March 18, 2006
Communitarians
I rarely have the temerity to post in the "Philosophy" category. That JohnGalt's territory. But -- at the risk of dropping something more serious into the weekend picayune posts around here -- I was intrigued with this post from Mary Katherine Ham on HughHewitt.com. (Side note: Sugarchuck has suggested from her word choice that she is a closet Buffy fan. It seems quite possible to me but I don't make it to Hugh's site enough to speculate.)
This post is about her experience at a SXSW conference in Austin (South by SouthWest music festival, Yahoo and I suppose). She notes the attendees were all left-wing (matches my Austin experiences perfectly) but that they all believed in Surowecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, and had a somewhat Hayekian understanding of community:
The Craig's List Katrina aid is a perfect example. Newmark said he was just getting out of the way and letting the community work to solve the problem the best way it knew how. He figured his central command from California would hamper the process rather than help it, so he let locals have at it.Gee, that sounds just like getting the bureaucracy and central government out of the way and letting the free market work. Seriously, he sounded like Grover Norquist, but all the Lefties in the room were nodding their heads vigorously just because Newmark called it community.
I think this is a huge recognition. I would link this with Arnold Kling's Folk Marxism and Michael Strong's divorce of leftism from liberalism.
In short, I wonder if we are as far apart as we appear to be. That the leftism espoused by some liberal friends may not be part of their core beliefs. Sometimes a think that realignment is possible that would put all of these "communitarians" that Ms. Ham has found in the same party.