Real Politics
Deneen, Patrick J.
NO IDEOLOGUE Patrick J. Deneen ean Bethke Elshtain is a rare J asset in the increasingly specialized world of academia. Not only has she resisted the widespread academic tendency...
...one result is a lack of money to remedy the lack of formation among adults...
...She exhibits throughout a concern for injustice in family settings...
...JOSEPH D. POLICANO Luquillo, Puerto Rico Did parish schools work...
...A conservative who looks here for an easy ally will go away disappointed...
...I-I'I :I ,I 4-I J ' l : I . I ~1 [ 14 4I (Continued from page 4) and special pleaders who seem to dominate the Op Ed pages these days--and one hopes he may even rein in the editors of Commonweal, who, with unexpected belligerence, seem ready to lob "smart bombs" on the Iraqi people in a new twist on that old refrain, "we had to destroy the village in order to save it...
...The silence reveals a significant admission: the personal may not be as political as politics: what one does in private may not, in fact, determine inexorably one's political positions or the nature of political life...
...One might define her alternatively as a political theorist, as an ethicist, as a feminist, and all of these would be correct, but none of these alone or even together would be quite suffident...
...But who else believes it...
...Elshtain is constantly and admirably attentive to the limits of politics and the finite nature of human knowledge, but to what extent she thinks that democracy must finally rest on selfevident truths that transcend "real politics" is not entirely clear...
...As this collection of previously published essays attests, Elshtain casts her net widely in the fields of politics, philosophy, and literature, in social commentary and feminist critique, and comes up with a rich and compelling catch...
...This is indeed a question Lincoln might have posed to Plato, but, on the other hand, Lincoln also consistently rejected the notion that one could trust entirely the democratic process to settle an issue such as of slavery...
...It would be a wonder for all of us to meet the saintly editorialist who can write so easily of "Plus XII's moral culpability...
...The reverberations of Elshtain's observation should be quite self-evident in context, specifically the deafening silence from feminists that has greeted the allegations of sexual impropriety against President Bill Clinton...
...If, as she says, "notions of stewardship, the common good, the responsibility of all Catholics in a community to rear the young have weakened or disappeared," where were the graduates of Catholic schools while this was happening...
...She admits that the Catholic school system now eats up a disproportionate share of church resources...
...this book includes not only the original essay, but subsequent responses by readers and Elshtain's ripostes...
...This is shabby stuff for an "intellectual" journal...
...or Professor...
...A dose of heroin...
...Your writers on the difficult matter of the persecution of Jews seem not to be acquainted with the enormous literature in the field, especially that written by Jews...
...Leave it to the National Enquirer, which is in business, Commonweal 2 8 May 22, 1998...
...Not only has she resisted the widespread academic tendency toward self-imposed irrelevance, but she has succeeded-where few have been able---in appealing to an educated audience whose names don't inevitably begin with the title Dr...
...In her recent book Democracy on Trial, Elshtain places Plato--a famous critic of democracy--in a fictional discussion with Abraham Lincoln about the place of transcendent truth and wisdom in politics...
...In fact, this is not Elshtain's contention: hers is a much more interesting and revealing critique of the feminist motto, "the personal is political...
...With a generation of parents whose own formation is poor, the problem is compounded...
...Elshtain's essays--and subsequent works--reveal an abiding hope in the prospects for democracy and the ability of citizens to make reasonable and even moral judgments in a democratic setting...
...This is a hope even a qualified faith--that many share, but which has at times been subject to radical doubt...
...In this regard, it might be suggested that it was Douglas who was the good democrat and Lincoln who was the "Platonist...
...Those on the political left, on the other hand, have been and wiIl be scandalized...
...It may make the writer feel good for a moment, like a dose of heroin...
...Without disparaging the Catholic school system, and agreeing with the author on the need to maintain our inner-city Catholic schools, I for one would rather steward our funds to address, creatively and successfully, the need for lifelong faith formation...
