-Blair-Olmert triangle, PNAC, and a Communitarian philosophy. Discarding Israel Zangwill, "Etzioni argues, [America] is neither a "melting pot" nor a "rainbow," but a mosaic." Mosaic is an unfortunate adjective to say the least. America is not an exercise in Hebrew Cubism.
E.g. The real Oprahfication of civilization, outside of Bill O'Reilly, Jay Severin, and Westwook One's thought box. Organized catharsis, soft Left-McCarthyism, Left-right fusion in a radical center, pseudo-Libertarians, and the deliberate dilution of an overclass of Prussianized European competitors in America with Mexicans. Pre WWII Viennese civilization inflicted upon modern Americans. A deconstruction of race in line with Columbia University and the Boasian School of Anthropology, with a hope that America can be sufficiently renormalized into a Monchrome cafe-o-lait colored, Esperanto speaking population base within 50 years. An ostensibly constructible utopia where identity politics would become impossible. Doubtless, it would still be possible for the intellectual deuses ex machina. The shorthand view of Communitarian's aims for civil society is to hijack the PAC, the 501c)3 nonprofit, the doctoral board, the PTA, and the airwaves and turn them into a hasbara for social manipulation, with an emphasis of working the bottom:
Thus can Communitarian activity, male or female, intellectual or stupid, at the local or tiny level NOT be dismissed or taken as anything other than a serious concerted effort by larger interest groups. It is an economic tactic aimed at the heartland targetting the Illiberal Moderate peons and pressing -mainly their children- into a foreign social ethic at odds with their current form of social structuring. The organization supports candidates like Bush and Gore equally, especially with respect to Faith-based organizations. Communitarians support faith based initiatives if the particular Faith Based Organization (FBO) subserviates to the Communitarian agenda. Thus, its masterminds assuage their traditional fear of church-state breach and end run around other tribal entities by enlisting the FBOs in secularized cooperative community ventures. They propose the:
Thus they work within the sensible confines of limited government while pursuing an fanatical agenda of civic manipulation. It almost seems legitimate and innocuous. They reject the strict command economy of socialism, having learned the lesson of uncut Communism. But they covet the finance engine of the free market, extolling it's virtues even while copiously salivating at the idea of what it could be used for in the name of The Community. The want to de-emphasize (that means PYU-NISHHH) the common act of getting and spending, and monkeywrench the profit motive. They are critical of the campaign finance and bribery, but not in a coherent way that is expressly critical of specific individuals. About Radical Centrism: It is not invalid to affirm both sides of apparently contradictory issues, disagreements, or false dilemmas if there is an included middle. When people try to synthesize a dialectical middle where there is in fact an excluded middle or a true dilemma (the two opinions are mutually exclusive), it is invalid as a False Compromise. If people are holding out for a middle, or striving for a middle between logically diametric views, then they are bound to oscillate opinions or hold those opinions in a schizophrenic state. Thus does radical centrism - a group critical of left-right extremism- foster its own extremists who are irrational, psychotic, or indecisive. Thus do you find a pairup of Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Lenora Fulani in a Reform or Independent party, or encounter a Republicrat, or much worse, a No/every Platform candidate like Hillary Clinton. There is a financial component to Radical Centrism embodied in the fact that The New America Foundation, run by Ted Halstead promotes and distributes venue to pundits who author works of real and false compromise. Thus can you find Fareed Zakaria, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Francis Fukuyama's creaming commentary on the front and back of Josef Joffe's 2006 paperback, Uberpower. You can find PNAC giving glowing review of a book criticizing American Imperialism! At The Centrist Party website you can find an agency simultaneously hyping the careers of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Frank Gaffney, Jr, indicating this is all a slick marketing gimmick, where "everything" in the country is reformed in a giant community Bread and Circus except for think-tanks, lobbyists, and media hucksters. About Third Way political philosophies: Some of the most notable and notably stupid Third Way political philosophies are: The National Socialist Green Libertarian Party, USA. No further comment necessary. The Troisième Voie, France, attempted in 1985 to simultaneously oppose communism, capitalism and Zionism. The Unspoken Thing Collective, Cambridge MA, ostensibly anti-capitalist, and somehow not communist. The most notable Third Way in current events is the rejection of both socialism and laissez-faire economics. It has state sponsored technology development, and state regulation and approval of new commodities. It has federal government corporations (FGCs) with dual federal and private board directorships. It is literally a fusion of capitalism and socialism. It is equally embodied by social democrats and neoconservatives. It has Ropke's Economic Humanism. It includes German Ordoliberalism and Cockshott and Cottrell's computer aided high-calculation command economy as in described in Socialist Planning After the Collapse of the Soviet Union. It includes the centrist positions of Chris