The Spirit of Whiggery

One of the things I'm trying to do is to develop a critique of the American political and economic system that isn't dependent on Marxism.  The Marxist critique, no matter how trenchant, will always be perceived as un-American.  It's always going to be associated with the secular left, which, whether its members have read Marx or not, is dependent on an interpretive frame that depends on Marxist ideas.  And besides, Marxism is a creature of the modern sensibility, and that's a sensibility that I've argued elsewhere, like Enlightenment rationalism, can no longer capture a postmodern imagination. The critique might be accurate, but its mythic dimension no longer inspires.

You don't have to be a Marxist to see that we are living in a society that with each passing decade is becoming an entrenched plutocracy. You have to be blind or not paying attention not to.  And yet we will do nothing about it until we are forced to, and by then it might be too late.  I'm right there with every one else doing nothing because at this point I haven't a clue what to do. The Democrats are hardly the answer because their office holders are, with a few exceptions, almost as deeply implicated as the Republicans in the plutocracy, and their active base is hopelessly captive of the secular left. 

That's why they can't win elections. It's hard for too many people to feel that they stand for anything they deeply care about. There's no inspiring myth, and the myth part is what the GOP understands and exploits very effectively. The Democrats still think politics is about rational choices based on one's perceived economic self interest.

Nevertheless, while I have learned much from the smartest and most thoughtful people on the secular left, I am not one of them.  I believe that the best minds of the secular left have something very legitimate to point out about how things work, but what they see has to be absorbed and transcended. I think economics is important, but I am not an economic determinist. I am someone who thinks that  spiritual impulses have a far more powerful influence in shaping human affairs than economic ones.  Show me the inclination of a man's spirit, and I'll show you his economics and politics.

The point of my post yesterday was that the Whigs arose as a potent spiritual cultural impulse in England that was carried for the most part as the Political manifestation of the Puritan Calvinist spirit.  Hardcore Whigs were disgusted by everything the Catholic Stuart dynasty stood for--its autocracy, its popery, its moral laxity. The Whigs were the first "progressives" of the modern era.  They were anti-royal through and through--true republicans, and the spiritual impulse that drove many of them to New England was also the impulse that drove them 150 years later to dump tea in Boston Harbor and to take arms at Bunker Hill, Lexington and Concord a year before any Declarations of Independence were composed or signed. 

They were independent-minded, cantankerous, morally serious, literate bourgeois who hated everything that the spirit of royal privilege stood for.  They saw it as corrupting to the human spirit, and they founded the Massachusetts Bay colony in the hopes of creating a model society based on self-reliant citizens who through their hard work and democratic institutions would create a new society, a city shining on a hill, that  their English brothers and sisters back home would emulate.  They were, at the beginning anyway, religious idealists.  And its been this idealism that has remained at the heart of the American spirit. Even if only ambivalently embraced by most Americans, it's still the best thing about us.

After the Revolution the Whig politics were mainly expressed through the Federalist Party under John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, and it was opposed by the southerners Madison and Jefferson.  The southerners party eventually evolved to become the Democrats during the Jacksonian era. The Federalists dissolved but reemerged to become the Republicans during the Lincoln era.  The Republicans were the party of federal control, civil rights, and Northeastern/Midwestern educated elites; the Democrats were the party of the states-rights, southern aristocrats, and poor working whites.  The Republicans were the party of the industrial north; the Democrats the party of the agrarian south. 

Lincoln was perhaps the greatest of the Whigs in terms of his moral sensibility, but his party after his death became the party of the wealthy northern bankers and industrialists known as the robber barons.  The Civil War, whatever its moral concerns, was ultimately about the defeat of the Jeffersonian agrarian vision for America by the  money-centered,industrial vision of the northerners, the triumph of Hamiltonian impulse over the Jeffersonian. 

And for the next hundred years the southerners licked their wounds, stewed in resentment, created good literature, and otherwise tried to maintain their traditional way of life as an impoverished quasi third world backwater.  America belonged to the northerners.  The attitudes of the old south were considered, at best, charming but irrelevant. At worst, racist and reactionary.

The dark side of the Whig Puritan spirit was its love of wealth and its compulsion to control.  Think Mr. Potter in "It's a Wonderful Life." The movie is a fairy tale about the Whig spirit by contrasting two different styles of banker, an emblematic Whig occupation. And the battle for the American soul became a battle between these two factions of Whiggery, the Potters vs. the Baileys with the Baileys winning out in the New Deal, a compromise worked out between the next greatest American Whig after Lincoln--FDR. 

So the point I was trying to make in my "Last Laugh" post yesterday was that while the Potter wing of the Whig impulse was brought under control.  The big corporation, the invention of the factions which defeated the south, has now been adopted by the southerners who have no interest in the compromise effected by the Yankees in the 1930s.  The corporation for them is the new plantation adapted to new historical circumstances.  Think Wal Mart.  And they are using it and its power to destroy the great Whig compromise we came to take for granted as the New Deal.

