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May
15
I just was informed about the Christian Democratic Union party in the United States. They just got started and advance views similar to the views advanced by the Christian Think-tank, the Center for Public Justice.
Here’s the message I got from them, recently.
I think Christian Democratic parties tend to be both pragmatic and progressive. The profile of USAmerica’s largest bloc of voters looks the profile of a Christian Democratic voter. Alas, somehow someone forgot to tell USAmericans about Christian Democracy.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that this party is emerging and who knows I might get involved with it someday. Though, I’d like to see some significant changes from other Christian Democratic parties. As you can tell from my “ideal type” Christian Pragmatic Progressive Party platform, I’m somewhat more libertarian-oriented and skeptical. For me, the bottom line is that Christian political participation ought to ensure that more interests can be served by the gov’t and that barriers to our ability to share the Gospel with others are lowered, not raised. I think that means one’s goal as a party is not to become institutionalized or to capture and keep captured the center(or a significant chunk of it), but rather to make the entire system more dynamic and to make more voters better motivated and informed about participating in public governance to the greater glory of God.
And, Honestly, I don’t think other Christian Democratic parties have helped to strengthen Christianity in their countries. As a Swedish Baptist Pietist, I get a little concerned about how the Catholic and Reformed and Lutheran and Pentecostal roots of these parties. Some of them have long had past unhealthy associations with political power. Some of them have become far more conservative and ”corrupted” when they came into power. Some of them reflect the secular-sacred dichotomy that treats certain social issues as commanding absolute solidarity by all devout Christians, whereas many secular issues are of minor importance for Christians. On these other issues, they can compromise on to get more support for their important issues.
But I don’t believe there is a political Ideology that is “based on Christianity”; instead, I believe that we need to have a Generous OrthoPraxy for Christian Political Involvement. And so maybe my skepticism comes down to this, I don’t believe that the center has any stable meaning in politics and so trying to base a political party on the center is more or less making a claim to control of the gov’t. Most people in the US don’t understand the political process very well. This makes it easier for parties and politicians, even those with the label Christian, to take advantage of them. I’d rather have Christian political movements inculcate habits of political deliberation than notions of what a “biblically-balanced” political agenda entails. I’d rather see us pressing for structural changes that will help to make the main two US parties be more ideologically dynamic, with third parties or intra-party movements providing the dynamism as to what is the center that the main parties center themselves around.
Although, I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a bipartisan Christian Democratic Caucus endorsed by the Christian Democratic Union in upcoming primaries and elections….
dlw
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what does being at the cetner have to do with Jesus and /or christianity. and as for pragmatism it has done more damage to the christian faith in the USA than we can realize, what is pragmatic about following a God who lived on the fringes of society because he wanted to not because he had to?
Hi, I never said that being at the center was critical for following Jesus as a Christian. I argued that the center has a slippery unstable meaning in the political sense.
As for pragmaticism, it is quite different from pragmatism. The latter is dogmaticism recast in terms of actions, rather than ontotheological beliefs.
Pragmaticism is about valuing our actions on the basis of their effects and Christian pragmaticism has to do with valuing our actions on the basis of their effectiveness in helping us share about the Gospel and advance the kingdom of God.
dlw
Both secular parties have let America’s Christians down with false choices and devil’s dilemmas, and both parties are drowning out the voice of Christian Americans with
their divide and conquer tactics. It is time for Christians to boldly assert their voice and their vision for the common good.
Therefore I have a modest proposal to make. The formation of a compassionate, radically centrist political organisation seamlessly bound to the consistent life-affirming ethic that the Christian gospel demands. More specifically I hope to participate in the formation of a mass organization, incorporated as a party or as a non-partisan Christian Democratic caucus that nominates candidates to run in the Republican and Democratic party primaries on a Christian Democratic platform. Non-partisan strategies are well tested in USAmerica….and the good news is that they work a lot better than strictly third party strategies. The types of strategies available to a CD movement in USAmerica may vary from state to state, depending on whether a state has closed or open primaries or if a state allows ballot line fusion More specifics later on in this post.
Though I favour a “non-partisan” electoral strategy for building a Christian Democratic movement here in USAmerica and I agree that our present winner-take-all electoral system presents challenges to third parties, nevertheless historically this system has not prevented third parties from having a significant impact on America. One only has to consider the impact that the Populist Party, Farmer-Labor parties and the Republican Party have all had on American politics both at the state and federal level. My personal reflection on this history leads me to have faith in the plausibility, if not the feasibility of USAmerican Christian Democratic movement that evolves a number of institutions, one of which may be a full-fledged national political party.
