The announcement of Representative Paul Ryan as the Republican VP nominee has energized Catholic conversation about the election. On this blog, Charlie Camosy said this election will now be much more substantive, while Jana Bennett worried about Catholics fighting Catholics in public and forgetting that politics is not the most important thing. Over the past several days, the left called Ryan out for his misuse of Catholic Social Teaching, while the right championed Ryan’s call for efficiency and lamented liberal blindness to the failures of the social welfare system.
I hope the continuing dialogue will be as substantive as Charlie predicted and less contentious than Jana feared. It might be, if those like myself who find themselves to the left of Ryan choose to enter into dialogue with him. Why is this important?
1. Civil dialogue is what we always say we’re for. Charlie Camosy recently gave us some rules for civility, like humility, solidarity with our conversation partners that includes a willingness to listen, and avoiding the binary language that divides us. Even if those on the left are justly angered and even fearful of what a Romney-Ryan presidency might bring, shouldn’t we be committed to seeking common ground?
2. This is a chance to bring a wider audience to the Catholic Social Teaching we love. This is an election moral theologians could only dream of. The texts we know best will be front and center. The wisdom we see in our tradition may soon become soccer field conversation. What a great chance to show the world the richness of this teaching that transcends the banality of mainstream political discussion.
3. Moving from principles to policy is complicated. If this is true, as many on the left argue, it must be as true in social ethics as it is in bioethics or family ethics. This is a chance for those on the right and the left to acknowledge these difficulties together. Yes, two-thirds of Ryan’s budget cuts come from programs that aid the poor. And, yes, Catholic Social Teaching teaches us to embrace the option for the poor and work for the common good. But this doesn’t mean that all programs for the poor must always be maintained as some seem to suggest. In a CBN interview, Ryan has defended his budget as consistent with Catholic Social Teaching and ultimately helpful to the poor. His views should not be approached uncritically, but he deserves a chance to explain and defend the following:
“Through our civic organizations, through our churches, through our charities, through all of our different groups where we interact with people as a community, that’s how we advance the common good, by not having Big Government crowd out civic society, but by having enough space in our communities so that we can interact with each other, and take care of people who are down and out in our communities,” Ryan said.
” . . . the preferential option for the poor, which is one of the primary tenants of Catholic social teaching, means don’t keep people poor, don’t make people dependent on government so that they stay stuck at their station in life, help people get out of poverty, out into a life of independence.”
4. The social welfare system is not without problems. There is reason to be worried when so many citizens receive nutritional assistance from the government, when such a large percentage of citizens would be poor if government assistance did not lift them above the poverty level, when rates of movement out of poverty in the U.S. lag behind those in other nations, when Medicare is unsustainable, etc. Of course, some people will always need government assistance and Catholic Social Teaching certainly affirms this responsibility of government. And it’s important to admit that much government assistance already goes to community organizations like Catholic Charities that aid the poor. Still, questions can legitimately be asked about whether our current system could be improved.
5. Listening goes both ways. If the left offers civil dialogue, allows for complexity, admits weaknesses on its own side, and seeks common ground, it can legitimately ask Ryan and his supporters to consider their best points: a Catholic anthropology that is diametrically opposed to the individualism of Ayn Rand, the duty of the wealthy to pay taxes out of their abundance, the appropriate role of government, and legitimate doubts about the ability of civil society to care for all of the vulnerable.
It’s worth a try.
Julie, this is a great post. I have an addition that is related to #3, which is to not let disagreement on principles get in the way of an honest look at policies. Here is an example of what I mean. In his criticism of Paul Ryan on America’s web site (http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13455), Gerald Beyer goes on and on describing how Ryan believes in “laissez-faire” and “that the government’s role in combatting poverty should be radically reduced, leaving the taxpayer to do as she or he pleases with her income and assets,” yet throughout the whole article does not describe a single policy that Ryan has proposed that supposedly is based on these principles.
