After the Future

The Sacred Polity

"Was anybody else offended by...can you put your hand on your heart?" Beck said. "It's the national anthem!" He said he had shushed his son and told him to put his hand on his heart when Christina Aguilera was singing the song.

"I was really offended by the sports players that were just hanging on their jersey," Beck said.

"The country that gives them the ability to...pursue their happiness in peace and safety is not worth putting your hand on the heart."  (Source)

In a secular age, it's hard for most cosmopolitan types to understand why Glenn Beck gets so upset at things like this.  I think I get it, but I'm going to give one of my long-winded explanations to provide some context to explain what I think is going on. Doing so also gives me  a platform to talk about a couple of other things as well. And in doing so I'm going to lean heavily on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, chapter 12--"The Age of Mobilization".

In the pre-Reformation Europe, the world still had an enchantment about it--some things were sacred and some very much were not. But it was a rather vertical, static sense of the sacred. The sacred was experienced in special times during the cycle of the seasons, in sacred places, and in sacred ritual actions. The sacred was sharply distinguished from the profane, and profane behavior in a sacred time or place was more than a breach of decorum--it was sacrilegious.

Worst-Case; Best Case

I've started several posts in the last couple of weeks, but I've not finished them.  They didn't really seem to add much, or they seem to be my repeating things I've written about so often.

In any event, I'm swearing off getting frustrated with Obama or the Democrats. They are what they are, and regardless of their limitations and their myopia, their inability to see the big picture or to understand the significance of the moment, they're the best we're going to get until we have our "clarifying moment".

In the meanwhile, the "system" has a mind and will of its own, and it gets what it wants no matter who's in office. At the moment, there is no mind or will that comes even close to being able to resist or counterbalance it. So things will play out the way they play out. Until we have our clarifying moment, I think that we have to accept that the underlying structure of American society is reverted to the historical oligarchical norm, and life goes on. There's not much that can be done except to do what we can to mitigate the negative effects.

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Some Thoughts on the Fourth of July 2010

Readers here know that I have a Whiggish view of history.  It's not the cool position to take because it could be characterized as a celebration of mostly dead, rich, white guys, so historians like the Beards and Howard Zinn would tell me I have it all wrong. Nor is it a particularly intellectually respectable position since Herbert Butterfield's taking the  Whig historians out to the woodshed in 1931.

But I stand by my Whiggishness because I take the long view, and because I do believe that there is meaning in history, that it is an unfolding drama, and that it has a point. And that while the 19th Century Whig historians got in wrong in the details, they got it basically right in the broad strokes. For Whig is a name we give to what I see as the particular Anglo-American manifestation of a transcultural, trans-historical archetypal impulse. Professional historians aren't allowed to talk like that.

For the archetypal Whig impulse in history is found wherever there is a movement forward effected by flawed humans in historically ambiguous circumstances usually against intense opposition of the archetypal Tories. It is driven by those spirits who, while they are men and women of their times, still in some small part transcend their times, and in doing so move everyone else forward, whether they want to move forward or not.

Whig history is about Moses vs. the Egyptians, Socrates vs. the pious burghers of Athens, the early Christians vs. the Romans, Luther and later Galileo vs. the Roman Church, the Puritans vs. the Stuarts, the American founders vs. King George, the abolitionists vs. the slaveholders, the turn-of-the-century progressives vs. concentrated corporate power. It's the story of human growth in individuality and freedom. It's the story of science and critical thinking, and all the ways in which human beings have moved the ball forward against the opposition posed by entrenched power and entrenched thinking.

Deneen's Two Cents

I came across this recent talk entitled “Sensus Communis and Nature’s Law: Why Communities Know Natural Law Better Than Philosophers” given by Patrick Deneen at a conference at Princeton. It supports Mike McG's dissent to my posts about the perils of allowing our social lattices to disintegrate and why kids' attitudes, and those of society as a whole, are trending toward lower levels of social empathy:

