The business of being Perot
Carlin, David R. Jr.
OF SEVERAL MINDS David R. Carlin Jr. THE BUSINESS OF BEING PEROT THE ANTINOMIAN CANDIDATE It must be the effect of advancing age, but I seem to be getting cranky about nearly everything...
...So we have a strong consensus at the material end of the spectrum and a weaktononexistent consensus at the spiritual end...
...In such a situation the moral element in politics will inevitably be drained away, leaving only the business element...
...Politics, after all, has a moral dimension...
...No wonder I'm cranky...
...Let's begin with the premise that a nation is something more than a giant marketplace where self-interested parties meet to do business with one another...
...So what does the Perot candidacy have to offer...
...it is also a community...
...Little wonder people turn away from politics...
...Now, in principle there is nothing impossible in this...
...I'm even cranky about Ross Perot running for president...
...If American politics were about religion and morality as well as business, it might make sense to elect someone like Abraham Lincoln or Woodrow Wilson or one of the two Roosevelts...
...Instead it says: "We don't care whether you have a religion or not...
...Certainly the United States has a cultural consensus...
...We'll be lucky if we have much more than 50 percent turn out to vote this presidential year...
...and this community is created and sustained by shared values, rules, meaning, and beliefs—in other words, by a cultural consensus...
...It is terrific for keeping a marketplace in good working condition...
...American government isn't working very well at the moment, and there are two main reasons for this: the political parties are too weak, and the influence of outside money is too strong...
...We can't get much help from the other end of the spectrum either...
...no one is asking for the restoration of slavery...
...no one is calling for a return to an agrarian economy...
...If we have little agreement on private moral values, we will soon have little agreement on public moral values...
...The trouble with our material consen consensus is that it is unsuitable for sustaining community...
...Today's agreement-to-disagree no longer says: "Just as long as you have a religion, we don't care which one it is...
...We did not agree that good Americans were free to have no religion at all—to be, for instance, atheists or agnostics...
...At the other end of the spectrum (let us call it the "spiritual" end), we have no consensus on religion, and we have a deteriorating consensus on moral values...
...Politics will exist to serve the marketplace only, not to serve community...
...and though we Americans don't seem to be able to agree on questions of private morality, perhaps we can agree on basic questions of public morality...
...The culture of secularism, agnostic with regard to religion, is largely antinomian with regard to morality...
...If it did not, the nation would have fallen apart before now...
...On the consumption side, no one is advocating the passage of sumptuary laws, and there are no signs that either monasticism or puritanism is about to revive...
...In other words, this agreementto-disagree pertained only to the denomination of one's choice...
...The further weakening of parties and the further enhancement of money influence...
...Why bother...
...But it is of doubtful merit if we are looking for signs of health in American society in general and the American political system in particular...
...But things have changed...
...Within certain broad and necessary limits, moral values are increasingly conCommonweal 5 June 1992: 11 sidered to be matters of pure personal preference, having no objective status...
...But the consensus, it seems to me, is weaker than it ought to be, and it is tending to grow weaker all the time...
...And why not elect Ross Perot president...
...12: 5 June 1992 Commonweal...
...As for moral values: here too the consensus grows thin...
...The Perot candidacy is a case in point...
...The Perot candidacy is a sign of that growing weakness...
...But if religion is gone and morality going and nothing is left in politics but business, then it makes perfect sense to put a businessperson in charge...
...In the middle of the spectrum is politics, which resembles the material in some ways and the spiritual in others...
...But the nature of today's agreementto-disagree is quite different from yesterday's...
...In the absence of a common religion or morality, it is politics, the institutions in the middle of the spectrum, that will have to provide us with the cultural consensus needed to sustain community...
...It participates in both while having its own distinctive nature...
...From the beginning, or at least since the adoption of the First Amendment, Americans have agreed to disagree about religion...
...One of the signs that a social problem has become irreversible is that the remedies proposed aggravate the problem instead of relieving it...
...and if America were nothing more than a giant market, then our material consensus would be sufficient...
...And when the Catholics and Jews finally came to form a nonProtestant critical mass, this very flexible Protestant consensus expanded and transformed itself, becoming a Judeo-Christian consensus...
...Our spiritual consensus is increasingly unavailable for sustaining community, for the simple reason that this consensus moves more and more in the direction of nonexistence...
...The one is a continuation of the other, and antinomianism in one sphere will tend to generate antinomianism in the other...
...This leaves us with no choice but politics...
...Americans generally agree that we ought to spend our money as quickly as possible on such things as housing, food, clothing, automobiles, college educations, vacations, furniture, computers, microwaves, CD players, etc...
...The Perot candidacy is a good thing if you're looking for entertainment, for it promises to be fun to watch...
...and hardly anyone (except for some of the friends of Milton Friedman, a notable exception) is seriously asking for government to keep its nose out of business...
...Why take it seriously when it deals only with the means of living, not with the ends for which we live—when it deals with nothing more than getting and spending, not with either last things or penultimate things...
...Why do I say that...
...THE BUSINESS OF BEING PEROT THE ANTINOMIAN CANDIDATE It must be the effect of advancing age, but I seem to be getting cranky about nearly everything nowadays...
...Picture a spectrum running from left to right...
...At one end (let us call it the "material" end of the spectrum), Americans have a high level of agreement relative to the prevailing system of economic production and consumption...
...It borders the two, forming the bridge between them...
...The nation wasn't specifically Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, etc., but it was generically Protestant...
...Secularism has become more respectable, indeed more aggressive, and religion has been forced further and further out of the public realm and into the private...
...Until about a century ago, Americans, despite denominational differences and their frequently unchurched status, were overwhelmingly Protestant...
...Unfortunately, no neat line can be drawn between private values and public values...
...On the production side, no one is advocating communism...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 11
