After the Future

Some Thoughts on Election Day

Whatever happens this week in the midterm elections, it won't be decisive. The stalemate will continue regardless whether the Red or Blue team gets the upper hand. 

America has always had a split personality: One part Jeffersonian/Jacksonian, mostly premodern in its outlook, wanting to stay close to the land and keep to the old ways, hating progress and most anything industrialized. And the other part Hamiltonian and Whiggish--more about economic growth, change, development and as such celebrators of the creative destructive energies of capitalism.

In the first two centuries after the founding, the first dominated in the South and the second the North, but since the 1970s the split is more rural/urban whether in Texas or in Wisconsin, Georgia or Pennsylvania. The Republicans used to be the party of the urban Hamiltonian elites, but over the last thirty years has become the demotic party of rural Jacksonians. And the Dems have become the party of Hamilton, the party of urban, educated elites and Technocapitalists. No wonder an incongruous rap musical about him was so popular in New York. 

I've been talking for years about how something has to give, how the basic compromises that held things together must break apart. The framework has always been fragile and the pressure has been building for years, at least since the Bush administration disasters in Iraq and the financial meltdown, but really since Reagan's fusion of Hamiltonian financial elitism with Jacksonian rural grievance that made the disasters of '01, '03, and '08 all but inevitable. And Reagan's Republican Neoliberalism was a reaction against the New Deal, which was a Democratic/Jacksonian reaction to the classical laissez-fair, Republican/Hamiltonian liberalism of the Robber Barons who emerged out of the Civil War, and the Civil War traces back to the North-South compromises made during the founding, which we're still fighting about today in this interminably irresolvable culture war between Hamiltonians and Jacksonians.

Things started breaking apart for the first time in the thirty year run up to the Civil War starting with the Missouri Compromise, and in a similar way they've been breaking apart again in the in the last thirty years starting with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine during the late Reagan administration, insofar as it provided a media soapbox for the repressed grievances of Middle America through Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. And so here we are in the MAGA Age when it feels as if Humpty Dumpty has fallen off his wall and all the king's horses and all the king' s won't be able to put him together again. 

History doesn't repeat itself exactly--the particularities matter--but certain historical themes do. We're not in the 1850s now, but we're in a situation where many of the same patterns are working very similarly. In the decade before the Civil War, the authoritarian, one-party South had advantages that enabled it to win most of the big fights in Congress and the Courts, and the pattern is repeating itself now. It remains to be seen how it will play out this time around.

The mistake the South made in the runup to the Civil War lay in its obsession for control that led to its overreaching. Most prominently The Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision crossed a line that forced the North, which was mostly indifferent to slavery so long as it stayed in the South, to push back. The GOP is overreaching similarly now in its obsessive need for control and in that it has made it abundantly clear that it would be quite happy with one-party rule going forward. 

Most everyday Americans aren't paying attention, or they see politics rather like sports and so without real-life implications other than the team they root for winning or losing. They can feel a passionate bond with their team, and they really, truly hate it when their team loses, and hate the other team for beating them. But the idea that one team doesn't believe in democracy anymore is for those rooting for the Red team too abstract, not enough for them to break with them, and so the real-world implications of the Red team winning are something they are going to have to feel before they understand them. Lots of Red Team fans won't care about one-party rule so long as their team wins, but most Americans will not be ok with it. They don't want the Red team running things, and they won't stand for it. 

The 1850s culminated in a war that killed north of 600K people, and while it's hard to believe that kind of violence is a possibility for us, we're in for some level of increasing violence, especially if the Blue Team finds a way to keep winning. MAGA is not going away peacefully. We're  not likely to see a territorial war, but I could see assassinations and terroristic acts that will make the 60s and the McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing seem like the good old days. And it's not inconceivable that a Red block of mostly rural states, for instance, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas declare a Democratic administration and Congress illegitimate, and assert their independence. 

And what's a Blue President going to do? Send in the army? Not likely for fear of pushing the border states--the more urbanized Red States like Texas, Florida, Georgia--into the secessionist camp. But if he does nothing, then other rural states like Mississippi, Alabama, etc. will go "independent". Then what? Corporations and Wall Street won't care so long as they're left alone. A lot will depend on where the how many MAGA heads are in the army--not the top brass, but MAGA brigadiers, colonels, and captains, the Michael Flynn types, who command the loyalty of the MAGA lower ranks.

It could get messy. There are a lot of unknown unknowns, so to say. Who knows what kind of plotting and collusion between military and local militias is going on even now? Sure secession would be crazy and irrational, but it was in 1861 as well. Lots of smart people then, Lincoln included, thought that saner heads would prevail. They didn't. 

On the other hand, If the Red team wins and institutionalizes a nation-wide, one-party system, and continues to stack the courts, it's not as clear to me what the Blue states would do. People will take to the streets, but Blue America has no infrastructure like Red America to support militarized resistance. If there will be any militarized violence it will come from the Red government moving in to suppress the rioting. I think it's likely that we'd become Hungary or Brazil for a while, but not China. It's unlikely that a regime that will be so fundamentally unpopular could last very long, but it could make things miserable for a while. The Hamiltonians won in the 1860s, and the smart money would be on their eventually winning again if a scenario like this unfolds, even if, as then, the early rounds go to the Jeffersonian/Jacksonians. 

Ok, sure I'm letting my imagination get the better of me. But neither scenario is as inconceivable today as it was ten years ago. Who knows what things will look like ten years hence? Better to hope and work for the best and yet be prepared for the worst. But one way or the other, it's likely to get violent in some areas of the country, and if so, it's going to be profoundly destabilizing. How that actually plays out, nobody, I least of all, knows. But it's hard to believe that we're just going to muddle through without there being some catastrophe-generated major realignment.

I'd prefer a scenario in which we'd find a way to muddle through without catastrophe. I'd prefer a stalemate to chaos in the political sphere while we wait for a breakthrough in our cultural life along the lines of what I wrote toward the end of my previous post. But it seems that we humans only learn the hard way. But whatever happens in the short run, I don't really trust the Blues or the Reds to get us safely through the next fifty years without a restoration of the wisdom axis in our metaphysical imaginary. That might be a long shot, but in the meanwhile, better the Blues come out winners because pragmatic is always better than fanatic.

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Note 1: Jacksonians constitute the MAGA base of the GOP, but GOP elite leadershp--McConnell, McCarthy, Romney, Cheney, Stefanic, etc.--are Neoliberal Hamiltonians who often campaign as Jacksonians to remain in power. This is the coalition of Neoliberal Hamiltonian elites and Jacksonian Reagan Democrats that Reagan forged. Reagan was Barry Goldwater with FDR populist charisma. The Jacksonians (for cultural reasons) and Hamiltonians (for economic reasons) in this GOP fusion share common ground in their both wanting as little interference from the federal government as possible in the private sector. But the populist/elite tension between them is real, and it will be interesting to see if the Hamiltonians in the GOP establishment will retain leadership positions in the House and Senate in coming years. Establishment Republicans are the Party of the One Percent, and its interests simply do not align in the long run with the GOP populist base. 

