After the Future

Mordor, the Shire, and Freedom in the Public Sphere

[This post first went up in 2012 as a further development of a post entitled "Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined", which focused on the way in which Neoliberalism has supplanted the older political idea of republican freedom with an idea of freedom as consumer choice. It relates to themes developed in "Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability".]

Maybe because The Hobbit is being released this weekend I have Tolkien on the mind, so let's take Mordor as the type of political system defined by hugeness, by domination and submission, and the Shire as the type defined by smallness, localism, face-to-face relationships, and self rule. In Mordor the people must submit to the will of the leader; in the Shire people live mostly by mores inherited from custom, but submit to laws and regulations they enact through debate and consensus. In Mordor, the space for the exercise of freedom is profoundly restricted, not in the interior sense, but certainly in the public sense. In the Shire, it is broad enough for people to exercise it both interiorly and publically. Nobody, I think it's safe to say, wants to live in Mordor.

In Mordor there is no public space for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. In the Shire, the space is there, even if most people choose to fill it with vulgar distractions. In the Shire it's possible for a community to self-correct, and reorganize its public life; in Mordor that is not a possibility. Having political and economic arrangements that provide a broad scope for the exercise of freedom does not guarantee that it will be exercised, but it's possible to talk about those arrangements as either creating or restricting the public space for its exercise. 

In contemporary America, there is still a rather broad space for the practice of deep, interior, creative freedom, even if it is rarely used. Consumerist ideas about freedom are a delusion that traps large swaths of the American population in collective patterns of compulsion, and their lives individually, and our lives together, would be healthier, more free, were not that the case. But these compulsions are reinforced by the structural requirements of the economy and the interests of the mass media, and both dominate the public sphere in ways that make it extraordinarily hard to resist. Nevertheless, there is nothing that prevents anyone from choosing a life that is resistant to or oblivious of all that.

 

***

In the early American republic, which was far more Shirelike than America is now, the ethos of economic sphere assumed that citizens were economically free, that they were self-employed farmers, small businessmen, and professionals. The franchise was limited to people with property because there was a fear then that if the vote were extended to salaried workers, their employers could compel them to vote as the employer dictated. (We saw employers using this tactic in the last election.) It was a commonplace that people could not be free in the political sphere unless they were free in the economic sphere. A similar logic applied to extending the franchise to women, since they were economically dependent on their husbands.

That simpler Jeffersonian world gave way to the economic warlordism of the Robber Baron era after the Civil War that turned much of America into Mordor. The new problem that the founders couldn't grasp was the way that the population, diversity, and economy would grow and change, and in doing so make their Jeffersonian imagination of America as a network of Tokienesque Shires obsolete. Bigness and huge concentrations of power and wealth became a problem by the turn of the century that no one could have envisaged one hundred years before. And so spirited Americans who understood how the scope of the new wage slavery was destroying freedom in the public sphere began to organize to push back.

The Progressive Movement emerged to pressure elected representatives to use the power of big government to break up monopolies, to regulate private-sector economic behaviors that negatively impacted the common good, and to provide social safety-net programs to ensure a minimum of economic security and dignity for those helpless to provide it for themselves. That balance between the public interest and free-market capitalism brought us the unprecedented prosperity of the post-WWII period.

Putting aside the question whether that prosperity and the consumerism that came with it was a positive or negative for the exercise of true freedom, the important thing was the consensus that a balance had to be struck between the interests of the market and the common good. That balance is what creates the public space for the exercise of freedom in the public sphere. It's precisely that balance that has been systematically destroyed since 1980 justified by a perverse appeals to liberty understood as negative freedom from the government so that positive freedom can be exercised in the marketplace. The laudable freedom-protecting principle of economic independence and self-reliance became perverted into celebrating the un-republican vice of unrestricted greed. The ideal was no longer the economically independent farmer or small businessman, but the plutocrat, the millionaire--and America became the place where anyone can become one. And shame on you if you haven't the ambition and drive to do so.

So that old lower-case 'r' republican imagination of America was destroyed in the late 19th century, but American conservatives still cling to it as if it were still a possibility. It's not. And the irony is that conservatives in voting for Republicans think that they are voting to retain the Shire but in fact are voting for the private-sector version of Mordor, one in which the government is dominated by plutocrats. In such a world we have the illusion of freedom so long as we have consumer choice, i.e., so long as we think of the exercise of freedom primarily in economic terms.

***

Thinking about what the space for republican freedom requires demands that we first understand how that space has collapsed in the post-war period. One strand, contributing to that collapse has been the replacement of the balance between the public and private spheres struck in the New Deal compromise with Libertarian/Neoliberal, market-centered, consumerist ideas about freedom. Freedom was no longer something we exercised in any robust way in the political sphere, it was something we came to think of almost exclusively in market terms. Freedom equals your ability to choose a Prius or a Hummer, to shop at Walmart or at Nordstroms.

Since market choices are consequential in our daily experience in ways that political choices are not, it was an easy sell. As long as we had market choices in the economic sphere, we felt free, and so why should anyone care about making positive choices in the political sphere? Politics is the domain of entrenched corrupt cronyism; the market is pure and self-correcting. Government just gets in the way, so the only political choices that have validity are the negative choices that diminish the power exercised in the political sphere and expand those exercised in the economic sphere. This is the core belief that has animated American conservatism since the 19th Century--to the degree that the public sphere grows, the private sphere diminishes. It's an naive belief, but it has extraordinary power because of the way it draws upon the 19th-century American mythos.

