| Understanding “America”[1] Anthony Mansueto Introduction The United States has always been an enigma to modern social theory. In many ways the planet’s most modern and most capitalist country, born with little or no residue of older “feudal” social formations and an early industrializer, according to historical materialist theory it ought to have developed a strong, independent workers movement early on, and been one of the pioneers in the transition to socialism. Instead, of course, it has been uniquely resistant to socialist influences and has become all but synonymous with the capitalist world order. But it is not only historical materialism which has had a hard time understanding “America.” According to functionalist secularization theory, which ties religious belief to the presence of traditional communities bound together by shared beliefs and values –what Durkheim called “mechanical solidarity”— the United States, with no tradition of village communities and its extraordinary ethnoreligious pluralism, ought to be the most secular of countries. The same is suggested by Weberian theories which interpret the Puritan tradition, which played such a powerful role in shaping US culture, as simply a link in larger process of modernization which terminates in a culture dominated by a secular, instrumental rationality. And yet the United States is not only among the most religious countries in the world; its religion has an intensely conservative streak. According to one recent survey, 61% of the population believes in a literal second coming of Jesus and 44% in the so-called rapture, in which the elect will “go to meet the Lord in the air,” while those who have not accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior will be “Left Behind (Sheler 1994).” This difficulty in understanding the United States should, however, come as no surprise. Most modern social theory, whether liberal or socialist, was formed in a European context. Much of it, in fact, represented an attempt by Germans to understand why their country was not following the same road to modernity as France or England, or represented a response to nationally specific Church/State struggles.[2] As such, it strains to understand the specificity of even the various European national experiences, and often generates gross misconceptions when applied to Asia, Africa, or Latin America.[3] But “America” is something else. Perhaps because it is so inextricably bound up with the principal ideological divisions which have affected the planet for the past 150 years, it has been difficult for either partisans or opponents of the “American way of life” to approach the question of American exceptionalism with anything like real insight. This essay is an attempt to do just that. It is intended first and foremost for those in the rest of the world who are struggling to come to terms with the dominating presence of the United States –economically, politically, and culturally— and with what they rightly see as a dangerous turn in US foreign policy. Among other things it should help them to distinguish more rigorously between US hegemony and the related, but distinct hegemony of the global market. Hopefully it will also be of use to Americans themselves as they reflect on who they are and what they might become. I begin by situating the American ideal in the context of Western modernity, identifying two distinct “founding” traditions: a complex ideological ensemble deriving from Puritanism and a moderate variant of Enlightenment humanism. I then show how the internal contradictions within and between these tendencies forced the creation of new kind of polity –one which brought together in a common public arena advocates of fundamentally different variants of the modern civilizational ideal. This sort of society was rendered possible by the development of a network of what de Tocqueville and his followers have called “intermediate or mediating institutions, in between the family and the state which not only tempered individualism but also brought together people from different social classes and ethnoreligious communities and different political and theological orientations. Both of the American variants of the modern ideal were disappointed during the nineteenth century –Jeffersonian humanism by the changes which accompanied western expansion and Puritanism by the failure of the Civil War to finally create a utopia of social justice and Protestant piety. Even so, the opportunities which the United States offered made the country attractive to continuous waves of immigrants who, only half consciously, have been defining a new American ideal centered on opportunity and pluralism. American elites on both the right and the left have had enduring difficulty understanding the possibilities of this new way of understanding what it means to be “American.” I conclude by arguing that the United States is at a crossroads. Rejecting both the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1989) and “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1993) theses, I show that humanity is in the early stages of a civilizational crisis, in which the modern ideal –transcending finitude by means of scientific and technological progress— is increasingly being called into question, but in which no new ideal has yet emerged in its place. The United States can either play a reactionary role, trying to enforce the hegemony of early modern (Puritan) or high (secular) modern ideals on a world which no longer wants them, or else serve as a model for a new kind of polity which is at once democratic and pluralistic, but which also takes principles and values seriously, and which is constituted by debate around fundamental questions of meaning and value. Only such a polity can conserve the contributions of Western modernity while creating a context for the definition of a new civilizational ideal. Situating “America” in the Context of Western Modernity The Emergence of the Modern Ideal “America” represents a distinctive variant of a larger civilization which, variously, calls itself “Western” or simply “modern.” By a civilization in this context we mean a complex of human societies ordered to a common end or civilizational ideal even if they understand that ideal somewhat differently or pursue it using different or competing structures, such as slavery or petty commodity production, capitalism or socialism. Thus the ideal of medieval Christendom –and indeed of all the great Silk Road civilizations—was to seek spiritual perfection by means of intellectual and moral self-cultivation using the diverse disciplines developed by the great salvation religions. The Catholic tradition, at least as it had developed during the Middle Ages, partook of a broad Aristotelian consensus which was shared by Jews and Moslems as well. This consensus upheld the ability of human beings to rise rationally to knowledge of God and regarded the universe as a teleological system in which everything sought God to the extent of its ability and in accord with its specific nature. God was understood as Being as such, at once qualitatively different from contingent beings but present in them as the ground of their existence. This Catholicism took a basically positive view of human nature. Original sin had, to be sure, weakened us, but we were still capable of rising to knowledge of God and of the natural law on the basis of reason. Revelation was first and foremost a source of knowledge about how to transcend the limits of finite humanity and achieve the beatific vision: knowledge and love of God in His essence. Grace created within us new capacities beyond those with which nature had endowed us. “Salvation” was first and foremost a matter of cultivating those capacities, achieving excellence in the intellectual, moral, and theological virtues. The Church, both as a community and a sacramental system, was a means of grace and an aid in cultivating excellence. This spirituality, with its emphasis on excellence or virtue, reflected the growing political weight in European society of a petty bourgeoisie of craftsmen and merchants organized in the guild system, a system which in turn shaped the universities and the mendicant orders which were the most characteristic institutions of medieval Catholicism.[4] There was, to be sure, always another trend at work in medieval Catholicism, a trend which looked more to Augustine than to Aristotle. This trend had a complex social basis. On the one hand, it received support from elements in the hierarchy who saw themselves as mediating divine grace through the sacramental system. On the other hand it spoke powerfully to the Germanic warlords who ruled medieval Europe, who envisioned Jesus himself as a warrior who, victorious over Satan, freely shared the gift of salvation with his loyal retainers. In either case there was more emphasis on revelation than on reason and on divine sovereignty than in participation in the life of God. Human nature was regarded as deeply corrupt and salvation a matter of divine forgiveness. Modern “Western” Civilization emerged out of the crisis of the late middle ages. Growing prosperity led to a shortage of land and ultimately to a series of conquests –the Crusades, the Reconquista, the conquests of Africa, the Americas, and eventually of Asia-- which flowed more or less seamlessly out of the Germanic conquests which had brought Western Christendom into being in the first place.