The
Protestant Elite and the Crisis of Capitalism
Anthony Mansueto
President and Senior Scholar, Seeking
Wisdom
The appointment of Elena Kagan to the United States Supreme
Court marked a critical juncture in the development of the North American
polity. For the first time in our history, there are no longer any Protestants
serving on the Supreme Court. Most analysis of this development has focused on
the immediate factors which contributed to this most unusual phenomenon. In
particular, only Catholics can be reliably counted on to be “pro-life,” so all
recent Republican appointments have been of Catholic justices. And Democrats
have been concerned to extend representation on the court to historically
excluded ethnoreligious minorities, among whom only African Americans are
likely to be Protestant. This is no doubt true, but the departure of
Protestants from the Supreme Court is part of a much larger phenomenon. Along
with the decline of liberal Protestantism and the collapse of the progressive
wing of the Republican Party, it is a symptom of the profound crisis of the
U.S. ruling class.
The idea that there is a ruling class in the United
States is not a popular one these days. Neoliberals and social conservatives
alike hold to the fiction that, because it is an electoral democracy, the
United States is ultimately ruled by the people as a whole. Those who recognize
the existence of ruling class, on the other hand, continue to think about class
in exclusively economic terms. For historical materialism class is determined
by who does and who does not control the means of production. But neither
approach is really very helpful. Even a cursory analysis of campaign finance in
the Untied States shows that while trade unions, middle strata groups such as
physicians and attorneys, and issue oriented groups across a broad political
spectrum are all significant players; elections are overwhelmingly funded and
thus controlled by Capital. High technology, information sector, and (at least
until recently) investment banking support the Democrats; the extractive
sector, defense/aerospace, health care, commercial banking, insurance, and low
wage, low technology manufacturing support the Republicans, with other sectors
ranged in between.
But understanding rule in exclusively economic terms
simply can’t account for the current political situation. Based on a purely
class analysis, the Democratic victory in the 2008 General Elections should
have restored to power the progressive, rising groups in the ruling class
(backed, to be sure, by labor and most of the progressive middle strata, but
only as junior partners), ending an interregnum in which backward
sectors, especially the extractive industries, used demagoguery to temporarily
secure control of the government. And those dominant groups in the ruling class
should be disciplining and reigning in the demagogues in the Republican Party,
while helping President Obama resolve a difficult economic crisis and begin to
move forward on critical global and national problems such as climate change
and the problem of paying for civilization. Instead, Obama appears to be
receiving very little in the way of either support or guidance and the
demagogues are setting the political agenda.
The problem with this analysis is that strictly speaking, while
the US is certainly a capitalist society in which the political structure is
overwhelmingly controlled by capital, we do not currently have an
authentic ruling class. This is because rule, even in a
capitalist society, is not merely an economic, but a political and
ultimately a sacral function. Let me explain.
Human civilizations grow up, to be sure, on a definite material
basis. But they are, first and foremost, attempts to realize transcendental
ideals. Thus the Egyptians sought divinity for the elite through pyramid
building and mummification. The Hellenic and Roman civilizations pursued the
humanistic ideal of rational autonomy and republican citizenship, in which a
sector of the population, at least (those freed from labor by the slave economy)
devoted themselves to public deliberation regarding fundamental questions of
meaning, value, and public policy. Christendom sought to make ordinary humanity
capable of God. Judaism and later Islam sought to actually realize the will of
that God, the first by forming the people in ethical deliberation, the second
by joining justice to power, commanding right and forbidding wrong. Indian
civilizations aimed at achieving liberation and enlightenment understood in
various ways, Chinese civilization at realizing the mandate of heaven. The modern West has aimed at nothing less
than actually building God, by means of scientific and technological
progress or by constructing a collective political subject (the modern state or
the Communist Party) which can make humanity the master of its own destiny.
