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Redistribution: The Unconquerable Delusion
“A Pope that mentions Dorothy Day is a pope that rocks,” tweeted Neera Tanden of the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Tanden might have wished to reel back that praise if she had known that Day, though a prominent pacifist and socialist, was also a fervent opponent of abortion, birth control, Social Security, and the sexual revolution.
It’s fitting that Pope Francis should have invoked Dorothy Day among his pantheon of great Americans – she’s a symbol of where leftists always go wrong. This Pope is going wrong in the same way. The left’s delusions of “social justice” seem indomitable – impervious to evidence.
The Pope lauded Day, for “her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed [which] were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints.”
Let’s assume that Dorothy Day’s motives were as pure as Pope Francis described: Does having the right motives excuse everything?
Day’s interpretation of the Gospel led her to oppose the US entry into World War II, which would arguably have led to a world dominated by Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. How would that have worked out for the poor and the oppressed?
Though her social views were heterodox for a leftist, Day was a supporter of Fidel Castro, and found very kind things to say about North Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. She visited Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin, and lent her moral support to other communist regimes despite their persecution of Catholics and others.
Of Castro, Day said, “I am most of all interested in the religious life of the people and so must not be on the side of a regime that favors the extirpation of religion. On the other hand, when that regime is bending all its efforts to make a good life for the people … one cannot help but be in favor of the measures taken.”
According to the Black Book of Communism, between 1959 and the late 1990s, more than 100,000 (out of about 10 million) Cubans spent time in the island’s gulag. Between 15,000 and 19,000 were shot. One of the first was a young boy in Che Guevara’s unit who had stolen a little food. As for quality of life – it has declined compared with its neighbors. In 1958, Cuba had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Today, as the liberal New Republic describes it:
The buildings in Havana are literally crumbling, many of them held upright by two-by-fours. Even the cleanest bathrooms are fetid, as if the country’s infrastructural bowels might collectively evacuate at any minute.
Poverty in Cuba is severe in terms of access to physical commodities, especially in rural areas. Farmers struggle and many women depend on prostitution to make a living. Citizens have few material possessions and lead simpler lives with few luxuries and far more limited political freedom.
This left-leaning Pope (who failed to stand up for the Cuban dissidents who were arrested when attempting to attend a mass he was conducting), and our left-leaning president have attributed Cuba’s total failure to the US.
It’s critically important to care about the poor – but if those who claim to care for the poor and the oppressed stand with the oppressors, what are we to conclude?
Much is made of Pope Francis’s Argentine origins – the fact that the only kind of capitalism he’s experienced is of the crony variety. Maybe. But Pope Francis is a man of the world, and the whole world still struggles to shake off a delusion; namely, that leftists who preach redistribution can help the poor. Has this Pope or President Obama taken a moment to see what Hugo Chavez’s socialist/populist Venezuela has become? Chavez and his successor (like Castro, like Lenin, like Mao) promised huge redistribution from the rich to the poor. There have indeed been new programs for the poor, but the economy has been destroyed. The leader of the opposition was just thrown in jail. Meanwhile, the shops have run out of flour, oil, toilet paper, and other basics.
If you want moral credit for caring about the poor, when, oh when, do you ever have to take responsibility for what happens to the poor when leftists take over?
We know what actually lifts people out of poverty: Property rights. The rule of law. Free markets. Not only do those things deliver the fundamentals that people need to keep body and soul together, they accomplish this feat without a single arrest, persecution, or show trial.
Published in Economics, Religion & Philosophy
How you can say this after reading Mona’s piece, my friend, I simply cannot grasp. The Castros and Che were killers–killers. And instead of defending the poor of Cuba against them, Dorothy Day praised them to the skies. For that matter, Dorothy Day opposed American involvement in World War II. In other words, she showed exactly what she was willing to permit happen when Hitler really did take over a country: let him have his way.
You make a terrific point.
I’ve been reading all day the writings of people with pre-conceived notions about Francis. whose sole purpose for listening to the speech was to find an admission of being a socialist by the Pope.
Suddenly papal opposition is the political correctness of the right.
I haven’t seen this much pope-bashing since the KKK did it.
I’m a conservative and I agree entirely with what the Pope says here.
Politics is about our common life. Politicians are supposed to serve the common good. That’s what they’re for.
To me he sounds a lot like JP II and like Solzhenitsyn, both of whom warned the west against the dangers of consumerism that were the more tempting and pernicious as the threat of Communism receded.
Manny: What good is alleviating poverty if people have no faith in God and therefore are heading for damnation?