[5] The result was, on the one hand, the process of primitive accumulation which made possible the industrial revolution and capitalist development and the emergence of a new type of political formation –the sovereign nation state in which a single lord exercised effective control over a territory and its people. These new monarchs found Aristotelian philosophy with its natural law ethics an unacceptable check on their exercise of this sovereignty, and thus supported bishops who, like Stephen Tempier, helped catalyze an Augustinian reaction which asserted ever more strongly the sovereignty of God and which stressed more and more the sinfulness and radical dependence of human beings. This trend soon found new support in the emerging bourgeoisie which, like the monarchy, found natural law ethics an unacceptable constraint in its freedom of action. It is this notion of sovereignty which lies at the core of the modern ideal. Originally, of course, it was the sovereignty of God which was at issue, with human beings and especially the new absolute monarchs acting as his vice-regents. This is the ideal of early modernity, as expressed in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras. Gradually, however, something peculiar happened, and this ideal was turned on its head. Augustinian theologians from the thirteenth century onward had been critical of Aristotelian science, with its emphasis on teleological explanation, because they believed that it compromised the principle of divine sovereignty which was so dear to them. Eventually, this resulted in a series of condemnations (the most important being those by Stephen Tempier in 1270 and 1277) and a shift away from teleological explanation in favor of mathematical model building (Duhem 1909). It took nearly four centuries, but the result was the development of a modern mathematical physics which seemed, at long last, to have unlocked the secrets of nature and made it possible for human beings to use their knowledge of the natural world to push back the limits of finitude and gradually assert their own sovereignty over the natural world. This ideal was extended by the Enlightenment to the organization of human society, something which resulted in the displacement of royal by popular sovereignty through the democratic revolutions. High modernity is the idea that human beings can realize the end which earlier civilizations sought through spiritual discipline –transcending or at least pushing back the limits of finitude— by means of scientific and technological progress –by understanding how the world works and using that knowledge to control it. “American” Modernity “America” developed along with and under the impact with this modern ideal in way that sets it apart from the modernizing societies of Europe and Asia –or even Latin America. But that does not make it a pure expression of high modernity. The American appropriation of the modern ideal was, first of all, shaped by very specific material factors. North America, while hardly the “empty” continent that some Europeans imagined it to be, was, nonetheless, far more thinly populated than most of the historic centers of human civilization in Eurasia. Much of the continent is inhospitable to human civilization, and most of the rest experiences extremes of heat or cold or both far greater than say Europe or the Mediterranean Basin. In short, aside from a narrow band along the coasts, the Mississippi and Missouri River basins and the “inland sea” formed by the great lakes, the continent was poorly suited to the development of densely populated urban centers devoted to the cultivation of high civilization. The continent provided an unusual opportunity for those seeking to escape from civilization, and would require a real struggle from those dedicated to building it. There would always be a profound tension between those who understood America as an experiment in one or another variant of the modern ideal and those who saw it as an attempt to escape modernity or even human civilization itself. Second, the United States came into being as the result of the dynamic of conquest and primitive accumulation cited above and largely as product of the distinctly English variant of this process. The victory of the English peasants in the Peasant War of 1381 made grain cultivation using tenant farmers unprofitable in much of England and set off the long wave of enclosures and clearance which over a period of several centuries all but liquidated the English –and Scottish-- peasantries (Anderson 1974, Moore 1966). As a result, while England, like Spain, certainly exported aristocrats to her colonies who were looking for a new peasantry to exploit (or, failing that, estates that could be worked by African slaves), England also exported millions of peasants looking for homesteads (Anderson 1974). This led the dispossessed of England and especially of colonial North America to identify with the Anglo-American imperial project in a way that goes far beyond patriotic pride. It also led, from the very beginning, to an essentially genocidal relationship with the indigenous peoples of North America, who had to be removed to make way for aspiring yeoman farmers, and encouraged dispersed settlement patterns which made civilizational building more difficult and encouraged anticivilizational impulses. Certainly many European immigrants who came looking for land settled down and built stable agricultural communities. Their work can be seen in countless towns and villages all across the United States where hard working people contribute regularly to sustain schools and churches and libraries and a rich network of other local institutions. This is the pattern typical of New England or parts of the Midwest, from the old Northwest Territories through Iowa and Minnesota. Others, however –especially those displaced by clearances—tended to withdraw to scattered homesteads and do everything possible to avoid participation in community life, even at the local level. This is the pattern more typical of the South (excepting a few of the older centers near the coasts or river basins) and above all the West. Third, the American identity has been shaped by at two competing variants of the modern ideal –the Puritan variant of the early modern ideal and a moderate variant of the Enlightenment ideal associated in the popular imagination with “Jeffersonian” democracy. And these ideals collided not just with each other but with the material and political economic factors mentioned above. It is to this story that we now turn. The Formation of the Puritan Ideological Ensemble Understanding Puritanism and its role in the larger project of modern civilization is, of course, a locus classicus for modern social theory, and our own approach does not reject Weber’s Protestant Ethic Thesis out of hand. Unfortunately, Weber and his successors lacked the in-depth understanding of the internal dynamics of Protestant Christianity generally, and English Calvinism in particular, which would have been necessary in order to comprehend the complex interaction between Puritanism and modernity. The Protestant Reformation is essentially just an extension of Augustinian reaction cited above. Luther rejected decisively the idea that salvation is something we achieve, even with the help of divine grace, by cultivating spiritual excellence, and treats it instead as a free gift of a sovereign God. He also rejected the idea that either reason or revelation has anything to say about the social order. Any attempt to build a just social order will dilute the gospel’s core message of forgiveness. Any extension of the ethic of forgiveness into the social arena will give aid and comfort to a still largely unredeemed humanity desperately in need of the repressive power of the state. Luther’s doctrine reflected the ideological needs of the emerging monarchies, which were given a mandate to build strong states that could restrain the sinfulness of an unredeemed humanity and were liberated from accountability to either natural law or the radicalism of the ethics taught by the Jesus of the synoptic gospels. Calvin’s doctrine, (Calvin 1536/1993), on the other hand, reflects the situation of the emerging bourgeoisie. Calvin taught that grace not only assured salvation to those who received it, but also transformed them into instruments of God’s work in the world. While God chose, “before the foundations of the world” those who would be saved, there were, in fact, signs which indicated whether or not one was among the elect. Weber’s analysis of the ideological dynamics of Calvinism (Weber 1920/1958) has much to commend it, but drawing as he did on a single text by a middle of the road English Calvinist, Richard Baxter, he misses the internal diversity within the Calvinist tradition around the question of just how, precisely, one knows whether or not one is among the elect. Broadly speaking, Calvinists divided on this question between those who stressed “usefulness to the community,” something which some, in turn, understood to mean productivity in the economic arena and others to mean a concern for religion and social justice, and those who stressed the need for a convincing narrative of a personal conversion experience. The New England Puritans were marked by, among other things, the requirement that such a narrative of personal conversion be presented to the existing members of the Church as a condition for admission to membership, something which in the Massachusetts Bay and New Haven colonies was in turn a condition of suffrage. Even so, there were sharp differences among the New England Puritans between those who looked primarily for a change of heart and those who looked instead for a change in life. It is not possible in this context to trace out in detail the complex internal struggles of the Holy Commonwealths. Suffice it to say that after the English Revolution in 1640, radical Puritans were more inclined to stay home, where the action was, and that the children of the original colonists, as well as many newcomers, saw the colonies first and foremost as commercial ventures and were more interested in making money and in advancing their social position than they were in building Holy Commonwealths. Many of the children of the early colonies leading lights were unable to fulfill the requirement that they give a convincing narrative of their conversion experience, and were thus unable to qualify for membership in the church and thus for the franchise. The result was the “Half-Way Covenant,” which admitted the children of church members to baptism and thus to the franchise, though not to communion, and eventually, the reorganization of Massachusetts Bay as a royal colony. Accompanying this gradual process of secularization was the strengthening of what eventually emerged as “liberal” Calvinism, which stressed usefulness to the community rather than personal conversion as evidence of election. This trend gradually evolved away from many of the historic tenets of Christianity, including the divinity of Jesus, and gave birth to Unitarianism as well as to the more liberal strains of Congregationalism and Presbyterianism, which eventually flowed together with latitudinarian Anglicanism to create a liberal Protestant consensus. Abandoning historic Christianity did not, however, mean abandoning the sense of “election” which had characterized the founders of New England. It is just that being among the elect now meant a sense of moral superiority based on greater productivity (and thus prosperity) or on a sense that the new society being forged in the Americas was free of many of the social injustices which characterized old England and especially the Continent, rather than a radical conversion experience. The Great Awakening of the 1730s was, first and foremost, a response to this growing liberalism and to the growing wealth and privilege of those who espoused it. The poor, especially in the more remote regions still focused on subsistence agriculture could not give any great evidence of their “usefulness to society,” especially when this was interpreted to mean productivity and wealth; but they could provide a convincing narrative of personal conversion. North American Evangelicalism was, in other words, from the very beginning, a