But the problem is not public vs. private sectors, but in keeping the two in a metaxis, a creative balance. Imbalance can lead, on the one hand, to too much government, as in the Mordor that was the Soviet Union. Or, on the other, imbalance leads to the Mordor of a weak government dominated by corporate interests that wildly exacerbate income inequality and reduce most people to serfdom or wage slavery. But in the U.S., half the country fears that any attempt to redress the balance by increasing public-sector controls leads to a Soviet Mordor. These fears have been reinforced by the dominance of an unbalancing Neoliberal market ideology that has dominated the political sphere since at least 1980. 

The effect of the post-Reagan era dominance of Neoliberal market ideology has been to destroy the popular consensus that representative government was an effective tool in the hands of the electorate to promote and preserve the public good. And the result has been to give a broad, unrestricted field for the economic warlords to emerge again and to wreak the havoc they are wont to wreak. And now we are facing a situation where the worst aspects of the economic sector--the few making serfs of the many--are merging with the worst aspects of the public sector--the security-obsessed surveillance state with Draconian police powers. (Habeas Corpus taken away in the Military Commissions Act still hasn't been restored.) We haven't seen these powers being abused on a wide scale yet, but the infrastructure for such abuse is very much in place. Both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in this surrender of the government to this ideology. 

 ***

The lesson of Tolkien’s trilogy is that republican freedom is personal and interpersonal, and it is exercised in concrete commitments that mostly happen on the local level, in the various Shires in which we all live, but we cannot be oblivious of the forces in history that seek to destroy those local and personal freedoms. 

And when humans are in such a situation in which their freedoms are so severely restricted in the public sphere, the only path to recovery is a freely chosen resistance, which often requires heroic levels of sacrifice. That is, the exercise of republican freedom requires the exercise of interior freedom by enough citizens who are willing to pay the price to keep the public sphere open. Frodo is a paradigm of the exercise of that kind of deep interior freedom.

Tolkien’s trilogy is on one level a story of great powers in violent conflict, but at a deeper level it’s the story of the suffering servant, the tzadik, the righteous man, Frodo, weak by the ordinary standards defined by power, freely accepts a burden and the stealth mission that went with it. The stakes were the preservation of a political space for ordinary people to live in freely. While so much of the story focuses on the great clash of armies, the struggle on that level was futile and nothing more than a subterfuge to keep the tyrant distracted. But the tyrant was vulnerable because it never occurred to him that anyone could do the unthinkable, that is, to 'freely' surrender the enormous power of the ring willingly.

Of course, Frodo needed a little help in the end, but that’s often the way it works. We hardly ever accomplish anything without the help of others. And no matter how good we think our intentions might be, they are never pure. Sometimes our exercise of freedom is simply the effort to put one foot in front of the other with only the faintest hope that someday we will reach our destination. But as we proceed along on our way, the exercise of our freedom is best expressed when in the service of others, in the creation of something that contributes to the common good, not just our own good. And that requires that we exercise it positively in the political and economic spheres, even if it is only to create a negative space for others to freely choose to fill it or not. 

University Neo-Puritanism

In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves. According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time. Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic during classroom discussions. At U.Va., 57 percent of those surveyed feel that way.  (Source)

Any wonder why it's hard to get a robust class discussion going these days?

A few years ago, I was called into the dean's office for a little chat. Apparently a complaint was made against me about something offensive I had said in class. I tried to think what inadvertent thing I might have said that would have caused offense, but could think of nothing. I was eventually told that a student overheard me chatting with an international student before class. He said that I asked where she was from. He said that made him uncomfortable because he felt that this would make the foreign student uncomfortable to talk about how she was different. There was nothing more than that. I'm not exaggerating. 

Republics vs Democracies

Some of the earliest contrasts between “democracy” and “republic” in Lee’s sense, according to Cornell historian Lawrence Glickman, came from conservative opponents of the New Deal. At the time, President Roosevelt sold his policies — both domestic and foreign — as a means of defending and enhancing American democracy. Some of his opponents, who saw the president’s redistributive agenda as a kind of incipient authoritarianism, used the “republic versus democracy” distinction as a counter.

“There is no surer way to destroy our government than to champion legislation under the guise of democracy, which piece by piece undermines the checks and balances of our republic,” anti-New Dealer H.W. Prentis Jr. wrote in 1939.

The John Birch Society, a radical faction in the postwar conservative movement, helped popularize the “republic versus democracy” distinction in the 1950s and ’60s. According to Nicole Hemmer, a historian of the conservative movement at Columbia University, the idea really took off on the right during the conservative fight against civil rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings expanding the franchise.

Vox Explainer

If you need a little poly sci brushing up of the distinction between democracy and republics, read the entire Vox explainer by Zack Beauchamp. It puts these civics-book abstractions into much important historical context. The explainer is written to explain Senator Mike Lee's tweet last week that  “democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are.” He, as someone in the minority, fears democracy as a threat to his liberty, peace, and prosperity, and so this apparently justifies in his mind minority rule to insure that people like him remain free, peaceful, and prosperous.

That this might impinge on the liberty and prosperity of others isn't apparently a concern. That this is an ideology to legitimate oligarchy is either something at best he is unaware of or doesn't care about, or at worst is something that he actually desires, so long as he's one of the oligarchs.

Oligarchs are terrified of the power of majorities, because they assume, whether consciously or unconsciously, that those majorities envy and resent them for what they have "achieved", and would deal as cruelly with them as they have dealt with their adversaries in their climb to the top. You don't have to be much of a psychologist to appreciate how so much of what conservatives say about Liberals is flagrant projection of their own repressed fears and desires.