The way I see it, neither capitalism nor poverty save a person’s soul. Someone living in poverty can be just as lost as a millionaire in a mansion – or a middle class family living in the suburbs. It’s not an either/or situation.
Capitalism is a sidestep from direct service to the poor. And that direct contact is at the heart of Christianity. Christ came and healed through touch. He didn’t heal by starting a business. If you don’t have touch, if you don’t have contact, if you don’t have direct service, you don’t have Christ.
The way I see it, capitalism is simply a tool. And like all tools, it can be used for good or bad. It can used as a sidestep, or it can be used to help provide the kind of direct service you’re talking about. I know of a coffee shop in Denver, Colorado (http://www.purpledoorcoffee.com/about-us/) whose owners hire homeless people and train them so they can eventually find jobs elsewhere and move beyond the circumstances they’re currently trapped in.
I think Dorothy Day was naive about Communism, as were many good people of that time, among them Whittaker Chambers. They thought the capitalist system was morally bankrupt. They found plenty of evidence for their views in the depression. They thought the Communists were serious about justice for the poor and the worker. They were wrong about that, but it wasn’t implausible at the time.
As for WW II, she opposed it because she was a pacifist, who was convinced (rightly or wrongly) that violence begets violence, not because she was okay with Hitler. For the Jews, she would have gone to jail or to martyrdom.
This was when the Castro revolution was in its infancy and the extreme direction they were heading was not evident, right?
Churchill praised Mussolini’s concept of fascism, and said if he were an Italian, he would be a fascist.
Be fair Peter – let me see your assertion that Churchill’s poor predictions of Mussolini is evidence that he was willing to let him have his way, as you assert with Day’s poor prediction of Castro.
Not a tool merely, since it’s dynamic and has a life of its own. It can be used for good (unlike Communism, which is essentially evil), that I grant, but I agree with Manny that unless it’s intentionally ordered to the good and imbued with an authentic humanism, it will begin to do bad.
Yabbut, he says that “a community” must sacrifice its “interests”, not that individuals must make sacrifices.
Sure, one could argue that he’s simply speaking generally, that he’s merely referring to the importance for Christians to act charitably, and that he doesn’t really mean that governments should forcibly impose sacrifices on their citizens, but then if that’s not what he means then why use those particular words?
What responsibility do I have, as a non-catholic, to give him more leeway than I would grant to any other political speaker?
That’s unfair. Her proposed economic system was based on private property and she should stood in constant opposition to communism, socialism and fascism.
Wasn’t the purpose of one of her books to sway her brother away from communism?
Honest question: why are non-Catholics so keen to determine what Pope Francis really means, if you think he’s just a guy in a funny hat who rules the world’s smallest city-state?
A community is an extension of personal life. Communities can be generous or not, welcoming or not, just or not. Governing bodies are not nothing more than force. They are capable of free collective action. That is something radically different from government-imposed sacrifice.
When Poland (am I right that it was Poland?) welcomed the Jews who were expelled from Spain, it wasn’t government-imposed generosity: it was free collective action.
When America went to war against Hitler, it was free collective action.
I assume he does think governments should forcibly impose sacrifices on their citizens. Do you disagree?
For instance: our government has the power to lay and collect taxes on income. That forcibly imposes a sacrifice on us, the taxpayers. Do you oppose this? Are you an anarco-capitalist who thinks we should privatize police, courts, and the military and abolish all taxation?
Few non-Catholics believe that the Pope is “just a guy in a funny hat”.
Many believe that the Bishop of Rome is a very important, and highly influential, Christian leader and the legitimate head of a global Christian denomination of which they don’t happen to be members.
If non-Catholics believed the Pope was nothing more that “a guy in a funny hat” they wouldn’t have nearly as much respect for certain previous Popes.
Maybe the reason non-Catholics are so interested is because they yearn for a Pope they can get behind, even if they have no intention of becoming Catholic.
I don’t know. Lots and lots of people, Catholic and non-Catholic, argue that’s not what he’s actually saying.
I do. I don’t know if the Pope does. Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t.
One does not have to be an Anarcho-Capitalist to oppose the income tax.
This conversation has sent me to my shelves for Dorothy Day’s memoirs, The Long Loneliness.
She was a leftist activist until her conversion to Catholicism, which came mainly through the inspiration and guidance of her great mentor, Peter Maurin.
Here she is describing him. (He sounds to me just like Pope Francis, and Solzhenitsyn and Whittaker Chambers, for that matter.)