movement of those who had been “left behind” by modernity. At least to begin with this “evangelical” trend in American Protestantism did not reject the struggle to build a better society. It was, rather, anxious to point out the hypocrisy of the liberals, many of whom were involved in the slave trade or in grabbing land from the Indians, and who were in general more concerned with enriching themselves than with advancing God’s work of redemption. Indeed, up through the Civil War, most evangelicals upheld what is known as a postmillennial eschatology, which teaches that Jesus will return only after the millennium, i.e. only after humanity, by means of personal conversion and social reform, as created a just social order. Very early on, however, the evangelical trend itself began to experience differences between those who stressed the purely subjective character of the conversion experience, and placed relatively little emphasis on transformed personal conduct or social reform, and those who, such as Jonathan Edwards and his followers in the New Divinity movement, regarded ethical conduct as the natural consequence and best indication of authentic conversion and who were actively engaged in efforts to combat the evils of American society, such as slavery and land speculation (Heimart 1966, Hatch 1977, Bryant 1983, Dayton 1983). By the middle or end of the eighteenth century, in other words, New England Calvinism had developed from a relatively compact ideological trend into a complex ideological ensemble containing at least four distinct trends. There was, on the one hand, a liberal trend, which was less and less focused on historic Christian doctrine and which regarded usefulness to the community as the best indicator of election. The liberals in turn were increasingly divided between those who regarded economic prosperity as the best evidence of usefulness to the community and those who focused on efforts at social reform. These two tendencies eventually gave birth to the Gospel of Wealth and the Social Gospel, both of which remain important poles in the liberal Protestant spectrum. The evangelicals, on the other hand, while united in stressing the importance of personal conversion, were, in turn divided between the high Calvinists (and especially the New Divinity movement) who believed that conversion had to bear fruit in ethical conduct and social reform and what was originally a relatively small group of back country revivalists who stressed a more purely emotional conversion experience. Anyone who is familiar with the political and religious history of late colonial North America, or with the period during and immediately after the Revolution knows that these various trends despised each other and saw themselves locked in what many regarded as mortal combat over the soul of the new “nation.” What they all shared in common, however, was the idea that they were building something qualitatively new and fundamentally superior to anything which existed in Europe or elsewhere. They had united unquestioningly in supporting England, which they regarded as the capital of True Christianity, in her struggle against papist France during the Seven Years War, but they saw themselves as building something nobler and purer than old England was capable of. Freed from the bonds of tradition and the accumulated weight of medieval corruption and tradition, they would build a society which was truly capable of advancing God’s work in the world, whether that work was understood as personal conversion, social justice, or capitalist accumulation –or some combination of all three. They were intensely aware of the moral failings of the new nation, especially the guilt of slavery, but regarded this consciousness of guilt as itself a mark of election, something which set them apart and promised to bear fruit in a future more glorious than that of the planet’s grandest empires. It would be the last and the best empire, and while some understood this literally and others more figuratively, it would be the empire of Jesus Christ. Enlightenment Humanism The second of the broad traditions which contributed to the formation of the American identity is that of the Enlightenment. It is, however, a very specific variant of Enlightenment ideology which took root in North America, and we need to trace out its lineage carefully if we are not to misunderstand its social basis and political valence. What became the Enlightenment emerged out of a response of the philosophical intelligentsia to the Augustinian reaction. In effect, when the elements in the hierarchy which were allied to the emerging monarchies rejected the accountability of theology to reason, philosophy responded by rejecting the accountability of reason to a higher, revealed wisdom and opted instead for an Averroist hermeneutic in which “revealed” religion was at best an imaginative way of presenting truths which philosophy understands far better to the broad masses who are unable to understand them. From this Radical Aristotelian starting point, what eventually became the Enlightenment ideal underwent a number of permutations. It flourished first in the economically advanced cities of Northern Italy and the Low Countries, centers of a vibrant wool textile export trade and a progressive agriculture which was incorporating new techniques in the production of traditional products such as wine and oil. Here it abandoned Aristotle for Plato, celebrated the creative potential of humanity, and maintained an alliance with a papacy which, however corrupt it may of have been, clearly saw itself as the steward of the human civilizational project –and provided leverage for autonomous urban republics against the emerging absolutist state. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this humanistic orientation gave way to an infatuation with the results of the scientific revolution, and thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz on the one hand and Locke, Berkeley, and Hume on the other hand tried to re-invent philosophy on the model of either mathematical physics or experimental science. The first, rationalistic trend articulated the perspectives of the modernizing absolute monarchies, especially on the continent of Europe, which founded Academies of Science as way to spearhead the transformation of their societies. The second trend reflected a mixture of gentry and craft traditions which drew on the experience of modernizing agricultural management and amateur tinkering which were contributing to the development of more empirical sciences as diverse as thermodynamics, chemistry, and natural history. Neither of these tendencies was atheistic. Indeed, Descartes and Leibniz both had strong ties to Augustinian theology, the first in Catholic and the letter in Protestant contexts. Gradually, however, Enlightenment intellectuals and their popular supporters developed their own organizational forms: Masonic lodges and other secret societies, some of which eventually became the matrix for the emergence of revolutionary organizations. These organizations in turn increasingly came into conflict with traditional religious authorities, both Catholic and Protestant. We call the American variant of this tradition moderate because it believed, at least initially, that it would have the luxury of simply carving a new type of the society out of the wilderness rather than engaging in revolutionary struggle against the aging social forms of Europe. It was eclectic, more influenced by the empiricist than the rationalist tendency in Enlightenment thought, though it was rarely dogmatic on the question and reflected a diverse social base which included craftsmen in the cities of the Eastern seaboard, yeoman farmers, as well as some of the more forward-thinking elements of the landed elite –people like Thomas Jefferson. What united it was the conviction that “America” would be a land of universal equal opportunity in which everyone would have a chance, and the best would naturally rise to the top, forming a sort of natural aristocracy. This was reflected in its interventions in the religious arena, in which the harsh anticlericalism of the continent gave way to efforts to “revise” Christianity in some very un-Protestant ways. Jefferson, for example, produced his own version of the New Testament which completed excised Paul and which made Jesus into a moral teacher fully compatible with Enlightenment Deism (Jefferson 1991). The economic engine which would make the realization of Enlightenment ideas possible was universal land ownership and or universal small entrepreneurship. Jefferson’s idea was that everyone would become a yeoman farmer with enough land to support at least a modest prosperity. This prosperity would, in turn make possible universal education, with the best sons of yeoman farmers attending public universities like the one he founded in Virginia and constituting an enlightened elite which would guide the rest of their communities.[6] In the cities this was transmuted into an ideal of universal master craftsmanship and a tradition of autodidact engagement with results of modern science and Enlightenment philosophy. This Deistic/Masonic ideology was the guiding vision of what became the dominant wing the Democratic-Republican Party, and echoes of it can still be heard, in updated form in the rhetoric of the Democratic Party to this day.[7] An Imperfect Union It is not possible in this context to consider in detail the factors which led what became the United States to seek independence from Great Britain. Suffice it to say that one after another the various sectors of North American society came to believe that membership in the British Empire was more an obstacle than an aid in realizing their own distinct versions of the American Dream. And it is important to remember that for many these dreams had more to do with wine smuggling and the slave trade than with any version of the modern ideal. This did not, however, signify any real agreement among the various tendencies regarding just what they wanted to build. The thirteen colonies represented thirteen very different societies, themselves often divided regarding directions for the future. The option for the somewhat stronger central government permitted by the US Constitution as against the looser structure envisioned under the articles of confederation was simply an arrangement on the part of the ruling classes to keep open their options regarding future economic development and to protect themselves --as much against internal rebellions as against renewed pressure from Great Britain.