Whigs and Tories, Jacobins and Fascists

Our political discourse is debauched, and the political terms we use on a daily basis and hear bandied about in the media have become detached from their history and root meanings. In my posts over the years I have tried to be careful about my uses of such terms as liberal, conservative, radical, reactionary, centrist, fascist, authoritarian, socialist, populist, communist, etc., and I have tried to scrape the rust off older words like Whig, Jacobin, Tory, and subsidiarity. I'm hardly original in my use of them.  But many readers who have come to this blog without having read  previous posts do not understand how I use them, so I thought I would do a little review.  This will be somewhat repetitive for long-time readers, and space requires that it be somewhat schematic, but might be worth your time, especially if there's any discussion of it in the comments section.  The idea is to provide a map for our political attitudes and to suggest where I, at least, think the true center lies. 

I would say that the first distinction lies in whether a political impulse is future or past oriented.  Traditionalist societies are past-oriented, and tend to see time as a cyclical rather than a linear process. The important stuff happened in the past, in illo tempore, a golden age, and in the worldview of such societies, if there has been any movement in history, it has been a slow process of degradation since the time of the great ancestors and culture heroes of the mythic past. Past-oriented, traditionalist societies were the norm throughout the globe until the 15th century when the modern impulse was born in Europe. And with modernity a tidal shift occurs in the way its leading figures began to think about time--they began to think of history not as decline from a golden age in the past, but as progress toward a eutopian future, a movement from Eden to the New Jerusalem--not as something given by the divine, but achieved through human striving. 

But insofar as traditionalists linger in modern societies, they are a faction that remains more past and authority oriented and resistant to this idea that history moves forward, and religious traditionalists typify this kind of attitude in the U.S as well as the Middle East. The Vatican, even as late as the mid-twentieth century, found Teilhard de Chardin's ideas about how biological evolution was part of a larger spiritual evolution repugnant.

So in the West at the time of the Renaissance/Reformation, what had been the future-oriented historical orientation that lay dormant within the Judaeo/Christian promise/fulfillment infrastructure awoke and immediately came into conflict with the entrenched, past-oriented, authoritarian, crown-and-altar establishment. Cultural history since then has been the story of the struggle between between future-oriented reformers and past-oriented traditionalists and authoritarians. To be a reformer means that you believe a better world is possible. If you think everything is just fine the way it is, you are likely to think that reform and the idea of progress is "sentimental hogwash," to quote Mr. Potter in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. In the Anglo-American societies, the Mr. Potters are Tories and the George Baileys are Whigs.Whigs are not anti-capitalist, but they strive ways to humanize it.

Whigs, while they are future-oriented and progressive, they are opposed to a more radical reformer attitudes I will broadly characterize here as Jacobin.  Edmund Burke, usually thought of as a conservative thinker because of his opposition to the Jacobin extremism of the French Revolution, was in fact a Whig, which means he was also anti-Tory.  Whigs like Burke were sympathetic to the American Revolution, but appalled by the French Revolution. The first was a Revolution conducted mainly by Whigs; the second by Jacobins. There's a significant difference, but Tories tend to lump them together, and in our day the epithet to dismiss them is "socialist." Whigs are subsidiarists, not socialists. (For more on subsidiarity see my post here. Slacktivist also has a good discussion here.)

I doubt that the term 'Whig' is going to make a comeback into our political discourse, but for me "Whiggery" represents the golden mean, the the true integrated center among all political attitudes, and I think of people who inhabit that center, whether in the more normal parlance they are conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, as Whigs.  To the right of the Whig center are the Tories, who are Democrat and Republican complacent defenders of the status quo. And on the extreme right are the fascists.   Left of the Whig center are what we have come to think of as secular liberals, and further left the radical reformers I refer to as Jacobins. If  a new Whig party was created, would anybody join? I would.