Tocqueville was not uncongnizant of the reality of America’s official philosophical doctrine, the more individualistic and self-interested claims of its official Lockeanism. He noted a strange fact about Americans – every action they undertake, even those that are clearly motivated by fellow-feeling and self-sacrifice, tended to be justified in terms of self-interest. He writes almost with a kind of perplexity over this American propensity, writing that “they do not do themselves justice; for one sometimes sees citizens in the United States as elsewhere abandoning themselves to the disinterested and unreflective sparks that are natural to man; but the Americans scarcely avow that they yield to movements of this kind. They would rather do more honor to their philosophy than to themselves.” (502). What Tocqueville identifies is a gap or lacuna between the official language of Americans and their actions. What he saw was the practical legacy of Puritanism – the active engagement of self-governing individuals toward the achievement of the common good in conformity with the Good – but what he heard was philosophical Lockeanism, that stated claim which the philosophy is more honored than the actions. He identified a puzzling disjuncture between word and deed, and worried whether over time word would begin to shape deed, whether our actions would increasingly conform to our claims. In worried tones he wrote, “one must expect that individual interest will become more than ever the principle and unique motive of men’s actions; but it remains to know how each man will understand his individual interest.”

The Down Side of High Mindedness

Digby reposted a piece she put up in 2004 about the difference between conservatives and liberals and it reinforces my recent trope that we are still fighting battles from the 19th Century.  She quotes the blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything who in turn quote an1820 essay by William Hazlitt:

Conservatives and liberals play the game of politics differently, Hazlitt wrote, because they have different motivations. Liberals are motivated by principles and tend to believe that personal honor can be spared in political combat. They may, in fact, become vain about their highmindedness. Hazlitt condemns the mildness as a mistake, both in moral reasoning and in political strategy. "They betray the cause by not defending it as it is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and without remorse."

The conservatives, on the other hand, start with a personal interest in the conflict. Not wishing to lose their hold on power, they are fiercer. "We"---i.e., the liberals, or the "popular cause," in Hazlitt's terminology---"stand in awe of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our persons.

More on Jacksonians and Whigs

If Jefferson and Jackson saw political life as a dark struggle of "haves" and "have-nots", Lincoln and the Whigs saw the Democrats--Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Douglasite alike--as an irrational and power-hungry elite, as the real "haves" trying to play the "have-nots" off against the bourgeois "have-somes" in order to lock American politics into a static system where they would always possess a monopoly on authority.  Every issue Lincoln spoke for as a legislator--the railroads, land grants, tariffs--and every rhetorical gesture, from his abusive early political journalism to the refinement of the Gettysburg Address, was undergirded by his unwavering allegiance to the Whig ideology . . . to the formation of an optimistic and socially mobile bourgeoisie who would guarantee an equal opportunity that "the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of men," "that every man can take care of himself," to give all a chance," to "improve one's condition." (Allen Guelzo, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, p. 458.)

This quote is taken from a section in Guelzo's book where he argues that the real, adamantly ideological Whig Lincoln has been lost in the American historical mists as everyone, except the most recalcitrant neoconfederate defenders of Dixie, seeks to claim him as their own. But Guelzo is at pains to argue that while Lincoln admired the Jefferson of the Declaration, he detested the static, agrarian, power-aggregating imagination of America that Jefferson and later Jackson represented. Lincoln, good Whig that he was, stood for growth and improvements, and embraced capitalism, particularly small-business capitalism, as the engine that drove that growth. He saw the Democrats as representing the interests of quasi-feudal oligarchs who manipulated the poor yeoman and subsistence farmers, the 'have-nots', into resenting the burgeoning middle class, the 'have-somes'. The more things didn't change, the more it favored the entrenched power of the Jacksonian olligarchs.

The Contemporary Crisis in Whiggery

Let's talk about Whigs. When I use the term, I'm concerned more about a mentality or a kind of values constellation than I am about the specific historical Whig Party in Britain and in America. My goal here is to trace the changing party affiliation of the Whig mentality in America to the present day.  My argument is that the dynamic, future-oriented, progressive dimension of the American soul is Whiggish, so I want to spend some time to understand what that means and how it makes us what we are, for better and for worse.

I'd argue that every significant crisis in American history, to the degree that it was resolved positively, required that left-leaning Whigs rose to the challenge, either by creating a new party, as they did in 1856, or by fusing with an existing party as they did in 1932.  The question I want to explore is whether the crisis we're currently dealing with is on the level of 1856 or 1932 and whether contemporary left-leaning Whigs have what it takes to rise to the challenge.  But first let's lay out some background.