[8] The result, however, created a public space which was unique in history –one that brought together representatives of distinct cultural traditions in common deliberative bodies and engaged them in debate around fundamental questions. This is point is vitally important if we are to understand correctly the unique “American” settlement of church/state questions. Among the founders were moderate representatives of both the Puritan and Enlightenment ideals, and among those they represented were more radical advocates of these ideals. Left to their own devices some would have opted, if not for a Holy Commonwealth then at least a polity which took for granted its roots in the traditions of Anglo- American Calvinism. Others would, no doubt, have preferred something like the French solution, in which traditional Christianity gave way to an Enlightenment spirituality centered on reason. But neither tendency had the weight to impose its will on the other, and both were divided against themselves. The result was a polity which was neither confessional nor secular but rather pluralistic. It was taken for granted that people would enter the public arena formed by their own specific ideological tradition, be it religious or secular, and advocate policies which were rooted in their own distinctive principles and values. What was excluded was any attempt to establish one particular tradition as constitutive of American identity and the authoritative reference point for public policy.[9] Two texts from the early years of the Republic capture this almost accidental creation at the moment of its birth. The first is the Federalist, written to garner support for the new constitution, and especially Federalist 10, written by James Madison. A reader literate in modern social theory, and especially in historical materialism, is struck by just how close Madison’s understanding of politics is to that of Marx or Lenin. Popular governments, as he calls them, have always been plagued by faction. This problem can be addressed either by extirpating its root causes –the aspiration of Rousseau and the French republican tradition—or by ameliorating its symptoms. While faction has its most immediate roots in ideological differences, these differences themselves are based first and foremost in differences in the amount and type of property. Madison differs with Marx only in regarding differences in property as based in ability –and in the fact that he wants to preserve these differences rather than abolish them. He thus opts for ameliorating the symptoms of faction. Now minority factions can be controlled by the principle of majority rule, but the faction of the majority (the poor) cannot. He argues, however, that the structures created by the new constitution have the effect of preventing the formation of a unified party of the poor. Representative rather than direct democracy, a federal rather than a unitary republic and (he might have added) ethnoreligious differences, all but guarantee that the America poor will never be able to unite. Madison was trying to create a polity in which political democracy never came to mean economic democracy. That he succeeded has had enormous costs for the United States, holding it back from pursuing as progressive a civilizational strategy as it otherwise might have. But in the process he also created (probably inadvertently) a polity in which political democracy could never come to mean either popular theocracy or secular totalitarianism. Just as the politics of representation, the existence of local and state identities, and ethnoreligious differences cut across class lines, local and class identities cut across ethnoreligious identities and prevent the formation of either fundamentalist or secularist parties capable of maintaining a stable majority. And for that we should be eternally grateful. The second text which captures the unique character of the United States at the moment of its birth is Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America. A French aristocrat close to the left wing of the traditionalist movement[10] de Tocqueville was fascinated by the fact that American democracy had not resulted in the descent into violence which had characterized revolutionary France. He was also impressed by the ability of the United States to temper radical individualism with effective civic engagement. He attributed this success to the existence of a network of voluntary organizations between the state and the family which brought together people from different ethnoreligious and political orientations and cultivated collaboration for the common good. John Winthrop (or Jonathan Edwards) and Thomas Jefferson (or Tom Paine) may have been the conscious architects of the twin variants of the American ideal, but it was Madison who was the unconscious architect of Madison of the American reality and de Tocqueville who was its best theorist. From Republic to Empire As might be expected, it was the Enlightenment tradition which initially had greater popular appeal than the Puritan ensemble, if only because its political program consisted in promoting widespread land ownership and entrepreneurship. This, however, proved to be its undoing. Partly because he wanted to expand opportunities for land ownership, and partly out of a desire to help is ally Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson agreed to acquire the Louisiana Territory and then to commission the Lewis and Clark Expedition which eventually opened it up to settlement. But the land in question was not, of course, uninhabited, nor were all those who sought to “settle” it prospective yeoman farmers. It was Indian land, and those pressing most strongly for westward expansion were the slave-owning planters of the South, where expanding cotton cultivation was rapidly depleting the soil and where access to new land was a powerful economic imperative (Genovese 1988), or else land hungry refugees with powerful anticivilizational impulses. The result, of course, was to link the Democratic project on the one hand to westward expansion at the expense of the indigenous peoples of the Americas (i.e. to imperium) and, on the other hand, to the interests of the Southern landed elite. Enlightenment radicalism was thus at once diluted and discredited as a vision for social reform. This tendency for Enlightenment radicalism to become discredited was overdetermined by the fact that the United States (contrary to what we are all taught in elementary school, and what we relive every time we sing the Star Spangled Banner) was on the losing side of the War of 1812, which was part of the broader geopolitical struggle between the revolutionary French and the reactionary English and Russians. Indeed, the violence of the French Revolution had already done a great deal to discredit Enlightenment humanism as a revolutionary ideology and the war itself was the occasion of America’s first great red scare, the Bavarian Illuminati scandal, in which Federalist politicians and Calvinist ministers from New England, most of whom opposed the war and some of whom advocated secession, attempted to associate the Democratic-Republican Party with a conspiracy of French-style revolutionaries, Masons, and Jesuits to undermine true religion and the “American Way of Life (Hatch 1977).” These developments did not kill the Jeffersonian tradition in the United States. Indeed, Democratic Party politicians still invoke both the name and the vision of Jefferson as one foundation for the party’s ideological tradition, with one or another new mechanism of upward mobility replacing land ownership as the economic engine for realizing his vision. But from the War of 1812 on, Democrats always had to be at pains to prove their loyalty to an “America” increasingly defined by Anglophile and macro-Puritan tendencies and to deflect suspicion that they were “soft” on foreign revolutionary and religious ideologies. And the Democratic Party –especially when it has been successful-- has more often been “Jacksonian” than “Jeffersonian,” promoting widespread upward mobility without worrying too much about whether or not the specific pathways towards upward mobility actually helped realize the Enlightenment ideal of an informed citizenry actively engaged in self-cultivation and deliberation regarding the common good. This is what happened to the rural, Jeffersonian variant of the radical Enlightenment tradition in the United States. What about its urban, freethinking and crafts variant? The cities have always been more resistant to hegemonization than the countrysides in the U.S. and urban radicalism in the United States has, even today, not so much been decisively defeated or hegemonized as it has been marginalized and rendered irrelevant. It seems, however, that the United States passed through a critical juncture –that of the industrial revolution— rather differently than did many European countries. In Europe, and in France in particular, craftsmen’s organizations, especially the compagnonages or journeymen’s associations, an outgrowth of the medieval guild system, played a critical role in both the resistance to industrialization and capitalist development and later in the emergence of a mass socialist movement (Sewell 1980). In the United States, which had no history of guilds, craft organizations of this sort were weaker. “Mechanics” and laborers were regarded as a dangerous element, and generally lived in their master’s household under his discipline and supervision. To the extent that craftsmen organized at all outside the churches and political parties, they did so through clubs of the Masonic type which, on the one hand, carried an ideology which valued labor and spiritual excellence, but which also included numerous local businessmen and thus were not really autonomous centers of artisanal organization like the French compagnonages. The Industrial Revolution, which began to affect the United States in the 1820s and 1830s gradually broke down this pattern and created, first the first time, large concentrations of workingmen who were not under the direct supervision of their employers –who in turn, were becoming increasingly wealthy and socially distant from those they employed. Taverns in particular emerged as centers of an autonomous working class culture, at just the time when the use of alcohol was becoming increasingly incompatible with productive employment.