White supremacy is nothing more than the fear among many Whites that the way Whites have treated Blacks is exactly how Blacks would treat Whites if they lose supreme power. Black Lives Matter triggers dark memories of Nat Turner's Rebellion. This makes no rational sense, but that's the way fear works in the souls of those who haven't much self-knowledge. And from what I've seen of Mike Lee, Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, et al., self-knowledge is something that they have no interest in at all. 

There is a kind of Social Darwinist logic that undergirds the mindset of oligarchs and wannabe oligarchs. It's as primitive as the bull moose who wins by brute force exclusive access to the cows by beating off all competitors. It's a game king of the hill where the stakes are higher than bragging rights as a kid but control of the whole system and everybody in it. Putin is exemplary here, but it's a mentality that flourishes wherever brute force is the basic measure of prestige and authority.

Donald Trump is a wannabe authoritarian, but he's hasn't the competency or attention span to pull it off except in the abusive way he treats the sycophants in his immediate vicinity. He's also too lazy to do the actual work that's involved. It's much more fun to play at it, which is essentially all he has ever done and is doing now. 

Americans who see brute force as the basic measure of prestige and authority are Trump's greatest admirers. And Trump, though buffoonish in the exercise of his brutishness, has normalized behaviors that have had a profoundly fragilizing effect on our democratic republic. Mike Lee seems oblivious of that. He would appear not to have the bandwidth to understand that the difference between the republican form of government that preserves liberties by everyone's consenting to the rule of law is not the same thing as minorities protecting their liberties by use of force, blatant lying, and rigging the system in their favor. The Vox explainer goes on--

One of the most difficult questions in political philosophy, endlessly debated in academic journals, is how societies should navigate between the democratic principle that majorities rule and the liberal principle that certain rights may never be permissibly violated.

But the tradition Lee is operating out of goes further than that. It casts doubt on the most basic democratic principle: that the people who win the public’s support should rightly govern. It takes such an extreme position on what should be out of bounds that it can be used to argue that Democrats being able to implement their policy agenda is itself a form of tyranny.

In other words, if wannabe tyrants don't like it, it's tyranny. 

On Courage and Prudence

One of Trump’s spokespeople derided the Biden event as “an episode of Mister Rodgers Neighborhood.” (In authentic Trump style, she misspelled the name.) If this was meant to suggest that the evening was all smiles and saccharine—well, it only showed that the spokesperson had never watched the classic children’s program hosted by Fred Rogers.

Rogers well understood the darkness in the world. The maker of a documentary about him explained: “What he’s doing is not just providing joy for children but really trying to allay fear.” But of course, in Trump world, allaying fear is the last thing you want to do. What you want to do in Trump world is incite fear, stoke fear, manipulate fear, and exploit fear. That can apparently work—at least with some people, and at least for a limited time. But only for some people, and only for a limited time.

David Frum

We cannot help what we feel; what matters is how we respond to it. When in the grip of fear, it can be difficult to see and think clearly. Fear makes us stupid, not in the sense of unintelligent, but rather in the sense putting us in a kind of disorienting stupor in which we have lost our capacity to understand and do what the situation calls for.

There's a difference between experiencing a threat that comes out of nowhere and needing to respond immediately--the adrenaline kicks in and with it our instinctual fight or flight response. But it's different when one lives in a situation of chronic fear or anxiety in which one has the time to understand it. When we have the time, we have also the responsibility to get to the bottom of it, to understand the cause and source of the fear so that it can be faced and overcome. The latter was Fred Rogers' approach with kids. 

Prudence, like courage, is a virtue. For a virtue to be a virtue, there has to be something counter instinctual about it. Battle rage, for instance, masquerades as a courage, but it is not the virtue of courage because it's just doing what instinct compels. If the adrenal response is fight or flight, battle rage is the fight response. Courage, on the other hand, requires feeling the fear and wanting to run away, but staying and facing the threat and doing what is called for. The greater the fear, the greater the courage called for.

Pusillanimity, on the other hand, masquerades as prudence. Pusillanimity is the instinct to run away, to procrastinate, to refuse to face the threat. Prudence is a virtue to the degree that it is counter instinctual, to the degree that it finds a way of feeling the fear but searches for a mood of detachment in the face of it. Prudence is the virtue that enables one to see clearly and assess the risks, so that one might develop a strategy to confront the threat that has the best chance of success.  

The Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an example of gross imprudence fueled by battle rage. It never had a chance of success. 

The Gospel tells us that we must be guileless as doves, but also shrewd as serpents. That's another way to understand the essence of prudence. People ruled by fear, whether in the fight or flight mode, are unbalanced in the serpent direction; people oblivious of the world's dangers and trusting in everyone's innate goodness are unbalanced in the dove direction. Neither are prudent, because prudence requires the counter-instinctual effort to live consciously in the tension between trust and fear.  

So prudence requires the courage to face the world as it is, not as we fear or wish it to be, to assess risk and to develop a practical approach in navigating in it. This is a world where we can be certain about nothing, but where we can also learn to trust that the worst is not the only or even the most likely possibility.

To compare Biden with Fred Rogers, as Frum rightly points out, is a huge compliment, and it might be exactly why Biden, despite my misgivings about his weathervane conventionality as a politician, might be the right person for this moment. He's a mediocre politician, but he's a people person in the best sense. He's something of a tool, and not the sharpest one in the shed to say the least, but he just might have that Mr. Rogers ability to help us face our fears and deal with them prudently. 

Rule of Law vs. Law and Order

Authoritarian nations come in many different stripes, but they all share a fundamental characteristic: The people who live in them are not allowed to freely choose their own leaders. This is why Republican Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, in his speech announcing his vote to convict on the first article of impeachment, said that “corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.”