In fact, if you look at one of Ryan’s most important proposals, reform of Medicare, the reality is much more complicated. According to the Ryan-Wyden plan, the government would define a set of comprehensive benefits comparable to Medicare today. Then insurance companies would provide policies covering these benefits, alongside a government-issued insurance plan similar to Medicare. The government would then provide seniors with a voucher equivalent to the cost of the second least expensive of these insurance policies (which remember all must contain the defined minimum coverage). The senior can then use this voucher to purchase an insurance policy, or could spend additional money out of pocket to have a more comprehensive policy. This may be a good or a bad policy, but it is certainly not laissez-faire and certainly does not leave people to their own resources.
Second, a lot has been made of the influence of Ayn Rand on Paul Ryan. As Peter Lawler points out at the Postmodern Conservative blog at First Things (http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2012/08/14/i-still-dont-know-about-ryan/) points out however, Ryan has a consistent record of being pro-life, which is completely inconsistent with Randian philosophy. Clearly he has been selective about what he got out of Rand. So again, this is evidence that we need to take his actual policies seriously without dismissing them simply because he likes Ayn Rand. After all, in Dreams From My Father, Obama describes how he actively sought out Marxist professors and other campus radicals in college and devoured the work of Frantz Fanon, and spent sleepless nights reading Nietzsche.
Matt,
Thanks for continuing the conversation. I really appreciated your recent post at Political Theology: http://www.politicaltheology.com/blog/ryan-obama-poverty-community/. I like your point about not letting disagreements about principles get in the way of discussions on policy. I’m a fan of Jeffrey Stout’s pragmatic approach to political discussion, which pushes us to keep talking in spite of different premises, with hope of reaching on the smaller things even if we will never agree on the larger ones.
The Medicare proposal does seem more nuanced than critics suggest. However, other cuts in social programs worry me, as I wonder how communities, churches, and families can respond quickly enough to prevent the suffering of vulnerable people. I’d like to hear Ryan talk more about this. As an advocate of “local” approaches to social change, I want to talk details.
I also think you’re right that too much can be made of guilt by association with radical thinkers. Clearly, Ryan differs from Rand. It does concern me that he cited her as such a great influence on his entry into politics and I would like to hear him talk about how he has changed since he has distanced himself from her thought.
Ryan’s call for greater civility today was heartening, but instead of blaming the president for the current incivility in Washington, wouldn’t it be great if he said, “Let’s return to President Obama’s great vision of no red states and no blue states, which I know he wants to see just as much as I do.”?
I just want to add that I don’t think the left is doing any better than the right with civility, and certainly I want to see more of it from the President and the Vice President as well as from their challengers.
Even if it seems hopelessly idealistic, I believe that if we practice civil dialogue from the ground up, change is possible.
Matthew,
If I had more space in my America piece (which you refer to above), I would have described all of the cuts that Paul Ryan proposes to government programs, including those to Medicaid. I think it is incontrovertible that Ryan beleives that the government needs to recede into the background in many areas of economic life. In other words, that he supports laissez-faire capitalism, neoliberalism in today’s parlance.
There are a numbner of sources that I could point to, but this one gets at the heart of the matter:
“The CBO report, prepared at Chairman Ryan’s request, shows that Ryan’s budget path would shrink federal expenditures for everything other than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and interest payments to just 3¾ percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050. ”
Please have a look at this at http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3708#_ftn1. In addition: http://www.offthechartsblog.org/ryan-2/
It is true that some government programs may not be effective. I was a social worker for a while and saw this up close. Nonetheless, I also saw the negative effects of so-called welfare reform in 1996, when many programs to help people gain job skills to re-enter teh workforce were cut. And what to say about cuts to programs like SNAP (which Megan Clarke has discussed at length in this blog) and S-CHIP, which has enabled so many children to obtain health care?
Julie Rubio’s point about civility is well-taken. But this does not mean that we should shy away from speaking truth to power, and from confrontation. As I wrote in my America article, Pope John Paul II himself stated that sometimes standing in solidarity with the oppressed requires confrontation. He acknowledged the “positive role of conflict.” Of course, he meant nonviolent conflict. Nonetheless, I think about the Solidarity movement in Poland, which I have studied for many years. Their tactics involved shaming their oppressor, as Fr. Jozef Tischner wrote in his phenomenological account of Solidarity, Etyka solidarnosci.