After the Future

The Individual Mandate

The individual mandate is a fundamental element in the flawed architecture of this HCR bill, and the best thing about it is its not going into effect for another four years. I think there's a good chance that by the time 2014 rolls around it won't be part of the new HCR system.  Already people are talking about court challenges to it, and I'd be surprised if it survives.

I don't care what the wonks say about it, the idea of the government forcing Americans to buy health insurance from hated, profit-driven companies is bad politics, and it's tossing a lazy softball to the political right to hit out of the park, and I, for one, will not come to the administration's defense.

This comment at Ezra Klein's blog this morning reflects my thinking about it all along:

The GOP Mindset

From the ATF Archive, 11/21/06:

Somewhere over the weekend I read someone describe the braintrust that has hijacked the GOP as the "chess club on steroids." Think Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, Bill Kristol, Karl Rove, and Paul Wolfowitz: very smart, geeky guys with second and third rate souls holding weird, strongly held, sometimes extremist, nerdish, borderline crazy ideas about how the world should be run. They are so many Bobby Fishers supported by cadres of guys like Dwight from "The Office" who have risen to take over the Republican party establishment.  This is hyperbole, but it points to something fundamentally true.

These guys are smart enough to recognize that they hardly represent the interests of most Americans and that their geekiness is not something most Americans could easily identify with. They craftily devised ways to deflect attention away from themselves by branding the Democrats as the party of  "liberal elites," and found an affable, down-home, empty suit with a political pedigree to be their front man. It was so much smoke and mirrors, but Americans  preoccupied with their own personal lives and so not paying too much attention went along with it and trusted that these guys knew what they were doing and had the best interests of the country in mind--lowering our taxes and keeping us safe and all. And Americans would have kept going along with it if it hadn't all gone so colossally wrong. That's what you get when you put too many Dwights in charge of the various governmental agencies.

I don't think it's hyperbole anymore.

Reich on New Deal vs. Reaganism

Robert Reich at TPM:

Most Americans continue to be suspicious of government. That distrust is deeply etched in our culture and traditions. Our system of government was devised by people who distrusted government and intentionally created checks and balances, three separate branches, and almost insuperable odds against getting big things done. The period extending from 1933 to 1965 -- the New Deal and the Great Society -- was an historical aberration from that long tradition, animated by the unique crises of the Great Depression and World War II, and the social cohesion that flowed from them for another generation. Ronald Reagan merely picked up where Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover left off.

But Reagan's view of government as the problem is increasingly at odds with a nation whose system of health care relies on large for-profit entities designed to make money rather than improve health; whose economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America; and much of whose fuel comes from unstable and dangerous areas of the world. Under these conditions, government is the only entity that can look out for our interests.

We will not return to the New Deal or the Great Society, but nor will we continue to wallow in the increasingly obsolete Reagan view that we don't need a strong and competent government. Today's vote confirms our hope that we can have both strength and competence in Washington. It is an audacious hope, but we have no choice.

This is a pretty good summary of a theme I've been exploring from different angles. The small government mindset has deeply ingrained patterns of thinking on the cultural right, but they no longer make any sense. I understand the fantasy that animates the small-government types.  I really do.  I'm enough of a Romantic with anarchic tendencies to  feel the loss of the de-centered, local, face-to-face community life that conservatives lament. But that de-centered world is gone--or rather it has to be retrieved, but in such a way that embraces a certain level of centralization.  

Random Thoughts on HCR (Updates I & II)

It's remarkable how HCR has brought out the feverish dark side of the American psyche.  First a couple of anecdotal bits.  From TPM:

And then from Ezra Klein:

Jon Cohn spent part of Saturday wandering through the patches of protesters on Capitol Hill. What surprised him, however, was that the protests seemed less about health-care reform than about redistribution itself. To the protesters, Jon says, health-care reform is "about having their money taken for the sake of somebody else's security. When they hear stories of people left bankrupt or sick because of uninsurance, they are more likely to see a lack of personal responsibility and virtue than a lack of good fortune." . . .