Tories, because they are comfortable with the current power and wealth arrangements, oppose or don't believe in progress; Jacobins are radical proponents of progress who think that it can be engineered by politicians top down. Whigs are centrist because they combine an ideals-driven future-orientation with a principled conservative's respect for traditional wisdom; they believe that history is moving forward, but that we must conserve that which is life giving from the past. History for the Whig is not bunk.  A typical Jacobin believes that tradition is mostly full of superstitious, irrational nonsense, quaint, at best, but mostly harmful. They generally support the idea that societies ought to find a way of wiping away its traditions and the religious claptrap associated with them, and start over tabula rasa with a rational blueprint for an ideal society.

Marxists took up the Jacobin torch from the French revolutionaries after the Metternichian backlash in the mid-nineteenth century, and secular liberationists of all stripes and the deracinated cultural avante-garde carry the torch today. Jacobins are impatient, top-down reformers who tend to over-reach, and in their doing so create more problems than they solve. Regardless what your opinions on abortion might be, I'd argue that Roe v. Wade is a classic example of Jacobin over-reach, and the backlash it created could have been avoided had the issue been handled using a more bottom up and democratic process to find a compromise most sane people could live with. But let's not get sidetracked on that.

Secular Liberals are not Jacobins, but they are sympathetic to Jacobin projects. LIke Jacobins, they tend to look at traditional values and religion as nonsense, and they enshrine rationality and science as the only truly legitimate authority. Secular Liberalism arose in the 19th century, and in the Anglo world its chief philosophical proponents were Jeremy Bentham and J.S. Mill, but Karl Marx also began to shape the conversation within secular liberal precincts. And eventually secular liberals split into two main camps, Libertarians and Socialists--the first emphasizing the primacy of markets as if it were a religious principle, the second the primacy of the state as if it were a religious principle. Whigs as subsidiarists see both Libertarians and Socialists as fundamentally wrong, and the conflict between them as a false polarity.  

Emerson is the nineteenth century poet and philosopher of the Whig impulse in America, and Lincoln was its greatest nineteenth century political exemplar. The Republican party carried the Whig torch from the mid-nineteeth century up to the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. But in the late nineteenth century the secular Libertarian wing of the party broke away from Emerson/Lincoln Whiggery, and substituted Spenser and Social Darwinism as a more compelling explanation for what drove the wheels of history. Emerson/Lincoln idealism was rejected as "sentimental hogwash." 

And within the Republican party this materialist libertarian faction became dominant--and still is despite its alliance with the religious right, who are being played by the wedge-wielding Social Darwinists/Libertarians as useful fools. Teddy Roosevelt was rejected by the party, and the GOP started its steep decline into Toryism from that point on.  And the Whig torch was passed to the more populist-oriented Democrats, starting with Woodrow Wilson and carried on by FDR, Adlai Stevenson, MLK, JFK, RFK Jimmy Carter, and now Barack Obama. (I would not put Clinton or Truman in this group.) The Republicans morphed into their opposite--Tories whose main purpose was to protect and promote the interests of established wealth and privilege.

Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is a parable that dramatizes in the American idiom the conflilct between Whigs and Tories. On the one hand, the degraded materialist Whig impulse in the bloated, split-off Potter character with, on the other hand, the Emerson/Lincoln Whig portrayed by George Bailey. In Potter we have an image of capital when it becomes an end in itself--and the result is Pottersville. The integrated, and human-scaled Emerson/Lincoln Whig preaches self-reliance, but sees capital as at the service of human flourishing--imaged by the interdependence and neighborliness that characterized Bailey's vision for Bedford Falls.

The New Deal, whatever its flaws, was a manifestation of the Emerson/Lincoln/Bailey Whig subsidiarist spirit, but it was mischaracterized by the Mr. Potter Tories as Jacobin social engineering. Reactionary Tories always characterize Whigs as Jacobins--aka, communists or socialists.  In this country and in Latin America, anybody who opposes the interests of wealth and privilege is thought by the Tory class and its sympathizers to be a communist. But Jacobinism is a very politically weak force in America, and the real truth is that the Republican Party has become a bastion for materialist, power-driven Toryism, and extremists within the party have been moving it closer to what can only be described as fascism.

