First Things comes out with another great article, this time wondering aloud just what precisely happened to Christian Socialism?

I keep reading through Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun, Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, and the parallel writings of the far Catholic left, and I fail to pick up much hankering for the old essential characteristics of socialism: the abolition of private property, the government-managed economy, and at least the pretense of economic equality. Even the soft versions of Christian socialism that Reinhold Niebuhr once cared about have disappeared, like old books and faded drapery put out of sight, upstairs in the attic.

Still, the general flirtation with anti-capitalism seems not to have lost its attractions. It has always infected aristocrats and artists—all the better sorts of people. The ever-ready slogan “The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer” still has some power to stir the jaded indignation.

Even when the facts run to the contrary. As when one reads behind the statistics that are bandied about in newspapers and magazines. If you recall that income, as the federal government counts it, consists mainly of earnings from work, you will probably be able to think very quickly of quite a number of poor persons in your family or your immediate circle of acquaintances.

It's a great read. The shift away from pro-socialist attitudes to a new, amorphorous "anti-capitalism" is both blind and relatively safe, because you never have to assert an alternative to the free market, just assert that the only economic system ever to produce wealth across economic class is a failure.

Odd... but people really do buy it.

"If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar's, to him I say that Brutus' love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more."

-- Act III, Scene II, Line 18