From me: I saw a bumper sticker in Seattle the other day that said "I'll Keep My Religion, My Guns, My Liberty, and My Money. KEEP YOUR CHANGE." This sums up the bunker mentality that afflicts the cultural right in this country, doesn't it? The guns are always a part of the formula because they're needed to defend the bunker, especially when you otherwise feel so impotent. You send the troops, and we'll fight you off.

I know that this doesn't come close to representing majority thinking, but it's considered legitimate thinking in this country. The sanctimony of the left is annoying, but the sanctimony of the right, especially toward those whose lives have been destroyed by this HC system, is just ill-informed, myopic, and plain mean. If you're not in the bunker with us, we just don't care about you.

Modernity and Soul Atrophy

A couple of weeks ago, I linked to an interesting lecture/slide show by the late Leonard Shlain, a physician who has written a couple of interesting books about the interface between rationality and irrationality, science and art, literacy and orality. His book, the Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image and my reading through the McLuhan opus were very influential in shaping my thinking in the late 90s and early part of this decade until I became sidetracked by the Cheney/Bush political crisis.

I've often stated here that while developments in the political sphere might be affecting us acutely in immediate ways, developments in the cultural sphere change us in ways that affect us profoundly in the longer run. What's possible in the political is determined almost completely by the conditions in the cultural sphere--the sphere of our collective soul life.  And I've also argued that since we are in a decadent or transitional cultural period, we have little or no sense of future possibility, and that for want of another argument we keep impotently rehearsing the Scopes trial over and over, which is the classic argument of the modern era, which no longer exists, since we are all postmoderns now, whether we know it or not. 

So I want to return to this attempt to grapple with what's happening in the soul sphere, and I'll probably be reposting older posts or essays I've written years ago in an effort to prime the pump and to plumb to see if there's any interest out there in thinking about what's happening along the lines I am interested in approaching it.  So following is my first repost, and if this interests you be sure to watch the Shlain video to which I linked above:

Sunday, April 10, 2005

The Hypertrophied Eye

Protestantism is the expression of faith that resulted from changes in consciousness effected by the spread of literacy after Gutenberg. Catholicism is the expression of a faith shaped by a consciousness formed in traditions and customs that have its roots in oral culture. A literate consciousness is one that hears the Word while reading alone. An oral culture hears the Word when it is read aloud and heard in the assembly in the context of a sacramental ritual--the mass--which became meaningless hocus pocus for the modern Protestant sensibility. I'm not talking here about the difference in doctrine between Catholics and Protestants, but about a very fundamental difference in the way each experiences and encounters the Word.

A spoken-word culture shapes minds that easily swim in the world of symbol and mythopoesis. The premodern ear-centered imagination is a far richer than the literal literate mind of moderns. Things change very dramatically when a culture tips toward literacy from orality. It's the difference between whether the ear or the eye is the main organ for processing information that comes to us from the world outside our minds. And this shift from orality to literate consciousness is central in understanding what caused the shift from medieval to modern consciousness. This is Marshall McLuhan's basic thesis, and it's an important one to understand if we're to grasp the significance of what is happening to us at this moment as once again consciousness is being changed by our continuous exposure to electronic media.

There are so many things that can be said about this, but the most important for my purposes here is the way these processes require the hypertrophied eye. Did you ever think that what we mean by doing science is essentially thinking only about what we can see and that the scientific revolution was founded on the development of instruments like the telescope and later the microscope that helped us to see more, and that knowing eventually became equated with seeing. In contrast, knowing in a textless world came from what people heard, from the poets and storytellers, which meant that human knowing by people not less intelligent than us was more metaphorical and analogical. The experience of knowing was different because it was done in very different mode of consciousness than the one we now take for granted as universal.

