Justice University

Leo XIII In his landmark social encyclical Rerum Novarum , Pope Leo XIII managed to do two things that took the socialists, modernists, and New Agers off guard.   One, he followed up on the series of social encyclicals that had started with Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos in 1832 with an unexpected twist.   Instead of simply condemning the “new things” of the modern world, he presented an alternative that could deliver what socialism, modernism, and the New Age only promised, and that without sacrificing one iota of the natural law or Catholic doctrine.

The other day someone referred to the Just Third Way as “utopian.”    It was one of those occasions when you realize that some people might not know exactly what they are talking about.   Quite a large number of people seem to think that a utopian scheme is one for an ideal society.   Not quite.

According to Dr. Lawrence Ball on a recent episode of “Squawk Box Europe,” inadequate regulation will bring about the next financial crisis.   Dr. Ball, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the book, The Fed and Lehman Brothers: Setting the Record Straight on a Financial Disaster , getting rid of regulations such as the Dodd-Frank Act lays the groundwork for an economic meltdown of cosmic proportions.

Last week in the Wall Street Journal Walter Russell Mead gave his opinion that the “Crisis of Democracy” in the modern world is a bit exaggerated (“The “Crisis of Democracy” Is Overhyped,” WSJ , 08/28/18, A-13).   According to Mead, the democracies are, if not precisely doing-just-fine-thank-you, at least doing better than the non-democracies.

Answering the question What is liberalism? is key to understanding the life and times of John Henry Newman, particularly since what has baffled many Newman scholars is the fact that he claimed to be against all forms of liberalism and yet held many opinions and took many positions that people today regard as liberal.   Part of this may be due to the possibility that Newman seems to have had trouble viewing this world as anything other than a temporary stopping place on the way to the next.

We’ve been looking at Woodrow Wilson and his role in eliminating the vestiges of what was once known as “Lincoln Republicanism,” i.e. , a political philosophy that viewed government as being of the people, by the people, and for the people.   The Progressive Party was pretty much the last gasp of the type of Republicanism that replaced the Whig Party and ran Abraham Lincoln for president back in the day.

The failure of the progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to address the issue of widespread ownership of capital resulted in a quarrel between Roosevelt and one of his “trust busters,” Judge Peter S. Grosscup.  As a result, the ownership issue was sidelined during Roosevelt’s administration.   It never became a part of the progressive platform, despite ongoing efforts by Grosscup to focus people’s attention on the critical need to spread out ownership of America’s productive capacity.

Back in 1913 during his first year in office as president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson published a book, The New Freedom .   Concerned about the growing power of corporations and trusts and the abuses of human rights that accompanied it, Wilson contended that the power of the giant organizations must be reined in.   After all, he needed something to convince the electorate that they hadn’t made too big of a mistake in electing him instead of Theodore Roosevelt. . . .