It's not hard to notice cameras on every street corner. Their parents may still need personalized retraining, but every school age child has been taught their new responsibilities and requirements. Our national government's new and very serious concerns regarding our health and smoking, drinking, overeating and exercise is impossible to ignore. New strange sounding "wars" are being waged on activities like overeating and freedom of speech. It's no joke anymore that we all may have to pay global taxes on the air we breathe. Inside our private homes we're all dealing with a whole new bureaucratic system that assumed the role of our new Big Mother.
What we share in common is we're all children in Big Mother's global communitarian family. I do know communitarianism is a mouthful to say and a challenge to spell, but it is the most important word you'll mumble aloud this year. Its use is slipping into the mainstream a little more each month and I think they're gearing up to unveil it before the "unwashed masses."
Some of you may remember when it was introduced by Tony Blair and New Labour as the Third Way. Now Phillip Blond is reintroducing communitarianism as the newest theoretical political answer to what ails us. The British Conservative Party, under David Cameron, is leading the British communitarian resurgence.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, in a TV interview on April 18, 2010, described Americans as more diverse and communitarian now. This was just the latest of Bill's assertions about American communitarianism, a repeat of speeches he's made in Toronto, Montreal and Berkeley over the past year. For once in his public-private career, Bill Clinton is not lying.
Communitarianism is a political system that gives authority over individuals to unelected community "stakeholder" councils. A stakeholder is defined as a "group, person, organization or system" which can be just about anybody or anything. You'll find the term used in just about every government and grant funded project in existence today. It's always used as if it means you.
Forming "partnerships" with "stakeholders" is an effective way to bypass voters and taxpayers living in the affected regions. Their community goals and missions always include "raising public awareness" and advising legitimate government bodies how to adopt the new communitarian laws (never identified as that though, unless it's a former communist new member EU state like Serbia, Croatia or the Czech Republic, or Bolivia and Peru with their new openly communitarian constitutions). Claiming to include more citizens in the democratic process, communitarian councils do just the opposite. And they continually seek more power.
Bill's right. We are all communitarians now. What that means to us is any body's guess. Most people will adopt the vague party line and agree it's a fresh solution to partisan politics. The libertarians will tell you they like the part about giving power to unelected, self-appointed community councils who have the communitarian power to regulate every one's personal life in the community. The Catholics will tell you they just hope a communitarian spirituality is included. The Protestants, Jews and Muslims won't want to seem selfish so they'll assume a moral value in it somewhere too. The left will dismiss it a right wing conspiracy theory and the far right will call it a communist plot. (If Sarah Palin ever mentions it we can be sure she'll confirm it!)
Here's the part that our politicians and the "experts" never tell us about communitarianism: it's also the law of the European Union. Communitarian Law is the entire basis for the supremacy of law clause that overrules all national, state, county and municipal laws in conflict with it.
Lots of really smart people will go to great lengths to explain the theory, how some parts of it make real sense to other smart people. Those same smart people will probably tell you they don't know anything about the law part, sorry. It's just a benign social theory, they say, one that rose and fell already, nothing to worry about. Others will tell you the law's a conspiracy theory.
Communitarian Law is the law regulating all community based government. At the top level it represents the global community. At the middle level it represents the regional community. At the bottom it represent the local community ("not to be confused with local government." Amitai Etzioni).
In October, 2004, Professor Jan Mazak, Ph.D., Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic published one of the most amazing descriptions of the EU I've ever come across. In it, he details the "immediate applicability of the communitarian law." He explains that the Slovak Constitution gave the Slovak government the power to sign an international treaty that transferred some of the republic's power over to the EU Courts, telling in no uncertain terms that communitarian law overrules conflicting national laws.
There was one news report that identified the French and Dutch referendums rejecting the EU Constitution in 2005 as based on voter concerns about the EU's supremacy of communitarian law clause. But both times the Irish voted on it I couldn't find any Irish articles or debates about the EU communitarian legal system Ireland was adopting. I thought that a matter of such importance would become a primary issue in a national vote over joining the EU. It never even became a minor point. The theories of communitarian justice, economics, development, morality, policing and mandatory volunteerism are not up for debate. To join, or not to join, that is the only question.
But the real dilemma is this: communitarianism is also the philosophical/legal theory for global sustainable development. Communitarian supremacy is the moral philosophy justifying new land and resource use regulations under UN Local Agenda 21. We don't need to accept EU style regional government to become communitarians. Yes the EU Communitarian system of harmonization and norms is the model for all the emerging trade unions from the Middle East to Africa and South America. But we already adopted community government hook line and sinker when we changed our national mission statements to adopt sustainable development principles.
Americans, like their neighbors across the sea, are manipulated back and forth between the right and the left, and then they're admonished for not thinking more communitarian. Whatever that means.
Communitarianism enriches experts, stakeholders and compliant citizens only. Individuals who can read and think for themselves need not apply. Voters who insist their national and state law reigns supreme in their nations must be re-educated into more moral, enlightened thinking. Our Common Destiny requires we all share one Common Purpose. We can forget Common Sense, it's completely outdated.