In the scientific age, the age of seeing, everything that was invisible was thought to be unreal—or merely a matter of subjective opinion. But the effect of this new habit of thought was to render a whole dimension of reality as unreal subjective fantasy even though for preliterates this dimension of reality was as objective as the chair upon which I’m sitting. In other words the invisible dimension of reality was pushed into unconsciousness, and as the mind individuated during the modern era, we came to understand the “unconscious” as a personal, subjective realm rather than as a transpersonal collective one. The "unconscious" means for almost everyone today our individualized personal reservoir from which arise personal thoughts, feelings, and fantasies, and we project back our own experience into the minds of the primitive preliterates as having thoughts, feelings, and fantasies the way we have them. Therefore, moderns think, the mythologies they created are the same thing as moderns writing science fiction--a species of imaginative speculation.

But what has become unconscious for us was conscious, or semi-conscious, for them. They lived in a world that was permeated by the gods. The gods were not in here locked in our individual unconscious minds, but out there animating a world shimmering with their presence. We have just come to think that the poor benighted fools were projecting intrapsychic unconscious content onto the blank screen that was the world around them. They weren't. This is simply the prejudice of a shriveled kind of mind that knows only with its eyes and brain.

Nature, for moderns, became the realm of "common sense,” but it has never been other than a cognitive consensus based on sharing in the heritage of alphabetic literacy. The world became “Newtonized” as mystics like William Blake lamented. The scientific process cast aside traditional lore and authority as steeped in superstition and the irrational, and substituted a new understanding of objectivity which required the freezing of reality by making most of it irrational, i.e., opaque to reason, except its physical husk. The world literate moderns came to live in is more like one of those awkward looking exhibits at local Natural History Museum than the living, buzzing, spiritually animated and soulful world of preliterates. And it is this experience of the world that is at the heart of our allienation and of our longing for something more.

Our cognitive capacities to understand more deeply come from listening and speaking. “Out of the depths I cry out unto you, O Lord.” What depths is the Psalmist speaking of? Music and the spoken word correctly heard engender feeling states that are the precondition for deeper modes of cognition. Music is very important here, and the trivialization of music is linked to our loss of a sense of the sacred and of the "moods" or "modes" of consciousness needed for extraordinary cognitive states. And so insofar as our acoustic sense has atrophied, so has our capacity for cognitive depth. What passes for deep thinking is just complex thinking, which comes from complex seeing, analytical seeing, decontextualized seeing, abstract seeing.

So I would argue, then, that Marshall McLuhan was one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the 20th Century. For him understanding the shift from orality to literacy was central to his understanding about how the modern mind is programmed, and his ideas about how the mind is being even now reprogrammed by electronic media is a major driver that is bringing us into a post-modern, post-literate world.

This is really the meaning behind McLuhan's idea of how society is becoming tribal. He didn't mean by this Balkanized or fragmented; 'tribal' was a positive word for him, and he didn't mean it as a regressive movement. He meant it as a way of describing a social connectedness that was lost during the modern era. The point bears repeating: post-literate doesn't mean a regression to preliterate, as it is commonly supposed. But reading and the eye will no longer remain virtually the exclusive means through which we obtain and process information. The goal is to return to a broader, more balanced cognitive capacity that will allow for a more ready acceptance of objective realities that are “unseen.”

McLuhan's point is that the human being in becoming literate paid a price by throwing off what had been a more balanced ratio among the senses. The hypertrophied visual man lives in a kind of estrangement from the world around him in a way that was not the experience of the preliterate, acoustic man. Modernity and its eye centeredness created the conditions for the possibility of individualism and critical reflection, but it also led to the gradual disenchantment of the world which became reified, Hamlet's sterile promontory, a thing over against which we become aware of our own subjectivity, but which in itself lost its numinous character. Yes, we developed a capacity to see with our physical eyes more accurately—but we see only the surfaces of things, and as a result our ability to cognize a richer kind of multidimensional reality has severely atrophied.