The Democrats, formerly the party of rural and ethnic urban Jacksonians, don't know who they are. Their establishment does not represent the interests of the Hamiltonian One Percent, but of the Hamiltonian top Twenty Percent plus rural and urban Blacks. They have have become resolutely anti-Jacksonian on cultural issues and have become instead a mishmash of Hamiltonian cosmopolitan urban and suburban coastal technocrats and technocapitalists, Blacks, feminists and LGBTQ+ identitarians. As such, the Dems have no real positive uniting vision for an American future. The only thing that unifies them now is in their being the party of anti-MAGA. But, as I've said elsewhere, they won't always have crazy to run against, and there's no future in No.

Since this is the week of the premier of the fifth season of Yellowstone, it's worth a few minutes to show how this Jacksonian/Hamiltonian tension is really the heart of the show.  Jacksonians like John Dutton are in conflict with Neoliberal Hamiltonian developers. Dutton votes Republican, but it's a safe bet that his developer enemies vote Republican too. The few Blue team types that show up are usually portrayed as naive flakes from California.

Beth and Jamie Dutton are both comfortable in the Hamiltonian world in a way that the other Dutton Ranch characters are not. Beth is acceptable to her father in a way that Jamie isn't because Beth's loyalties are beyond question in a way that Jamie's are not. Loyalty is the supreme value in the Jacksonian world. Having no loyalties except to your self is beyond contemptible.

Beth, a true loyalist, submits her Hamiltonian skills to Jacksonian ends; Jamie is untrustworthy because his east-coast elite education has inured him to the Neoliberal Hamiltonian order. He's no longer truly a Jacksonian, and his pursuing a career in the Hamiltonian world is, when push comes to shove, more important to him than defending his family's Jacksonian heritage. He protests that he's loyal, but his loyalty is for hire and can be bought by the highest bidder. He went to Harvard, after all, a place where you learn to be a soulless, Neoliberal, meritocratic, careerist for whom the only value is what the market determines. Ask Larry Summers. 

The Archetypal American Divide: Andrew Jackson v. John Quincy Adams

Although Andrew Jackson defended his own authority with resolute determination, he did not manifest a general respect for the authority of the law when it got in the way of the policies he chose to pursue. This character trait, already apparent in his military career, continued to manifest itself during his years in the White House. Jackson's removal of the federal deposits from the Bank of the United States proved but one of a number of presidential actions illustrating his impatience with legal restraints. His reactions to the Supreme Court's decision on Cherokee rights, to abolitionist use of the mails, and to the epidemic of public violence that raged during his presidency all contribute to the pattern. Old Hickory's admirers, in his own time and since, have extolled his willpower and leadership. Yet, although he set an example of an activist presidency, Jackson's administration was also an unusually divisive one. He remains the only president to have been formally censured by the Senate. No wonder the opposition party took up the name  that traditionally stood for resistance to abuses of executive authority: "Whigs."  

 

Jackson's personal attitude toward the law bore a decided congruence to the broader relationship of his [Democratic] party to the American legal tradition. . . Democrats could close their eyes to the problems of pervasive lawlessness and violence that plagued American society in their time. In the words of the historian Richard Hofstadter, violence in the Jacksonian period expressed "the pathology of a nation that defied control, governed by an ineffective leadership, impatient with authority, bedeviled by the internal heterogeneity, and above all cursed by an ancient and gloomy wrong": slavery. 

 

Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 to 1848, 2009, p. 411. 

 

If you want to understand the roots of contemporary American divisiveness, read Howe's book. It's the story of how an ethos of loutishness came to replace a basic American decency that was supported by an ethos of republican civic virtue and reverence for the law. It's the story, in other words, of how the America that Andrew Jackson represented came to displace the America that John Quincy Adams represented.

 

Two primal archetypes that shape the American character emerge during these decades in the political sphere. On the one side, the Progressive, future-oriented, sane, decent Whigs (and later Republicans)  represented by figures like Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, and the young Abraham Lincoln. None were morally pure or flawlessly consistent, but they were all in varying degrees anti slavery, anti-Indian removal, anti Mexican War, anti-nativist. They were more open to women’s suffrage. They were, though, fundamentally decent human beings who were at the same time pragmatists who wanted to preserve the union in the face of the fundamentally indecent, if not delusionally insane, mentality that was organizing the politics of the South. This is the archetype of the educated Yankee elite—the Transcendentalists, the Northern progressive evangelical Christians, first-wave feminists, and abolitionists. 

 

It continues to be the archetype that governs the thinking of most decent, educated, coastal, Americans, and those who live in the blue counties on the election maps. It is universalist and rules- and process-oriented. It believes in "improvement", that individuals and societies can be better than they are. John Quincy Adams is the exemplar here. He had wildly ambitious plans for 'improving' American society that were about a hundred years ahead of his time. 

 

On the other side, were the localist, anti-economic development, anti-education, pro slavery, ruthlessly anti-Indian, anti-Mexican, pro-war, white supremacists for whom Andrew Jackson is the exemplar. Jackson pushed Adams out of office in the 1828 election, and Jacksonian loutishness came after that to govern the politics of the Democratic Party—both North and South. This is the mentality shaped the politics of Calhoun, Polk, Tawney, van Buren (and later Tammany Hall), Tyler, and later Andrew Johnson, and just about everybody who thought of himself as pro-slavery in the South or a man of the people in the North. It continues to be the archetype that largely shapes the thinking in the South, the Mountain West, Scots-Irish Appalachia, and some urban, white-ethnic areas in the North. These are all bastions of the tribalist Jacksonian mindset.

 

Because this mentality is so deeply racialist and/or tribalist, it means that decency is something that is only owed to other tribal members. If you're not with us, you're the Other, the enemy, and if you're the enemy, we owe you nothing, and we couldn't care less if you live or die, and if you get in our way, we'd prefer you dead. It is static, change resistant, and caste-oriented, and so it resists anything that might be de-stabilizing--like educational, social, and economic programs that might "improve" the lives of those in the lower caste, especially if they're not white. Its resistance to the idea of progress or improvement is premodern and, imo, largely derives from a deep Calvinist suspicion in the utter depravity of unregenerate humans who cannot by definition be improved. It has little or no interest in 'justice' as a transcendent, norms-challenging ideal. It cares only about preserving traditionalist norms, and will push back viciously against anyone who seeks to subvert those norms, no matter how unjust, especaily regarding the Other. For the Jacksonian, someone like Atticus Finch is not a hero. He's a villain because he is a traitor to his tribe. 

 

Fox News, the Tea Party, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell, et al., are all very much in that Jacksonian stream. They are all moral louts, but they don't see themselves that way. They think of themselves as noble and generous to friends and family, as people who try to live right in their personal lives, and if they are violently antagonistic to non-tribal members, well that's a toughness that necessary for survival in a cruel world. But this morality, while it might be justified as necessary for survival on the frontier, no longer makes sense.

 

As individuals most of these people are not louts, and they are decent in their day-to-day behavior. But they align themselves with an American tradition that is deeply, loutishly dysfunctional insofar as it shapes a politics for the 21st Century. And when push comes to shove, people who find themselves more comfortable in this stream than in the liberal one, will vote for the Jacksonian lout rather than the decent Whig. And so the basic archetype plays out--Jackson wins again over Adams over and over again. This isn't about policy or about differences in political philosophy; it's about tribal loyalties and alignments. 

