Gore Vidal once said - no, that's not true, Mr. Vidal never says anything once, though never the same way twice. If one wants to know America, then
Lincoln is a place to start.
[BTW Bopnews is live for podcasting:
]
It was Robert Penn Warren who defined Democracy by the moral agency of its citizens. It is the participatory nature of the internet that turns consumers of politics into participants in politics. The internet is a space, even though it has media on it.
Steve Hicken is starting a meditation on the moral agency of Americans, and my friend Glenn Smith - of The Politics of Deceit fame - who has argued that politics is the creation of a moral covenant between office holder and electorate.
The lack of moral autonomy is a crucial issue in our time and place. Autonomy is one of those greek words we know, but we don't know. Auto means self, an "auto-mobile" goes by itself. An auto-nomous actor is --- what? We know this word nomy is seen astronomy and economy and nominal. It's the word nomos which we don't see in the wild in English by itself - it means rules or laws.
So someone who is auto-nomos is one who is self ruling. Philosophers use the term "heteronomous" for those who are ruled by the outside - by force or outside books. The reactionary movement is unified in that it is a movement that believes only in heteronomy. Libertarians only pay taxes because they are forced to, the religious right only obeys laws that come from their version of God, set down in their interpretation of scripture. In short, the unifying feature of the reactionary movement is a rejection of autonomy.
It goes without saying that this is a rejection of American and Americanism - to be "self-governing" is the same thing, the exact same thing - as to have autonomy. This does not mean that one obeys no other law, nor recognizes no other good, but that the source of good comes from within. Kant's formulation that it is the starry sky above and the moral law within.
The attack, the deep attack, on the reactionary movement then must come from convincing people that they want to have autonomy, and that moral decisions - including the difficult ones, come from within.
Plato's last work of philsophy that we have is entitled "nomos" or "the laws", and while I disagree with most of what is in it - the issue, the issue is the only one in the end - "From whence comes order?"
It is the liberal project that says that the only lasting order comes from within, and that people must, therefore, have the necessities of being free. Particularly free from those forms of coercion that come from starvation, or the power of those who merely came before, or have temporary advantage.
Recently Jesus' General has been conducting a campaign to embarass the yellophants. It is satire, but it gets to the reality of the problem: the most vociferous supporters of Iraq are those that want someone else to die there. That is a lack of moral agency. On the otherside, they want to put up monuments to the 10 Commandments everyplace - and which includes commandments for "thou shall not kill" and "thou shall not covet ... anything that is thy neighbors." Strange, we've been doing an awful lot of covetting as a nation. Heavy on the covet, Father.