Mythological Thinking

 In a debate for the hearts and minds of the American people, Ron Paul will defeat Peter Orszag every time.  Michale Lind

Lind has an interesting post today at Salon if you're interested in a very ATF explanation for the mindset of the Teapartyers.

We are dealing with a mythological mentality, based on simple and powerful archetypes. Contemporary figures and current events are plugged into a framework that never changes. "King Charles (or King George) is threatening the rights of Englishmen" becomes "Barack Obama is promoting socialism" — or fascism, or monarchism, or daylight saving time.

As in other cases of mythological politics, like messianic Marxism, this kind of thinking is resistant to argument. If you disagree, then that simply proves that you are part of the conspiracy. Inconvenient facts can be explained away by the true believers. It's hard to come up with arguments that would persuade people who think that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are totalitarians to change their mind.

I've frequently written about the power of Mythos over Logos, and there's no question in my mind that Lind is right about this. Mythos defines the framework of possible acceptable meanings and thinking; logic and rationality are simply tools people use to defend the framework or to argue fine points that might be debatable without posing a threat to the basic framework.

I contend that we are living in a decadent period, which means that the overarching mythos or metanarrative that provided the framework for the dominant culture has died. For Americans and Europeans that framework was defined by Enlightenment rationalism. Moribund in the late 19th century and dealt its deathblow by WWI, it no longer possesses compelling or persuasive power when it comes to organizing a culture-wide cultural meaning and values framework that gives most of us a sense that we're all in this together. A fragmented, Balkanized array of subcultures fills the vacuum, and in such an environment, anything goes, and whoever comes up with the most compelling narrative wins.

Better Angels of Our Nature

It's always interested me how the country was riven from the beginning by two different but fundamental political values constellations, the first, a static, rural, agrarian populist values of the 19th Century Democrats, and the other the dynamic, economic growth values of the Federalists, Whigs, and eventually the Republicans. Following Mark Twain we could call the two parties that took shape around these values constellations Finnians and Sawyerans, but let's keep it in the political sphere and call the first group Jeffersonians and the second Hamiltonians.

As with all things human, these kinds of values constellations, insofar as they live in individuals and groups, have both a light or ideal side, and a dark, shadow side, and too often the dark side drives an agenda that uses the rhetoric of its ideal side as a cover. So first let's take a look at what this means for both groups.

The Jeffersonian constellation in its ideal form celebrates rural, traditional values and the simple pleasures of family, community, nature. Jeffersonians comprise both hippies and rednecks in that sense. They compose the equality party.That this group historically also justified and fought for the preservation of a slave society and the segregationism that followed upon its destruction by the Civil War is a contradiction to be explained another time. But the basic essence of the Jeffersonians from the beginning was to represent the the common man  vs. a financial elite. It was the party that represented the yeoman farmer, the Jacksonian redneck, the  Irish immigrant, the turn-of-the-century unionist against the bankers and industrialists whose power increased as the country's history unfolded.

Sustainability: A Dem or GOP Value?

Deneen has put up an interesting post in which he points out that Liberals are more conservative when it comes to the environment than people who call themselves conservatives.  He talks, I think, accurately about the fundamental incoherence in both the liberal and conservative positions, and the post is worth reading here.

What interested me more, though, was a response to his post by Empedocles who has this to say:

The environmental movement today is based around two main tenets: sustainability, and localization. If I ask which political philosophy more closely embodies those two principles I am lead to the inevitable conclusion that (paleo) conservatives embody them far more than liberals. As far as sustainability goes, unfortunately under the neo-cons, the Republican party is as far from being the party of sustainability as can be. They’re now the party of debt, economic growth, fossil fuels, environmental destruction, military intervention, centralized power, and big business. Despite this, I actually think there is more hope for the Republicans to be the party of sustainability. The old school Republicans were as wary of big business as they were of big government, they were the ones who were for local businesses, were in favor of environmental protections, were for localizing political power, were noninterventionists, and were fiscal conservatives. There are still some of these around that might make a resurgence. I see nothing of the sort possible with the Democrats, who are far from the sustainability party as well. Despite being more open to passing laws protecting the environment, Democrats are the party of unchecked, unsustainable population growth, economic growth, widespread military deployments, and government spending. But more importantly, the Democratic party is the party of centralized political power, not localization.

