Core Politcal Model: The Market, The State or The Family?

At the heart of any political vision is a core model, value or belief. For the communist this would the dictatorship of the proletariat; for the Islamist it is Sharia, complete obedience to the will of Allah, for the libertarian it is unfettered individual freedom, for the fascist it is the ethnic nation state.

For our American Right, especially the Tea Party movement, the core value is The Market, the free market. Their faith is that The Market, as a system of unobstructed exchanges between free agents, is able to create wealth for all, to eliminate poverty, to ensure the liberty and well-being of all. This is religion, a leap of faith. It isolates the individual as an autonomous agent, separate from the family. Family becomes a private hobby, an option, a personal preference abstracted from the public realm.

For the Left, the Messiah is the State: the democratic government as protector of the poor and weak; re-distributor of wealth; and provider of education, health, and general well-being.

For a Catholic, the core model is the family, nestled within the Church, and nourished by broader communities according to the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity. The family is the first and foundational community. The individual is never an isolated automaton, but always son/daughter, brother/sister, spouse, mother/father. The well-being of the person and the family depend upon and infuse each other; they cannot be separated from one another. The family as a value and a community precedes the state, the party, the market and all other social institutions.

All other social constructs spring from and feed into the family. Their value is determined by their impact on the family. The primary social values include:
- Marital fidelity and chastity in general.
- The cherishing of every human life, especially those most weak and vulnerable.
- Primacy of labor over capital; the family wage; the complimentarity of gender and the privileging of maternity; the widest possible distribution of private property and political power; parental rights in education; the protection of religious freedom and conscience; the empowerment of local, concrete, person-to-person communities and endeavors over more globalized, giganticized and distant institutions of state and commerce.

We can see that as currently constituted, the Democrat and Republican parties are both hostile to this politics of the family, although they are not morally equivalent. Both isolate the individual from the family. The Left is more directly hostile to the family in its destruction of innocent life and its ethos of sexual liberation. The Right defends the powerless and the family but subordinates it to the isolating, deconstructing, disintegrating dynamics of global capitalism. The Right is culturally supportive of the family culturally but not economically and structurally.

Increasing, a Catholic political vision is cynical about “politics” as such; it is becoming more intensively counter-cultural in reaction against broader, alienating cultural forces on the Left and Right; and more interested in engagement that is local, concrete, limited, and personal.