Democracies are sustained through the formal process by which power is contested and exchanged. Once that process is corrupted, you have merely the trappings of democracy within an authoritarian regime. Such governments may retain elections and courts and legislatures, but those institutions have no power to enforce the rule of law. America is not there yet—but the acquittal vote was a fateful step in that direction.

--Adam Serwer in the Atlantic: "The First Days of the Trump Regime."

The problem isn't Trump; it's the Republican Party. Republicans simply do not care about the rule of law, i.e., the constitution, except when they can use it as a club to hit their political enemies. This isn't new; it been a growing trend at least since Nixon. But if you had any doubts, their lockstep acquittal of Trump (Romney excepted) is all the proof you need. 

Even if the Dems win in November, they're going to have to contend with half the country that is hellbent on destroying the current political order, and these Republicans don't care what comes out of the rubble so long as their thugs come out on top. And they have every reason to believe that they will come out on top because they understand that when you make a mockery of the rule of law and when you destroy the norms and traditions that make a republican form of gov't possible, the authoritarian thugs usually win. The Dems will always be hamstrung by their desire to follow the rule of law; the GOP feels no such compunction. The Dems are like the feckless Weimar Liberals trying to cope with the brown-shirts. These thugs have nothing but contempt for these Liberals and their process and their laws. Roger Stone is exemplary in this respect.

Serwer goes on--

Much has been made of Trump’s unfitness for office. But if Trump were the only one who were unfit, his authoritarian impulses would have been easier to contain. Instead, the Republican Party is slowly transforming into a regime party, one whose primary duty is to maintain its control of the government at all costs. The benefits here are mutual: By keeping Trump in power, the party retains power. Individuals who want to rise in the Republican Party and its associated organizations today must be unwavering in their devotion to the leader—that is the only way to have a career in the GOP, let alone reap the associated political and financial benefits. Allowing Trump to fall would render all the humiliations, compromises, and sacrifices the party has made to keep him in power meaningless. 

***

I wrote a long piece in October entitled Law and Order and the Jacksonian Right in which I argued something that I don't think most Liberals understand, which is that for Law and Order Conservatives, the emphasis is on Order, not on Law.

...Republicans see themselves as the party of law and order. I think this only makes sense if you understand that the more important word in that pairing is "order", in the sense of social order, not the political or legal one. Or to put it another way, the political and legal order has legitimacy only insofar as it is a reflection of the social order. The social order that shapes the politics of [American] social conservatives traces its roots back at least as far as the 1820s when the party of Jefferson became the party of Jackson. Then a rather primitive, premodern customary sense of American identity came to dominate in the political sphere, and in doing so replaced the modern, enlightenment imagination embraced by most of the founders. It was a collective return of the repressed. 

We were taught in school that the Jacksonian democracy was a good thing, that it made America more representative of the will of the people. We tend, however to romanticize the "people" because we were not taught that the "people" who saw Jackson as their hero couldn't have cared less about the rule of law and the kind of virtue that is necessary for a true republic to thrive. With the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the older republican imagination of America infused with Enlightenment ideals was displaced by an imaginary that legitimated the lawless, loutish, violent impulses exemplified by Andrew Jackson himself. These Jacksonian Democrats never really cared about good government; they just wanted to be left alone to do their lawless, loutish, violent thing, especially regarding their slaves, the Indians, and the Mexicans. Trump, despite his un-Jacksonian bone spurs, is Jackson redivivus. 

Law and Order is not the same as the Rule of Law. Laws are only legitimate for law-and-order Conservatives if they align with and support the social order. Any laws that undermine that order or are out of alignment with it have for them no real legitimacy. Those conservatives in the past who have thought of themselves as advocates for Law and Order have often not opposed lynchings, or the kind of thievery and dirty tricks that led to Watergate, or the defiance of the Bolland Amendment that led to Iran Contra, or the kind of lying that led to the invasion of Iraq, or now the egregious, flagrant, out-in-the-open lawlessness of Donald Trump. What has mattered to them is that the Conservative social order be maintained, and so any technical lawlessness undertaken to promote or maintain that order is legitimate. If in the past lynching some uppity Negro was technically illegal, then obviously the law is illegitimate. The same goes for Trump's illegal abuses of power. 

Russia used to be an enemy of these law-and-order conservatives when it was ruled by the godless communists, but now that it is a nominally Christian fascistic autocracy, they see it as an ally. They are very happy to accept its help in keeping Trump in power. They are gleeful that Brennan, Comey, Yates, and all the national security types who appear on CNN and MSNBC are in such a snit about Trump's dismantling of the government and institutions they have devoted their careers to defend. 

And so this explains why Evangelical Christians support Trump. They see him as someone who is restoring the old social order. His personal behavior and lawlessness are irrelevant because they see hm as sent by God to destroy the godless secular Liberal Order. If that means destroying American democracy, so be it. Better a kingdom or autocracy where civil laws align with divine law (in the primitive lex talionis sense) than a democracy that is out of alignment with it. The authoritarian thugs, of course, don't care about the divine order; they just care about maintaining power. But they understand that they need to be seen as champions of the divine order if they are to maintain their base of support.

The naïveté required of the supporters of this kind of politics is, of course, jaw-dropping, but it has always been there waiting in the wings for its moment, and that moment is now. It explains why Trump's approval ratings can be so high after everything we have learned about him. None of that matters to his supporters because he is the great destroyer of the Liberal State. This is Bannonism more than it's Trumpism. Trump has no agenda except self-aggrandizement. But reactionary Opus Dei-type Catholics--Francoist fascists--like Bannon, Barr, Gingrich along with Falwellian Evangelicals see Trump as the sword that divine powers are using to destroy their secular enemies. Rule of law be damned if rule of law keeps their enemies propped up.

