After the Future

American Elites v. the American Demos: A Short History with Some Help from Gordon Wood

A strong argument can be made that the kind of thing that cultural conservatives hate about Liberalism is really at the heart of what made the country interesting and dynamic in those first decades of the American experiment. The static, community-centered, face-to-face society conservatives celebrate was very consciously rejected by the non-elites in that early generation precisely because it preserved the privileged society in which the pre-Revolutionary elites had unfair advantages. The personal, face-to-face society was more characteristic of the monarchical pre-Revolutionary ethos than that of the era after the Revolution when the unruly westerners insisted that democracy replace the oligarchy the eastern elites assumed would continue to shape American society.

For a new democratic equality ideal took shape in the early Republic: the ambitious American aspired not to some elite status--to be the "gentleman" who no longer had to work to support himself and his family, but to be an independent thinker, well-informed, politically involved, clever and resourceful in practical matters, hard working.  And, sure, making money was important, but for a time, at least, wealth did not determine status. The main thing was not to be dependent, that is, to be self-reliant.

But dependency made the old monarchical system work. In the pre-Revolutionary system of dependencies everyone was part of an intricately woven, interdependent hierarchy in which everyone knew his place. In the old system, it was all about a web of face-to-face relationships; in the new system it was all about atomized, independent, individual exchanges. As Gordon Wood points out, this was supported by the introduction of paper money which replaced the old system of personal, face-to-face credit issued by the gentry to people whom they knew and judged trustworthy:

When "exchange" became the primary element of the economy. . . , then paper money became more important. "The rapidity and quick succession of exchanges" required increased quantities of money, and this paper money had democratizing effects. James Madison, like gentry creditors everywhere, may have earlier condemned paper money as destructive of "that confidence between man & man, by which the resources of one may be commanded by another." But now many were extolling that same destruction of confidence between one man and another, for such confidence was simply another name for authority and dependency. In a traditional intimate society it had been possible for a gentleman with a reputation and property to deal with everyone personally. But, said the physician Erick Bollman . . . in 1810, gentlemen could not relate to people in such a personal manner anymore.  When they wished, for example, to buy a turkey from a farmer, they could not say, as they had used to, "I own the big house at the corner of Ninth and Chestnut Street," and expect the farmer to tip his cap an deliver the turkey on credit. Now the farmer will say, "What is that to me!"  Proprietary wealth, conspicuous property, personal reputation, and genteel authority did not matter as they had in the past. What the farmer wanted now was ready money, and it did not matter from whom it came: "I want a dollar" says the farmer, "or else you cannot have my turkey."  Wood,  The Radicalism of the American Revolution, p. 339-40.

Paper money was democratizing because with it one man's dollar was as good as another's. Exchange did not require being part of a local network of face-to-face relationships in which your reputation, good or bad, mattered in the transaction. Was something lost in this destruction of the old intimate economics?  Yes--in fact, it's what southern elites always bragged about retaining in southern society. "We have personal relationships with our poor whites and slaves; we understand one another: We're not coldly impersonal like those money-grubbing Yankees." But the exhilarating American experiment was all about freedom, and what that meant, at least in the North, was freedom from embeddedness in the old vertical system of dependencies. And capitalism was the primary engine for the destruction of that old system of face-to-face relationships that cultural conservatives get so nostalgic about.

This was a significant shift from the English system replicated in America in which everyone knew his place in the hierarchy. Get hold of the Cary Grant movie "The Howards of Virginia" which provides an easily accessible portrayal of the old system living uncomfortably with the emerging new. And you can't understand what's going on in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice if you don't have some sense of how the old system worked. D'Arcy's advice to Bingley to dump Elizabeth's sister Jane was just common sense because of the Bennets' lower-gentry status--too big a jump for her, stooping too low for him. And later how shocking was the idea of Elizabeth's becoming the mistress of Pemberly?--an unthinkable jump from lower gentry to the pinnacle of the landed aristocracy. Just not done.

This was the early 19th-century's fantasy novel. It shows what ambitious English men and women aspired to--to climb vertically in the traditional aristocratic, face-to-face class hierarchy.  For Americans the fantasy was entrepreneurial--to become a millionaire, as the Cornelius Vanderbilt story exemplified. Vanderbilt hated the old aristocrats.

Here's Wood on the subject:

In the end, no banks, no government, no institutions could have created the American economic miracle of these years. America suddenly emerged a prosperous, scrambling, enterprising society not because the Constitution was created or because a few leaders formed a national bank, but because ordinary people, hundreds of thousands of them, began working harder to make money and "get ahead." Americans seemed to be a people totally absorbed in the individual pursuit of money. . . .