 

So if you read Howe's book you’ll see why this tribal mentality governing GOP politics today hasn’t changed fundamentally from the mentality of its ancestors in the 1820s. It’s remarkable that such a primitive way of thinking could survive despite all the massive changes that have occurred in the last 200 years. But I think that the kind of disorienting change the country has undergone forces people who need outside cultural cues or authority figures to tell them what’s ok, and they tend to look to the ancestors to find an anchor, a place to steady themselves against the effects of ontological dizziness. It doesn’t matter that the ancestors were loutish white supremacists. 

 

The difference between Liberals and Conservatives, imo, is not that as individuals the first are morally superior to the second, but that Liberals have adapted better to a dynamically changing reality as it is given to us in late modern capitalism. To adapt so easily is not without moral peril: They are, I would argue, too comfortable with the spiritual/cultural impoverishment that late capitalism has made normative. Too many Liberals have no sense of how impoverished their lives really are, and that they are in Kierkegaard's despair that does not know it's despair. Nevertheless, I believe that a move forward is more likely to come from this cosmopolitan, educated class. Already many sense the inadequacy of Liberal assumptions, and are groping their way out of them. This groping is, I believe, the only way forward, and it will have the most significant cultural impact because more likely to be honestly and thoughtfully achieved. 

 

Conservatives, on the other hand, understand that something is missing, and they long for a rich cultural vitality they know cannot be found within a Liberal ethos. But the problem for conservatives lies in that they are looking for love in all the wrong places, and it tends to lead them into abusive relationships with nasty, violent types who present themselves as knowing more than they really do. These violent types are not interested in persuasion; they want to ram their values down your throat because they believe it's Us against Them, and it's eat or be eaten. It's white people vs. the Other--whether the Indians or Blacks or Mexicans, and now Muslims--and the traitorous white Liberals who side with these Others. This is why they are the "real" Americans and Liberals are not. Liberals are traitors, and yet they have the smug audacity to think they are morally superior?! How dare they! 

 

Conservatives in this Jacksonian stream cannot tolerate the moral ambiguities that come with pluralism, and so they see themselves involved in  a zero-sum culture war. This explains Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham. Apparently it explains Bill Barr. For this reason conservatives pose a far greater danger to our ability to live together in peace. Peace for them is only possible when the Other and the Liberals who defend them are annihilated or subjugated. I know--the political correctness of the Left derives from an a similar inability to tolerate moral ambiguities. But we have much less to fear from overly sensitive snowflakes than we do from gun-toting right-wingers who think they are doing God's will in imposing theirs by any means necessary. The former might be annoying, but they are not joining militias. 

 

Andrew Jackson's behavior, attitudes, and politics were truly despicable, even by the measures of his own time. Many of his Whiggish contemporaries were appalled by him, but he was for many Americans "Old Hickory", a great American who deserves to be on our twenty-dollar bill. And that Americans chose him over Adams in '28 was the beginning of the descent into mainstreaming American political loutishness. And while louts we shall have always with us, the more decent among us need to robustly push back against them and any claims they have to be the only real Americans. There's another tradition of decency that we can all draw upon that is equally and more desirably American. 

 

Here's Howe on Frederick Douglass, another exemplar of this better American imagination of itself:

 

Douglass wished to see himself as a man who transcended racial differences, a "Representative Man" in the Emersonian sense of one who demonstrated the potentialities of human nature. He shared the Transcendentalists' celebration of a human nature common to all races and nationalities and, like them, hoped America would be the place where the common nature would achieve its fullest expression. As Emerson put it:

 

In this continent, --asylum of all nations, --the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, all European tribes, --of the Africans, and of the Polynesians will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature.

 

Douglass, like Emerson, put his faith in an American melting pot, out of which would spring a new humanity.   (Howe, WHGW, p 655)

That's about as un-Jacksonian and un-Trumpian as you can get. It was a minority position in Emerson's and Douglass's day; it should be common sense now.

Some Random Thoughts on the American Character

I never quite grasped why Jefferson and Adams were so discouraged by the way the country had democratized by the 1820s. Wasn't that what they, especially Jefferson, had hoped for? I tended to dismiss their concerns as a snooty elitism. But I understand it differently now, especially in light of Trump’s ascendancy. Reading Wood, Howe, and Potter over the last several months has set me straight about that. There was a snootiness in it, but also there were good reasons for them to be appalled. 

The “populism” that dismayed Jefferson and Adams was the kind of populism that lifted Trump into power. Adams's and Jefferson’s republican ideals —and really the ideals of the entire revolutionary generation—seem quaintly naïve over against the crude, myopically interest-driven energies released after the Revolution. The most active Americans were remarkably ignorant and short-sighted, they were drunks, they were all too inclined to run with the mob, they were white supremacists and nativists who exhibited a barbaric violence toward Blacks and Indians, and they indulged in a kind of grandiosity about being an American that fed their delusions and their worst instincts. America was a nasty, nasty place in the 19th Century. There is very little about it to be nostalgic about. 

The old republican ideals were payed lip service to, but played hardly any role in the dynamic realities shaping the political and economic spheres. Everything was transactional. Everybody in the private sector was on the make and in the public sector you were considered an idiot if you weren't on the take. You know the picture we have about the lawless, wild west in the period after the Civil War? That's the way it was back East before it.

It's a mentality that made America economically dynamic, for sure, but also what made it shallow and cruel. It's the America that Trump envisions when he wants to make it great again because Trump's America appeals to whatever is shallow, cruel, and short-sighted in the American character. Trump's candidacy and now his presidency have shown how fragile the norms that have suppressed what has always been there as the ugliest aspects of the American character. And what has become clearer to me is not that Trump is an aberration, but rather he is a reversion to the 19th century, pre-Progressive Era norm. He's the culmination, if not the reductio ad absurdum, of the Republican project that began with Reagan in 1980 to dismantle the reforms that made the U.S. a relatively decent place to live for a while.

What we see in Trump's kakistocracy (look it up) is very much in line with that part of the American character. The Mueller investigation seems to be approaching its climax. It seems to be big news that Cohen has come public about lying about not having contact with the Russians during Trump’s 2016 campaign. People think this is a big deal because it shows that Trump was dealing with the Russians to promote his own business interests in such a way that could compromise the country’s interests. But we know this already, and do we have any confidence that Mueller's proving it will make a difference?

The talking heads on TV keep telling us that the Trump people are second raters who cannot withstand Mueller’s attack. But it’s amazing to me that the elites in this country have put up with Trump this long, and it’s simply because the elite factions disgusted by Trump simply don’t have enough power anymore to push him out.  A piece in the NYT today sums it up:

The allure of a Mueller report lies in its imagined promise of a single, definitive truth capable of cutting through the haze of lies, confusion and “alternative facts.” But Mr. Corsi’s and Mr. Papadopoulos’s antics are a warning that this hope will inevitably fall short. Conspiracy theorists and prosecutors live in different worlds: The first, unmoored from truth; the second, devoted to proving facts beyond a reasonable doubt. Mr. Mueller has the power to charge Mr. Corsi for lying; he has already done so to Mr. Papadopoulos. Rather than crumbling, though, their falsehoods have continued to spread and grow — and they’ve taken root in the media ecosystem in which the president chooses to spend his days. 

