A 'Spiritual Recession'? | National Catholic Reporter

A 'Spiritual Recession'? | National Catholic Reporter by MSW.  MGB: The faith that Brooks walking about was not Catholicism or the kind of secular Protestantism that gave us capitalism as we know it.  Rather, it is the push to spread democracy.  Of course, for most of our existence, we spread something else - autocracies friendly to the American military and commercial complex - especially in Central America.  That we have recently tried and failed in Central Asia and Iraq is what has us wearing of an ideal that never really existed - spreading Democracy.  The only other time that was tried was in Vietnam.  Look how well that one turned out.  As for the race between socialism and democratic capitalism, the latter does not really exist and has not since the deregulators had their way from Nixon to Carter to Reagan.  We went from what was largely an economic peace with people getting richer than their parents and regulated airlines providing the occassional family special (kids fly free!) to what is essentially an oligarchy - made more so by Citizens United.  In Europe, however, they found Democratic Socialism and it worked in its form, although they never did figure out how to apply democracy or socialism to individual companies.  That is where I hope to come in.