Dodd and a soft position on Hugo Chavez. On the one hand these elements could be viewed innocuously as an equidistancing between equally repugnant goals of a rapacious free market and a totalitarian communist dictatorship. On the other hand they could be viewed more sinisterly as an attempt to fuse the worst of both worlds into a Henry Morgenthau dystopia of G-State consensus ripoffs. The innocuous view is supported by prevailing literature. The sinister view is supported by historical practice. Testimonial Example: At the time of this writing, my ability to purchase a home in a hyperinflated and burst housing market wholly depends on whether the Federal Reserve Chairman decides to lower or not lower interest rates. That is to say that money earned by labor, being insufficient to purchase a house at state-sponsored FGC monopoly prices with matching FGC loans must be gambled on "the free market" which may be "up" or "down" depending on which way FGC head Ben Bernanke decides to point his thumb. Ben Bernanke literally decides whether this author will live in an apartment or a house. That is the nature of Caesarian rule by the Middle Way. The Middle Man is final arbiter of the Middle Way. Stirring Orwell, the Communitarian "alternative" to the Communitarian "way" is to increase The Community. Words fail to describe! To bring a kook into the discussion, Ludwig von Mises and his followers assert that there is no middle way between capitalism and communism, that market interventions are slippery slopes and flying buttresses formed of bricks removed from the foundation structure of the economy. This resembles the Apocalypse of Marx and perhaps might be lacking an unseen intervening factor such as "The Industrial Revolution" or the "Information Revolution" or some other unseen innovation. In any event, dialectical materialism between objectivism and humanism should be exorcised from the discussion of economy, and replaced with "The Philososophy of Money" by Georg Simmel. That is my two cents. To bring this back to Communitarianism, one thing is certain: there is an excluded middle between individualism and collectivism, communalism or communitarianism. If one tries to conceive of examples of rugged individualists acting as a collective or policing body of community standards, one comes up short on examples. Australian outback highland horsemen? American frontiersmen? The Rough Riders? Kaczynski-ites? These are humans of the boundary equation of expanding civilization, not in and of themselves the basis of a peak civilization. Egoism and altruism are not combined into a synthesis! Altruism is a heavily inveighed, caveated, and liened subset of egoism. The frontal cortex and the hypothalmus are not the same sub-organ. Ayn Rand's proclamations are not needed to morally defend the distinction, or to check the idea of "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" Platonic state utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. In fact, you would find the Randians under Yaron Brook or Leonard Peikoff absorbed into the cluster of the PNAC side of Communitarian ideas supporting Clean Break and Israelism, trying to insert their Communitarian idea of The Prohibition Against Initiation of Force into classrooms using the Fountainhead and Ominous Parallels essay contests and book drives, alongside the likes of David Horowitz. That is deliberate on my part, to confound Objectivism with Communitarianism and Neoconservatism. Randians would scream until they are blue in the face that they are not Communitarians. But aren't they? What else would you call a group which purports to resurrect 1700s Enlightenment and Age of Reason ideals while supporting pre-enlightenment Jewish Tribalism, diverting US taxes to the Mideast and nuking arabs to make to make room for expansive Israeli "democracy?" What would you call Hercules Teams? These are examples of standard AIPAC communitarianism, communal enforcement related to crypto-religious kleptocracy. Nation building crap. Abe Foxman's standards of what is "acceptable" or "unacceptable" by current community standards of political discourse. Imagine that I ultimately buy that house; that beth; that domain. Will I be able to use it as I see fit within the Enlightenment Era's conception of what a "reasonable man" might deem reasonable? Doubtful. It would be heavily restricted according to the principles outlined in Anti-Communitarian League Niki Raapana's 2003 paper "Communitarian Law and European Community Law: Individual & National Sovereignty vs the Collective Good" where she says:
I am not bugging out, because on my mother in law's land in NH, use is tightly dictated, and the owner must obtain permission before doing most things short of mowing the lawn or drinking water from the ground. Here in MA, we have mandatory health insurance, Click it or Ticket, and ever tightening restriction on the possession of legal items. The State level trend toward "common good" overruling individual good fits inside the National trend, and the International trend. And this is just my view from my position in Boston Massachusetts. Even idiot protesters and their media outlets organize against the Bill of Rights on the basis of Communitarian principles. Raapana and Friedrich, who I discovered while writing this essay, state in The Anti-Communitarian Manifesto: "The misunderstood communitarian philosophy is designed to define the "common good," even though the U.S. Bill of Rights was specifically designed to "protect and maintain individual rights." I refer the reader again to the works of these authors and their site: because they have thought this out even more than I have. |
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