In this environment, the question is less what Mr. Mueller will do next and more what Congress and the American people will do with the information they already have.

By now it’s clear that the special counsel is not armed with a silver bullet, not because the facts are not bad for the president but precisely because they are. If facts were enough, Mr. Trump would already have been impeached.

The Republican Party and Fox News are more than ok with Trump and his unprecedented awfulness. They represent the America that appalled Jefferson and Adams that I described above. The Republicans have become the party of incompetent ideologues and grifters who think that America is at its best when it is a crude, un-regulated circus where the most cunning kleptocrats can engorge themselves on the public teat. They want to destroy the whole American public infrastructure for reasons they don’t even understand because their ignorance, venality, and short-term thinking blinds them to the consequences of their actions. (If this isn't obvious to you already, read Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.) But tens of millions of American think that any accusations about Trump and his cronies' corruption and incompetence is fake news. The Democrats are just as bad, they argue. How do you penetrate that kind of filter?

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Trump doesn't frighten me nearly as much as the breathtaking stupidity, the willful ignorance, the childish resentfulness, and the ideological blindness of the Americans who allowed themselves to be conned by him. Their psychology is very similar to the kind of delusional psychology that led to the Civil War. I understand better now how this kind of ignorance and stupidity can take hold after reading Howe and Potter. At the time of the founding and even into the first couple of decades of the 19^thcentury, everyone, including southern elites, was embarrassed about slavery. It was an unhealthy thing, like smoking or drinking too much. It's something that everybody wanted to stop, but they kept procrastinating about because it would be hard to do. 

And then around 1820 with the Missouri crisis, it became clear that the slaveholders no longer wanted to give slavery up, and they started looking for ways to justify it. They were  rather like the drunk who comes up with any rationalization to keep drinking. And like the drunk who is really deeply ashamed of his having a problem, he denies he has one. And because he cannot face it, he becomes indignant when someone confronts him about it. He tells the person to mind his own business, and maybe takes a swing at him. 

States Rights and Nullification become the ideological justifications to beat back the busy-body northerners. Heretofore American nationalists like Calhoun become localists in the name of protecting slavery from Federal interdict. And after 1830, in the wake of the Nat Turner slave rebellion, this shame is compounded by an intensified fear that the cruelty that they have inflicted on their slaves will in turn be inflicted on them if the slaves are ever freed. What goes around comes around is a deep source of fear for the violent and cruel. Black slaves come to represent all their repressed fear and shame, and rather than face it, they must double down to make sure they keep it repressed. This subconscious drama gets acted out in ante-bellum Slavery politics and after the war in the fantasy of the Lost Cause and the cruelty of Jim Crow. 

Anything that threatened to weaken Slaveholder control threatened to unleash all these dark, repressed, violently irrational parts of the Southern psyche. A fantasy about Southern nobility and gentility begins to develop. Southern elites begin to think they are not morally inferior for being slaveholders, but rather morally superior to Northerners. Those Yankees don’t have the nobility of soul to understand what makes their Southern way of life so sweet, so civilized as compared to their money-grubbing, mercantile ways.

Theological digression: Everybody feels ontological shame; all humans feel that they don’t measure up, that they’ve failed, even if they cannot understand quite why. Call it original sin or whatever you please; it's just built in to the human condition. And so much of human motivation is about compensating for the feeling of shame and inadequacy that is its chief symptom. It might be a cliché, but it points to a real truth about why the greatest achievers are often those who feel most intensely this “ontological” inadequacy. It drives them to do almost anything to get rid of it.

And that's why 'pride' is considered by the wise to be among the worst human characteristics. Pride is not a sense of one's inherent dignity as someone born in the image and likeness of God. Pride is a false image of ourselves that we fabricate to overcome our sense of ontological shame. That's why the tradition has always been suspicious about human effort. It's not that effort is bad in itself, but rather that the effort is more often than not in the service of the wrong motivation--that it's a causa sui project, and as such delusional because we are not causa sui. That is the fundamental insight of the person of faith and the reason why gratitude, not pride, is the fundamental precondition of a life well lived. And this is why American culture, for all its ostensible religiosity, is fundamentally delusional. It is a prideful, greedy, and ungrateful culture through and through

And so the one thing that people cannot stand is to be accused of doing anything shameful by someone whom they see as no better. And in a kind of deep ontological sense we are right to think that our accusers are no better. We’re all projecting our deep-down ontological sense of shame onto others. And that’s why the gospels admonish us not to judge or accuse others, because more likely than not what we see in others is just a reflection of what is in ourselves that we don’t want to face.

But complementing this suppressed shame is a transcultural honor fantasy that is central to sustaining this pathology. It's called "losing face", when the "face" is the delusional construct, the mask we wear that masks the deep truth about who we are. The honor fantasy is a delusional fantasy about our identity being the same as the mask we present to the world, that part of ourselves we've constructed that’s captured in our reputation. And when that reputation is challenged as fraudulent by someone, we feel a deep, angry hostility toward whoever would shame us by doing so.

But everyone captured by the honor fantasy is by definition a fraud because the whole idea of one's 'honor' is a delusional construct designed to keep you from confronting who you really are. If you lived in ante-bellum America and other places, your honor would require you to fight to the death to defend this fantasy, because nothing is more unbearable to people who have become identified with their "honor" than to face the deep truth about their ontological inadequacy. And this, in brief, is why we fought the Civil War, and it's why so many Americans cannot admit why their vote for Donald Trump was a disaster. You must cling to the fantasy at all costs, because once it bursts there's nothing to hold onto to prevent your plunge into that deep vat of ontological shame. 

So whenever we judge or accuse others, it's more likely than not that they are just going to dig in and come to a far more rigid defense of their delusional thinking. So better not to judge, right?  But then you have this problem of an entire social system behaving toward other human beings in a way that is horrifically cruel and living in a fantasy that justifies it. And just as you have a loved one with a wife-beating problem, you can’t just do nothing. You have to intervene. And this is where things tend to go off the rails, especially when you call the police, all of whom have a wife-beating problem, metaphorically speaking. This was essentially the situation that the relatively sane and decent people had in confronting slaveholder delusions in the ante-bellum south.

Now while the Abolitionists wanted the southerners to go cold turkey, the free-soil types thought that it was impossible to tell the southerners to quit, so they adopted a strategy of containment. The Wilmot Proviso introduced in 1846 initiates a pitched battle fought not about the existence of slavery where it already existed, but about whether slavery, in principle, should be allowed in the territories opened up by the Mexican cession. Here’s it’s wording:

Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.

Ironically this statement is modeled on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was uncontroversial when formulated for reasons explained above, and it shows how much things had changed since the founding. The slaveholders didn’t want to be contained anymore. To agree to a containment policy in the new territories would be "dishonorable"; it would imply that to be a slaveholder was to be morally inferior, and the Southern honor fantasy could not be sustained if they were to give in on that.