[11] Johnson (Johnson 1978) has shown that the industrial revolution, the advent of temperance movements, and the Second Great Awakening, all occurred at roughly the same time in cities like Rochester in western New York which were among the most important new centers of industrial development. What the Second Great Awakening did was, in effect, to hegemonize at least a part of the emerging industrial working classes –that drawn from English stock and from older immigrant groups which had been more complete assimilated. It did so by means of an ideology which could no longer be called classically Calvinist. Gone was the emphasis on predestination. Salvation was open to anyone who chose it. Along with this went a commitment to perfection –both personal and social—which at once tended to draw workers away from taverns and other centers of autonomous working class culture and channel working class political energy into bourgeois reform projects. The Second Great Awakening was, it should be noted, closely aligned with the Anti-Masonic movement and with the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party. While these political-economic developments were undermining the integrity and salience of the Jeffersonian vision, the macro-Puritan elite was at work in the ideological arena. Universal public education was an integral part of the Jeffersonian program and was hardly something that the New England Calvinist elite, with their tradition of a literate laity and a learned ministry could oppose. But they also did not want the schools to become agents of what they regarded as an anti-Christian ideology, as they had in France. This is the origin of the peculiar character of the United States educational system –far more extensive far earlier than most European systems, but uniformly mediocre and reactionary. It is possible to read in the debates in state legislatures during the early and middle decades of the nineteenth centuries just how this happened. Schoolteachers were not, under any circumstances, to be drawn from among the graduates of elite universities where they might be exposed to foreign ideological influences, but from normal schools where they would learn what they needed in order to train a literate populace –but no more. The minister, not the schoolteacher, was to be the intellectual leader of the local community. And these normal schools would be kept away from the great cities where foreign influences might creep in. The curriculum, kept closely under the control of local elites, was to assimilate the people, and especially the waves of new immigrants to an American (read macro- Puritan) identity. This is why every child in ”America” grows up believing that his or her ancestors came over on the Mayflower, seeking religious freedom, when in fact the Mayflower brought only a tiny group of dissenting Puritans who even the founders of Massachusetts Bay thought were lunatics … (Lasch 1995, Brouilette 1999). This whole complex of developments, which seemed to so favor the Puritan over the Enlightenment variants of the American dream all came to a head in the middle of the nineteenth century as a growing section of the bourgeoisie moved gradually into the antislavery camp. North and South had longstanding differences over questions such as tariffs and state expenditures on infrastructure, both of which were essential to the emerging industrial economy of the North and both of which threatened the South’s position in the global economy as an agricultural exporter. And the Northern bourgeoisie had never been entirely comfortable with slavery. But for a long time, these tensions with the South were balanced by the need for cheap cotton. Gradually, however, industry developed to the point that its need for free workers and an internal market loomed larger than its need for cheap raw materials and the Northern bourgeoisie gradually came to the view that slavery, one way or another, would have at least to be contained, and preferably come to an end. The result of this process was the formation, under the aegis of the new Republican Party, of a broad alliance of industrial capitalists, commercial farmers in the old Northwest (what we now call the Midwest) and part of the urban proletariat and petty bourgeoisie (the part hegemonized by the Second Great Awakening) on a platform of commitment to containing or ending slavery, expanding access to land for prospective yeoman farmers, high tariffs, and state investment in infrastructure and education. Thus, by the time of the Civil War, the more modernized part of the rural population, as well as a significant part of the urban population of the United States was firmly bound to the industrial bourgeoisie, and its principal hopes for upward mobility linked firmly to the imperial project of westward expansion. All of this was articulated through a rhetoric which linked the concerns of liberal Protestants and (postmillennial) evangelicals in a way which was inspiring to both. One need only think of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to understand the power of this vision. But as was the case with other bourgeois revolutions, the full promise of the Republican Program of 1860 was never realized. A complete capitalist transformation of the United States would have involved not only an end to slavery but expropriation and redistribution of the lands of the southern plantation owners. This was, in fact, the program of the Radical Republicans, who represented the emerging steel and railroad industries, but the proposal won only 37 votes in the House of Representatives. The older section of the bourgeoisie based in the New England textile industry, was too deeply dependent on cheap cotton to liquidate entirely the southern plantation system. Indeed, after 1876, the Union withdrew its troops from the South and allowed the southern landed elite to reconstitute itself on the basis of tenant rather than slave labor. Indeed, between 1876 and 1908 the industrial bourgeoisie ruled, in effect, in coalition with the Southern Landed elite in what Barrington Moore has called an American version of the Prussian alliance of iron and rye (Moore 1966: 141-155). The disillusionment which resulted from the failure of the bourgeoisie to complete the promised redemption of the “nation” cannot be underestimated. As we noted above, most American evangelicals up until the Civil War were postmillennialists and regarded the creation of a just social order as the essential precondition of the second coming of Christ and thus an integral part of God’s work of redemption. The struggle against slavery was seen as the leading edge of that process. God really was sifting out the nations beneath his judgment seat --and the Union armies were to be the agents of that judgment. When the promised redemption failed to take place the old Evangelical United Front began gradually to dissolve, with some drifting towards the liberal gradualism which eventually became the Social Gospel movement and others abandoning their postmillennial eschatology in favor of what eventually emerged as modern fundamentalism (Marsden 1980). This new, fundamentalist evangelicalism was based on a dispensational premillennial eschatology. According to this view, God deals differently with humanity during different periods. The ministry of Jesus, up until the time of his crucifixion, was part of the dispensation of the law, and Jesus’ moral teachings with their profound social implications are essentially part of a superceded Judaism. Humanity is living now in the age of grace, when salvation is by faith, not works. What is more, rather than leading naturally to moral uplift and social reform, personal conversion has no really visible moral or social effects. Far from looking forward to the creation of a just society, the new fundamentalism expected the world to get worse and worse until Jesus came to “rapture” the elect and redeem it. This new fundamentalism had a social base very different than that of the old Evangelical United Front. While evangelicalism had always spoken to those who were “left behind,” it did so at least in part because it promised a better world, and not only in the beyond. Evangelicalism had, been, in other words, an ideology of those who hoped to make America keep its promises. In this regard it overlapped very substantially with liberal Protestant reformism. Now, increasingly, it spoke to those who recognized that high modernity (they never said “America” or “capitalism”) had no use for them and their way of life and who felt, furthermore, that the proposals of liberal reformers and socialists, far from offering a more humane modernity, simply promised a more vigorous effort to extinguish their way of life.[12] For broad layers of the rural population in the South and West and for the petty bourgeoisie and even small capitalists of the smaller cities and towns, “progress,” whether understood in the capitalist or the socialist sense, meant only further attacks on their way of life. And so they dug in their heels and resisted and waited for Jesus. They are still waiting. The one politically significant exception to this pattern was, of course the African American people who, alone among the members of the old Evangelical United Front have retained both their evangelicalism and their commitment to social reform. Black evangelicalism has, to be sure, always been different from its “white” counterpart. As Eugene Genovese pointed out long ago, African Americans never really bought into the doctrines of original sin and double predestination (Genovese 1974). The Black community has, however, always had a deep sense of the degrading effects of oppression on personal morality. Personal conversion in this context means getting your act together and learning to live productively and creatively in the world as it is while struggling for a better world. The result has been that African Americans, while more than willing to point out the shortcomings of the United States are, perhaps more than any other group in the country, true believers in “America,” and are so in more nearly the classical Puritan sense than any other ethnoreligious community. As anyone who has attempted to organize in the African American community has discovered, it is one thing to call “America” to task for her sins; it is quite another to attack the American ideal. And a commitment to capitalism remains, for the most part, an integral part of this idea. It was only much later, with the failure of the civil rights movement to realize its full promise, that elements in the African American communities, and then only a small minority, began to break with the “American” idea, and it is not coincidental that this involved an explicit break with Christianity, something which could be made fully explicit only by opting for another, and historically opposed religion –Islam. Well before the end of the nineteenth century, in other words, the American Dream as it had been understood by both its Puritan and its Enlightenment advocates was dead. The United States would be neither a Holy Commonwealth the Christian commitments of which would be reflected in a just social order nor a petty bourgeois utopia of self-cultivation in which yeoman farmers and master craftsmen studied the arts and sciences and philosophy in the evening and sent their sons to public universities which allowed the best the rise to the top while permitting everyone to develop as far as they could. It was, rather, a developing industrial capitalist power with a continental empire –and a voracious appetite for cheap labor. Immigrants