So we are seeing this play out now in front of us in real time. If any Liberal is so naive to think that Trump is an aberration, and that things will go back to normal after he is gone, they are as delusional as the benighted religious conservatives who see Trump as their divinely inspired champion. They do not understand what the Republican Party has become--and will remain--deeply fascistic. I'm sure Susan Collins would be deeply offended to hear such a thing, but her utter cluelessness is characteristic of how many non-fascists have been and are now being coopted to support a fascist regime.

And so if the rule of law and a decent, tolerant American society have any chance of survival in this century, the first step is to vote Trump and the Senate Republican majority out. If this doesn't happen in November, then there is very good reason to fear it will be too late. Another four years of Trump and/or McConnell will give these fascists enough time to consolidate their grip on power. But this is also why the Democratic moderate candidates--especially technocrats like Bloomberg and Buttigieg (And I don't even want to think about the utterly clueless Biden)--provide no solution and could make the situation worse if elected. Their mindset is naively symptomatic of and so therefore dismissive of the underlying problem. 

Bernie is a risk, but Bloomberg is an even bigger one. Neither is likely to have a maximizing unifying effect regarding consolidating opposition to Trump, and that consolidation will be necessary to beat him. I'm writing this before the Nevada results are known, and I'm still hoping Warren will make a good show. It's clear to me that she has the best chance of uniting both wings of the Democratic Party. She is not clueless in the way the Neoliberal moderates are, but neither is she a Democratic Socialist. I agree with Krugman that Bernie isn't really a socialist and that he's just playing one on TV. But it's an open question whether most Americans will understand the difference. I'm perfectly fine with a Sanders' presidency, but I worry that he may not be the candidate that enough people will unite behind to beat Trump. 

What worries me most about the Sanders' candidacy is that the Neoliberal establishment--think Chris Matthews or the Bloomberg/Buttigieg, NY Times/WashingtonPost wing of Liberalism--will refuse to enthusiastically support his election or to undermine him once he is elected. The Neoliberal establishment must join with the Progressive Left if we are to prevail in defeating the increasingly fascistic GOP--not just in November, but in the years to come. The passion and the unity of the Right is not going away soon, and it will continue to exploit the divisions of those who oppose them.

The Dem establishment needs the energy and commitment of young people to win in this fight--not just in November, but in the years to come. They must not be alienated from this process. Yes, there is a lot of political naïveté driving the Sanders' campaign, but he and his more fervent supporters are at least groping in the right direction. Better Sanders capture youthful, populist anger and energy than the fascists capture it. This election is our 1933. That's what's at stake. This is not hyperbole. 

McConnell's Calculation

It would seem that McConnell feels a need to disguise the fact that the Senate impeachment trial is a sham and a cover up. Americans expect a fair trial. Assuming most Americans have retained at least some shred of sanity, McConnell's obvious cover up would lead them to vote out Trump and the senators who participated in this cover up next November. It's clear that what we know about Trump is just the tip of the iceberg, and more awful stuff about Trump will be coming out after the Senate trial. McConnell and most of the Republican senators know how bad Trump is. The question is why they would risk their own political careers in protecting him, if it's inevitable that the American public will find out just how horrible he is. Won't this backfire on his GOP defenders? 

So why would McConnell be willing to take this risk? Does he think that the Fox News world view is the one that most Americans share? Does he believe that most Americans don't care and are not paying attention? Does he believe that public perception no longer matters because the only thing that matters is the use of raw power to get the results he wants? Is he right about that in a way that people like me, who do care and who are paying attention, cannot understand? I guess we won't know for sure until November. 

But it would seem that McConnell's bet is that he has no future if Trump has none, and so he and the rest of the GOP must go all in and do whatever it takes to insure he stays in office. And if that means running a sham trial in the Senate, so be it. Once he gets past that, then he will do whatever is necessary to insure he gets elected. If that requires Moscow Mitch to work with the Russians to subvert the election, so be it. If this makes him look bad in the history books, so be it. History is written by the victors, and he intends to win. And so that's what's at stake. The Democrats are going to run on what we know and will continue to learn about Trump's corruption, and they will run in the House and Senate against the cultists who support him. We'll find out what kind of a country we have become.

Maybe most Americans don't care that the GOP has become this cult of raw power. I honestly don't know. Maybe it doesn't matter what most Americans think anymore, because most American by a 3-million-vote margin voted for HRC in '16, and that didn't matter. And it's likely if the election is close again, as it's likely to be, then the interference of Russia and others could throw it to Trump once again. This is McConnell's bet. If he's going to lose, he's going to lose fighting on this hill, and he'll fight with all the raw power he has or can enlist from elsewhere. 

His winning is not a sure thing, but if it turns out that McConnell's calculation is correct, if next November Trump gets reelected, and McConnell and enough GOP senators get elected to retain the majority, then we will have clearly passed the point of no return. For the last three disgraceful years under Trump and McConnell, the United States has become a dysfunctional banana republic. Elected Republicans and the people who support them either don't understand that or they want it. The election in November will provide Americans a last chance to decide if they want to make it permanent. 

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?

***

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. 

Silicon Valley Progressivism

"And when you walk thru Uber’s HQ in San Francisco, the place is pulsating with young, brilliant and dedicated employees who believe they are part of doing something historic and meaningful and won’t take no for an answer. It’s a feeling I’ve been fortunate to experience previously and feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by that talent and energy one more time." David Plouffe quoted in Andrew Leonard's "How Uber Will Conquer America".