I love this picture, it’s exactly how I feel in most of these debates about the Pope. The argument seems (from my perspective) to run as follows:
Because there are no other viewpoints, you’re either a tea-party conservative or a Marxist.
Thank you.
Tommy, many thanks for the helpful clarification. I have yet to read the Pope’s remarks in full–it was a busy day–and see that I need to do so.
I should also mention positives. I greatly appreciate the way this pontiff doesn’t just talk about the poor but emulates Christ by getting whatever barriers he can out of the way. This is special. Francis clearly cares deeply and actively about the disadvantaged. They are not an abstraction to him.
However, I worry very much whenever anyone–particularly someone with such moral authority–seems to lend support to coercive force over voluntary action. Christ calls each of us to voluntarily and joyfully help the poor, and Pope Francis is right to remind all of us of this fact and point out our shortcomings. But the UN and cap-and-trade won’t get us there.
However, I see from your comment and others that I am likely letting my distaste over this matter obscure other points of greater import.
Thanks again.
Of course not. One could, for instance, support replacing the income tax with a national sales tax.
Don’t all taxes forcibly impose sacrifices on taxpayers? Are you opposed to all forms of taxation, or only income taxes? Do you think taxation is theft?
(Note: as with my previous questions, I put several questions in one post to save time and space. I do not mean to suggest that all 3 are identical, or that holding one view necessitates holding the other 2.)
Yabbut, I’m not making this argument at all. At least, I don’t think I am.
I’m asking (what I think is) a pretty straightforward question about whether Christians, both Catholic and non-Catholic, have a responsibility to interpret ambiguous statements in the most favourable way when those words are spoken by Pope Francis, when they might not subscribe to such a favourable interpretation if the words were spoken by a different political figure, and whether that responsibility has any limits.
I’d like to be able to subscribe to the most favourable interpretation, but the number of ambiguous statements keep piling up, and I’m left remaining skeptical.
Skepticism is not the same as condemnation.
I also haven’t read anybody else make that argument. At least, I don’t think I have.
Instead, I’ve read people alternate between confusion over the meaning of ambiguous statements made by Pope Francis, and explicitly disagreeing with Pope Francis over specific statements and/or actions.
I have Dorothy Day fans on my Facebook feed. Here, thanks to them, is an article in Crisis, defending her from detractors who reduce her to leftism:
And this:
Like the Pope, she’s not a leftist pure and simple. The center of her concern is the person—the image and likeness of God in each and every person.
I tend to agree. But then I think that’s how most things tend to work.
In her early years (before her conversion) she was all in with the left. Afterwards, she wasn’t. But even after she became a Catholic, she was left-leaning. Like Whittaker Chambers, her personal sympathies and efforts lay with the marginalized, the outcast, the downtrodden. The luxuriousness of bishops’ lives bothered her, for instance.
From Slate:
I confess I don’t understand it. Ignore the Pope if you disagree with him, but I don’t see the need to attack the Pope.
Yes it’s a tool, and I applaud that business owner, but that’s a small example. But we also have the results of all the modern capitalist societies and while they are rich in material wealth they are poor in faith. At some point you have to ask yourself, does capitalism drive society to this? What did Christ mean that you can’t serve two masters: God and mammon? What did Christ mean that it is harder for a rich man to enter heaven than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle? The Pope is reaching back to Christ to find that wealth is not the solution to spiritual problems, and one of the sources of the problem.
Does that prescription apply to all political leaders, or just a Pope? When one disagrees with any political leader should one simply ignore them rather than expressing one’s disagreement?
From the JVL:
And by Turkey, they mean the Ottoman Empire.
That’s not left leaning.
We all want the poor lifted. The left/right debate is on how we deal with production and capital to get that done.
The left want to control it and dole it out, the right only wants equal access to the attempt to attain it.
Stop reading and start thinking. She was no leftist by any yardstick.
I think all people of good will have a kind of obligation to try to interpret the Pope truly, viz. as a moral, not a political leader, and against the backdrop of the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching in which he stands.
She was no leftist, but she definitely leaned left politically. Have you read her stuff? She was for labor unions, against management. She was a pacifist. She hated wealth disparities…. and on and on.
Whittaker Chambers said it this way (paraphrasing) to William Buckley, who wanted to recruit him for conservatism: “There are two types of people: those focused on justice and those focused on mercy.” He was the mercy sort.
Now, of course, in true religion and ideal statesmanship these differences are transcended and disappear. But DD would have voted Democrat, I feel sure.