Electronic media is changing us profoundly, but these changes are gradual just as the shift from oral to literate did not change humans very quickly. Literates until recently lived in a world in which most people were still illiterate, and the oral world still flourished in the rural areas, and the oral culture preserved there was an endless source of material and inspiration for the literate artists of the last two or three centuries. But as literacy has become almost universal and along with that the rural world withers as it technologizes, another way has to be found to break out of the literate straitjacket so many have come to assume is the sole basis for our civilized life.

I feel very ambivalently about technolgoical civilization, because it's not at all clear that the changes that come are an unambiguous good. So the question here, as elsewhere, is who's in the driver's seat--the serpent or the dove? (Matt 10.16) If it's the serpent, we're likely to evolve into a race of cyborgs. But if the dove is driving or at least influences the direction evolution will be taking in the future, something else is possible.

And so if there is one point I hope I’ve made so far it's that being literate is not the goal of the evolution of consciousness; it’s just a stage. And whatever anxiety we may understandably feel about the unknown terrain to be navigated ahead, we need to trust that we will have the resources to find our way. These technologies cannot be feared, they must be mastered and used for transformative purposes. And the one rudimentary resource we have to achieve that now at this point is conscience--Protestantism's bequeathal to the future, which is the way the serpent part of us searches out and listens for the prompting of the dove part.

A Progressive/Populist Alliance?

Digby reposts a piece she wrote taking a long look at the problems with such an alliance, foremost among which is the inherent nativism that fuels the fires of populist political passion. Populists have a tendency to bash elites--not just the financial elites, but progressives, whom they perceive as elites because of their cosmopolitan sanctimony. Populists don't like being dealt with self-righteously by progressives who disapprove of their a racism and hatred of the drunken, swarthy masses who have been invading and ruining the country since the mid-19th Century :

Bashing immigrants and elites at the same time has a long pedigree and it is the most efficient way to bag some of those pick-up truck guys who are voting against their economic self-interest. There seems to be little evidence that bashing elites alone actually works. And that's because what you are really doing is playing to their prejudices and validating their tribal instinct that the reason for their economic problems is really the same reason for the cultural problems they already believe they have --- Aliens taking over Real America --- whether liberals, immigrants, blacks, commies, whoever. And it seems that rural folk have been feeling this way forever.

Populists might agree with progressives on many issues, but Progressives don't "get it", when the it to get is the tribalism that defines us as us and them as them. 

Unprecedented

Ezra Klein:

The fact that Democrats had to break more filibusters last year than in the 1950s and 1960s combined is, quite literally, unprecedented. . . . Congress needs to decide how the place is going to be run and then rewrite the rulebook so that it actually works that way. Otherwise, it's just going to be one unprecedented event after another. Unprecedented use of the filibuster will trigger unprecedented reliance on reconciliation. Unprecedented gridlock in the Senate will lead to unprecedented efforts by the House to protect itself from Senate failure.

But you can't pick and choose. Either unprecedented use of the rules is a problem or it isn't. But if it is, then you have to be upset about the filibuster. And if it isn't, then you can't be upset when the rules are manipulated by both sides. 

This states the obvious, but it nevertheless needs to be emphasized. 

Quote of the Day: Michael Lind

The media is building Ryan up as a serious thinker. Build him up even more, I say. Give him a Nobel Prize, like Obama's. Make him the face of the Republican Party. Progressives should want Ryan and Paul and the Cato Institute to define the next American right. That will ensure its minority status for decades.

Before Buckley and the movement conservatives took the right in another direction in the 1950s, this country had a libertarian, isolationist right, the right of Robert A. Taft and Alf Landon. Thanks to their opposition to the New Deal, U.S. entry in World War II and the Cold War, the libertarian isolationists turned the Republicans into the minority party between 1932 and 1968. The only Republican to be elected in that era, Dwight Eisenhower, ran for the presidency in 1952 to save the GOP from Taftian isolationism and dismissively rejected suggestions that the Republicans try to repeal New Deal programs like Social Security. (Source)

Lind makes the optimist's case that history is on the side of progressives. He says the neocons and the religious right are in eclipse and that the only potent force remaining in the old GOP coalition is the Randian Libertarians. 