He certainly seems to see the Republicans and the Democrats for what they are. But what struck me was his seeing the Republicans as having more potential to engender a politics of sustainability than the Democrats. I don't think that there is even the slightest vestige of the old Republicanism left in the GOP that makes it possible to take  GOP even remotely seriously. But I think it's legitimate to ask if the Dems should be taken seriously either.

I've written several times here about what I call the Whig spirit. (See  here.)  I realize that the use of this term has problems, not the least of which is its historical failure, but it comes closest in representing to me what Empedocles is talking about: A principled, forward looking, sustainability-oriented politics that understands that restraint and limits are essential elements of the human condition and at the heart of the meaning of political virtue.

I think some of the paleo-cons like Larison and Deneen are struggling with this, but in my opinion they mistakenly assume that tradition still has enough of a presence in contemporary society that we should still worry about conserving it. I accept that the meaning of modernity was to disembed us from traditional forms which we can no longer accept naively. For this reason there are no "forms" to be conserved.  There is, however, the underlying life and spirit that shaped those forms that must be continously rediscovered worked with in an ongoing effort to grow forward. Tradition no longer mediates the discoveries of the past for us.  They have to be rediscovered or uncovered, and I see that as primarily an interior process with social effects.

Tories and Whigs

Reader Brian in comments to yesterday's post questions my designation of Larison as a Whig.  My response got too long for a comments in my post about Larison yesterday, so I'm posting it here instead:

I see Tories as defined by their commitment to the preservation of status quo power and wealth arrangements that benefit their class. They do not live by principles but only by a kind of primitive instinct to preserve their prerogatives. Philosophy or thought has the value of expediency--ie, valuable only insofar as it provides a justification for the preservation of privilege and are discarded as soon as they becomes ineffective in that regard. Tory bankers, for instance, are libertarians only when it justifies lower taxes and de-regulation; they jettison libertarian principle as soon as they need the government to prop them up.

There are second-level Tories who might be described as wannabes who aspire to the attainment of Tory privileges whether they succeed in attaining them or not. And I suppose you could describe third-level Tories as those who don't benefit from or aspire to Tory privilege, but accept that the world is run by Tories and are content to play an uncritically subservient role in that world.

A Whig is a lower-case 'r' republican who vigorously resists the natural tendencies of all societies toward oligarchy. Larison's vehement, principled rejection of the Paulson bailout is Whiggish, not Toryish, as are many of his other values. No one is a pure type, but I would argue that he is more Whig than Tory for these reasons.

Whigs, at least the way I think about them as a class, fall within a right/left spectrum, but in either case embrace both a gradualist or organic idea about social or civilizational progress and at the same time a modern affirmation of the free, rights-endowed, self-reliant individual. The Whig lives in the creative tension between individual freedom and the discipline of life framed within a tradition lived in community. Whigs reject the radical individualism of Libertarian/free-market, and the type of human promoted by socialism in which the individual is absorbed into the collective. As I've written about before, I argue that subsidiarity is Whiggish principle that avoids either extreme.

Now obviously what it meant to be a Whig in the 18th and 19th centuries is very different from what it means or could possibly mean now.  One could possibly make the argument that it is impossible to be a Whig because in a globalizing, pluralistic, market-driven social environment because it has destroyed the tradition as a living organism. And so along these lines I think that what distinguishes a left-leaning Whig from a right-leaning Whig is his imagination of the how tradition shapes society and personal identity. Those on the right tend to accept tradition as a "given" that might have been weakened but which has not been destroyed and that what remains must be bolstered; those on the left accept that it has been destroyed but that parts of it can be chosen and preserved. Or to put it another way, they accept that the living tradition is like a great tree that has died, that it is delusional to believe that it still functions as a living organism, but that it has left behind seeds that need to be retrieved and cultivated.