There were other factors besides honor, of course. The economic and power dynamic was always a factor, and the southerners were justifiably afraid of being outnumbered in Congress if they didn’t match the admission of each new ‘free’ state with a ‘slave’ state. And they understandably feared that no matter what people said in 1846, they would not have the power to resist a future abolitionist congress. The slaveholders understood deep down that they were on the wrong side of history, and they did everything they could to keep the tide from rising.

And in the short run they succeeded. They controlled the Senate, and their threats of secession forced concessions that were wins for them:  In the Compromise of 1850 with its notorious Fugitive Slave Act, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1855 that repealed the Missouri Compromise, in the Dred Scott decision in '57 that made slavery legal even in the states that had banned it, and in '58 the astonishingly fraudulent pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Bleeding Kansas that President Buchanan rammed through. Mitch McConnell is playing the same game. He's read his history, and he's learned a thing or two from his ante-bellum ancestors. It remains to be seen whether his victories will be as Pyrrhic. 

So the Civil War ends in slavehollder defeat. Six hundred thousand dead. For what? For Southern honor? If it was just about the money, they could have worked it out. The Civil War, like most wars, is always about something else, something deeper  and darker in the human psyche. Sometimes, a war though, knocks some sense into those who waged it, but not true for the South. The honor fantasy morphs into the Lost Cause fantasy, and a deep-seated culture of resentment develops there. Slavery ends officially, and while Black Americans get a taste of freedom for a decade or so, it's quickly back to the same old, same old as the white shame-repression fantasy reasserts itself. Black Americans find themselves getting 'repressed' in whatever way it's still possible for white people to do it. 

A part of the fantasy is still to see Northerners as soulless, money-grubbing grifters, which, of course, many are. But then this curious thing happens when Donald Trump runs for office. There is no one in the history of American politics who embodies the kind of person Southerners hate more than Donald Trump. He is the king of the grifters. He owns casinos, for gods sakes. And yet there he is, playing his blatant, pandering con, and they embrace him like a long, lost brother. So now we've got the worst of the North embraced by the worst of the South.

And we have to ask what is there in the American character in the long term to push back against this deep-seated worst? In the short term, sure, people in the mushy middle who voted for him and kakistocrats like him vote for the other party. We saw this a couple of weeks ago. Why am I not relieved? Because too many deeply awful, ignorant, delusional people beat truly decent and intelligent ones, and because it won't take long for the kakisitocrats to regroup where they've lost. They want power in a way that ordinary, decent Americans don't. Decent Americans can say No when things get egregiously bad, but they can't win in the long run until there's something truly decent to which they can say Yes. 

Donald Trump is not an aberration, he is an exemplar of a long tradition of American bad actors who have played too large a role in shaping our history. People like him and his supporters are deeply ignorant, delusional people living in a self-worth magnification fantasy. The only real cure is intervention by people who are wise and compassionate, and who can point to an alternative, reality-based meaning story that gives all Americans a robust imagination of future possibility. We have to hope and pray that some how, some way, a movement will arise in America that can promote such an alternative. I think there is a fundamental, latent decency in every human being, but you have to have a cultural story that activates it. And until we do, MAGA, or variations of it. wins by default. 

The Puritan Mind

Several years ago I did a series of posts on the Puritan Mind trying to understand both its dark and light sides. The positive side I called Whiggery. Whiggery, I argued, was the spirit of the abolitionist movement and the settlement house movement, but also the Yankee spirit of innovation and love of money, growth, expansion. The New Deal compromise was essential negotiated by factiions within Whiggery that tended one way or the other. Jimmy Stewart in "It's a Wonderful Life" always interested me because he was torn between them. But in the Capra mythos Pottersville was the hypostasized version of the Dark Side of the Whig spirit, and he was right. We see it realized now in Wall Street, Enron, and the NSA. 

I wrote this back in 2006:

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 during the New Deal. The big corporation, the invention of the factions that 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.

It's the ambivalence in the American soul between the progressive side of evangelical Christianity with its dark side that drives the poltical debate even now. And my post the other day about the obsession with eliminating any threat of terrorism reminded me of what I wrote then about the Ahab-like self-destructive obsession to destroy Moby Dick. And in another post about how violence always seems to be at the heart of it:

These struggles have always been framed by the Anglo-American Calvinist mentality as a struggle for democracy and freedom over autocracy and tyranny. Now obviously there is no argument about whether democracy and freedom is superior to autocracy and tyranny, but there should be an argument about the means by which the former asserts itself. The Puritan way is by violence, and this violence is justified by a demonization of the premodern whether it be the Jacobite subversives, Catholics in Ireland, witches in Salem, King George on his throne, the slaveholders in the South, communists in Moscow, or now the Islamic fundamentalists throughout the Middle East.  
    
Puritans don’t work things out with enemies like these because there is no negotiating with the irrational. The Puritan mind reasons: “Well of course the witch doesn’t want to be saved from her own evil. That’s why we must save her from herself by burning her at the stake.”  Sounds absurd, but we heard it again from that American major who said after the destruction of the village of Ben Tre in Vietnam: "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." A true Puritan there. And now look what we're doing in Iraq.  Think Fallujah. We're burning the country at the stake. It's a form of mental illness, but it's a sickness we all accept as normal.

So these posts from the murky past were brought to mind when I read David Brooks's column this morning, which link them to themes I've been thinking about more recently. He's talking about competing hierarchies, the one we tend to accept as normative in which wealth, power, and a trophy wife are the markers of a successful life, and in which feminism is all about getting some of that. And then he points out that the Jewish and Christian traditions, which embrace an inverse hierarchy as Brooks calls it--I call it upside downness--is something that has virtually disappeared from the broad American cultural ethos. The Capra mythos is mocked as naive and nostalgic, but I honestly don't think so. He's pointing to something archetypal, but we have become incapable of recognizing it anymore. Brooks writes--

In Corinthians, Jesus tells the crowds, “Not many of you were wise by worldly standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.”

Under this rubric, your place is not determined by worldly accomplishments, but simply through an acceptance of God’s grace. As Paul Tillich put it in a passage recently quoted on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, “Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted.”

Not exactly a Horatio Alger/Norman Vincent Peale formula for success in the world. But Brooks's point is that while the cruder success model was always a strong one in American society it competed with this other inverse narrative, and it no longer does. I think he's right about that. 

This inverse hierarchy took secular form. Proletarian novels and movies made the working class the moral bedrock of the nation. In Frank Capra movies like “Meet John Doe,” the common man is the salt of the earth, while the rich are suspect. It wasn’t as if Americans renounced worldly success (this is America!), but there were rival status hierarchies: the biblical hierarchy, the working man’s hierarchy, the artist’s hierarchy, the intellectual’s hierarchy, all of which questioned success and denounced those who climbed and sold out.

Over the years, religion has played a less dominant role in public culture. Meanwhile, the rival status hierarchies have fallen away. The meritocratic hierarchy of professional success is pretty much the only one left standing.

I've often argued here for the recovery of a gritty Capraesque sense of who the really important people are. It's the argument I make all the time in my education writing--it's famlies and teachers that matter, not principals and downtown administrators. The latter are useful only insofar as they do things to make it easier for the former, including just getting out of the way. And by the same logic, what happens locally rather than what's happens in the Beltway or the national media matters far more.