I'm not sure that he's right about the waning influence of the religious right or the neocons, but let's assume he is. Does it really matter? The question we need to ask is not whether more Americans lean toward the Dems or the GOP, but who holds the real power?

Refusing to Be Bullied

I've been interested lately in how the outlines of the battle between the right and the moderate left at this time is a reflection of the battle as it took shape in the 19th century. The main outlines of the conflict are archetypal and as old as the Republic itself.  The wonder is not that we can't get anything done now, but that there were periods in our history when we did. And when we did it was in part the historical circumstances, but also because a tough-minded left-leaning leadership rose to the challenge. We've got the historical circumstances right now.  The question is whether a tough-minded, left-leaning leadership will emerge and rise to the challenge.

I've also been grappling with the implications that this archetypal struggle is at its roots subrational, and as such futile to argue as if reasonable people can come to some meeting of the minds. Those on the Right understand that political conflict is a battle of wills, not a battle of minds, and this puts those on the moderate left who are willing to be reasonable at a disadvantage. 

The conflict is asymmetrical from the get go. Progressives' reasonableness and willingness to compromise, their pride in their high-mindedness, as in the Hazlitt quote posted the other day, means that they are always on their heels, always playing defense, and never able to make much headway. And for this reason people like me who are considered immoderate precisely because we understand that reasonableness gets you nowhere are exasperated by progressives who represent them in Washington who are getting nowhere precisely because they are being so reasonable.

So does that mean that the only solution is to fight fire with fire, the subrational with the subrational?  No, I don't.  But it does mean that we should demand more tough-mindedness from those whom we elect to do the people's business, and to vote them out if they allow themselves to be bullied or bought.  And we should rally behind those, like Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean, and Anthony Weiner, all of whom exemplify a fact-based reasonableness combined with a refusal to be bullied. 

That they are widely perceived in the MSM as the extremist left's answer to Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin on the extreme right is a perfect example of the symmetrical thinking that creates the asymmetrical disadvantage for progressives.  If you accept that bit of MSM symmetrical conventional wisdom, you might consider the possibility that you are being bullied without having realized yet how it works.

Portrait of a Tea Partier

This is not what it first appears, so read to the end.  It's a vivid illustration--and an important reminder--about why what most of us think is secondary to what we actually do. From Jonathan Raban's NYRB report of his participation in the February Nashville Teaparty Convention:

I was joined at a table by an intense, wiry, close-cropped, redheaded woman from southern Virginia who dated her conversion to hearing Sarah Palin for the first time.

"She was me! She's so down-to-earth! If Sarah was sitting here with us now, she'd be just a normal person like you and me. You could say anything to her. She's not like a politician—she's real. And Sarah always keeps her word. If Sarah promises something, you know she'll do it. She's just am az ing."

Before Sarah, the woman said, her interest in politics had been limited to voting in general elections. Her one big involvement was with her church. Now she was traveling around the country on behalf of Team Sarah and Conservative Moms for America, a fundamentalist group whose "Conservative Moms Pledge" begins with a quote from the first epistle of Saint Peter:

Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives, when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear.

In the last year, she'd marched on 9/12, gone to CPAC—the Conservative Political Action Conference—and attended a string of acronymic events, which she recited to me. Soon she'd be off to New Orleans for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

Lighting her second cigarette in ten minutes, she talked about missing her family on these political jaunts. After their own children were grown, she and her husband had adopted two infant daughters, now aged six and nine. The girls were the light of their sixty-ish lives. One was autistic, the other severely developmentally disabled: her birth mother was an "alcoholic" and a "drug addict," and the baby had suffered a series of strokes in the delivery room, where her heart had twice stopped beating.