I know I need to explain this better, but what interests me here is not so much the economic dynamics, but the spiritual-cultural dynamics.  Because what the southerners represent is a regressive spiritual tendency I have called elsewhere Lot's Wife Syndrome.  They are dragging us back rather than moving us forward, and that is never a good thing.  The human spirit is saturated in nostalgia for what has been lost in the past, but its health lies in finding a way forward.  The trick is to take with us from the past only that which is necessary.  We have to travel lightly if we are to make our way forward.  The Whig Spirit for all its limitations was  a progressive spirit, and its gains for us Americans are being eroded by a different kind of spirit, which for me is symbolized by Texas.

Comments

[Tom Strong]

My sense - and I honestly think that this is going to happen, although probably twenty or thirty years from now - is that the left's vestigial Marxism is going to have to be replaced by co-operativism in order to move forward.

By co-operativism I mean a form of socialism that is emphatically voluntary: you can buy in if you want to, but you don't have to; nobody's going to force you. The forcefulness of Marxism is exactly what's wrong with it; its dynamic emphasis on exploitation and revolution throws the matter of individual choice out the window, and Americans in particular will never endorse such an anti-individual ideology.

That forcefulness is also a problem with Fordism, the essential Democratic alignment of labor, business, and government that grew out of the New Deal. Although it's far more small-d democratic than Marxism, Fordism is also on the decline, in large part because it never figured out how to deal with the people who hate it, and who have engineered its destruction. Unlike Marxism, I think Fordism could and should make a comeback, but it's going to need the support of more voluntary, co-operative systems in order to do so.

The standard-bearer for co-operativism is, of course, co-ops; those quaint little (and sometimes huge) community-owned businesses that have mostly served to exasperate their members over the past thirty years. But one thing that we co-op insiders know is that the co-op movement is getting stronger, even while its image remains as fuddy-duddy as ever. Co-op business practices have strengthened immensely over the past two decades - in large part because the corporate is embracing certain kinds of cooperativism in leaps and bounds, and actually showing us how to do things we never figured out for ourselves.

And in that way, the co-operativist movement is also beyond co-ops now. It is also represented in the more progressive wings of mainstream business, and it is increasingly represented in government and social experiments, especially in Spain, Italy, and Japan. It's highly present in the most idealistic forms of "Third Way" politics; it's also very vibrant in the open-source movement and the sustainable food movement.

I'm cross-posting this at my own blog to see if we can get a bit more dialogue going.

[Matt Zemek]

Jack,

Perhaps answering this question can enable you to find more clarity.

I think you've outlined and unpacked things quite well, but if there's a certain something you feel you're missing, maybe this question can fill in some gaps:

Is the Democratic Party's total failure as an opposition party/alternative political outlet more a failure of spirit & will, or a failure of political sophistication?

Follow-up question: if it's a lack of political sophistication, is the deafness toward spirituality and religious tradition the very element that, in turn, produces the unsophisticated view that keeps the Dems and the secular/cosmopolitan left in the wilderness?

[Matt Zemek]

A second and separate comment on this post/thread.

The topic: what to do?

One partial but significant suggestion:

what I would call a "column collective."

10, 15, 20 people with basically similar beliefs and views (but allowing for some differences on very specific matters, as long as the larger vision is shared) stay in constant communication and dialogue, discussing what needs to be said to the larger polity/culture/power structure.

Since one person can't have a newspaper op-ed column any more frequently than 3-6 months, it's hard for one person to gain enough influence in the current mass media landscape.

But with 10-20 people each writing columns over these multi-month intervals, a group of people can, collectively, move a set of ideas and principles. A group can enable a larger worldview to gain traction.

Ideas for columns would be discussed, and perhaps, a few people in the group could even do most of the writing. But every person--by virtue of having to have the byline in his/her name--would need to be the one to pitch and negotiate the column with a Times or P-I (or if in another state, another paper's) editorial page editor.

With each person in the group contributing, 10 people could have a column 2-3 times in a year, enabling that group to have as many as 30 columns in the city papers in one calendar year.

30 columns in one year. Not a bad step forward in terms of gaining visibility for a larger ethos/worldview/sensibility.

That's one very tangible thing a group of us could do.

[Jack Whelan]

Tom Strong:

In my understanding of it, Fordism is one of the key legs upon which he New Deal compromise stood. It was a breakthrough idea to see that the economy grows more robustly if you have workers who are making a decent enough wages to buy the stuff the economy produces. It was classic win/win that demonstrated that American capitalsm was more adaptable than Marxist theory predicted it could be. But let's face it, Fordism was really also an effetive way to buy off labor for the time being, and it worked. Labor became very complacent and now votes Republican. You know what I mean. They may still be Democrats, but they're Reagan Democrats.

And anyway the Marxists seem to have the last word as the economy globalizes and capital flees to where it finds the cheapest labor.

Maybe we have to go through another robber baron era on a global level before some kind of stablity sets in and a global form of Fordism becomes possible. Seems like that's we are quite a ways off from that stability.

In the short run the whole sytem has taken on the character of a runaway locomotive. No one seems to be controlling it; it seems that the most successful people are those most clever at gaming it.

I don't know what role the cooperative movement can play in trying to bring some sanity to this situation. I think bringing ecnomic transactions back down to a human scale might be a part of it. I admire your patience and persistence in remaining an actor within that movement.

I'll check out your website this week when I have a chance.

[Jack Whelan]

Matt--

Someing needs to be organized. I'm currentl trying to think my way through for a way for me to act in a way that has a chance at bearing some fruit. Not sure yet what that will be.