Social structures such as the tributary mode of production,
slavery or feudalism, capitalism or socialism are simply ways of realizing
these ideals. When they fail to do so, they are called into question. When even
revolutionary transformation cannot create a structure which realizes the ideal
which guides a civilization, or when the ideal succumbs to its own internal
contradictions, that ideal is abandoned and the civilization goes into crisis.
Ruling and
prospective ruling classes –as opposed to those who are merely
economically privileged-- are first and foremost the leading agents and
advocates of civilizational ideals. They must, to be sure, control or have a
credible strategy for gaining control of a significant share of the social
surplus product. But they exist to advance their ideals and possess “mana”
or a sacral character because they are believed to realize their ideals in a
qualitatively higher degree than ordinary people.[1]
Now the ruling class in the United States has, historically,
been complex and heterogeneous, reflecting the formation of the country out of
the fusion of several different founding settlements. But its historic core was
the old Puritan elite and its broader English Reformed (Congregational,
Presbyterian, and Episcopal) periphery. This ruling class emerged during the
sixteenth and seventeenth century in England. The English gentry, engaged in a
rapid capitalist transformation and modernization of agriculture, and the
bourgeoisie, engaged in the early stages of manufacturing development, embraced
enthusiastically the ideals of Reformed Protestantism, which saw in economic
productivity –and more broadly in contributions to innerworldly civilizational
progress-- a sign of divine election and a participation in God’s plan for the
universe. When the Reformation stalled in England, under the Stuarts, a small
section of this group migrated to North America, where they tried to create
Holy Commonwealths which would embody the Reformed ideal in its purest form
–and ended up constituting themselves as the ideological core of the what
eventually became the U.S. ruling class.
Now the Puritans never enjoyed uncontested hegemony in North
America. From the very beginning they shared power with an array of other
elites, from the much more moderate Calvinists who dominated the middle states
to the landed elites of the South. Radical Puritanism, which made a convincing
narrative of a conversion experience a condition of church membership, and
church membership a condition of franchise, had lost control even in
Massachusetts by the 1660s. And the Puritan elite itself went through a gradual
transformation as well. While a minority –mostly those “left behind” by the
development of mercantile capitalism—clung fast to the Evangelical emphasis on
conversion, most looked to “usefulness to society” as the most compelling sign
of election. They became, in other words, liberal Protestants. This, in turn,
served as the basis for alliances with other progressive elites and to the
gradual formation of a ruling bloc. After a number of failed attempts to govern
without making significant concessions to the working classes (the Federalist
and then the Whig Parties) this ruling class finally came to power in 1860 on a
platform of public investment in science, technology, and infrastructure and
the closure of the West to slavery in favor of the creation of a mass base of
yeoman farmers. It was this ruling class which led the United States to global
dominance, “proving” its founding claim that leadership in the Anglo-American
imperium should be vested only in those who actually embodied its
civilizational ideal, and not in an hereditary aristocracy with feudal origins
or a monarchy with suspect religious credentials. And the political
organization of this ruling class was the Republican Party.
It is important to understand that the Protestant Elite was
never a pure “high modern” ruling class. Even as it drew further and further
away from its Evangelical roots, it never fully embraced techno-political god
building, even covertly. Rather, it understood civilizational progress as first
and foremost an extension of divine sovereignty which would ultimately usher in
the millennium. Evangelization, scientific and technological progress, the
political advance of the Anglo-American imperium, and a process of economic
growth and development which ultimately gave birth to capitalism were all part
of a single process.
Several factors conspired to undercut the hegemony of this
ruling class. First, and most important, was the fact that the civil war failed
to usher in the promised millennium of prosperity and social justice. This led
to a rupture in North American Protestantism which is still with us. Those left
behind by successive waves of capitalist modernization turned to a pessimistic
dispensationalist fundamentalism which abandoned hope in innerworldly
civilizational progress in favor of a literal Second Coming which alone would
usher in the millennium. But even those who profited from industrialization and
capitalist development could not help but recognize that it fell far short of
the ideal it had been intended to serve. Thus the rise of the Progressive
movement and the Social Gospel. Indeed,
a few went even further than this, embracing socialism (the American left has
always had its share of trust fund cadre) or otherworldly spiritualities from
Asia. This latter process began with the Transcendentalists and Theosophy in
the nineteenth century and ultimately culminated in the New Age and the broad
embrace of Hindu and Buddhist spiritualities by a section of the old elite.