I know this is an incendiary term, and has been overused to demonize anyone who supports conservative ideas or policies.  I don't think I use the term to demonize, but rather to understand and call certain ideas and attitudes by their right name. Some might argue that the word has become useless and no longer advance an effective argument.  But to say so is like insisting that one is not allowed to use the word white when describing the color of snow. The only real objection to the use of the word is if it is used inaccurately in an effort to unfairly smear. So let's define what I mean by the word: The organizing principles that identify fascism are the violent imposition of order and suppression of dissent, the insistence on top-down authority,  the suppression of freedom and individual rights in the name of national security, the insistence about social homogeneity in values and attitudes, the glorification of militarism and of brute power, and nostalgia for and romanticizaton of a mythical traditionalist past.

These attitudes are incompatible with a healthy democracy, and it's quite possible that if a majority of people had these attitudes, it could democratically vote its democracy out of existence. That's why anybody who cares about preserving the American republic understands that fascist/authoritarian ideas need to be understood for what they are and repudiated root and branch before they establish themselves as part of our legitimate political discourse. To me it's obvious that these ideas and attitudes have already made significant inroads. Everyone has a right to express his opinion and to be heard, but when fascist ideas are discussed or defended as legitimate opinion in the MSM, it's the same as legitimizing racist, anti-semitic or other pernicious ideas. The idea that in a democracy ideas which lead to the destruction of democracy are legitimate and to be taken seriously is idiotic.  Such ideas and policies need to be seen for what they are and marginalized.

As suggested above, secular liberals are not Jacobins, but they are sympathetic to Jacobin projects. In a similar they typical Tory or person on the religious right is not fascist, but in troubled times are easily seduced into supporting a fascist agenda. The history in Europe and Latin America has repeatedly demonstrated that Tories and religious conservatives are sympathetic to a fascist agenda in times of crisis. It doesn't take much to push them into fascism if fascist factions develop any social legitimacy within a given society. It's silly to think that Americans are any different from anyone else.  Our lack of outrage at the erosion to our constitutional form of government over the last eight years should suggest that we are far more vulnerable than most people think.

Now if you accept as accurate the characteristics describing the key elements of fascism, does it not follow that policies and behaviors that fit those characteristics should be described as fascist?  Challenge me on this if you will, but how can anybody dispute the essentially fascistic nature of the suspension of habeas corpus, the promotion of rendition and torture, the demonization of Islam,  the hundreds of signing statements exempting the president from compliance with the law, the insistence on secrecy, the repeated use of executive privilege to hide from congressional scrutiny, the suspension of the need for warrants in performing wiretaps, the politicization of the Department of Justice, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war, the preference for brute force over diplomacy, the endless fear-stoking propaganda, and the lying, lying, and more lying. And that's just what we know about.

The argument that Democrats are just as bad doesn't hold water.  The Democrats are bad--no question. They are largely composed of feckless Tories who spinelessly follow the course of least resistance; they are myopic careerists who have no real interest in any interest other than their own self-interest.Democrat Tories are no better or worse than Republican Tories, but Democrats are not the principal architects of these proto-fascist policies. And while I would not say that the Whig spirit I talk about in this post is a dominant force in the Democratic party, at least they have managed to nominate a true Whig, and that's not nothing. And you're more likely to find Whigs among Democrats than you are among Republicans.

Or maybe you'd like to make the argument that two of my Whig exemplars, Lincoln and FDR, were guilty of implementing fascistic policies.  Lincoln imposed martial law and suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and Roosevelt created gulags for Japanese American citizens after Pearl Harbor.  I guess the thinking behind this argument is that if they did it, it must be ok.  We survived, didn't we?  Look, to be a Whig doesn't mean you never make mistakes. Roosevelt was clearly wrong, and Lincoln probably was, but whether wrong or right, these moves were made during real crises, not a mostly manufactured one like this misbegotten and endless GWOT, and they were never intended to be permanent. 