The American," foreigners said, "is always bargaining; he always has one bargain afoot, another just finished, and two or three he's thinking of.  All that he has, all that he sees, is merchandise in his eyes." English travelers were stunned to see Americans selling their landed estates in order to go into trade--the reverse of what Englishmen sought to do. [The English aspirational fantasy was to be Master or Mistress at Pemberly] (Wood p. 326)

We Americans now think of D'Arcy's first attitude as insufferable snobbery, and perhaps a more affable if patronizing show of manners to his social inferiors would have reflected better on his "character", but his attitude simply demonstrated how people in the old system were acculturated to think. It was as true in America before the Revolution as it was in England. The revolution in the title of Wood's book refers to the broad-based American rejection of all that after the war in a way that surprised and shocked the gentlemen founders who expected the old hierarchical system to remain intact. Wood suggests that America as it actually evolved after the Revolution was, from the perspective of the founders, largely an unintended consequence:

This democratic society was not the society the revolutionary leaders had wanted or expected. No wonder, then, that those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought. Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned. Indeed, a pervasive pessimism, a fear that their revolutionary experiment in republicanism was not working out as they had expected, runs through the later writings of the founding fathers.  All the major revolutionary leaders died less than happy with the results of the Revolution. (Wood p. 365)

The founders had more in common with Jane Austen's world than with the crude, commerce-driven energies that characterized Cornelius Vanderbilt's. They (the Federalists more than the Jeffersonians) fantasized a future American Republic that would be a lot like the Roman Republic in which the rich, "noble" senatorial class dominated political life. But they unleashed democratic energies that destroyed that fantasy and the social order in which it subsisted. The new Democratic order was largely structured by market relationships, not face-to-face relationships. But . . .

Even Jefferson, sanguine and optimistic as he had always been, was reduced to despair in his last years. . . . He hated the democratic world he saw emerging in America--a world of speculation, banks, paper money, and evangelical Christianity that he thought he had laid to rest. . . .

But Jefferson lived too long [died in 1826], and the future and the coming generation were not what he had expected. Jefferson was frightened by the popularity of Andrew Jackson, regarding him as a man of violent passions and unfit for the presidency. He felt overwhelmed by the new paper-money business culture sweeping through the the country and never appreciated how much his democratic and egalitarian principles had contributed to its rise. Ordinary people, in whom Jefferson had placed so much confidence, more than had his friend Madison, were not becoming more enlightened after all. (Wood p. 367)

Old-system gentlemen like the founders were dismayed at what they saw as an orgy of greed and self-interest. They feared the country would devolve into chaos--without the old system and the old values, what would hold the country together?  Well it became clear as the American experiment moved further into the 19th century:

It was inevitable, therefore, that many came to conclude that this unruly society could tie itself together only by bonds that were in accord with the realities of American freedom and pursuits of happiness. Nothing less than interest itself--that "most powerful impulse of the human breast" --would do as an adhesive force in this dynamic, busy society. . . . They could not be controlled by force, or else they would have no liberty. But appeals to virtue could not contain these busy people either. Only interest could restrain them. Americans govern themselves, they said, because it was in their interest to do so. The desire to make money and get ahead helped them to develop habits of self-control. "The influence of money is wonderful, and the mind changes as the means of acquiring it are presented.  But the 1830s Tocqueville thought he saw what was holding this divers, rootless, restless people together.  "Interest," he concluded. "That is the secret. The private interest that breaks through at each moment, the interest that, moreover, appears openly and even proclaims itself as social theory." . . . (Wood p. 336)

According to French theorist Comte Destutt de Tracy

. . . the United States was "the hope and example of the world." There in the new Republic, he said, commerce had found its full identity with society. Indeed, commerce was society. "Society consists only in a continual succession of Exchanges," and thus "commerce and society are one and the same thing." . . . "Commerce, that is exchange, being in truth society itself, it is the only bond among men; the source of all their moral sentiments; and the first and most powerful cause of the improvement of their mutual sensibility and reciprocal benevolence." And nowhere more than in republican America had commerce been allowed such a full and fair play.

America, at a stroke it seemed, had overturned two millennia of Western history.