Exploiting the idealism and adventurousness of the young--it's an old game played by old men to get kids to fight in wars that should not have been declared or to support demagogues who should never be given power. It's now a game being played to hoodwink kids into supporting a economic model that is leading us into neofeudal peonage.

It's cool--it's disruptive, no stodgy rules, no boring safety net. But those kids working for Uber are no different than the associates who work for Wal-Mart--except in their having been sold a bill of goods that they are going to change the world. For better or worse? Who cares? It's not boring. A lot of German kids reasoned that way in the early 30s. As did a lot of kids worldwide in 1914. Off to war. What a lark! What excitement! What a delusion. 

My son just turned 18 in time for the election in 2008. He was a senior in high school, and with a handful of his friends who were voting age decided to ritualize the moment by wearing a suit and tie to school on election day and to drive together to the polls to cast their votes for Obama. I was touched by that, that they would even care enough, but Obama did that for kids then. It was one of the last years that such a ritual was even possible, at least here in Washington State, because now here it's mail-in only voting. It's more consumer friendly, no hassle of having to actually go out to the local school, wait in line with neighbors for a few minutes, go to a booth, and actually cast your vote. Voting is so much easier to do in the privacy of your own home.

Well, we all now know how disappointing for young people the election of 2008 turned out, and now politics are no longer inspiring for them--disruptive business models are the next new thing. The 'consumer' has now completely displaced the 'citizen'. There is no stronger indicator that we have given up on the belief that we have the capability to govern ourselves; we all have abdicated responsibility to the mystical powers of the Invisible Hand to make all things right. 

The Tea Party and the Mythos of 'Real' Americans

People in Red America are in pain, and it's deeper than just economic. I'd argue that a good deal of the pain comes from the disjunction between its mindset and the real world in which Red America lives. The world no longer makes sense for a mindset that was developed in the early 19th century. Rapid change and disruption have been normative in America at least since the 1860s, and the rhetoric we hear from the cultural right is rooted in ante-bellum commonplaces. But as Gordon Wood points out in his book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, even ante-bellum Americans were already highly mobile, individualistic, restless, and commerce driven--there was never a time when Americans were content Hobbits living in their respective edenic Shires.

In my post from which this quote is excerpted, "What's the Matter with Connecticut?", I responded to an article by Patrick Deneen in which he plays with two well-known books on America's class-driven politics--Tom Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas and Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites. I want here first to challenge the idea that, except to some degree in the South, there ever was a traditional America in the post-Revolutionary era. If there is anything "traditional" about America it is its restless, uprooted, unruly drive to get ahead.

Gordon Wood argues that the radicalism of the revolution was social more than political because of its rejection of the traditional hierarchical structure that characterized pre-Revolutionary, monarchical American society. That pre-Revolutionary society persisted in the tidewater South--but less so further west, which was at this time far more egalitarian in its rough-and-ready, frontier ethos. The Cary Grant movie "The Howards of Virginia", although awkwardly cast, is interesting for the way it captures the difference between the settled, conservative, tidewater traditionalists and the striving, restless spirit of the frontiermen in the Shenandoah Valley. The dynamism of the first years of the Republic lay with the second group, which in every state developed a deep antipathy toward the first.

Jefferson's ideas about liberty and equality and the minimal role for central government in America made a certain kind of sense in the early decades of the new American republic. But as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. points out in The Age of Jackson, the anti-Hamiltonian Virginians--Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe--had become de facto Hamiltonians once faced with the exigencies of office. It was left to John Randolf, John Taylor, and their disciples to carry the anti-statist, anti-Big Money Jeffersonian flame. 

The Jeffersonians had legitimate concerns and well-thought-out arguments, but they were out of tune with the American reality as it was rapidly evolving beyond anybody's ability to control it. Even in the South, the original Jeffersonian concerns about the republic being destroyed by the marriage of Big Money and governmental power were pushed aside as a new class of cotton-growing oligarchs emerged who dominated the local governments and obsessed about preserving their slave society. They may have disliked industry-favoring tariffs and Biddle's Bank, but they didn't care at all about equality. 

Nevertheless, I think that we are all Jeffersonians today to the extent that we are dismayed at how the country has become the servant of Big Money. This is certainly a central Tea-Party concern in the high Jeffersonian tradition. The best Jeffersonians understood how money and power tend to aggregate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and how its doing so destroys and corrupts governments. They were legitimately and presciently concerned about how industrialism was creating a new class of wage slaves. But their response was, to use an anachronism, Tolkienesque. They idealized Shire-like, agriculture-centered small towns, in which there was none of this infernal, greedy, powermad striving. The Jeffersonians hated industrialism, and just wanted it to go away, and if the North wanted to destroy itself, so be it, but leave them out of it. They would do everything they could to protect their verdant Shire from the soul-destroying forces being unleashed in the North.

I understand that motivation for anti-statist project to preserve local control, but once the industrial revolution was unleashed, such ideas were, and still are, quixotic--and the Shire in Tolkien's Middle Earth didn't have the ticking time bomb of chattel slavery. I think that it's also questionable how many southerners outside a small group of intellectuals really thought in Tolkien-esque terms, but rather were motivated more by their own economic interests in preserving their oligarchical slave society. But even grant the most noble motivations to the states' rights nullifiers, you cannot stand against a tsunami; the best you can do is ride it. This was the lesson learned in 1865, and then again in 1965, but there are always dead-enders, which are a nuisance, like the Basques in Spain. They become a more serious problem when they get support from Big Money to further the Big-Money agenda. 

