E.J. Dionne: Germany's "Socialized Capitalism" Works Better Than Divisive Individualism

The full context of Matthew 25:40 should scare bejesus out of "Christian" fundamentalists (and kin) who prostrate themselves at the altar of America's Secular Religion. 

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2025:%2031-46&version=MSG
Where are "biblical literalists" when we need them?

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Excerpt: "One of the keys (to Germany's post-war success), said Charles Maier, a professor of history at Harvard, is that the country’s broad conservative party, Merkel’s Christian Democrats, “from the beginning had a strong welfare notion based on the idea of solidarity” drawn from Catholic social teaching."

Alan: I sometimes wonder if Canada's passion for social justice is due to its 43% Catholic population whereas the corresponding number in the United States is 24%. Could it be that Canada's saturation with Catholic Social Teaching has reached "critical mass" at the cultural level, whereas the United States persists in ruggedly individualistic fundamentalism, a nightmare now in raging disarray? 

Consider these "Quotations From Catholic Social Teaching On The Theme Of Capitalism" 
http://www.cctwincities.org/document.doc?id=102  

Other social justice themes are "clickable" at 
http://www.cctwincities.org/CatholicSocialTeachingNotableQuotes

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Who is more American?

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: September 29, 2013

Are Germans now more American than we are?

As we stare at the prospect of a government shutdown driven by tea party radicalism and ludicrously irresponsible hostage-taking politics, we’d do well to study how postwar Germany — yes, encouraged by the United States — has embraced the sort of consensual, problem-solving politics for which we were once famous.

E.J. Dionne Jr.

Writes about politics in a twice-a-week column and on the PostPartisan blog.

Archive

Greg Sargent

The Morning Plum: For GOP, a refresher on the meaning of the word `compromise’

On Sept. 22, Chancellor Angela Merkel won an extraordinary personal victory in Germany’s elections, leading her Christian Democratic Union to one of its best results in a half-century. The election created some difficulties for her and for Europe, but no one should deny Merkel the accolades she deserves for political genius, toughness and what Chase Gummer in the American Prospect cleverly called her “boring brilliance.”

You can take issue with some of her policies, notably her insistence on austerity in southern Europe, which is suffering from massive joblessness and economic contraction. As Martin Wolf wrote recently in the Financial Times, the danger is that Germany will remain a country that “exports bankruptcy and unemployment.” While Merkel may have kept the euro alive by pushing relief for Europe’s south about as far as German public opinion would accept, Wolf’s worries are well-placed.

But let’s focus for now on public policy inside Germany, which has proved that capitalism with strong social protections works. The Christian Democrats call it “the social market,” a system that has been enhanced and reformed over the years by both Merkel’s party and the center-left Social Democrats.

This moderate form of progressive, bring-people-together politics was what the United States and its allies had in mind for Germany when they worked with German leaders, especially Christian Democrat Konrad Adenauer, to create a post-Nazi state. The goal was to avoid the extremism and polarization that destroyed the pre-World War II Weimar Republic and led to Hitler’s seizure of power.

“The institutions of postwar Germany were deliberately shaped so as to minimize the risk of a rerun of Weimar,” wrote Tony Judt in “Postwar,” his monumental history of Europe after 1945.

One of the keys, said Charles Maier, a professor of history at Harvard, is that the country’s broad conservative party, Merkel’s Christian Democrats, “from the beginning had a strong welfare notion based on the idea of solidarity” drawn from Catholic social teaching.

“The Germans don’t buy the zero-sum thinking that government and markets — or liberty and equality — can’t be pursued jointly,” observed Jackson Janes, president of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. “They argue about the same issues we face — how much social, how much market and how much government do we want? — but their starting point is that all three should be working together: capitalism with a strong welfare dimension steered by a government which is an ally, not the enemy.”  (Alan: Obama is a Rockefeller Republican.  And Ronald Reagan is a RINO.  "What Would Reagan Really Do? 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/09/what-would-reagan-really-do.html)

That used to be us.

Recent years have seen a fragmentation away from the two big parties, and in this election, a new anti-euro party nearly entered the German Parliament. But this time, there was also a strong pull toward the center.

Merkel’s landslide was built primarily on a reshuffling of voters on the center-right. An analysis by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung found that the largest share of the Christian Democrats’ gains since the 2009 election — about 2.2 million votes — came from their more free-market-oriented coalition partner in the last government, the Free Democratic Party (FDP). As a result, the FDP fell below the 5 percent threshold required to earn seats in Parliament. So Merkel will have to look left, to the Social Democrats or the Greens, for a new coalition partner.

For their part, the Social Democrats did worse than they hoped, but picked up votes from the Left Party — appropriately to their left — and the Greens.

To the dismay of some Germans but to the apparent satisfaction of a substantial majority of them, German politics will have to be more consensual than ever.

Just to be clear (and to short-circuit some right-wing comments and tweets), I’m proud to be an American and harbor no desire to become German. I love our country’s raucous freedom, culture, history and diversity, the beauty of our vast land, and baseball.

But the fact is that countries learn from each other. Germans applied to their own best traditions some useful pointers about reaching workable compromises in a democracy fromus — from the America of FDR, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Why do Germans remember ideas from our history that the shutdowners dearly want us to forget?

Read more from E.J. Dionne’s archive

Pope Francis washing the feet of Islamic criminals

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For an alternative Christian view of Pope Francis, see "The Thinking Housewife"
http://www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2013/09/an-interview-with-pope-francis/