Politics Power And The Common Good 6th Edition Pdf Free

[Carlos Beirise]

Igrew up in a pretty rough environment, and what the American dream meant to me was that I had a decent enough job to support my family and that I could be a good husband and a good father. That's what I most wanted out of my life. It wasn't the American dream of the striver. It wasn't the American dream, frankly, that I think animates much of this town. I didn't care if I went to an Ivy League law school, I didn't care if I wrote a best-selling book, I didn't care if I had a lot of money. What I wanted was to be able to give my family and my children the things that I hadn't had as a kid: That was the sense in which the American dream mattered most to me.

That American dream is undoubtedly in decline. I want to talk a little bit about why I think that's happening and what a conservative politics has to do in response, but I think a first step is to distinguish between a conservative politics and a libertarian politics. I don't mean to criticize libertarianism. I first learned about conservatism as an idea from Friedrich Hayek. The Road to Serfdom is one of the best books that I've ever read about conservative thought. But in an important way I believe that conservatives have outsourced our economic and domestic policy thinking to libertarians.

I have been blown away by some of the research I've seen in the past year on how pornography warps young adolescent minds. We know that young adults are marrying less. They're having fewer children. They're engaging in healthy and productive relationships less and less. And we know that at least one of the causes of this is that we have allowed pornography, under the guise of libertarianism, to seep into our youngest minds through the channels of the Internet. Again, we made a political choice that the freedom to consume pornography was more important than public goods like marriage and family and happiness. We can't ignore the fact that we made that choice, and we shouldn't shy away from the fact that we can make new choices in the future.

But I think that to make this about economics is to grant too much of a premise that we don't want to grant. Because when I think about my own life, the thing that has made my life best is the fact that I'm the father of a two-year-old son. When I think about the demons of my own childhood and the way that those demons have melted away in the love and laughter of my own son, when I see friends of mine who have grown up in tough circumstances, who have become fathers and become more connected to their communities, to their families, to their faith because of the role of their own children, I say we want babies not just because they're economically useful. We want more babies because children are good, and we believe children are good because we're not sociopaths.

Libertarians are not heartless, and I don't mean to suggest that they are. I think they often recognize many of the same problems that we recognize, but they are so uncomfortable with political power, or so skeptical of whether political power can accomplish anything, that they don't want to actually use it to solve or even address some of these problems.

But to me, ignoring the fact that we have political choices, or pretending that there aren't political choices to be made, is itself a political choice. The failure to use political power that the public has given is a choice, and it's a choice that has increasingly had, and I think increasingly will have, incredibly dire consequences for ourselves and our families.

A popular libertarian author talks a lot about the decline of community, the decline of family, the fact that people aren't marrying as much, that they're spending more time on social media, that they feel increasingly isolated, and that in part because of that isolation we're seeing skyrocketing rates of youth suicide. This author is smart about the fact that technology is at least part of the reason why we're seeing all these trends.

My answer is simple: I serve my child. And it has become abundantly clear that I cannot serve two masters. I cannot defend commerce when it is used to addict his toddler brain to screens, and to addict his adolescent brain to pornography. I cannot defend the rights of drug companies to sell poison to his neighbors without any consequences because those people chose to take those drugs.

It is time, as Ronald Reagan once said, for choosing. And I choose my son, I choose the civic constitution necessary to support and sustain a good life form, and I choose the healthy American nation necessary to defend and support that civic constitution.

Together, I recall we attended a White House Holiday gathering. With our noses almost pressed against glass cabinets, we admired the White House china collection from all presidential administrations and, of course, the mammoth Christmas tree.

And just as faith without works is dead, we owe so much to the NETWORK Lobby for making our faith come alive in the halls of power. Their commitment to the common good has helped ensure that love and care for our neighbors finds expression in federal policy and are lived out more fully on the peripheries and throughout society.

To explain this partial independence of the distinctively legal common good, let me make more explicit my methodological premises, and even express a very amicable methodological complaint, delivered in quiet tones.

So, to begin with some broad premises: law (or more precisely jurisprudence, understanding that term in the civilian sense rather than the Anglo-American academic sense) is best seen as a department of political morality, a subaltern science. In particular, it is the department that attempts to embody in practical reasoning the virtue of what Aquinas called general or legal justice, the rendering of each his due, a virtue intrinsically ordered to the common good of the community. But, and conversely, this means law is also a special department of political morality; it is not to be assimilated or dissolved into political morality as such, let alone morality simpliciter. Law has to treat justice in special ways because practical reason applied to governance through law ordered to the common good is a prudential activity, one that faces distinctive problems.

Second, for concrete legal purposes one usually does not have to choose between high-level, contested sub-conceptions of the common good. Philosophers and theologians debate so-called distinctive, aggregative, and instrumental conceptions of the common good, among others. The book adopts the classical or distinctive conception of the common good, because I think it is the conception that unites Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, and for the sake of concreteness, and because I think it is true. But very little in the operative interpretations of our constitutional order offered in the book, and very little in the quotidian work of law generally, turns on contested philosophical refinements of the common good at the outer boundaries of debate. As George Duke observed, the differences among high-level conceptions of the common good often make little difference in the work of practical reason. Those conceptions can travel a long way together, and this is a problem both for the jurisprude (in the Anglo-American sense) who is eager to plunge into conceptual refinements and also for the skeptic about the common good or natural law. Instead the quotidian activity of practical reasoning about the legal common good serves concrete ends, on which different speculative conceptions of the common good usually converge in practice. It condemns the abuse of official power for private purposes like nepotism or peculation; it underwrites equitable and public-regarding interpretations of semantic meaning; and it helps to prevent a kind of pointless and fetishistic legal formalism that benefits few and harms all.

I was at the impressionable age of fourteen when I heard John F. Kennedy urge us not to ask what America can do for us but what we can do for America. Seven years later I took a job as a summer intern in the Senate office of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy. It was not a glamorous job, to say the least. I felt lucky when I was asked to run his signature machine. But I told myself that in a very tiny way I was doing something for the good of the country.

The last five decades have also been marked by growing cynicism and distrust toward all of the basic institutions of American society. There is a wide and pervasive sense that the system as a whole is no longer working as it should. Racism, xenophobia, and religious intolerance are on the rise.

A growing number of Americans feel neglected and powerless. Some are poor, or Black or Latino. Others are white and have been on a downward economic escalator for years. Some have been seduced by demagogues and conspiracy theorists.

Americans sharply disagree about exactly what we want for America or for the world. But if we are to participate in the same society we must agree on how we deal with our disagreements, our obligations under the law, and our commitment to democracy.

We\u2019ve gone through the shameful first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and of the refusal of 147 members of Congress (all Republicans) to certify all the electors from states that voted for Biden, on the basis of no evidence of fraud. So far, no political figure has been charged with any criminal wrongdoing. We\u2019ve seen 34 voter-suppression bills enacted by 19 Republican state legislatures; at least 8 give state legislatures the power to disregard election outcomes. More than 400 additional voter suppression measures are now being prepared. And we are now witnessing a struggle in the Senate to reform the filibuster so that voting rights legislation can be enacted. All of which raises a basic question: Is there still a common good?

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