Market relationships defined social relationships--the old hierarchical, deferential society had been destroyed, and with it any hope of classical republican virtue shaping the new society. This is striving spirit of interest, to get ahead, is the essence of America and fundamental to understanding the American soul and its equality mythos:

If everyone in the society was involved in money making and exchanging, then to that extent they were all alike, all seeking their own individual interests and happiness, "The market house, like the grave, is a place of perfect equality," said Philip Freneau in bitter derision. But he was right.  All this commercial activity did promote equality, yet not, of course, equality of wealth.  Quite the contrary; wealth was far more unequally distributed in the decades following the Revolution than it had been before. Nonetheless, early-nineteenth-century Americans felt more equal, and for many of them that was what mattered. (Wood p. 340)

But the inequality in wealth was the fly in the ointment that would destroy this early celebration of democratic equality. This celebration could only last so long as it was possible for most Americans to be, or to aspire to be, self-reliant and economically independent. Industrialism and the new wage slave system destroyed that possibility for most Americans. And it was just a matter of time before the captains of these new industries constituted a new class of oligarchs that would dominate political and social life. But in the decades before the Civil War, except in the South, there was no real oligarchy in place--at least no oligarchy that had the kind of control that the new oligarchs would obtain at the end of the century. For a time most white Americans could truly believe that they were, or could be, free and equal citizens.

***

What are the takeaways here? First, that some nostalgic view of a stable, Shire-like, community-centered United States is largely a fiction. Early America, even in the urban East, was very like what we think of now as the rough-and-tumble wild west. The Revolution unleashed powerful, commerce-driven energies which largely destroyed the old social order and its traditional pieties and authorities. What we have come to think of as "traditional values" were largely invented in the early 19th century, and are a bizarre amalgam of free-market capitalism with evangelical Christianity, neither of which had much to do with the vision of the founders, who despaired as it became clear that economic "interest" and not gentlemanly republican virtue would largely shape the future of the country. 

The American ideal held that citizens would be self-reliant and economically independent, free from the dependencies of the intensely hierarchical societies of the precolonial era that continued to dominate society in England. Foreign visitors to the United States were often shocked at how ordinary working Americans did not know their place, and that was because these Americans did not think that people richer than they were any better than they. The early days of the Republic were largely about the widespread rejection of the old-world status system determined by hereditary wealth.

The American ethos was one in which everyone was expected to "get ahead" and the opportunities abounded for anyone with a lick of sense and an ounce of ambition to do it. Getting ahead meant going into business for oneself as a merchant, tradesman, artisan, or farmer.  Independence and equality were primarily rooted in that ability to make your own life without the benefits of inherited wealth, family connections, and the patronage system that determined status and the chances for success in the old system. Externally imposed social order or restraints were minimal. Social order largely derived from the discipline of the market and by an individualistic, conscience-centered, evangelical Christianity.

Sound familiar? This imagination of America is at the heart of the Tea Party movement. It doesn't have much to do with the founders' republican vision, and it doesn't have much to do with reality as it exists in America today, but these ideas define deep themes in the American soul, and in confusing times we revert to them for want of a better way to think about who we are and where we are going.

The country's center of gravity for a while did not lie with the very wealthy, but with the prospering, self-reliant, property-owning middle. That was the ideal, and for a while it seemed as though it had some relationship to reality, but the emergence of the cotton oligarchs in the South and the industrial oligarch's in the North changed all that, and by 1900 the ideal no longer bore any relationship to the reality of American society. The fears of the Jeffersonians had become realized, and Whiggish, idealist elites and populists joined forces in a new Progressive movement to redress the balance in what eventually emerged as the New Deal compromise that accepted that Bigness was our future, and that Big Business required Big Government to keep it in check if there was any hope of preserving either political or economic equality in this country.

The second takeaway: This early 19th-century mentality forms the foundation for the commonplaces of the Tea Party movement and are an essential part of the American mythos.  It's this aspect of the Tea Party movement that must be appreciated and respected by serious people on the Left. It's a mythos that is inadequate to deal with the complexity of our life now, but it has elements that we all should be able to work with to build something new. For me it's a question of who will own that mythos--the forces of regression or the forces that will move us forward.

None of us can stand against the tsunami force of historical change, but that does not mean we are simply to be swept away by it.  We must learn to ride the wave and to use its energies, and to become skilled in that we have to be resourceful and adaptive, and to me that means we need to rely less on what is outside and more on our own interior resources. The architecture of society does not matter so much as the architecture of our souls. And the architecture of our souls does not depend on society's promoting virtue so much as conservatives want us to think. We have one another, we have access to the great souls of the past, we have grace. That's plenty to work with, and working with all three has been what the American experiment at its best has been about from the beginning.