Nevertheless, I am sympathetic to the feeling of loss of a more human, face-to-face America that people like Deneen and the crunchy cons at Front Porch Republic lament. And maybe there's some value in their attempt to keep the fantasy of that American past alive, because no matter how much or how little basis it has in the historical reality of the 19th century, our striving for a better future has to be framed by our imagination of what a better future will comprise, and the high Jeffersonian/Tolkienesque, small-is-beautiful imagination does have soulfulness and humanity that should play a part in our thinking our way forward.

The value of what the crunchy cons bring, though, lies not in some obsessive preservation of what does not exist. It lies rather in the inspiration it brings to people who are looking to experiment in living those values now, testing them against reality to see if they can withstand the the ripping forces in the world as it actually exists. I have no problem with the crunchy-con project--there's a lot I like about it; I just find crunchy cons annoying when they blame all the culture's woes on cosmopolitan Liberalism. They have yet to prove that they can live something that models a real possibility in the world as it exists. I love Wendell Berry, but his draft-horse, tobacco-farming monasticism is not a viable model for the rest of us--unless you believe (or hope) the whole globalizing system is going to come crashing down--or should.

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's Wood on the subject:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was not that the past left nothing to cement the society together. The Revolution had not dissolved all the bonds of the old monarchical society; no revolution could.  People still looked after their families and kin; bank directors lent money mainly to themselves and the people they knew; and nearly everyone requested offices for relatives and friends, though now always adding that talent and merit were the prime considerations. Private patronage remained prevalent; only now there was not as much paternalism to clothe it: naked interest seemed to dominate. (Wood pp. 327-28)

What would be the glue that would hold the country together?  Would it be religion?

With individuals being told that each of them was "considered as possessing in himself or herself an original right to believe and speak as their own conscience, between themselves and God, may determine," religion in America became much more personal and voluntary than it ever had been; and people were freer to join and change religious associations whenever they wished. They thus moved from one religious group to another in a continual search for signs, prophets, or millennial promises that would make sense of their disrupted lives. With no church sure of holding its communicants, competition among the sects became fierce. . . . The result was a further fragmenting of Christianity. "All Christendom has been decomposed, broken in pieces: in this "fiery furnace of democracy," said a bewildered Harrison Gray Otis. . . .

Amid this religious fragmentation, Lyman Beecher and others came to realize that making each person alone responsible for his or her salvation left nothing holding "society against depravity with and temptation without" except the force of God's law "written upon the heart" of each individual. Only the self-restraint of individuals--their moral "character"--now remained, it seemed, to hold the burgeoning, unruly society together.  (Wood p. 332-33)

In other words, there were no longer any externally imposed social or legal constraints. It was up to the individual to constrain himself. But was religion enough to get the job done?  Not likely. Rather the new key would be the discipline of the market:

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

According to French theorist Comte Destutt de Tracy

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of us can stand against the tsunami force of historical change, but that does not mean we are simply to be swept away by it. We must learn to ride the wave and to use its energies, and to become skilled, i.e., resourceful and adaptive, and to me that means we need to rely less on what is outside and more on our own interior resources. The architecture of society does not matter so much as the architecture of our souls. And the architecture of our souls does not depend on society's promoting virtue so much as conservatives want us to think. Depending on priestly cultural authority was never very "American". Instead, we have one another, we have access to the great souls of the past, we have grace. That's plenty to work with, and working with all three has been what the American experiment when it's at its best has been about from the beginning.

[This post is a slightly revised "encore" repost of an September 2010 post entitled "Elitism and the American Equality Ideal."]

Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 2

I wrote on this theme here, but this kid really gets it:

See also Patrick Denneen's eloquent speech at Notre Dame against the Common Core. Key grafs:

I began by suggesting that it was in the very absence of any national standard for education, and the strong tradition of local control of education, that we could perceive, in fact, a pervasive historical commitment to the aspiration of republican self-government. Because humans in their social and political communities are various, it was understood by our Founders that the way that these educational purposes to be achieved would be various, and so the commitment to local control of education was not born of a resignation in the absence of a strong central government, but a positive embrace of variety and multiplicity. Because there is likely to be debate and disagreement in a pluralistic society over the nature of our civic ends and the nature of a good character, it was understood that only in more local circumstances could the highest aspirations of education be pursued, even if that would be various and multiple. In our modern insistence to standardize and equalize, we necessarily discard any higher aspiration of education’s end in an embrace of a widely-secured agreement about lower, debased ends: an education based upon a lowest common-denominator, “career-readiness.” Our civilization thus shows its ultimate commitments through how it educates its young—that we think them incapable of anything higher than being workers in a deracinated globalized economic system, neither citizens nor, in the fullest sense, humans.

At the same time, we condemn ourselves, betraying our ancient faith in our own ability to educate and cultivate our young, handing over our final and most basic liberty to a distant power. Contained in the very act of handing over the education of our young is the self-indictment of a decaying Republic, a future feared by, among others, Tocqueville, as a possible path that America might take, since it is one that all republics heretofore have taken, and is an inevitability once a people has lost the taste and the art of ruling themselves.

 

Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined

Neoliberalism is a philosophy which construes profit making as the essence of democracy and consuming as the only operable form of citizenship. It also provides a rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much as possible of social, economic, and political life in order to maximize their personal profit. Neoliberalism is marked by a shift from the manufacturing to the service sector, the rise of temporary and part-time work, growth of the financial sphere and speculative activity, the spread of mass consumerism, the commodification of practically everything.