The GOP agenda to erode the constitution has a stealthily worked to establish a permanent infrastructure that provides authoritarian powers to the executive, and if that's not worrisome, I don't know what possibly could be.  I guess if people don't want to see it, it just doesn't exist.

I'm trying to draw a political map here that gives us a clearer picture of where commonly held political attitudes lie on a spectrum--at least in the way I see it.  At the center there is a fundamental conflict between people who believe in a better future and those who like things the way they are.  In the better-future camp are people generally called "progressives" or "liberals, but there's a significant difference between Whigs, secular liberals, and Jacobins who compose the progressive camp, but they are allied in their fight against the erosion of the constitution and rule of law promoted by the GOP. 

Whigs are both future oriented and tradition respecting. Some Whigs might even think of themselves as conservative as a way of contrasting themselves with secular liberals and Jacobins. But they are committed to the rule of law and the preservation of our constitutional form of government, and are appalled at their recemt degradation. Whig idealism is both nourished and balanced by a respect for tradition, and their perspective on history gives them a ballast and realism that secular liberals Jacobins tend to lack. 

In the anti-change or let's-go-backward camp are Tories and the religious right, and they are too-easily demagogued by the hard right. Fascism is the hard-right cult of power for the sake of power, but it feeds on the fears and resentment of Tories and religious conservatives, and part of their strategy is to lump Whigs together with the more radical secular Jacobins. 

That's the strategy we see with Obama. They want the Tories and religious right to see him not as a Whig who wants to define a new forward-looking common ground, but as a dangerous Jacobin. The real Obama hangs out with Jacobins like the bomb-throwing Bill Ayers or the Black-Power radical Jeremiah Wright.  Fear makes people stupid, and the hard right understands and exploits that.

This is enough for now. This is admittedly broad brush; it's meant to stimulate thinking and work toward greater clarity about how we understand the spectrum of political attitudes. If people want to raise objections or explore nuances, we can deal with those in comments.

Comments

[Mike McG...]

Jack:

Whig, Tory, Jacobin, and Fascist. The first three are obscure to most folks outside of the academy; the last is exceptionally loaded. I take your precision in using the term. But our cultural discourse is easily as debached as political discourse. Language choices have consequences. On the street and in the heart, being so characterized is devastating and highly consequential.

'Fascist' is hurled with imprecision and venom by the left in ways entirely comparable to past use of the term 'communist' by the right. In addition to betraying zero interest in understanding the worldview of the poeple so branded, it stigmatizes and demonizes.

We come from a similar cultural past but seem to have arrived at a very different present, at least with regard to our tribe. Each group wants to control its own narrative; solidarity with that group means resisting characterizations that are grotesque when more benign ones are available.

Why not seek alternative, less contemptuous and more respectful, ways of understanding middle American sensibilities? In point of fact, there aren't all that many alignments out there and it is awfully damn lonely being a worldview of one.

You (and I) swallow hard and align with the progressive agenda that is interwoven with a cultural project many people in fly over country regard as transgressive. They have neither the education nor the sophistication to sort out all the ramifications in this frightening world. They sees their choices as constrained due to an entirely understandable read that our project deplores their value system.

'Fascist' may work as a description for leaders who exploit their sensibilities and foster their resentments. But in its common meaning, it as grossly unfair a characterization of right-leaning folk as communist was of left-leaning folk in the '50s.

[forestwalker]

Patrick Deneen has a pair of posts up talking about the deception built into our dominant political categories. Pretty good stuff.

Divided and Conquered
http://patrickdeneen.blogspot.com/2008/09/divided-and-conquered.html

New Categories
http://patrickdeneen.blogspot.com/2008/09/new-categories.html

[Mike McG...]