[This is a revised and mush shortened version of an essay original posted in September 2010]

Triumph of the Will at Amazon

Even as the company tests delivery by drone and ways to restock toilet paper at the push of a bathroom button, it is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable. The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the popular management bromides that other corporations at least pay lip service to and has instead designed what many workers call an intricate machine propelling them to achieve Mr. Bezos’ ever-expanding ambitions.

“This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.”

Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,” said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system....

In 2013, Elizabeth Willet, a former Army captain who served in Iraq, joined Amazon to manage housewares vendors and was thrilled to find that a large company could feel so energetic and entrepreneurial. After she had a child, she arranged with her boss to be in the office from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, pick up her baby and often return to her laptop later. Her boss assured her things were going well, but her colleagues, who did not see how early she arrived, sent him negative feedback accusing her of leaving too soon.

“I can’t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying you’re not doing your work,” she says he told her. She left the company after a little more than a year.

Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else....

Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event. ...

The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.

Read more.

You see how what Wolin is talking about works? You can argue that people choose to work at Amazon, and they're free to leave if they're wimps who can't keep up. They are well paid, and there are some people who thrive in that kind of culture. Who are you to judge? Well, we're foolish if we don't think this only affects people who work at Amazon, or Walmart, or wherever. It slowly seeps into what the rest of us accept as 'reality'. 

Here's the problem: The most dehumanizing practices can be justified in the name of striving for excellence. Competition and conflict bring the best out of us, right? That adrenal brain flush you feel when winning or losing is at stake energizes us to do things you never thought yourselves capable. If you're a winner, it's a rush. You're an elite warrior, and you crush those who think they can challenge you. If you're a loser, well, who cares? Go away. 

There's a well-known dynamic in which you sink to the level of your enemy. The U.S., for instance, largely lost its soul during WWII and the Cold War as in subtle and not so subtle ways it began to look more like its totalitarian enemies in Germany and the Soviet Union. It's not that we're bad, it's that our enemies are, and we have to fight fire with fire. Our survival depends on it.

This is a logic we all accept as realistic. We're the good guys, but If they play dirty, so then must we. But then before you know it, we're not the good guys anymore. We're torturing and suspending habeas corpus and surveilling without warrants and drone assassinating citizens without trials, and it's all ok. It's justified, because we're the good guys and our security depends on it. And then we ask with astonishing naivete: Why do they hate us? Well, it's not our freedoms they hate; it's the jackbooted thugs that we've become.

The same happens in the business world, and as the ruthlessness that drives the Amazon model becomes better known as its studied in business schools, it will be emulated. Copy cats will talk about how it's all about striving for excellence, or if they want to be more honest, they'll just say that in order to survive they match or exceed the ruthless of their competitors. Anything is justified in the name of the survival. 

Liz Pearce spent two years at Amazon, managing projects like its wedding registry. “The pressure to deliver far surpasses any other metric,” she said. “I would see people practically combust.”

But just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace: fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers demanding the maximum.

 

Black Lives Matter v. Bernie Sanders

In the past one hundred years two models have defined the extreme opposite poles for the oppressed to actively resist their oppressors. One pole is framed by a Gandhian non-violent resistance and the other by Frantz Fanon, the Algerian psychotherapist and theorist of violent resistance. Fanon saw resistance as a zero-sum game. If my existence is diminished by my oppressor, I can affirm my existence only by diminishing my oppressor. If my humanity is denied by my oppressor, then I assert my humanity in denying him is by by killing him. 

For Gandhi--and for James Lawson and MLK, who adapted Gandhi’s approach to resist the endocolonialism of the segregated south--the oppressor was always a human being worthy of respect. Through King’s and Lawson’s Gandhian/Christian existentialist lens, the oppressor was a decent person who didn't know it yet. The act of nonviolent resistance was meant to awaken the oppressor to the humanity of the oppressed but also to his own suppressed humanity. Resistance, when successful, isn't zero sum; it's win win. Both parties have transformed their reality. 

I understand the necessity of disruptive direct action tactics--it's at the center of the Gandhian approach, but I'd argue the short and long-term effects of such tactics are directly linked to the spirit in which the disruptions are conducted. I think Black Lives Matter is poised somewhere between the Gandhian and Fanonian poles right now. Its style and rhetoric feel Fanonian, though, and I think this in part explains why some people sympathetic to their cause are put off by their tactics, particularly as they have been directed toward Bernie Sanders.

