One of the things I'm trying to do is to think through for myself 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.