I believe the time is right to start down this road, and that much of this road has already been started for us and I believe members of this list should take some note…There is a dynamic, principled and pluralistic Christian Democratic movement in Europe and Latin America. Many Americans share the same Catholic and Reformed religious traditions in which the Christian Democratic movement is rooted. And Americans not only vote their fears and their pocketbooks, they vote their consciences as well, and much of that political conscience manifested at the ballot box (if it happens no where else!) is driven by Christian principles. Abolition of slavery was one such cause that stirred American Christians to political action, and they elevated the Republican Party from third party status to become what appears to be a permanent fixture on the USAmerican political landscape.
Today the pro-life cause to abolish abortion is creating much the same kind of political dynamics that the abolitionist cause created. Republican Party support may be wide, but it is not deep….except on one issue:abortion. This issue is of so much concern to Americans that 10 Million Democrats, most of them pro-life, voted for Republican presidential candidates. In the year 2000 exit polls showed that active and observant Roman Catholics voted for the GOP candidate for president for the first time in American history…but they did so while holding their nose as it were. These Catholic faithful,
progressive and populist in terms of social justice felt compelled to vote for the only party that might be willing to abolish abortion. But their support is aimed at the issue. They clearly do not support Republican economic and social policy.
In fact, if the Republican Party dropped its pro-life commitment many of these voters might simply stay home. The polls from the 2002 mid-term elections in key upset races in Minnesota, Georgia and Missouri showed that a pro-choice Republican would have lost to their Democratic opponent. Let’s interpolate the results a bit. It stands to reason that a pro-choice Republican would have lost to a pro-choice Democrat. A pro-choice Republican would have lost to a pro-life Democrat most definitely.
What’s going on here? The biggest and most cynical special interest con-game in history, in my not so humble opinion. Christians are being divided and conquered through the manipulation of the Christian conscience. If not an outright con-game the best that can be said about this situation is that neither party dividing Christian voters shares a Christian worldview, neither party has what even approaches a Christian public philosophy or vision for the common good. Christians are being forced by political circumstances to vote one way or another based on where various issues are on their priority list.
Christians by and large don’t disagree on the issues themselves so much as they may differ in response to those issues according to a set of priorities. National polls suggest that almost half of Democratic voters are in fact pro-life, but they find themselves voting for pro-choice candidates because of priorities related to social and economic justice, the common good. Complementary to this, polls shows that the majority of Republican voters(many of them pro-life Democrats!) favour a universal healthcare system in USAmerica.
The upshot of this of course is that both secular parties have let America’s Christians down with false choices and devil’s dilemmas, and both parties are drowning out the voice of Christian Americans with their divide and conquer tactics. It is time for Christians to boldly assert their voice and their vision for the common good.
Much of the blueprint to build the road to a viable Christian Democratic movement in America has been prepared by various groups. Catholic Social Doctrine is on the map. Among protestants a parallel line of doctrine known as “Neo-Calvinism” has invaded academia in both USAmerica and Canada, even to the point of organizing Christian labour unions! European office holders, theologians and academics contribute their vast fund of knowledge and experience directly to the Neo-Calvinist movement in the hopes that Christian Democracy will at long last find its rightful place in North America.
Given present world circumstances in which the US is isolating itself from its European allies with unilateral and quasi-imperialistic policies and actions, one can readily see why European Christian Democrats might be anxious that Christians in America stop being
dictated to by fallen thrones, principalities and powers. Two leading organizations in this movement are Citizens for Public Justice (Canada) and the Center for Public Justice in Baltimore. You can scope its website at http://www.cpjustice.org
Returning to the question of America’s electoral system let me just say that I think many creative strategies short of constitutional amendments have been dreamed up…and some of them are even battle-tested. It is not impossible for third parties to become first and second parties. The Republican Party is an example of a former third party….and we haven’t heard from the “Whigs” Federalist Party for quite a long while, have we? So we know that historically speaking first and second parties can become third and none parties as well!
I agree that there is a need for proportional representation(PR). There is no provision in the US Constitution that prevents a state from using PR to elect its US House delegation because the US Constitution only specifies that a state send a number of House representatives based on state population. In other words you will find nowhere the words “congressional district” within the Constitution itself. This means that a state could decide to elect its allotted number of US House members according to a PR system. How a state chooses to elect House members is pretty much left up to the states. While a constitutional amendment could be used to compel states to adopt a PR system at once, it may not be necessary because each state can at present adopt a PR system of its own volition.
PR of course is used in parliamentary democracies across the world. USAmerica is unique in that rather than forming coalition governments as many parliamentary democracies frequently do, Americans form coalition parties made up of several broad groupings that are often ideologically opposed to each other and therefore coalesce only on a narrow range of interests.