The majority of the elite slugged on, however, confident that
reforms within the context of capitalism would rescue their ideal and unleash a
(much secularized) millennium of peace, prosperity, and justice. It was not
until the 1910s that this confidence really began to be shaken. Two factors
were important here. First, the Progressive movement failed to gain hegemony
over the Republican Party. This in turn led to Herbert Hoover’s tepid response
to the Great Depression, which in turn allowed the Democratic Party to capture
what had been the Republican Party’s historic position as the party of the
advanced, progressive sectors of capital. Many Republicans believed, to be
sure, that their own party had a deeper tradition of capitalist reformism and
provided critical, creative support for the New Deal and the Great Society
while clinging to their Republican identity. But after 1914 Progressive
Republicans were always junior partners in the ruling bloc, supporting
Democratic-led governments from 1932 to 1980 and leading a couple of
governments themselves, albeit from a minority position. The Democratic Party,
shackled with a powerful Southern faction still loyal to the old landed elite,
and resistant to the civil rights movement and the Great Society, depended on
this support. But clearly something had happened. The core of the US ruling
class no longer fully controlled its own political party.
The second dimension of the crisis, and the more important one,
was religious. This crisis dates, in fact, from the same period as the crisis
of progressive Republicanism: the 1910s. In this case, it was reflected in the
global rejection of liberal and social gospel theologies in the wake of the
horrors of the First World War. Neo-orthodox theologians such as Barth,
Brunner, Tillich, and Niebhur, stunned by the descent of the West into horrific
warfare, all rejected the easy identification of Christianity with the
achievements of the Modern West and argued for a return to the ideals of the
Reformers. Politically, they remained firmly on the Left, but rejected the idea
that any social reform or any social revolution, capitalist or
socialist, represented the establishment, even incipiently or gradually, of the
Kingdom of God. In this they were well in advance of Catholic theologians, who
were still looking for ways to accommodate modernity, a pattern which continued
up until the crisis of liberation theology in the 1980s.
The effect of this theological move, at least in so far as it
was embraced by the Protestant Churches, was to strip the Protestant Elite of
its mana. Protestantism no longer offered a civilizational ideal of its
own, but rather adopted a critical position in relationship to the human
civilizational project itself. In its most radical form –e.g. the work of
Jacques Ellul, this amounted to a rejection of human civilization as itself a
rebellion against God and a direct consequence of the fall. But even relative
moderates such as Barth, Tillich, and the Niebhurs, whose theology dominated
Protestant Churches in the US from the 1930s on, positioned themselves very
carefully so as not to provide unconditional religious legitimation for any
political agenda whatsoever.
The decline of the Republican Party and the Liberal Protestant
Churches followed inevitably from this crisis. The progressive sectors of
capital, concerned more for political clout than aristocratic lineage, invested
more and more in the Democratic Party, which transformed itself from a party
whose boundaries were defined in ethnoreligious terms (i.e. as the party of
those outside the Anglo-American Protestant consensus, and therefore of both
Jewish and Catholic immigrant workers and Southern planters), into the party
of progressive capital, with labor and the progressive middle strata as junior
partners. And the Republican Party became by default the party of the left
behind, led by backward sectors of capital (low wage manufacturing threatened
by both labor and foreign competition, the extractive sector, etc.).
