This seems like a particularly good moment in American political discourse to be thinking about Dorothy Day. Can you talk a bit about her life and legacy in the context of a renewed interest in democratic socialism?
This is a good moment in American life to give thought to the life and outlook of someone like Dorothy Day. From the 1920s until the time of her death in 1980, she worried that Western culture had lost its bearings without even realizing that the choices we were making were soul-destroying and pointing us toward a dire future. She saw a society that was becoming progressively more self-absorbed, less compassionate, manically preoccupied with comfort, security, entertainment, and technological innovation. “Make America Great Again” would have been an offensive slogan to her, beyond a doubt. Talk of walls and a triumphant nationalism would have distressed her. “Make America more caring, more spiritual, more centered, less voracious” would have been her idea of a better call to action. All of her writing and all of her work with the Catholic Worker are about suggesting there is another way to live.
While Day’s activism and political outlook appears to us in hindsight as a version of socialism, much of it was based in the Catholic theory of “distributism”—can you unpack that idea a bit, and where it’s situated on the political spectrum?
Dorothy Day was fundamentally an anarchist, not a socialist. She never registered with any party and, while she was not a Communist, refused to repudiate those Marxist governments that displayed any genuine concern for the poor. “Distributism,” on the other hand, spoke to her because it was less about electoral politics and party affiliation and more a philosophy concerned with individual empowerment and initiative.
The distributists, a group of British social theorists, were foes of big government and believed in the right to private property; they were as skeptical of socialism as they were of capitalism. They just wanted to see the goods and opportunities of a functioning society distributed more equitably. This, to them, meant that monopolies needed to be eliminated, mass production phased out, local ownership of factories encouraged, the pace of growth and urbanization slowed, and our absolute faith in science and technology rethought. Bigger was never better from the distributist perspective, and the more a man was master of his time and labor, the better. It was a wake-up call to a society that was becoming less personal and more corporate and dehumanized all the time. Some people thought this was a naively idealistic position for anyone to hold in the mid-20th century. Like G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, Dorothy Day was a true believer.