Today, Dennis Prager spent the better part of two hours on the radio discussing what he believes unifies nearly all liberal positions: a basis in feelings. I’ve heard this idea before, but Dennis added something that no other discussion of it has ever included: the idea that feelings reside in the realm of the microcosm.

In fact, Dennis, himself, said that in the microcosm – the world of the individual, the family, the smaller units – he tends to be more politically liberal. Most of us are. Six years ago it occurred to me that, here in my own home, I’m the perfect socialist. Back then, in an article entitled, “The Smallest Proletariat,”* I took a position that actually irritated many conservatives I know who believe that socialism never works. The idea, in a nutshell, is that all families (small-scale entities) employ socialism beautifully:

THE SOCIALIST MECHANISM has a pleasing, almost lyrical prelude; it never starts out as a totalitarian thought. Nobody embarks on the socialist road whistling Orwellian hymns or worrying about someday burning dissenting books at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.

To thinkers just starting out, socialism represents cooperation and kindness and a strong social tapestry. It represents humanity. It represents, oddly enough, the way I was raised by two capitalist, free-market, patriotic conservatives.

Our small family of three enjoyed a communal lifestyle, as most families do: We lived according to the common good. We shared in the overall prosperity of the family, which meant collective ownership of all income, from Dad’s paycheck to my babysitting money. We also shared in the family work; Mom and Dad’s shares were more valuable, while my share was usually forced upon me.

Do I regret being forced? Not now; it was good for me to nourish the dog, scribble out my homework, and abuse our spinet piano for 35 minutes every afternoon. It was also good to eat food that a ten-year-old like me could never pay for. It was socialism at its finest.

I got some flack for writing that; most conservatives miss that socialism works very well when utilized on the proper scale. Small groups of emotionally bonded individuals can’t survive without employing socialism. It’s a system tailor-made for the microcosm, and tailor-made for the liberal mind – it resides in the realm of feeling, and the realm of the personal.

Which brings us back to Dennis Prager on the radio today. He correctly pointed out that feelings are what make us human, and conservatives should never discount them. But using personal feelings (micro) as the basis for political theory (macro) is extremely problematic.

Take, for example, the well-known and much used political metaphor: Nation as Family. We feel for members of our families - much emotion is wrapped up in our family bonds - so likewise, we should feel for members of our country, or the world, for that matter. We are, after all, one big family. Not only should we feel for our nation/family, but we should employ the same financial systems for that nation that we would employ for our own families. The nation-as-family metaphor may seem full of brotherly love at first glance, but such a worldview, as I'll show in my next post, has the potential for real damage... which is usually the case when you try to apply the rules of one scale onto another.