I look forward to the day when what happens in Washington will be as interesting to us as what happens at the U.N. What an inversion that would be.

 

Liberalism 5.0?

The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in. --Walter Russell Meade

Last Spring, Walter Russell Mead from Bard College wrote a piece in The American Interest entitled "The Once and Future Liberalism." The first part of the article gives the impression of a standard Libertarian critique of big-government overreach, but he's attempting something more interesting and raises some important questions.

The article is long, so I'll try to summarize his argument here, and then, if I have time this week, I will write some follow-up posts to dig a little deeper into some of the issues he raises. He starts out by describing the history of political liberalism in the Anglo-American world using the Operating System software update metaphor:

Liberalism 1.O: England's Glorious Revolution in 1688. Estabishes a constitutional monarchy and asserts the primacy of parliament over the King. Hobbes and Locke were 1.0 Liberals. Crown-and-altar narrative still essential for national identity

Liberalism 2.O: American Revolution in 1776. Replaces constitutional monarchy of L1.0 with a republic founded on Enlightenment ideas about natural rights. Crown-and-altar narrative and traditions are abolished. Benjamin Franklin starts out as a L1.0 but converts to L2.0. (Limited suffrage. Slavery tolerated.)  

Liberalism 3.0: Manchester Liberalism. "Programs included once unthinkable ideas like universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, an end to state-enforced monopoly corporations, limited government, free markets at home and free trade abroad. . . . More likely to be evangelical than either 1.0 or 2.0 liberals. . . . believed that capitalism, individual rights and a culture of virtue supported by a tolerant, non-fanatical Protestant Christianity could provide ordered liberty. (They also, by and large, believed in the superiority of the white race, thought that “too much” Jewish influence was bad and believed that Catholic countries could never become effective modern democracies.)"

Liberalism 4.0: Late-19th century's Progressive movement that developed in repsonse to social imbalances created by industrial capitalism. Rises to policy during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. If an unholy alliance between church and state was the chief threat to liberty for L1.0-3.0, "the rise of huge industrial corporations seized pride of place as a threat to individual liberty; 20th-century, 4.0 liberals began to think about the state as a possible ally to defend individuals from unaccountable private power. The liberalism of Theodore Roosevelt and men like William Allen White was defined by their response to these challenges. Democratic government needed to ensure a level playing field, to fight for basic equality of opportunity."

Liberalism 4.1: In response to Great Depression and WWII, "turn-of-the-century progressivism was revamped and retweaked into liberalism 4.1, the big government, Iron Triangle system [Feds, unions, large corporations] that most Americans think of when they hear the word “liberal” today." 

Mead argues that the whole mentality behind Liberalism 4.1, the mentality that I have been defending on this blog as the "New Deal Compromise" is obsolete:

Today liberalism 4.1, blue liberalism, is increasingly outdated and backward-looking, but in its time it was a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances, and many of its achievements still demand our respect. The driving force shaping the agenda of 4.0 and 4.1 liberals before and after the New Deal were a series of powerful and profound historical developments that changed the world under their feet. The earlier versions of liberal politics had been built in societies that, while beginning to urbanize and industrialize, were still predominantly agricultural. Both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian liberals saw independent small farmers as the basis of American freedom and democracy.

. . . Although socialists and social democrats sometimes made common cause with 4.1 liberals, at bottom, blue liberalism was built as an alternative to socialism rather than an on-ramp for it. With the onset of the Great Depression in particular, most American liberals came to believe that providing benefits like Social Security and unemployment insurance would inoculate American workers against more virulent forms of socialist ideology and attract new immigrants and their children toward the American liberal tradition. It worked. 

. . . Programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and later the GI Bill, along with the experience of mobilization and rationing during the war, convinced many liberals that government could and should do more than ensure a level playing field, that it could plan, regulate and control well enough to at least bracket a rough equality of economic and social outcomes, not just opportunities. . . . In time, with the advent of the Great Society programs of “the best and the brightest”, liberalism 4.1 became more explicitly redistributionist, and more deeply convinced of the superiority of the technocratic ethos. 

Mead talks about how all the earlier versions of Liberalism--1.0 through 4.1--are inadequate for our situation today, and points to the as yet to be realized "Liberalism 5.0": 

None can serve as the political program for the heirs of the two great revolutions today. We don’t want the constitutional monarchy and Anglican establishment of William III; we don’t want the aristocratic, limited-franchise republic of George Washington; we don’t want the Manchester liberalism of the 1860s; and we don’t want the managerial state that liberals and progressives built in the first two-thirds of the 20th century. That doesn’t mean we should not admire, learn from and build on each of these liberal traditions, but our job today is to synthesize enduring liberal values in a 21st-century liberalism 5.0.

As with earlier versions, liberalism 5.0 must build on the best of what has gone before while making adjustments—radical when necessary, though never gratuitously so—to existing beliefs and institutions. 5.0 liberals must challenge the right of blue [4.1] liberals to own the L-word, seeking both to convince 4.1 liberals to come back to the future and denouncing those who won’t as the blinkered reactionaries and speed bumps they are.

And I agree with him when he says

. . . Many believe that the real ideological contest in America today is between “red” liberalism 3.0 (the more individualistic, laissez-faire, often evangelical kind of liberalism of the 19th century) and the more state-oriented, collectively minded post-World War II 4.1 blue liberalism. Red liberals denounce blue liberals as betrayers of the liberal legacy, as ideology thieves who have taken a philosophy grounded in individual freedom and limited government and turned it into a charter for “big” government. Blue liberals respond that red liberals don’t understand how the complexities of modern life make the outmoded pieties of liberalism 3.0 inadequate to today’s problems. But common to both these positions is the belief that the American debate today is between two versions of the past: the (presumed) free market utopia of the 19th century versus the (presumed) social utopia of the New Deal/Great Society of more recent times. If that were true, this would be a nation of conservatives fighting reactionaries—the status quo of 1970 fighting the status quo of 1880.

I agree that a society dominated by a technocratic ethos is not a good thing, and I am never going to defend government overreach, but the fundamental problem that the early progressives recognized has not gone away: If there is no big government to protect the public interest, a huge, powerful private sector will dominate, and the key players in that sector care only about their own interests, not the public interest. Until the problem of bigness in the private sector is solved, bigness in the public sector is a necessity. Until the disruptive, destablizing effects of market capitalism can be tamed, there must be an adequate way to support the people whose lives have been disrupted and destabilized by it.

If you want to argue that capitalism is so great because it's the most effective wealth engine the world has ever seen, then there have to be mechanisms for distributing that wealth fairly and sanely, and if private market mechanisms fail in that regard, then the public sector must step in to provide the remedy. But if the task now is as Meade puts it to make "a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances," a 5.0 solution cannot be found if the public sector is locked in an ideological argument that pits 4.1 thinking against 3.0 thinking. 