Right-leaning Whigs are a type of modern, but they tend to think of Enlightenment rationalism as akin to Jacobinism as a fundamental mistake; those on the left accept that Enlightenment modernity along with free-market capitalism, for better or worse, has destroyed the "given" living traditional framework, and they are more receptive to the postmodern critique of modernity. While they appreciate what modernity contributed to human cultural evolution, they see it now as stale and inadequate at best, and at worst dangerous for its excessive, soul-destroying rationality which has come to shape a dominant cultural imagination of the human being as either merely a talking animal or as a wetware machine.

So while I would position myself on the left side of the Whig spectrum and Larison on the right, I see people like him as more of an ally, or as one with whom I share more common ground, than I do with the typical liberal/secular Democrat.

See also my post Whigs & Tories, Jacobins and Fascists.

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 because they were uncomfortable with Darwin.

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 to find ways to humanize capitalist institutions. In the nineteenth century they supported the national bank, and they were the political faction that attracted a high-minded civic idealism and a role for the state. Most abolitionists and others concerned about the spread of slavery into the new territories were Whigs, and later Conscience Whigs.  They morphed into the Republican Party after the shock of the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas/Nebraska Act, and the Whig high-mindedness of the Conscience Whigs was carried after that by the Republican Party, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt the best exemplars of the mentality about which I speak.  But the Republicans passed the torch to the Dems by the time FDR moved into the White House, and the Dems have since then, mostly in a fairly degraded form, became the custodians of this spirit of Whiggery.

Whigs, while they are future-oriented and progressive, are opposed to a more radically reformist attitudes I will broadly characterize here as 'Jacobin'.  Edmund Burke, although usually thought of as a conservative thinker, 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 the "let's re-invent humanity" Jacobins. There's a huge difference, but Tories tend to lump both Whigs and Jacobins  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" at its best represents the golden mean, the the true integrating center among all political attitudes, and I think of Whigs as those people who inhabit that center, whether they are in the more normal parlance thought of as conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat.  To the right of the Whig center are the Tories, who are the complacent conservadems and Republican  defenders of the status quo. They are the ones the media considers centrist, when it's perfectly apparent that they are not. 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. Obviously no political factions in the U.S. have been called either fascists or Jacobins.  I'm defining them more by the underlying principles that guide their thinking and action, not by the labels they give themselves.

Tories, because they are comfortable with the current power and wealth arrangements, oppose or don't believe in progress and don't care about innovation unless it promotes their interests; Jacobins are radical proponents of progress who think that it can be engineered by politicians top-down. Whigs (at their best) are centrist because they combine an ideals-driven future-orientation with a principled conservative's respect for traditional wisdom; they believe that history moves forward, but that we must conserve that which is life-giving from the past. History for the Whig is not bunk. 

A typical Jacobin, to the far left of the Whig 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 from which an ideal society can be engineered. A secular liberal is a moderate Jacobin, someone who believes social progress is possible, but like the Jacobine tends to understand progress in secular terms, and as over-against a repressive, irrational traditionalism. The Jacobin is not averse to the use of violence and twisting the truth to achieve its political objectives. The Liberal or progressive want to achieve similar ends, but through the democratic procdess.

Weak-Kneed Liberalism

Interesting post here by Sara Robinson in which she uses D.H. Fischer's Albion's Seed as a tool to explain how voting patterns follow cultural patterns that are rooted in the four colonial-era English cultural groups: Puritans, Cavaliers, Scots-Irish, and Quakers.  My early 2006 post entitled The Spirit of Whiggery covers much of the same ground.  What we have come to think of as "liberalism" is rooted in the culturally Whiggish legacy of the Puritans and Quakers; what we have come to think of as "conservatism" rooted in the legacy of the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish. If you're unfamiliar with the characteristics that define the attitudes of these groups, read Robinson's post. She provides a clear, concise summary.

It's interesting to see how American political history is shaped by this cultural patterning. The Republican Party was a Whig creation and the Democratic Party a Cavalier/Scots-Irish creation. The old Republicans, therefore, were more culturally liberal and intellectual, while at the same time the party of the Northeastern and Midwestern financial elite. The original Democrats were more culturally traditionalist and economically populist. The realignment that took place in the period between 1968 and 1980 disconnected the parties from their cultural roots, while each maintained its economic philosophy.