These coalitions are forged in the Republican and Democratic local, state and federal primaries. The primaries are where insurgent groups can have the most impact. Sometimes an insurgency operates within the primaries of both parties. The best example of this is the Non-Partisan League of North Dakota (NPL).It formed in 1915 quickly as a mass organisation with a political platform adopted from the Socialist Party. Members of NPL committed to vote only for candidates that supported the NPL platform. These candidates could be running as Republicans, or they could be running as Democrats. NPL had tens of thousands of members, in a small state mind you. NPL made sure that there were candidates that members could vote for by holding pre-primary caucuses and nominating NPL members to run in Republican and Democratic primaries. If a voting district leaned Republican the NPL member nominated in the NPL caucus would run in the Republican primary. If it leaned Democratic, then the NPL caucus nominee would run
in the Democratic primary. North Dakota was as a whole a Republican state at the time, and so most NPL caucus nominees ran in the Republican primaries. They ran in the Republican primaries and won. Then they went to the general election and won. The next legislature to take its seats after the first round of NPL caucuses was a legislature made up of NPL members that ran as Republicans. The governor elect a scant few years later was an NPL member governor. Decades later the Christian Coalition would discover the power of running its insurgent candidates in primaries as well.
I favour the NPL strategy. I favour it because of the circumstances I mentioned above. The voters that a Christian Democratic movement wants to appeal to are divided by a partisan wall of offence. I want to breach that partisan wall. I favour it because of the particular challenges we face in bringing a Christian public philosophy to public view. And last but not least I favour the NPL strategy because it isn’t a purely electoral strategy.
NPL was a social movement that not only conducted political caucuses but it also actively built a social economy, whether or not it was in office or not. Many European social movements are conceived of as having a political electoral wing and a social economic wing. The former Italian Communist Party, whether in office or not is able to work out its social, political and economic agenda because the party is a part of a movement that includes networks of thousands of firms and hundreds of thousands of workers. The same is true of the Catholic parties in Italy as well. The NPL strategy gives us the space we need to pull down partisan walls, separate both parties from their wedge issues and begin a process of genuinely educating and organizing American voters so that Americans may indeed function fruitfully as true citizens.
So I see a mass Christian Democratic movement with a non-partisan electoral wing that functions in all but name only, as a political party and on the other wing the movement organizes its mass membership base to build a cooperative commonwealth in North America, a commonwealth that is being built whether the other wing is in office or
not. I call the political wing of the movement the “Christian Democratic Union” rather than a “party” but over time I anticipate it may become a full fledged party in every sense of the word. Again, because of the unique balloting situations in the various states USAmerica’s Christian Democratic movement may have a federal party, state parties in “fusion” states where individual candidates can be nominated by multiple parties, and closed primary states and juridically non-partisan Christian Democratic Unions in open primary states. This particular situation of mixed mode for a party continues to exist within the Democratic Party: Minnesota’s Democratic Farmer Labor Party is purely a state party, not a part of the federal Democratic Party. Nevertheless they are allied very closely indeed. The same situation could exist for a federal CD party, state parties and state “unions.”
I hope I’ve clearly presented my modest proposal to you all and that it might lead to a discussion in which some breakthrough can be found. A Christian Democratic movement able to run its candidates in both Republican and Democratic Party primaries would certainly be a good step toward building on the unity of views that Americans do in fact
hold, but which are not reflected at present by either wing of the secular partisan duopoly.
[...] Alan Avans has written out for me in a comment his description of the vision for the rise of the Christian Democratic Union in the US. [...]
I wonder if the CDU will have the same problems as the CPa in the UK. Without a history of Christian Democracy, Christians don’t know much about politics, and so we see them rounded up to vote by Karl Rove, or spurred into action by Christian Voice. In the UK, the target audiences are those most likely to want a Christian party, not Christian democracy; to want a right wing social and economic agenda, rather than an informed communitarian one.
As for pragmaticism mentioned above; either you are their to wrok with other groups towards common goals, or you are only trying to subvert the system to your own ends. Pragmaticism is in favour of the former.
I agree that there is going to be a tension between the sort of voters that CDU is bound to attract and the ideals they are s’posed to be based on….
I don’t know about “common goals”, but it seems that making the political system work better for a wider range of interests is a different goal than displacing the top partng or rivalling the top parties in terms of their prominence.
Maybe, it’s possible a party or caucus will rise to greater prominence as a result of doing the latter faithfully over an extended period of time, but it cannot be presumed. I think it’s a matter of the bandwagon effect. They need to talk up their potential to rise to get more people to join on.
Anyways, I may have destroyed any chance of having a significant voice in this party with my posts by now.
dlw