...Apparent in the passionate responses to Elshtain is that feminists who read "Feminists against the Family" came away with the sense that Elshtain sought to defend existing family structures at all costs...
...Catholic charitable gifts, traditionally the lowest among Christian groups, have dropped further...
...As Elshtain describes her approach, the essays share a "block that kick" quality--a defensive posture against sometimes utopian or simply reformist tendencies that in various ways would threaten real politics, or real lives and relationships, in the name of the untested amelioration of society...
...That said, it would be entirely incorrect to call Elshtain a conservative thinker in the contemporary sense of that term...
...This visceral reaction, especially from the feminist left, comes across most clearly in responses to a 1979 Elshtain essay titled "Feminists against the Family...
...Indeed, I am not sure there is a saint in all of our history who would have used such a phrase especially because we are enjoined, for our own benefit, to avoid the mental position which that phrase assumes...
...Catholics are now very well represented in the upper echelons of business, where the values espoused are increasingly counter to the gospel...
...Do the graduates of our Catholic schools see any conflict here...
...she rejects quite forcefully the typically conservative reverence for the role of the canon in education in favor of a much more dynamic approach that incorporates the traditional with the new...
...she frets over the possibility that small-town life, while a rich and rewarding experience for many, may also be thwarting and repressive for some...
...As she notes, Gloria Steinem explained that Packwood's alleged activities should be taken in context, specifically the context of his voting record, which consistently supported causes dear to feminist organizations...
...In the Lincoln-Douglas debates it was Stephen Douglas who defended the doctrine of "popular sovereignty," and Lincoln who invoked "truths" that we "hold to be self-evident...
...Faith is caught, not taught, and it is caught primarily in the home...
...it is conservative...
...For," she continues, "if politics is power and Commonweal 2 7 May 22, 1998 power is everywhere, politics is in fact nowhere and the vision of public life as the touchstone for a revitalized ideal of citizenship is lost.'" Elshtain's prescience is in evidence throughout this book, but here it is rather stunning...
...She notes this hypocrisy in an essay on the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, when feminist voices were nearly unanimous in their condemnation of Thomas's alleged sexual harassment, but were suddenly quieter when more substantial charges were leveled against Senator Robert Packwood...
...DEIDRE HETZLER Scottsville, N.Y...
...When Hidy writes that the parish school "completed the circle of faith formation begun in our home," she is talking about those children who had a strong Catholic family life, which was not the case for many even in the time she is discussing...
...Like Edmund Burke's critique of the French Revolution, it resists arguments for social reorganization or the willingness to submit to the supposedly inevitable progress of history under the assumption that these progressivist impulses will very likely create scenarios for human life that are fundamentally worse than existing ones...
...nor that the personal and political may be fruitfully examined as analogous to one another along certain touchstones of power and privilege, but that the personal is political...
...As she writes, "note that the claim is not that the personal and the political are interrelated in important and fascinating ways not yet fully explored and previously hidden to us by patriarchal ideology and practice...
...Elshtain criticizes this perspective for its rather bleak Hobbesianism...
...As for the flight to the suburbs, many graduates of our schools fled to avoid integration...
...For all the variety that these essays offer, one finds a remarkable undercurrent of consistency throughout the collection, spanning her early feminist writings in the late 1970s to contemporary essays on democratic theory...
...This response, of course, is more than merely defensive...
...Whatever the benefits of the Catholic school system--and there have been many--I think Kathleen McGarvey Hidy [April 10] has idealized the system, while overlooking some important questions...
...Lincoln asks Plato, "How can one know, save through democratic give and take, the rough and tumble of politics itself, who is the wisest and who is the best...
...Patrick J. Deneen is assistant professor of politics at Princeton University...
...What kind of faith formation is revealed by these examples...
...Not only does she anticipate the direction of postmodernism, exemplified by the work of Michel Foucault who found power everywhere, but her criticism of this feminist mantra should have served as fair warning for the potential hypocrisy that this position might entail...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 10