During that realignment, the Dems lost their ownership of the culturally conservative, southern-agrarian and northern blue-collar Dems as it became identified with the more educated, culturally liberal Whigs while they retained, at least in theory, its economic populism; the GOP lost its Whiggish northeast cosmopolitanism as it sought to embrace conservative evangelicals and Catholics, while it remained the party of the northern business elite now in alliance with converted southern elites. The party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Nelson Rockefeller became the party of Reagan, Tom Delay, and Newt Gingrich.

This alliance of both southern and northern economic elites in the Republican Party is not something you hear much about.  These southern and northern elites were at loggerheads during the post-Civil War period until the birth of the New South in the 70s. That this is no longer the case is significant because if before this conflict between regional elites acted as a check to each faction's power, now as a united force there is virtually no check on them.  And while Whiggish ideas about social responsibility played on the consciences of the old northeastern business elites, whatever buffering effect that might have had hardly exists at all as the kind of wildcat buccaneering of Enron or the exploitative plantation mentality of Wal-Mart have become more the norm in Republican business culture as the party lost its northern Whiggishness and became southernized.

There is also a significance in this re-alignment insofar as it separates much of the electorate from it political/cultural roots.  I'm not sure I understand it, but I think it contributes to the way politics has become a fantasy divorced from lived reality for so many Americans. It's as if all the circuits have shorted out, and our politics is composed of the acrid-smelling smoke produced that floats in the air afterward.  In any event, the Dems are currently the legatees of the Whig spirit which in the party's inception it opposed, and the GOP continues as the legatee of the Whiggish moneyed classes but now in a strange coalition with the southern Bourbon elite, the pugnacious Scots-Irish, and other low-education, religiously conservative immigrant groups.  

Puritans Running Amok

I made a couple of attempts in February here and here to talk about the effect of the Puritan mind on contemporary culture. I was interested in those pieces mainly about the peculiar psychology that is associated with it, and how that psychology shapes our politics.  ForestWalker sent me a related article that came out in the Guardian a couple of years ago.  Some key excerpts, and then some commentary:

Puritanism is perhaps the least understood of any political movement in European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption of Republican America. But Puritanism was the product of an economic transformation. . . .

Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God. From his doctrine of individual purification, the late Puritans forged a new theology.

At its heart was an "idealisation of personal responsibility" before God. This rapidly turned into "a theory of individual rights" in which "the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed". By the mid-17th century, most English Puritans saw in poverty "not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion ... but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will".

This leap wasn't hard to make. If the Christian life, as idealised by both Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of the individual soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and protected by the medieval church, becomes redundant. "Individualism in religion led ... to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric."

To this the late Puritans added another concept. They conflated their religious calling with their commercial one. "Next to the saving of his soul," the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman's "care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go." Success in business became a sign of spiritual grace: providing proof to the entrepreneur, in Steele's words, that "God has blessed his trade". The next step follows automatically. The Puritan minister Joseph Lee anticipated Adam Smith's invisible hand by more than a century, when he claimed that "the advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public". By private persons, of course, he meant the men of property, who were busily destroying the advancement of everyone else.

This excerpt focuses pretty much of the dark side of Puritanism, and as I've written in my pieces about the Whigs (see here and here), I think about the Puritan impulse more ambivalently.  Nevertheless, the article describes how the positive spiritual impulse that inspired (and still inspires--Bill Moyers comes to mind) the best among the 17th-Century Puritans, calcified into the coarse, bizarre religiosity of a guy like Tom Delay. The niggardly, moralistic, avaricious  religiosity of the Puritanical Christianist has nothing to do with the spirit of the Gospels; there are few things I can think of more alien to it.

As I suggested in one of the posts referenced above, the Frank Capra Christmas classic, "It's a Wonderful Life" is an American Puritan fairy tale that pits the dark Potteresque side of the Puritan Spirit against the idealistic, Whiggish side represented by George Bailey. George Bush shares Bailey's first name and looks more like Jimmy Stuart than he does the villain Lionel Barrymore, but is there any doubt that Mr. Potter's America is Mr. Bush's?

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 early/middle 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 up arms at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill 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 Whigs and eventually 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.