The Liberal Protestant churches have, in this sense, fared
better than the progressive wing of the Republican Party. But Liberal
Protestant numbers are bolstered by churches outside the historic core elite (such
as the Methodists, who have historically served as a way of incorporating the
working classes into the English Protestant project) or outside the
Anglo-American cultural stream entirely (the Lutherans). Some still offer a
self-critical neo-orthodoxy. President Obama has, in fact, declared himself a
disciple of Reinhold Niebuhr. But many survive by offering something quite
different from historic, especially Reformed Protestantism: nearly Catholic
liturgy, Buddhist or Hindu spirituality, interfaith engagement, especially with
Jews and Muslims (a central issue for the dislocated elite, anxious to know
where they went wrong in their bid for a fully humane and just global
imperium), together with openness to gays and others historically excluded from
the church and to the ordination of women. It is not a bad mix, but it is
hardly a recipe for rule.
The Protestant Elite still exists, to be sure, and is still
highly privileged. Economically, they seem to have retired, progressively,
first from direct production and then from active involvement in finance,
living off their investments and leaving both entrepreneurship and management
to the nouveaux riches. Instead, they devote themselves to philanthropy,
scholarship, and public service. The Protestant Elite still controls most of
the great research universities and liberal arts colleges and the network of
preparatory schools which feed into them, preferential admission to which they
secure for their children through legacy admission programs which, according to
one estimate, gives students a 160 point advantage on the SAT. They also control most of the largest
private foundations. They fund –and control— the arts and humanities and social
sciences in the United States as well as their political expression in left/progressive
activism, setting firm limits to the latter which keep it with in bounds
acceptable to capital. But they no longer have the vision –or the mana-- to
rule.
What does this suggest about the current political
situation? No party can establish
hegemony without a credible civilizational ideal. The “progressive” forces in
the United States lack such an ideal and are, instead, committed to preserving
the infrastructure of human civilization without one. This is the meaning of
the postmodern condition, but it was already the attitude of Protestant
neo-orthodoxy, which was the first religious postmodernism. It is a vitally
important task –but one which is
unlikely to inspire devotion or economic sacrifice on the part of the people.
The Right is divided between those who believe that Western civilization can be
saved only by restoring some older ideal –generally either Evangelical
Protestantism or Augustinian Catholicism—and anticivilizational opportunists
who are capitalizing on the civilizational crisis for personal gain. The first
–the core social conservatives-- are essentially pronatalists who believe that
the West can support itself and retain its identity only if women return to
traditional gender roles and bear and raise enough children to prevent
demographic collapse and to sustain Western identity in the face of growing
Islamic, Hindu, and Chinese populations. Their numbers are actually quite
small. The opportunists use them to provide moral cover for their efforts to
cut taxes and protect low wage, low technology economic activities that are of
questionable viability even in places like China, much less in the United
States.
Seeking Wisdom remains dedicated to the task of charting the next steps in the
human civilizational project. This means defining a new civilizational ideal
which conserves what was sane and whole in modernity –the value it placed on
innerworldly human creativity— while rejecting technopolitical god-building and
situating human creativity in a broader spiritual context. We also re-affirm
the importance of conserving the infrastructure of human civilization while
addressing such critical questions as climate change and the demographic
imbalances which are making it more and more difficult for the economically
advanced to pay for civilization. It is especially important, in the latter
regard, to develop compelling alternatives to the combination of pronatalism
and fiscal austerity advocated by the Right.
Ultimately, these tasks are inseparable. The people (quite
literally) won’t buy civilization as an end in itself. We need to
articulate an ideal in service to which civilization is a means. It is the
articulation of that ideal which is the only stable solution to the current
political crisis and the first step in constituting a new leadership for
humanity.
[1] This is true even for the working class in a hypothetical “true communist” society. A communist civilization is ordered to building God through scientific and technological progress and through the construction of a collective political subject –the organized proletariat—which is able to elevate itself to the status of what Lukacs called the unique subject-object of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process. The working class, because its identity is defined –and its revenue comes exclusively from-- its labor enjoys a position of ontological privilege vis-à-vis other social classes. The Communist Party, which organizes the most advanced, conscious elements in the working class, represents this new ruling class in potentia