Anti-Climacus

SOLIDARITY: So it occurs to me that one of the things I don't particularly like about blogs is that they encourage piecemeal responses to political questions, so you can often end up feeling like there's nothing particularly systematic about the way some people approach political questions. Being a theory guy, and having spent a lot of time recently going over reading for a provisional dissertation-type project (I pitched it without actually giving much thought to whether it'd work at extended length), I've been reading up on liberal anti-communism in the 30s-50s, and one of the things I'm really struck by is how open everyone is about the foundations for and entailments of their own political beliefs. To that end, I thought I'd expand a little on the operational principles of my politics, starting with the first and most basic, which is for me the concept of solidarity.

“When I first became a socialist, the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not the defining thing, whether the cause was popular or risky or not.”
-Christopher Hitchens

"That town was the kind of place he remembered where you prayed side by side with your neighbors. And if things were going wrong for them, you prayed for them and knew they'd pray for you if things went wrong for you."
-Pres. Bush, on Ronald Reagan

You can spin in one way or another (religious or secular, liberal or conservative), but the basic pinciple of politics ought to be the idea that people who inhabit a certain position in the world (members of a democratic society, relatively free and relatively well off), should be all about making common cause with people whose ends are similar. This seems like it should manifest in two ways: internally, by saying that the people around you are engaged in the same struggle, and insomuch as they are, you have the exact same obligation to help them get ahead as you'd place on yourself--you should refuse no reasonable effort for the sake of your fellow men. Externally, it recognizes that there are lots of people who desire the things we have and do not yet have them, and that we ought to fight just as hard for them as we would for anyone else.

(do note that the above can be nicely justified within Christianity, by noting both the obligation we have to love others as ourselves and the realization we all must have that man is corrupted by sin, which means men will sometimes need vigorous defense, and we have to be the ones to provide it. This is not intended as liberation theology--I don't mean to imply that God obligates us or sides himself with oppressed or downtrodden people, but merely that we shouldn't forget our obligations to them when they are faced with the cruelty of others)

This is intended to replace the concepts of equality and fraternity--men don't meet as equals because they're not equals, nor should their bonds be merely brotherly--there's an essential obligation on everyone's head to act rightly (though there are obviously some problems with cashing this out in practice, it doesn't lessen our obligation to it).