So my argument in defense of the New Deal Compromise is not one that seeks a return to mid-20th Century arrangements--that was then; this is now--but that the New Deal provided for its time a much healthier balance between the interests of the private sector and the public interest that we need to emulate in principle now. This is a balance that was destroyed in the period since 1980, and we saw the destructive impact of this imablance in 2008. Whatever Liberalism 5.0 might be, it must restore this balance. Most of what we think of today as "crisis" derives not from uncontrollable structural changes, but from regressive 3.0 thinking poorly adapted to the real world in which we are living that dominated policy in the first decade of this century.

I would argue that, yes, there are structural issues that we need to deal with, but they could not have been handled worse by the Reagan/Norquist/Cheney resgressive 3.0 mindset. Real problems emerged in the 1970s; the weaknesses of L4.1 were exposed, and the worst possible approach was taken in trying to solve them. A saner approach would have been to make gradual adjustments to 4.1 thinking that might have slowly ratcheted us throught 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, etc., in a more orderly progression toward an eventual 5.0 realignment. Instead we've had reactionaries in the driver's seat dominated by 19th-Century 3.0 thinking. Meade correctly points out that it's a mistake to think that the argument is between 4.1  and 3.0 thinking, but seems not to be willing to point out the obvious, that 3.0 thinking ought not to have a place at the table at all. The real debate should be about finding ways to push basic 4.1 arrangements to be more adaptive to the changing global economic realities. 

Whenever anybody tells you that there is no money for entitlement programs like Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, or Medicaid, they are talking ideological nonsense. The fiscal crisis at the federal, state, and local levels was engineered by no-taxes/no regulation ideologues on a mission to destroy the legitimacy of government. There is plenty of room for debate about how to find the right balance between the private and public sectors, but you cannot find that balance with people who think that the government has no legitimate role to play in redressing social and economic imbalances created by private markets. We don't have a resource problem; we have a thinking problem.

Anyway, Meade talks about five things that Americans want from American socieity. When I have a chance, I want to examine them, show where I agree and perhaps lay out a few other things that I think will be necessary for a workable 5.0. 

 

 

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.

Today secular cosmopolitans and even, I'd say, most believers have lost any sense of the intensity of experience that was associated with the sacred--or, for that matter, the sacrilegious. Comedians keep trying to push past the last vestiges of an old decorum as if they were on some other sacred mission, but it's all rather inconsequential. They think they are lion tamers in their imaginations of themselves, when in fact in a reversal of the Monty Python sketch, they are really dealing with anteaters.

And with Beck you have  someone who articulates a nostalgia for the lost sacred--and that's the part I get, kind of, because I, too, feel that loss. But Taylor illuminates something that I as someone who grew up in a pre-Vatican Catholic world (I was born in 1950, graduated 8th grade in '64 and high school in '68) had very little sense of--the sacred rituals of American civil religion. We Catholics had our own definition and way of experiencing the sacred and the sacrilegious, and all the Protestant versions of it (with which I associated the rituals of civil religion) seemed rather pallid, a kind of wannabe sacred that really didn't cut the mustard. It was all so much going through the motions. The various rituals of American civil religion always seemed kind of silly and unserious to me, the way the Shriners play at being some kind of initiatory mystery cult--they're acting out a collective fantasy that has lost any real connection to the living spiritual forces that gave these rituals their shape.

So here's where Taylor helped me understand something I didn't before. I had only a passing acquaintance with Bellah's work on civil religion in the 70s--it didn't really interest me because it had little to do with what I believed to be a vital spiritual future.  But that work is important if you want to understand what's going on in American society today, and I'm more interested in that now than I was then. I see now that there was a moment when American civil religion really had valid sacred power, where the rituals weren't empty or without reference to something noble.  And I understand how it functioned effectively to replace the experience of the lost sense of the sacred that pervaded the collective imagination in the ancien regime:

In an enchanted world, there is an obvious way in which God can be present in society; in the loci of the sacred.  And the political society can be closely connected to these, and can itself be thought to exist on a higher plane.  Ernst Kantoriowicz tells us that one of the first uses of the term 'mystical body' in European history referred to the French kingdom. The king himself could be one of the links between the planes, represented respectively by the king's mortal and undying bodies. . . .

This is a description of what we'll call the old-school sacred polity. But this model began to crumble after the Reformation for lots of complex reasons that are beyond the scope of what I want to write about here.  But three very important factors were the religious fragmentation of Christendom that broke apart its organic sense of modeling a hierarchical cosmos, coupled with the post-Copernican understanding of the cosmos that supplanted the Ptolemaic hierarchical scheme, and lastly the project by both Protestant and Catholic counter-Reformation elites to purify religious practice and belief by purging the pagan vestiges of popular religion, which were essential for maintaining a sense of the world's enchantment. 

Educated ecclesial elites were among the most aggressive in trying to stamp out all that superstitious enchantment; nevertheless, it continued, even in the Protestant countries, well into the 19th Century. In Catholic countries there was what Taylor calls the baroque compromise, which allowed for a little of the old mystery and spiritual exuberance, but it was definitely 'new school'. I experienced as a child the last gasp of that baroque ecclesial mentality. The old-school practices of the heath, that had been largely accepted and reframed in the pre-Reformation Christian social imagination, were now taboo.

But despite the resistance to these changes by these heathen heathdwellers, a new notion of the sacred began to take hold of the imaginations of the educated elites, especially in the Protestant countries. Here's Taylor on this shift:

Now with advancing disenchantment, especially in Protestant societies, another model took shape, with relation both to the cosmos and the polity. In this the notion of Design was crucial. To take the cosmos, there was a shift from the enchanted world to a cosmos conceived in a conformity with post-Newtonian science, in which there is absolutely no question of higher meanings being expressed in the universe around us. But there is still, with someone like Newton himself, for instance, a strong sense that the universe declares the glory of God. . . . Now the presence of God no longer lies in the sacred, because this category fades in a disenchanted world. But he can be thought to be no less powerfully present through His Design.

So before getting to our more intensely late-20th century experience of secularism, there was an intermediary stage that was very much at the center of the American project. It was carried primarily by what I have written about here as the whiggish spirit for which the Puritans and other northern Calvinists were the chief bearers. The sacred wasn't something experienced in sacred space so much as it was experienced in a kind of sacred time--or perhaps more accurately in a sense of Providentially ordained historical purposes. This is what I'll call the new-school sacred polity.  Its citizens belonged to a society that was developing, moving at the cutting edge history according to a divinely ordained purposes.

One's experience of the sacred correlated with this sense of living one's life as a free individual, but in a free individualism that was attuned to the evolving effort to fulfill that plan, and in doing so to be on the right side of history:

The presence of God in the cosmos is matched by another idea: His presence in the polity. Here an analogous change takes place. The divine isn't there in a King who straddles the planes. But it can be present to the extent that we build a society which plainly follows God's design. This can be filled in with an idea of moral order which is seen as established by God, in the way invoked, for instance, in the American Declaration of Independence: Men have been created equal, and have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

The idea of a moral order which is expressed in this Declaration, and which has since become dominant in our world, is what I have been calling the Modern Moral Order. It is quite different from the orders which preceded it. Its members are disembedded individuals who come to associate together. The design underlying the association is that each, in pursuing his or her own purpose in life, acts to benefit others mutually. It calls for a society structured for mutual benefit, in which each respects the rights of others, and offers them mutual help of certain kinds.