The problem with the way BLM activists have treated Bernie Sanders lies in their refusal to show him any respect when clearly he deserves it. He is not the oppressor. People can argue that BLM won because their tactics “forced” Sanders to expand his platform to embrace the concerns of BLM activists in a way he had not done before. But there is a difference between winning and winning over. Does anybody believe that Sanders would have resisted doing the same if someone from BLM had sat down and had a conversation with him about those concerns? Maybe he needed a little push, but is there any evidence that he had to be publicly humiliated? Twice?

There's a way of disrupting that awakens consciences, and there's a way of doing it that comes across as moralistic guilt tripping that accomplishes little. Which category do you think applies to BLM? There are some people you need to smack upside the head to awaken their consciences, and there are others who have already very lively consciences with whom you just need to sit down and have a conversation. Which category do you think applies to Bernie Sanders?

The activists in BLM are applying the slap upside the head indiscriminately. So far there's no significant harm done, but I hope that they learn how to build bridges with those who would be their willing allies, and I hope they realize that these otherwise willing allies will find it extremely difficult to build the bridge if there is some unilaterally imposed test of ideological purity that they must pass for it to be built. There's a place for pressure politics, but to build lasting alliances you have to know who your real enemies are and how to create bonds of trust and respect with potential allies. Building durable alliances is not accomplished in a zero-sum game.

It's counterproductive to force someone to do something that they would otherwise be persuaded to do willingly. With force always comes an element of humiliation, and with humiliation anger and resentment. It's human nature for any spirited person to resist being forced to do anything, and when he is forced, unless he is a saint, he might comply, but he does it with an undertone of resentment and just to meet the minimum requirement. When one is won over, she complies with enthusiasm and full engagement. Do BLM activists understand this? So far it doesn’t look like it.

When the Party's Over

We are a country now in the hands of deeply deluded people, people who are living in bubbles, whose minds are addled by chronic cognitive dissonance at best or at worst an addiction to power and wealth. Electing sane people to fix things in Washington isn’t a solution because it’s like sending a sober person to break up a party where everyone is drunk and and oblivious of how they are annoying the neighbors. These drunks have no interest in ending the party or in listening to spoilsports who wants to break it up. The "spoilsport" sees that there’s no point in calling the police, since the mayor and chief of police are among the partygoers--and they're as drunk as everyone else. Even those among the partygoers who are sober enough to recognize that they should tone things down are themselves are powerless to do anything about it--and they really don't want to. They’ll hear you out, make sympathetic noises, and then a minute later they'll return to the party to hang out with the people they really care about.

Have they no shame? Why should they have? Shame requires that there is a code of conduct that you have broken, and that your having broken it exposes you to the negative judgment of the people whose good opinion you value. But the people at the party only care about the good opinion of the other partygoers, and the partygoers who are most outrageous are the ones who are most admired. The partygoers see those who disapprove of them as the "little people", the people who don’t count enough to get an invitation. The little people are just jealous; they would change their scolding tone if they got an invitation to the party.

So there’s nothing to be hoped for until the bubble bursts, the party ends, and people sober up. This moment will come; Reality always asserts itself. That's the good news. But the bad news is that it won’t be pretty. If 2008 wasn’t enough to burst the bubble, sober these people up, and cause them to feel any shame, just think what it will take to do it.

In the meanwhile, those of us who are relatively sober need to start laying the foundation for a sane future. And this requires developing an alternative narrative aligned with Reality that makes both intellectual sense and soul sense. And we are more likely than not to find the bricks with which to build something Real from those elements in our heritage that, even if a little tattered and worse for wear, have withstood the test of time. And so a sane future lies in salvaging or retrieving those elements and using them to build something new.

Retrieval and nostalgia are not the same thing. Nostalgia, the method of the cultural conservative, is impotent and backward looking; retrieval is constructive and forward looking. Retrieval uses the bricks of the forgotten or rejected past to build something new. Nostalgia wants to set up house in an abandoned ruin. 

This space in its modest way is about thinking about a sane future. As laid out in posts last month, I think that such a future must retrieve aspects of the Christian Humanist tradition that have been forgotten or rejected during the modern era. We are no longer moderns, and we are entering a post-secular age, and that affords both perils and opportunities. While it is simply not possible to maintain an attitude of optimism in the short term, we must start thinking about the post-party aftermath. If sane progressive forces are not in place to clean up the post-party mess, we can be sure regressive authoritarian forces will do it instead.