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A Thunderous Silence on Unions

By Msgr. George Higgins

June 12, 1998

    My friend Father Richard John Neuhaus, a prolific journalist and author, takes me to task in a recent issue of his monthly magazine, First Things, a serious intellectual journal which I always read cover to cover.
    After a ritualistic word of "admiration" for my "formidable energy over these many years," Father Neuhaus finds it regrettable that in recent years I seem unable to get through a column without attacking those awful neo-conservatives. That's rhetorical overkill on his part. I plead guilty, of course, to having disagreed with the neo-conservatives now and then.
    Father Neuhaus specifically disagrees with one recent column in which I said that neo-conservatives refuse to put any blame for American cultural decadence on democratic capitalism as such, preferring to blame what they call the "new class" of liberal intellectuals.
    Father Neuhaus responds that he and other prominent neo- conservatives have written repeatedly about corporate America's domination by the "new class" and the exploitation of the pseudo- rebellion of the counterculture to make big bucks. But where, he asks, does Msgr. Higgins suppose bankers et al get their ideas? Leftist intellectuals, he says, shape the fashions, including that of being anti-business, which corporate leadership then co-opts. 
    Father Neuhaus concludes that he nearly despairs of changing my mind on this issue. I assume, then, that he despairs of changing the minds of other more important writers on the topic.
    Two scholars come to mind immediately: Father Gary Dorrien, an Episcopalian priest, and Jesuit Father John Langan of Georgetown University. I could quote extensively from two of Father Dorrien's recent books, "The Neo-Conservative Mind" and "Soul in Society," but one brief quotation suffices for present purposes. 
    Neo-conservatives, Dorrien says, rarely find anything wrong with American society that cannot be blamed on the hypocrisy or subversion of the putative new class.
    However, he continues, they give a free ride to commercial interests that relentlessly manipulate baser human instincts; while condemning the so-called "new class," they ignore "the far more influential and subversive impact that commercial society makes by turning labor and nature into commodities."
    Father Langan, reviewing Michael Novak's writings on this, points out that the institutions of the moral-cultural system are themselves economic entities; indeed, in some cases they are large, profitable economic entities. It will not do, he argues, for neo- conservatives to direct all their fire at "new class" intellectuals. Why, he asks, are they reluctant to direct at least some fire at the capitalist system?
    He notes Novak's position that "the fundamental reason behind the capacity for self-reform in democratic capitalism lies in the independence of its moral-cultural order and its political order alike."
    Father Langan cogently concludes that one need not be a Marxist reductionist to seriously doubt the extent to which the political order and moral-cultural order are effectively independent of the economic order in the contemporary United States.
    While I despair of convincing Father Neuhaus on the point Father Dorrien and Father Langan make, I promise him I will say no more about it in this column for the indefinite future. However, I will have much more to say about my major complaint against the neo-concervatives: that they have been deafeningly silent on labor issues, a silence broken in recent months only by a terrible book, "Epitaph for American Labor," which rejoices at the alleged demise of the American labor movement and argues that, given democratic capitalism's success, unions have completely outlived  their usefulness.
    I find it rather scary that this superficial book was published by the flagship neo-conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, and with extravagant blurbs by prominent neo-conservatives, including Irving Kristol, often referred to as the neo-conservative movement's godfather.
    To my knowledge, no neo-conservative journal (and I read them all religiously) has said a word in criticism of this book. I can only wonder why. Centesimus Annus'' devotes less than two pages to what the document says about unions in a market economy.
    According to the book, ``most workers seem to think that the labor movement is obsolete, and are prepared to dismiss it with thanks for past services rendered.''
    Clearly John Paul II does not think the labor movement is obsolete. He thinks -- as he said a decade ago in his first social encyclical, ``Laborem Exercens'' -- that unions are ``indispensable.''
    It is also clear that for him the purpose of unions is not merely to render ``services'' to members -- e.g. by bargaining for better wages and working conditions. Unions are also ``places where workers can express themselves.'' They ``help workers to share in a fully human way in the life of their place of employment.'' 
    ``Centesimus Annus'' says that unions ``defend workers' rights and protect their interests as persons, while fulfilling a vital cultural role so as to enable workers to participate more fully and honorably in the life of their nation and to assist them along the path of development.''
    In still another wording ``Centesimus Annus'' says the role of unions should expand to include new forms of co-management and co- ownership.
    In ``Centesimus Annus'' free trade unions are viewed among a democratic society's indispensable non-governmental mediating structures. We in the United States have yet to come to terms adequately with his treatment of this subject.
    ``Laborem Exercens'' speaks of a wide range of intermediate bodies with economic purposes enjoying real autonomy with regard to the public powers and pursuing their aims in honest collaboration with each other and in subordination to the demands of the common good.
    My impression is that many in the United States who rightly stress the importance of these intermediate bodies do not really envisage them being institutionally involved as autonomous bodies with economic purposes in the economic decision-making process either of individual nations or the community of nations.
    I am inclined to think that this limited understanding of the role of intermediate structures and organizations accounts, to some extent, for the massive and menacing lack of concern in neo- conservative circles about the growing weakness of American unions. 
    The late Robert A. Nisbet was one of the few conservative social and political philosophers who strongly lamented organized labor's decline in the United States. But even he tended to think of unions one-sidedly, as powerful forces supporting capitalism and bulwarks against political invasion of economic freedom.
    In ``The Quest for Community,'' a 1958 book recently made available again, Nisbet wrote that ``the labor union and cooperative are foremost among new forms of association that have served to keep alive the symbols of economic freedom as such. It should be remarked,'' he continued, ``they have been the first objects of economic destruction in totalitarian countries.''      He said that the individual entrepreneur, ``is less dangerous to the totalitarian than the labor union or cooperative. For in such an association, the individual can find a sense of relatedness to the entire culture and thus become its eager partisan.'' 
    Nisbet concluded that to weaken the labor union or industrial community for political or individualistic motives is to convert the culture into an atomized mass that will have neither the will, nor incentive, nor ability to combat tendencies toward political collectivism.
    Now that the Iron Curtain has come down, it is time for scholars of Nisbet's stature in the neo-conservative community to stress not only the negative role of unions as bulwarks against stateism, but also their positive role in the proper ordering of U.S. economic life.