and “America” This said, the United States still offered to the dispossessed of Europe –and many other parts of the world— what seemed like unprecedented opportunities, and became a magnet for peasants displaced by the penetration of capitalist relations of production into the countryside, as well as for religious minorities –especially Jews—escaping persecution. These immigrants brought with them civilizational ideals which were, in many cases, fundamentally different or even in conflict with both the Puritan and Enlightenment ideological ensembles. As I have shown in depth elsewhere (Mansueto 1985, 2002a), it was the immigrant working class which formed the principal basis for the development of a mass socialist movement in the United States, and it did so not because it was a proletariat, but because it was the carrier of organizational forms and socioreligious traditions which supported such a development and which were not easily assimilated to the American ideal. More specifically, it was the mutual benefit societies formed by the immigrants on the basis of old village networks which were gradually transformed into the cells of immigrant socialist organizations such as the old Federazione Socialista Italiana. These organizations were ideologically diverse, but for the most part reflected a combination of peasant popular religion and Masonic and freethinking craft traditions. Thus, in the Italian socialist periodical Parola del Popolo articles about the Gesù socialista ran side by side with columns by writers using pseudonyms like “Lucifero.” Anticlericalism was nearly universal; anything like a full blown atheistic nihilism was rare. This was a socialism better understood using the categories of Durkheim, Gramsci, or even the Russian Narodniki than those of Marx, Engels, Kautsky, or Lenin. These immigrant communities did not, to be sure, see themselves as engaged in a frontal assault on the American way of life; rather they understood America precisely as defined by a pluralism which at once admitted to the public arena even ideologies fundamentally at variance with the historic consensus (such as socialism) and which not only permitted but actually encouraged the development of distinct subcultures. Thus socialists of my grandfather’s generation saw no conflict between their political commitments and their love for “America.” On the contrary, it was precisely because the United States allowed him to advocate socialism openly and struggle for it by peaceful and democratic means that he loved it so deeply. Jewish territorialists (a tendency within the Jewish socialist movement which supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland, but did not believe that that homeland needed to be in Israel) even imagined that the U.S. federalism might allow them to create a Jewish state within the larger framework of the U.S. polity. The immigrant culture which developed in the great industrial cities of the US, in other words, engaged the “America” actually created by the founders rather than any of the Americas the founders had intended. Aspects of this “actually existing America,” –i.e. its capitalist economic structure— they often struggled vigorously against, but other aspects –the possibility of a polity defined by debate around fundamental questions of meaning and value, and thus of a democracy far from thorough going that envisioned by either liberals or socialists in Europe—they transformed into a conscious ideal. What happened to this ideal? The answer is twofold. On the one hand, the principal institutions which organized the immigrant communities –the Socialist and Communist Parties on the one hand, and the Catholic Church on the other— rejected their reading of American pluralism. The old Socialist Party was dominated largely by Anglo, German, and the a lesser extent Irish workers drawn from the skilled crafts and organized in trade unions, and these workers looked down on what they saw as unskilled foreigners who had to be assimilated to “American” culture before they could become real participants in the public arena. Many Socialists –though by no means as many as in Europe— also supported participation by the United States in the First World War. Not surprisingly, therefore, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe gravitated to the newly formed Communist Party. But this party did not understand their socialism any better than the “American” social democrats. In 1922, only 10% of the party’s members belonged to the English speaking section, and by 1925 this figure had grown to only 14% (Glazer 1961: 40). The party was, furthermore, organized around the semi-autonomous language federations. The leadership, however, did not understand what it had achieved by conquering for itself the allegiance of the immigrant working class. Indeed, in 1925 the party expressed its recognition of the contributions of the immigrants by undertaking a campaign of “Bolshevisization” designed to “raise the level of organization, political, and ideological discipline.” At the center of this campaign was the liquidation of the language federations, which were the carriers of the immigrant socialist traditions, and the reorganization of the party around a system of factory nuclei –in spite of the fact that some immigrant groups, the Italians in particular, tended not to work in factories. English classes were to be mandatory for all comrades who were not already fluent in the language, and leadership cadre were to be drawn from among the “American” comrades (Glazer 1961: 47-52, 56)!!! “Strengthening ideological discipline” meant that the orthodox atheistic position of the communist movement on the religious question was much more in evidence, and religious propaganda of the sort promoted by the FSI was out of the question. This campaign had disastrous results. Membership dropped from 14,037 to 7,215 in the space of one month, between 25 September and 25 October 1925, as immigrant workers resisting the new line left or were purged from the party. Worse still, the party lost its precious roots in the popular communal institutions and the popular religious traditions of the immigrant working class --roots it has never been able to rebuild. The liquidation of the language federations had two critical results. First, liquidation of the language federations deprived the immigrant communities of the institutional apparatus they needed to conserve their own cultures while engaging the broader pluralistic public arena. Second, the party essentially sent a strong and clear message to the immigrant communities that the struggle for socialism had nothing to do with them or their traditions. On the contrary, it meant the destruction of their institutions and the devaluation of their traditions. Not surprisingly, most immigrants abandoned socialism once and for all, significantly undermining the ideological pluralism of the American public arena (Mansueto 2002a). The other potential carrier of an alternative immigrant culture –the Catholic Church—made essentially the same decision as the secular left, albeit after some hesitation and internal debate. The Catholic Church in the late niineteenth century was not of one mind as to how to contend with the ethnic differences which divided the immigrant church in North America. Many felt that the most important task for the Church was simply to maintain, or in the case of the Italian communities to gain, the institutional loyalty ‑‑and thus to "save the souls"‑‑ of the immigrants, and advocated the establishment of national parishes, often drawing on religious orders based in the old country, to establish a religious environment in which the immigrants would feel comfortable (Shanbuch 1981). Increasingly, however, the "AAmericanizing" wing of the hierarchy was gaining influence over the North American Church. These Americanizers were profoundly impressed with the accomplishments of American civilization, which they attributed in no small part to the vigor and individualism of American culture, and they were sensitive to accusations that Catholicism was "un‑American," which they believed had to be answered effectively if the Church was to have a future in this country. And, with the exception of the immigrant clergy themselves, even those ecclesiastics not associated with the "Americanist" tendency had little commitment to preserving the religious traditions of the immigrant communities themselves, and tended to see the national parishes more as a temporary expedient for gaining a foothold in the communities, than as a permanent institution. And the Vatican, while more than a little suspicious of "Americanism," both as a theological tendency and as a way of life, was profoundly suspicious of the institutional pluralism and relative autonomy from diocesan control which the national parish system tended to give the immigrants. In 1915 matters finally came to a head. A new code of canon law was promulgated which made the territorial parish the legal norm, from which departures were possible only by exception (Shanbuch 1981: 163). Promulgation of the code was accompanied in Chicago by the appointment of Mundelein as archbishop. Mundelein had little taste for cultural pluralism, and declared an immediate moratorium on creation of new national parishes (1981:182). Those already existing, provided they were self‑supporting, would be transformed into vital links in an aggressive program of Americanization (1981:172‑3). Those which could not support themselves ‑‑ this included most of the Italian American parishes‑‑ would be closed (1981:163). Of critical importance to Mundeleiin's program of Americanization was the parochial school system. Initially, many Italian‑American and other immigrant clergy had hoped that the parochial schools, attached to national parishes, would be the first line of defense for immigrant culture, assuring that the children of the immigrants were taught in their parents' languages, and that English was taught only as a second language. Such, however, was not to be the case. James Jennings, Mundelein's school superintendent, wrote in 1916 that it was his purpose to thoroughly Americanize the Catholic school system in Chicago. We propose to teach our children that there shall no longer be Irish‑American, German‑American, or Polish‑American in our city but only real Americans. In other words we intend to take the hyphen out of the parochial school system in Chicago. (1981:187‑8). All subjects, with the exception of foreign languages ‑‑as the native tongues of the immigrants were now called‑‑ were to be taught in English. Italian children were rarely taught by Italian sisters, but rather by Irish or French Americans. It was not unheard of for Italian children to be segregated during mass, being made to sit in the back of the church with the African‑Americans (Vecoli 1969:233). It