"The hospital said they doubted if she was salvageable. Salvageable! Imagine talking about a human life as 'salvageable'! You see why I love Sarah? We have so much in common." She rattled on about her girls' accomplishments—how nearly normal they were, how happy, how responsive to the warm climate of affection in which they now lived. "Here, I'll show you...." She found her cell phone in her bag and treated me to a slide show of family photos: her husband, a heavily built man in plaid shirt and jeans, playing with their daughters in a well-kept backyard. She hadn't bothered to mention that both girls were black.

There are so many levels of things going on here, it makes your head spin. The mindset is crazy; she isn't. Her thinking might be confused and based in insupportable fictions, but her soul is healthful and magnanimous.

This is a picture of America today. It's a poignant example of that quote from Wiebe I posted the other day:

they tried desperately to understand the larger world in terms of their small, familiar environment. They tried, in other words, to impose the known upon the unknown, to master an impersonal world through the customs of a personal society.  They failed, usually without recognizing why; and that failure to comprehend  a society they were helping to make contained the essence of the nation's story.

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.

Glenn Beck: Man of the Seventies

. . . the 1870s, that is.  From Robert H. Wiebe's The Search for Order 1877-1920:

America in the late nineteenth century was a society without a core.  It lacked those national centers of authority and information which might have given order to such swift changes.  American institutions were still oriented toward a community life where family and church, education and press, professions and government, all largely found their meaning by the way they fit one with another inside a town or a detached portion of the a city.  As men ranged farther and farther from their communities, they tried desperately to understand the larger world in terms of their small, familiar environment. They tried, in other words, to impose the known upon the unknown, to master an impersonal world through the customs of a personal society.  They failed, usually without recognizing why; and that failure to comprehend  a society they were helping to make contained the essence of the nation's story. p. 12

Upside of HCR Failure (Updated)

Marcia Angell on Moyers made the case why it shouldn't pass.  She thinks overall it's going to make things worse despite its positives.  And if it's going to get worse, better it should do so without government-run healthcare to blame.  Maybe she's right.  I'd like to hear her in a debate with Ezra Klein.  But if nothing else, her argument makes me feel a little better if this bill goes down. You should watch the whole interview, but this except is the heart of her point:

BILL MOYERS: But the President is pushing ahead; he wants Congress to act in the next month. What would you have us do?

MARCIA ANGELL: I think the problem is this, Bill. If this plan is passed, and I think there's real doubt as to whether it will be, and there's even more doubt as to whether it would ever be fully implemented, but let's say that it's passed. It will begin to unravel almost immediately. And then what will people do? Well, they'll say, "We tried health reform, and it didn't work. Better not try that anymore."

People and Their Mindsets

I'm getting a few lectures about how wrong it is for me to be so hard on the tea partiers because they are mostly good-hearted folks who hate the bailouts/outsourcing/corporatism just like the rest of us. But that argument makes me feel the same way I felt when people told me that Bush wasn't really that bad or that Rush is just an entertainer or that the rush to war with Iraq made sense. It's an awful lot like being told you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes. I know what I see. Digby

Yes and No. This post by Digby gives me the opportunity to clarify a few things about recent posts I've put up. There's a difference between a "mindset" and a "person". My critique is directed toward mindsets and not persons. A mindset does not tell us everything about a person who has a particular mindset. Different people participate in a mindset to different degrees. Only fanatics are completely possessed by a mindset; most people are more adaptive.

Now all of us operate with a mindset because we have to. But some mindsets are better than others, and the measure of a good mindset as contrasted with a bad one is the degree of complexity a particular mindset can work with comfortably. And the degree of complexity a particular mindset can work with depends on the individual's adaptability and capacity for independent thinking. Mature, independent thinking requires, for instance, that we have some sense that our mindset does not define who we are, that our identity, our humanity, is not coterminous with our mindset and that whatever our mindset might be, it's not THE truth; it's just a set of mental habits that help us to navigate effectively in the world without having to rethink everything we've learned as we go through our day.

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.