Neoliberalism combines free market ideology with the privatization of public wealth, the elimination of the social state and social protections, and the deregulation of economic activity. Core narratives of neoliberalism are: privatization, deregulation, commodification, and the selling off of state functions.  Neoliberalism advocates lifting the government oversight of free enterprise/trade thereby not providing checks and balances to prevent or mitigate social damage that might occur as a result of the policy of “no governmental interference”; eliminating public funding of social services; deregulating governmental involvement in anything that could cut into the profits of private enterprise; privatizing such enterprises as schools, hospitals, community-based organizations, and other entities traditionally held in the public trust; and eradicating the concept of “the public good” or “community” in favor of “individual responsibility.”

It is a form of terrorism because it abstracts economics from ethics and social costs, makes a mockery of democracy, works to dismantle the welfare state, thrives on militarization, undermines any public sphere not governed by market values, and transforms people into commodities. Neoliberalism’s rigid emphasis on unfettered individualism, competitiveness and flexibility displaces compassion, sharing and a concern for the welfare of others. In doing so, it dissolves crucial social bonds and undermines the profound nature of social responsibility and its ensuing concern for others.  In removing individuals from broader social obligations, it not only tears up social solidarities, it also promotes a kind of individualism that is almost pathological in its disdain for public goods, community, social provisions, and public values.  Given its tendency to instrumentalize knowledge, it exhibits mistrust for thoughtfulness, complexity, and critical dialogue and in doing so contributes to a culture of stupidity and cruelty in which the dominant ethic is organized around the discourse of war and a survival of the fittest mentality. Neoliberalism is the antithesis of democracy. (Source)

Yes. Our idea of political freedom has devolved into an idea of consumerist choice. It should be rather rooted in an older republican tradition which stipulates that free men and women rule themselves. We've have allowed ourselves to become serfs in a world dominated by corporate warlords who have convinced us we are free because we have the choice to shop at Wal-Mart or Target or Costco. 

 

Republican Virtue

Active virtus, to achieve its highest development in the confrontation with fortuna...requires the fullest participation in the life of the city, . . . Bruni goes on to develop an idealization of Florentine civility along lines consciously modeled on the Funeral Oration of Pericles, the citizen is he who can develop as many forms of human excellence as possible and develop them all in the service of the city, and a constitution like that of Athens--which Florence now follows--was praiseworthy because it encouraged and required this combination of versatility and patriotism from as many individuals as possible. The case for the open society, as Bruni saw it, was that the excellence of one could only flourish when developed in collaboration with the diverse excellences of others; not only was it better for any citizen that there should be many rather than few others, but such civic if not directly political excellences as the arts and letters could flourish only under conditions of liberty.  it was also better for any one republic that there should be others than that it should rule the world alone. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, p. 87-88.

I've been reading Pocock to understand better why the imagination of republican virtue seems no longer to have much traction in the American imagination.

Pocock's book traces the American founders' ideas about the founding of the new republic back to the Renaissance thinkers Bruni, Machiavelli, Cavalcante, and Guiciardini who retrieved classical republican ideals that trace back to Thucydides, Aristotle, and Polybius, Livy, Plutarch. I don't think I've ever really appreciated how the neglect of these writers in our education as Americans has played so significant a role in our loss of any imagination of Republican virtue. In fact, if it's alive in anyone's imagination these days it's in the fevered minds of the Tea Party. I would argue that the rest of us have to reclaim the Republican tradition from the fanatics on the right.

I suspect that their neglect by "liberals" derives from the contemporary intelligentsia's compulsion to debunk as quaintly unhistorical the events and characters rendered by these classical authors. Why read these ancient sources when we can get a more historically accurate, modern account elsewhere? The result: we have become divorced from the imagination that shaped the nation's founding, and we don't care anymore when attitudes and policies that erode that imagination become commonplace. For the founders were more influenced by the imagination of these events and personalities than they were by the historically verified truth of them.  

I'm not saying that's it's not important to understand what really happened; it's just not as important. There's been a misplaced emphasis. These texts should play the role in our political life that the Bible plays in our relgious life.  Oh, I forgot--the liberal imagination has rejected those texts as quaintly unhistorical as well. I would argue nevertheless that our political health and the progress that progressives insist that they want depends on retrieving the earlier relationship to these classic texts, but, of course,in a way that is adapted to 21st-century realities. 

Or perhaps that's just question that I'm posing to myself without being sure yet what the answer is. For republican ideals and virtues cannot flourish in big, populous, centralized states. And yet some degree of centralization is inevitable in a world as complex and globalized as ours is. But it should be minimal, and so subsidiarity has to play a role here in framing the relationship of local, face-to-face polities and their ability to function as small republics like the Greek, Latin, and Italian Renaissance city states. Ultimately it's about finding a balanced tension between local autonomy and liberty on the one hand, and a central, rights-protecting, peace-keeping authority on the other. Is such a balanced tension possible?

Human excellence and flourishig is possible in the Bruni sense only in face-to-face relationships. There was a time in American history during which there was more prestige in working in Hartford or Richmond than in Washington. How and why that changed would be important to understand and then to reverse. We've become paralyzed by our focus on things we cannot change in Washington rather than focusing our energy locally on things we do have the power to change. It's more likely that we'll get real health care reform on the state level, for instance, before we ever get it on the federal level.  

Another problem lies in that republican theory requires the "armed citizen"--this is the theme the Tea Party and Second Amendment fanatics seize on. I think there is a place for the warrior spirit in the republic that I would work to realize, but such martial energies must be channeled into other projects besides the domination of one's neighbors. I'm not sure that's possible, though; for so much of the American ur-repubican identity lies in this idea of the warrior citizen imposing his will on fortuna, the chaos of the primitive wilderness and the aboriginal forces who would thwart him. Perhaps there is some way of reworking those archetypes, but I"m not sure what it is. 

More later.