Damn, forestwalker, I wish you'd have commented first! In the second of Dineen essays you cite, Joe Bageant explores "elite consensus" on "backward" elements of society, saying everything I wanted to say but saying it so much better.

Thank you.

[Jack Whelan]

Mike--

I think I have been pretty careful not to vilify middle Americans, or Main Street as I call it here. Main Street is mainly a mix of Tories, Whigs, religious conservatives, secular liberals, Populists, and a-politicals. You'll find them all in the bleachers watching their kids playing Little League. Very few, if any, sitting there would meet my definition of fascist, but several are willing to listen to fascist ideas, and feel a tug toward them. We all know people like that.

I'd like the Whigs to emerge as a much stronger force organizing Main Street attitudes. That's the point of the Capra reference. Right now I'd say Tories are the dominant group. The Catholic parish that I belong to is mostly Whig; there are others in Seattle that are mostly populist/traditonalist. Most people's political attitudes are not thought through very carefully, and not all that strongly held. And that's why I think Obama could convert a lot of Main Streets to more Whiggish views if he made a concerted effort to do so. That's what I mean by changing the terms of our political discourse.

The challenge for Obama is not something is not my challenge here. This blog is not primarily directed to Main Street, but to a fairly well-informed reader interested in ideas. So I'm careful about the use of the word 'fascist' in other contexts, but the purpose of this post was, in part, to justify its use on this blog.

I reserve the term "fascist" for those who push or support an agenda which is as defined in the post as fascist. I recognize that the word has a lot of baggage, but my only intent is to define how I use it on this blog and in relationship to the spectrum of other American political attitudes.

If there's a better word to describe the dangers posed to our democracy by the hard right, I don't know what it is. I want the word to have connotations that make it repugnant. Just saying 'hard-right' suggests a legitimacy these ideas and policies should not have. Why is it ok to vilify racist or anti semitic attitudes that are truly racist or anti-semiti, but not fascist attitudes if they really are fascist? All are equally repugnant.

The problem, as I see it, is not primarily with the use of the word, but with the ideas and policies it describes, and convincing Main Street of the danger that those ideas and policies pose. So I'm open to other ways to do it, so long as we're agreed that it's worth doing.

[Jack Whelan]

FW--

Bageant reflects my mood in my more pessimistic moments, but I'm not ready to dismiss Obama "a political entity but, in essence a product, an ornament that made his supporters feel better about themselves."

Did you see Moyers on Friday night. He had Katrina van den Heuvel and Adolf Rupp, Jr. on, and Rupp comes close to Bageant's view whereas van den Heuvel closer to mine. She drew this comparison between Obama and FDR:

"I mean, that story about Roosevelt. It is a different America. But the story, and everyone has their tale, whether it was Sidney Hillman, the labor leader, or Frances Perkins, the first woman in the cabinet, comes into Roosevelt's and, she goes, 'We got to do this. We got to do that. We got to speak out more boldly.'

And Roosevelt says, 'Go out and make me do it.'"

The point is that it is about us, not about Obama. If we Americans are only interested in feeling good, we probably won't push him, but that doesn't mean that he wouldn't be receptive if we did.

Rupp is pessimistic that there will be any such push, and I've written things like that here, too. But I really do believe we have an opportunity here. As I've been arguing that Obama is more about his potential and whether he will realize it, I should also be arguing that whether he does so depends on whether Americans will give him the capability to realize it.

Link to the Moyers show--it's worth watching: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/08292008/watch2.html

[Matt Zemek]

Mike McG:

I know where you're coming from. We've had this kind of chat on this blog before.

My worry is, "If words lose their central meanings to the point that educated, concerned people can't use them in public discourse, how can we reclaim the original meanings and intentions of certain words, thereby educating and enlightening a public in need of education and enlightenment?"

Jack:

Why is Truman not on the list of populist presidents/Democrats/popular figures in your list? I'd like to know more about the reasons you arrived at the distinctions you made.