was, however, not internal decisions but rather external pressures which did the most to undercut the immigrant reading of American pluralism. And here the ideological salience of the struggle against fascism played a central role. Where at least many of the European workers who joined the resistance fought against fascism under the banners of the Communist Party (and even those who did not fought alongside Communists), workers from the United States fought under the banners of “America.” Indeed, it would not be too much to say that the war took the sons of Italian, Sicilian, Polish, Jewish, and Irish workers and made “Americans” out of them. Certainly the women of the immigrant communities felt the change. As one woman told me, “the boys were somehow different when they came back. It is like we couldn’t talk to them any more. Like they were no longer one of us. (Oral Testimony, Italians in Chicago Oral History Project)” It is conceivable that had the returning soldiers been re-integrated into their old communities, that something more of their ethnic identities might have remained, but shortly after the war they began moving out of the cities in large numbers, populating newly developed suburban communities, something which utterly disrupted the social patterns which made it possible to create and sustain distinct ethnic identities in the first place. Rather than spending the evening sitting on the stoop chatting with neighbors or paying a visit to the barber shop to discuss the affairs of the day, people camped out in front of their television sets. Rather than getting their news from The Jewish Daily Forward or Parola del Popolo, they got it from the newly formed networks, something which represented an unprecedented concentration of the media of social communications in the hands of Capital. And of course the most important function of the media was not to interpret the world, but rather to change it, by feeding to viewers images of a the good life which centered more or less exclusively on consumption. The GI Bill gave those who had served in the armed forces unprecedented access to higher education, albeit of a rather diluted variety. As the postwar generation entered the professional middle class their commitment to trade unionism declined, and even those who remained pro-union were rarely active members. When, in the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy unleashed his campaign against Communism from public life in the United States, he faced little real opposition. But more was at issue here than simply purging a discourse around socialism from public life. McCarthy’s campaign resonated deeply with earlier witch-hunts going all of the way back to the Bavarian illuminati scandal and perhaps further, to the literal witch-hunts of the Puritan era, and made allegiance to one or another version of the Puritan variant of the American ideal the condition for participation in the public arena. From the Crisis of the 1960s to The Crisis of Socialism and the Victory of Neoliberalism Why the Sixties Didn’t Change Things Many, both in the United States and abroad, believe that the movements of the 1960s represented at least a challenge to, if not a decisive break with the understanding of American identity which had emerged over the course of nearly two centuries and crystallized in a particularly monolithic form in the previous decade. Indeed, even the old Communist Parties were rejected as part of the “establishment”! The reality, however, was far more complex. There were many “movements” during the 1960s, each with its own distinctive social basis and political valence. In the United States, the most important of these was the Civil Rights movement, which was first and foremost a movement within the established framework of “American” political discourse (indeed within its most authoritative variant, the old evangelical social reform variant of the Puritan ideological ensemble), and a movement to gain for those who were still excluded, especially African Americans, access to what other Americans already enjoyed. There was also a new wave of the women’s movement which, while it certainly developed a more radical wing, was for the most part also firmly embedded in the “American tradition.” Indeed, this wave was first and foremost a response to the development of effective artificial contraception which gave women increased control over their bodies and opened up for them new possibilities which, however, required some modest changes in law and custom if they were to be realized. What was being demanded, however, was simply what every liberal society claims it accords its citizens anyway –equal access to careers and public office on the basis of talent. The youth and student movement was more complex and ambiguous in its social character. At its base, this was a movement of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia resisting proletarianization –resisting transformation, in the words of the popular sociology of the day, into “organization men.” This gave the movement a radical edge, and an ability to see some of the contradictions of modernity which had been missed even by the communist left –the problems of bureaucratic organization, for example and the danger of ecological devastation. And because of the profound connection between capitalist modernity and the “American” way of life, it also gave the young rebels an impetus to question the role of the United States in the world and to develop a sense of solidarity with struggles in other parts of the world. This push was intensified by the fact that the youth/student movement was also, first and foremost, a movement against the war in Vietnam. And yet even this did not lead to a global, generational break with American identity. On the contrary, there was a longstanding tradition of anti-imperialism within the liberal Protestant and evangelical social reform traditions, going back to Whig resistance of the conquest of Mexico, and most of the resistance to the Vietnam war, and later adventures in Central America remained within this framework. Most of those who went beyond anti-imperialism to genuine solidarity with movements of national liberation did so on the basis of a shared Catholic religious identity with those prosecuting those movements, an identity which was undercut when the Vatican began its campaign against the theology of liberation in the 1980s. And the small minority which actually identified with the communist leadership of these national liberation movements soon found, that the foreign parties they supported had no more patience with their existential angst than did the market system they had rejected. More importantly, however, the youth/student movement reflected the underlying weakness of its social base. It is not that, as classical historical materialism has argued, the petty bourgeoisie is incapable of developing a powerful movement for social justice –that is what the guilds were all about, and earliest socialism was first and foremost a movement of petty bourgeoisie resistance to capitalist development. It is that this petty bourgeoisie was weak. Partly this is because it was not really much of a petty bourgeoisie at all. While elements in the movement were drawn from old petty bourgeois families which were, ironically, experiencing both increased prosperity and proletarianization, as members of the liberal professions were gradually turned into “organization men,” most were the grandchildren of immigrant workers and the children of physicians, attorneys, or more often of engineers, accountants, schoolteachers, nurses, or social workers, who had attended the university on the GI Bill. They believed that expanded access to higher education was an invitation to join the ranks of the autonomous liberal professions, and when they found out that instead it was a mechanism for training a new intellectual proletariat, they balked. They lacked, however, a petty bourgeois tradition which might actually have sustained real resistance. As we have seen, the postwar generation grew up in a suburban environment which had all but destroyed the rich network of institutions and traditions which had nurtured immigrant socialism. Rejecting the “American” way of life meant rejecting the traditions of the old “American” petty bourgeoisie –i.e. the traditions of liberal Protestant, evangelical or Enlightenment social reform. And so their resistance more often than not took the form of pure self-indulgence: sex, drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll. And when they realized that their pleasures cost money, and that the apparent prosperity of their youths notwithstanding their parents were very far from being able to endow them for life, they cried “uncle” and were reborn as the “yuppies” of the 1980s and 1990s –organization men (and now organization women as well) even more pliable than their parents because they were even more addicted to prosperity. The Present Period The present period, in the United States as elsewhere, continues to be defined first and foremost by the collapse of the Soviet bloc. This has, variously, been interpreted as a global victory for capitalism, democracy, and secularism, an end of history in which ideological struggle will all but disappear, and the beginning of a clash of civilizations in which the socialist opposition to Capital has been replaced by a militant Islamic opposition and the conflict between competing modernist ideologies such as liberalism and socialism has given way to a conflict between civilizations constituted by fundamentally different principles and values. We have argued elsewhere (Mansueto 2005) that both of these theories are fundamentally inadequate and that what we are witnessing is, instead, the beginning of a civilizational crisis in which the modern ideal –transcending finitude by means of scientific and technological progress— has lost its credibility, but in which a competing civilizational ideal has yet to emerge. Current political struggles –both globally and in the US-- are dominated by a conflict between those for whom globalization at the very least opens up fundamentally new possibilities, and those who feel themselves “left behind.” The former have either tried to revise and revitalize modernist ideologies such as liberalism or occasionally socialism or else have embraced the reality of postmodernity --a civilization without an ideal-- and mmade it into an ideology. The latter have gravitated towards various forms of fundamentalism which, we have argued are not so much antimodern as early modern –a return to the vision of humanity as God’s vice-regent rather than as an autonomous itself the emerging cosmic sovereign of the high modernist utopia. Central to such fundamentalisms is a search for validation on some basis other than merit –especially intellectual merit. At its margins (and