Reflections On The Constitution, Distributism, And Empire

The return to the Constitution, advocated by Traditional Conservatives and Ron Paul seems to be the American way of affirming Hillaire Belloc's Distributive State. Putting property and the means of production in the hands of as many families as possible makes people as happy and secure as people can be, given the realities of life.

Regarding "Empire" in this scheme, the Roman Empire seems to have transformed into the Catholic Church, the Empire-that-became-the-Faith shrunk down to a small core in the Dark Ages, and rose again and fell again, to this day. We are not speaking here of the capitalist global “empire,” which is, for the most part, an aberration in the long history of Western Civilization. Now it seems that our future will see Europe and America eventually split into small states and ethnostates to survive the ongoing destruction of the Western world. Should this mean the end of Empires?

When "Empire" is defined as small, separate, states lightly guided by Subsidiarity or light Federalism, this is an Empire we can affirm—some insist that this was the scheme of the Roman Empire, which continued with the Church. This can harmonize with the American Constitution. Small states can cause broken down Globalism to yield to small agriculture and small manufacturing, which can be guided by the ethics of the Church.

But we would go further, and slowly, transform the Church, as the Church transformed the Roman Empire, to reconcile religion with science, by combining the Outward Path of Evolution with the Traditional Inward Path of the Soul.