by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
In an article published today, Friday, Gustavo Corção addresses the unfair note with which Rio’s Archdiocesan Chancery attacked him in this era of dialogue. Although my weekly contribution to Folha is now complete, I want to note that he has handled the subject with the skill and verve characteristic of his talent, producing a real gem.
I now return to my article.
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Praise is much easier than censure. This is the task that falls to me today. Incidentally, this task is all the more gratifying when it concerns Nixon. Indeed, I have not spared the harshest criticism of this head of State’s international policy, whose hands, in temporal terms, bear the heaviest share of responsibility for the defense of the West against communism. It is obvious that Richard Nixon has been using the immense powers that circumstances have placed in his hands to lead the world he represents to political self-destruction. I have repeatedly made this statement, laden with serious criticism.
Nevertheless, in the realm of domestic policy, Nixon is planning a series of measures that I cannot help but applaud. I do so as an impartial observer.
The May 5 issue of Time magazine reported on the measures the US president is considering. The first is a broad decentralization of the federal government, accompanied by a welcome reduction in government social programs. Because of their size, these programs had been labeled socialist by the conservative wing of American opinion. This reduction will include considerable cuts to the massive social integration services for blacks and other ethnic minorities, subsidies for the socialization of medicine, and state construction of apartments. The community development plan and over 100 other plans will suffer substantial reductions, totaling $22 billion.
I warmly applaud these measures.
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Instead, some readers may be appalled to learn of this sweeping change of course. How can a large modern government throw such important problems to the wind?
Herein lies the key to the question. Often, a problem is neglected because the State has monopolized its care. The way to get rid of it is for the State to entrust it to someone else.
Newspapers are full of reports on the failures of communist and socialist states. Economic and social problems are reaching threatening proportions, even in Sweden, which was recently presented as a model of prosperity under socialism. This fact demonstrates not only the State’s inability, as the sole or dominant factor, to solve a country’s problems, but also, in many cases, the irreplaceability of private initiative.
The lesson also applies to states that are not socialist or do not consider themselves so. They are heading for disaster to the extent that they hypertrophy their functions by undertaking activities that would normally fall to private initiative, while failing to solve, or solving poorly, many of the problems they take on. At the same time, they create new problems.
Nixon is not losing interest in their solution by partially removing the federal government from the sphere of the aforementioned issues. On the contrary.
The head of state intends to distribute a significant share of the funds withdrawn from the respective federal services to the municipalities. The measure is wise because it puts an end to the gigantism of the immense centralized bureaucratic networks. The more local and autonomous a service is, the more humane, agile, and realistic it becomes.
Furthermore, Nixon will undoubtedly call on major private-sector organizations to lead a joint effort with myriad smaller private organizations, social groups, and families within their own spheres, and to generously devote themselves to solving these major issues. This is not ignoring the problems but putting them in the right hands.
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I can see the contemptuous smiles of some readers from afar as they encounter this program. They anticipate division of opinion, uncertainty of direction, and dispersion of effort. For them, private initiative is the great sick man in any State. Entrusting anything to it seems crazy. Their dream of collective happiness is expressed in terms of opulent legislation, devised and executed solely by top-level technicians through vast networks of public agencies or parastatal bodies. Naturally, they avoid looking at the flip side of the coin, which is the impoverishment of an entire people, from within which no spontaneous movement of vitality springs. A living State governing a dead or numb people: such is the true face of a socialist country, or of the socialized areas of non-socialist countries that are at the forefront of the West.
The nation is thus transformed into a sad and docile “matière à gouvernement,” made to be docilely happy as commanded and to pay exactly the taxes levied on it. The result of implementing these plans, which should never have left the ethereal sphere of utopias, is there for all to see.
The joyful result of the policy Nixon proposes to inaugurate is quite different. He put it in this picturesque and felicitous phrase: “It is high time to get the government off the backs and out of the pockets of the American people.”
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Far be it from me to claim that the private sphere does not need to be stimulated, enlightened, and supported by the State’s actions, or that the State does not play a role of the utmost importance in all temporal matters. This would amount to denying national sovereignty. I merely say that the private sphere has an important and essential task, in which it is strictly irreplaceable.
When the balance between the two spheres is properly established, the country has an authentic people. When the State exceeds its functions, the people tend to disappear, becoming a structure without national characteristics, lacking initiative and its own structures. The people become a mass, homogenized.
I illustrate this point with one of the most beautiful and profound texts of Pius XII:
“The state does not contain in itself and does not mechanically bring together in a given territory a shapeless mass of individuals. It is, and should in practice be, the organic and organizing unity of a real people.
“The people, and a shapeless multitude (or, as it is called, “the masses”) are two distinct concepts. The people lives and moves by its own life energy; the masses are inert of themselves and can only be moved from outside. The people lives by the fullness of life in the men that compose it, each of whom—at his proper place and in his own way—is a person conscious of his own responsibility and of his own views. The masses, on the contrary, wait for the impulse from outside, an easy plaything in the hands of anyone who exploits their instincts and impressions; ready to follow in turn, today this flag, tomorrow another. From the exuberant life of a true people, an abundant rich life is diffused in the state and all its organs, instilling into them. with a vigor that is always renewing itself, the consciousness of their own responsibility, the true instinct for the common good. The elementary power of the masses, deftly managed and employed, the state also can utilize: in the ambitious hands of one or of several who have been artificially brought together for selfish aims, the state itself, with the support of the masses, reduced to the minimum status of a mere machine, can impose its whims on the better part of the real people: the common interest remains seriously, and for a long time, injured by this process, and the injury is very often hard to heal.”[1]
[1] Pius XII, Christmas Radio Message of 1944. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/speeches/1944/documents/hf_p-xii_spe_19441224_natale.html.