Stephen B. Young, The Daily Record Newswire
Our 2012 national election is over and what has followed President Barack Obama’s re-election was to be expected. Yogi Berra was no fool: “It’s deja vu all over again.”
The Democrats who kept the presidency by a squeaker are all huff and puff about their mandate and their keenness to shove their ideology down Republican throats.
In their turn, Republicans are telling themselves, “It wasn’t our message but our messenger that lost,” so hang tight and our message will win next time, and then we will shove our
ideology down Democrat throats.
I wish they would all grow up and realize that it is not winning that counts, that it is not a minority, partisan ideology that will save the country; it is mature judgment and wise stewardship that we need.
On the importance of wise stewardship, there is a foundational aspect to the election results that I have not seen mentioned in all the wrap-up reports and speculations. Two institutions have failed in recent years as wise stewards of their powers and responsibilities, and those failures drew into question the moral authority of their acolytes.
Minnesota Republicans had two regrets in the election: the defeat of Mitt Romney for the presidency and the defeat of the marriage amendment.
Both Romney and the marriage amendment advocated conservative value propositions opposed to “progressive” thought. Since the rise of the modern left in the French Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Beaumarchais, etc.), those who oppose progressive ideas of liberalizing traditional norms and practices stand against the supposed tide of history in the name of universal, permanent values. To make their case, they need moral authority more than the left does.
The moral appeal of the left arises easily in its deconstruction of tradition and “old-fashioned” ways of thinking and acting. The left appeals to individualistic, self-referential sentiments and immediate conveniences. This is the Nietzschian and Freudian morality of unsocialized personhood, not of community.
To attain and maintain their moral authority, conservatives and other non-leftists must walk their virtuous talk. If they fall short, they lose authority, either through evident hypocrisy or through equally evident abuse of power. They are exposed not as paladins of truth but as just another set of self-referential individuals with no metaphysical claim to the possession of better judgment.
Romney’s claim to better judgment was undermined by his association with “Wall Street.” In common parlance, he was not the candidate of “Main Street.”
The claim of the Catholic Church to better judgment on how marriage should be defined was undermined by its longstanding entanglement with pedophile priests.
Wall Street’s stewardship responsibility was to create wealth for America, not destroy it. When Wall Street failed to meet its principal responsibility — after repeatedly asking the federal government more and more freedom to make profits in trading and speculation — it lost its claim for credible moral leadership in the eyes of many moderate Americans.
When Romney asked Americans to trust him to run the economy better than Obama and his team has, he put himself in an awkward position. While individually he may indeed be more sound in his views and accomplished in his business experiences than Obama, he was seen by many Americans as dealing from a position of moral weakness. His kind had not walked the talk of wise stewardship.
Many of them had made money for themselves and had tanked the economy in the process. Then there were no significant apologies from Wall Street honchos, no acknowledgments of shortcomings that were plain to see.
So too for those in positions of authority in the Catholic Church, which took a firm stand for affirming the traditional understanding of Christian marriage. While they themselves did not participate in the pedophilia or its many cover-ups, their institution had spawned and coddled too many priests who had violated the trust placed in them for sexual probity and celibacy as men sanctified to be intercessors for God through administration of the sacraments. An organization that had compromised on its standards lost credibility when it demanded obedience to those standards.
As with Wall Street, there is a grave service dimension to the daily work of the Catholic Church. Its chosen mission is a high and glorious one — to frame out and structure God’s sense of moral order here in this world. This is both a service to God and a holy ministry to humanity. Falling short in this work is a more substantial failure than when an individual comes up short in his or her personal ethics. When those who are to serve fail in their stewardship responsibilities, they do more than bruise our faith in the future.