especially in its Christian form) this trend becomes openly anticivilizational, looking forward to apocalypse as the only way in which those left behind by high modernity can be rescued from their irrelevance. The current political situation in the United States reflects a very specific crystallization of this dynamic. Partly just because of its size and diversity, but partly because if the historic weakness of socialism here, the United States has larger proportion of relatively backward economic sectors (i.e. sectors which can compete only with subsidy or by reducing wages to world market levels) than any other advanced industrialized country. The current ruling bloc, organized in the Republican Party, is essentially a cross-class alliance between these various elements. Fundamentalist Christianity and various forms of social conservatism serve as mechanisms for linking those sections of the working class and middle strata which have been left behind, especially by globalization, to the political project of more pragmatic backward sectors of Capital, such as the petroleum industry as well as sectors which may be relatively high technology, but which have reason to resist rationalization –the healthcare and insurance sectors, for example. Popular support for imperialist adventurism –e.g. spreading “democracy” throughout the Middle East—is rooted fundamentally in a sense that the “American way of life,” at least as understood by those left behind, is profoundly threatened. The opposition, on the other hand, brings together essentially all of the forward looking sectors of the population –most of the higher technology sectors of capital, those elements in the middle strata and working classes which bring the skills necessary to profit from globalization, elements in the petty bourgeoisie which have moved into new economic niches created by globalization, and those elements in the working class (mostly immigrants) for whom even movement into lower technology, lower wage activities in the US represents a step forward. It also includes the African American population, which remains wedded to a progressive vision of the future, largely because of its continued embrace of the evangelical social reform tradition. Even in the US these latter elements probably represent a majority of the population, and are certainly in a better long- term economic position, but their immediate political weight is undermined partly by the fact that they are younger, noncitizen, and lacking traditions of active political participation. This strategic disadvantage is compounded by the effectiveness of the Republican mobilization of the fundamentalist variant of the Puritan version of the American ideal. Any attempt to redefine the “America” in a way which stresses its pluralism is, in other words, labeled unpatriotic. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has shown that it does not understand the possibilities of American pluralism very profoundly. The Democratic Party is the heir of the Enlightenment variant of the American ideal (and of that variant’s suspect taint). While it has incorporated the discourse of those liberal Protestants and evangelicals (mostly African American) frustrated by American’s failure to live up to their ideals, it has always regarded the immigrant population more as a political base to be engaged with promises of economic opportunity than as real partners in defining America. At a deeper level, however, the possibilities of American pluralism are still constrained by the changes in social patterns which took place during the post WWII period. Mediating institutions which link people from different ethnoreligious communities have declined as the United States has become suburbanized and privatized. People have probably always given priority to those mediating institutions which organized their core identities –local parishes and congregations, for example. Secondary institutions which bring together people with mixed identities have suffered most. The decline of these organizations has, furthermore, been asymmetric, with more surviving in socially conservative “red state” regions than in major metropoles and high tech suburban corridors. These problems not withstanding, the road forward for the United States lies clearly in building on its pluralism. The United States is far behind Europe and China in addressing some of the critical challenges of the coming period – energy shortages, global warming, the need for a highly skilled, innovative workforce. Where we stand out is in our superior adaptation to pluralism. Even as the US Congress debates immigration legislation which looks like it will be unvisionary at best and draconian at worst, the immigrant rights movement has become a potent and growing force, and it has neither veered towards random violence nor elicited the kind of backlash engendered by its European counterparts. This pluralism constitutes a powerful comparative advantage in a period of civilizational crisis. The peculiar polity devised by the American founders for rather unexemplary political reasons has created the institutional context for, and fostered the first steps towards the practice of, of a new kind of democracy which is a debate not just about means but also about ends, a public arena which is pluralism but which takes principles and values seriously, a public arena constituted by debate around fundamental questions of meaning and value. This cannot, of course, by itself resolve the other challenges which the United States will face in the coming period, but it will create a context in which Christian triumphalism and other ideologies of the left behind can be forced to justify themselves in a broader public arena –something which will prove difficult and begin to erode their public weight. It will also create a context in which progressive spiritualities of meaning and self-cultivation can flourish, creating a political culture in which it will be easier to promote public investment in the development of human capacities. The result will not be the Holy Commonwealth or Enlightenment utopia, the “last, best hope for humanity” which the founders envisioned, but it may be something far better: a society which realizes that precisely because humanity is so varied and creative, there is no last best hope, but only an ongoing search for meaning and an ongoing struggle for excellence. If the United States can bequeath this to humanity, it will have more than justified its existence. References Alighieri, Dante. 1300-1318/1969. De Monarchia. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. —1300-1318/1969. Commedia. trans. as The Divine Comedy and with commentary by, John D. Sinclair, New York, Oxford Press. Anderson, Perry. 1974. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: New Left Review. 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Puritan Oligarchy. New York: Grosset and Dunlap. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] We use the term “America” to denote the United States here because the focus of this article is on the country’s self- understanding, and that is the term most in the US use to describe their country. It is placed in quotes out of deference to the fact that Canadians and Mexicans and Argentines and Brazilians and all of the other peoples of the two continents of the Western hemisphere are also Americans. [2] This was certainly true for Marx, for example, whose German Ideology was first and foremost an attempt to come to terms with the fact that Germany had not followed anything like the French revolutionary democratic path of development (Marx 1846/1978). Durkheim’s work is best understood as a thoughtful reflection on some of the costs of French secularism –and a proposal to ameliorate them. [3] Consider, for example, the Weberian claim that Asian religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism are incapable of sustaining action aimed at innerworldly transformation (Weber 1921/1968). Committed Weberians have every bit as much difficulty understanding Japanese industrialization or Burmese Buddhist socialism as committed Marxists do the United States’ resistance to socialism (Bellah 1957, Sarkisyanz 1965). [4] This is the Catholicism of Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri. See Alighieri 1300/1969a, b; Aquinas 1272/1952. [5] Thus, for example, the Norman conquest which created modern England also took Sicily from the Fatimid Caliphate, a critical component of the European re-conquest of the Northern Mediterranean. [6] Note that widespread access to university studies was to be the result, not the cause of economic opportunity as in later versions of the Democratic Party ideal. [7] Another wing of the party was dominated by evangelicals such as Nathaniel Niles, who derived from their Calvinism a radically democratic ideology which stressed the struggle for social justice and which sought to hold the rich accountable for the sins of the new nation. This wing of the party was led by Aaron Burr who was bound to it by blood, being a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, and was discredited after he was marginalized from political life (Heimart 1966). [8] One need only read Federalist 10, in which Madison argues that the principal danger to a republic is faction. Faction is rooted immediately in ideological differences but ultimately in differences in ability and the differences in type and quantity of property which result from those differences in ability. The principal danger is not minority factions, which are contained by the principle of majority rule, but precisely the majority which lacks property and which might be tempted to use democratic means to acquire it. [9] It is true, to be sure, that establishment at the level of the individual states was still not excluded. But as we will see, the individual states soon became to pluralistic themselves for establishment to be a realistic option. [10] For an analysis of this peculiar species see Milbank 1991. [11] Prior to the Industrial Revolution it was not unusual for the employer himself to roll out a keg of rum around mid afternoon to carry his workers through the final hours of their work day. Industrialization, which involved the use of fast- moving, dangerous equipment made this impossible. [12] There were, to be sure, exceptions to this pattern. Oklahoma and North Texas, for example, gave birth during the first decades of the twentieth century to a mass socialist movement with strong roots in the Pentecostal churches (Burbank 1976, Green 1978, Bisset 1999). Such movements of resistance to capitalist modernization were, however, rejected by both the Socialist and Communist Parties, on the ground that socialism was, first and foremost, about realizing the modern ideal. This successfully alienated the marginalized rural population and drove them into |