But in the earlier days, when the plan was understood as Providential and the order seen as Natural Law, which is the same as the law of God, building a society which fulfills these requirements was seen as fulfilling the design of God. To live in such a society was to live in one where God was present, not at all in the way that belonged to the enchanted world, through the sacred, but because we were following His design. God is present as the designer of the way we live.  We see ourselves, to quote a famous phrase, as "one people under God".

This is the basis for American exceptionalism that was felt especially strongly in the 19th century. Lincoln was an exemplar in his sense of the nation's providential mission, and his vision and his prodigious ability to articulate it have made him the architect of America's second founding. He articulated what so many Americans came to believe--that America was  the world's "last best hope".  Not because it was flawless, but because in the American soul there were these better angels working to accomplish in a more perfect union a providentially ordained design. Lincoln--who was no churchgoer--more than any other prominent American I can think of had a profound sense of America as sacred polity in the new school sense. He was the St. Paul, so to speak, of American civil religion--not its founder, but its most eloquent evangelist.

So this sense of higher national purpose comprised two elements: first, the sense that there was something providential in the American project to the degree that it was progressively moving toward a greater realization of this higher purpose or design, that it was in this sense a project of the nation's better angels; second, a collective sense that while we are a self-reliant, freedom-loving people, we are also good neighbors, that we have as individuals a vested, mutual interest in the welfare of the whole society--that we all have a shared hope for a better American future.

This idea of moving toward a more perfect realization of a divine order was was not a possibility in the  collective social imagination of the  old-school sacred polity.  The order was already established, and people lived virtuous lives in conformity with it or they lived dissolute, disordered, sinful lives out of conformity with it.  But in the new-school sacred polity it became a commonplace, especially for the more "whiggish" factions in the new American republic, that the American providential purpose was to realize more perfectly over time the ideals articulated in the Declaration, and in doing so to be a light to the nations. And to a large degree, and for a long time, America was that.

Sure, the nation had its dark side. There has always been a  violent, rapacious aspect to the American character, but it was balanced by this other side, these better angels, this feeling for a providential destiny, and for the hope of a society ruled by decency and a spirit of mutual help. This sense in those who bore the nation's better angels empowered them with a zeal that is hard for progressives today to imagine or embrace. Just read the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to get a feel for it if you need some reminding.

It's hard today to think of American evangelicalism as being a force for progressive change, but it was. The last time we saw it was in Martin Luther King's rhetoric that drew deeply and powerfully from this now submerged sense of the new school sacred polity. And that's the last time we saw any real significant change in this country. I'd argue that without an appeal to the new school sacred polity nothing significant gets done. I'd like to say that if Lincoln was the American sacred polity's St. Paul, then MLK was its St. Augustine. Augustine's imagination of the world and God's relationship to it dominated Europe for over a thousand years--would that MLK's did so as well.

But for most educated now Americans it's too hard to believe that America has a providential role to be at the cutting edge of history, or to think of America as Lincoln did as the world's last best hope. People mouth the words from time to time, but it doesn't resonate. That's what was different, though, about Obama.  When he used the language of the sacred polity, it resonated, and it awakened what Lincoln called our better angels.

I think this was the key to Obama's mystique during his campaign, and is the reason why for so many of us he is now such a crushing disappointment. During the campaign, he awakened that latent sense of America's sacred providential calling, he roused those better angels. But when they reported to work the day after his inauguration, he told them to go home. He told them that America is a game played by insiders, that it was back to business as usual and that he would govern in a way that was in its substance, if not its style, in continuity with everything decent Americans hated about what had happened to the country since the invasion of Iraq.

That's Obama's great failure--not to recognize the opportunity that was afforded him, that these angels with his leadership could have accomplished significant progress toward the change we all long for, whether we consciously recognize it or not. But Obama so far has disregarded them, and he has given new life and restored legitimacy to the forces of regression, which were on their heels in 2008. That's what's so infuriating--this sense of missed opportunity.  And so now we're told by all the jaded types that those of who believe in those better angels were foolish ever to think they exist. I insist that we were not.  And I insist that nothing changes until those angels are roused and put to work.

***

The culture wars in America since the 70s is a war between two competing forms of nostalgia--between those nostalgic for a sacred, providential sense of America's purpose--the cultural right--and those nostalgic for the lost, collective spirit mutual help--mainly progressives on the cultural left. The odd thing about this culture war is that both sides need the aspects in the other they oppose. It's as if the American soul were riven in two, and in its division cannot stand. They each in their way flip and flop impotently, gasping for breath like fish on a dock. We're left with impotence, stalemate, frustration--the best people at best mustering a kind of diffident goodwill, and the worst a barbaric ferocity that commands the field.

The cultural right is all about a longing for this static sacred with little sense of what I described above as the national project of our better angels--it is on the whole remarkably mean spirited and small minded. And the cultural left is all about social progress without any sense of history's having a sacred or providential dimension. And that's why, I'd argue, progressives are so weak. They lack the force of deeply inspired conviction. They don't really believe in the better angels, except maybe as a quaint, air-quoted metaphor, so they would never think to call upon them.

Progressives on the cultural left don't "get" what Lincoln and MLK "got". They don't understand that in order to resist the enormous power of the barbaric forces that now dominate in our political and economic sphere, there has to be a deeply felt spiritual counterforce that resistance can draw from.

So what's the takeaway here? Someone like Glenn Beck recognizes on an unconscious level that something is missing--a feeling for the sacred that all of us whether we realize it or not deeply long for, but he doesn't know where to find it. He looks vainly for it in a preservation of dessicated forms rather than in a recovery of the broad-minded generous spirit Lincoln helped us to imagine. These forms without their originating animating spirit are zombie forms, possessed in his case by paranoid demons and the delusional thinking that follows from such a possession.

This kind of extremist right wing conservative embraces a fantasy sacred, one that has no existence or force except to reinforce his delusional thinking. By their fruits you will know them. Progressives, on the other hand, reject any possibility for experiencing the sacred, and so don't, and so on the whole lack the collective will to oppose the barbarians except to write nasty things about them in their blogs. And so we're at this impasse. And the barbaric forces rule until somehow or other the better angels find their footing in some kind of social movement that understands the power they have to make the difference.

We must at some point retrieve this sense of a sacred national purpose in the way that Lincoln and MLK understood it.  And to recognize once again the difference between the sacred and the sacrilegious, and that there is nothing sacred about markets; they are profane neutral. Nevertheless there are some market behaviors, like the kind of thing we've seen done by Wall Street, that are downright sacrilegious--deep, appalling, abject affronts to what in our collective sense of decency and common national purpose.

I fear that if a movement inspired by the nation's better angels does not arise, we will eventually be thrown into a dialectic of barbarism, one barbarian faction seeking to supplant the reigning barbarians in an endless cycle of political king of the hill.  We were supposed to be better than that--and at times we have been, but we're in a part of the cycle now in which we have no sense of our national purpose.

I guess the question is whether the game is lost or whether we can at some point recover what we've lost. I'm pessimistic, but not without hope. 

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.

***

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.