A confluence of three things: the latest mass shooting at Parkland High School, reading the introduction and initial chapter of How Democracies Die, and the news cycle. First things first, the school shooting at Parkland hit home, or perhaps more precisely, very nearly hit home. The Parkland school district is contiguous with our grand daughter's school district, and Bella had just recently engaged in a color guard competition with them. On the day of the shooting, our son had felt it necessary to call, fearing that my wife, Lora, would think it was Bella's school and become frantic. Unlike many of the other mass shootings, this one had the aura of a catastrophe barely averted. It's a cliché, of course, to say that "I can't imagine the anguish of the victim's parents and grandparents," because I can, of course, imagine it, but for many reasons simply choose not to do so. Perhaps because this was a catastrophe that nearly struck home, perhaps because she simply cannot help herself, Lora does imagine it and the shooting colored her mood for two days running.
There is a question of just how to understand the shooter. The major news outlets tend to psychologize the shooter's motives -- I don't have a better term for it than "psychologize," but it is the attempt to find "explanations" for the shooter's present actions in his past, an abusive childhood being the hands on favorite explanation, the second favorite being social changes -- e.g. the emergence of violent "shooter" video games. The difficulty with all such explanations is that they're not "causal," not in the sense that an explanation in physics or chemistry or even physiology is causal -- a sense of this enters the common parlance in statements like, "not every abused child grows up to be a school shooter." At best, there are statistical correlations, and they don't allow us to predict the emergence of school shooters in individual cases. We would have to say, this individual has had an abusive childhood, has indulged excessively in violent shooter games, along with other so-called "risk factors," and so has an xx% chance of becoming a school shooter. Even accepting the notion that our predictions are not "causal," but rather "statistical correlations," it is questionable whether we could act on the predictions. What degree of predictive "certainty" would be necessary to elicit a social response, a cure if it can be cured, incarceration if it can't? 80%? 90%? 99.99%?
There is also a felt sense that abusive childhoods, violent video games, and all the other risk factors serve less as "explanations of," more as "excuses for" the behavior. They tend to imply that the individuals are the way they are because of factors outside their control, and so are not morally or ethically culpable for their actions. Indeed, such "explanations" tend to suggest, if nothing else, that the shooter is as much a victim of unfortunate circumstances as his targets -- that we should look at the whole incident in much the way we look at any other "natural" disaster. We do not blame the hurricane for its devastations, nor should we "blame" the shooter. Both are unfortunate, but also, heavy sigh, both are unavoidable. For many, this amounts to "letting the shooter off the hook," along with the felt sense that he should "held accountable" for his actions. We want to believe, in other words, that individuals have "free will," that they make "choices," and consequently that the shooter could have followed another path. Even if the individual himself, as such, is not evil, his actions were nevertheless evil and he should suffer retribution for his crimes. Our legal system is more or less predicated on this notion, and of course because the shooter has "broken the law," to use the catch phrase of Law and Order, the police will investigate the crime and the legal system will prosecute the crime, all to affix culpability.
Of course, affixing culpability offers too little too late. While it provides some social remedy and removes at least one shooter from the streets, it does nothing really to solve the problem -- if, that is, we define the problem as dead children. In this particular case, the FBI has received some heat because they didn't follow up on leads that might have prevented the shooting. As if to demonstrate, the media has reported on another case where a wary grandmother reported the "suspicious" behavior of her grandson, who was subsequently arrested and a "tragedy" was averted. We have to ask, however, what kind of society would it be if we followed through on the suggestions of law enforcement, if we were all wary grandmothers reporting suspicious behavior, if all such reports were investigated and prosecuted? On the assumption that law enforcement has other priorities and that every tip cannot be thoroughly investigated, it raises the question of what sort of tips would be investigated? Or, perhaps more to the point, whose tips would be investigated? It also begs the question of motivation, not only of the potential shooter, but of the "tipster." One can easily imagine "tips" being made as a prank, as a way of bringing trouble to a rival, et cetera. Then too, when does a threat become credible enough to merit actual prosecution? A few Facebook posts? The purchase of materials and weapons to carry out the Facebook fantasy? One might add that this particular shooter purchased his weapon legally, in full view of the world, and it is only the failure to correlate the Facebook threats with the purchase that comes into question. We are back in the realm of predictive validity, and what degree of certainty would go beyond "reasonable doubt" to merit conviction. It doesn't take much second order imagination to understand that it would only serve to multiply the number of accusations against law enforcement for failing to act effectively.
Lurking behind all of this is another question. Is it better to bury two children or 17 children? The answer is at once obvious and unsatisfactory. Of course, it's altogether human (and humane) to respond that it would be best if we buried no children whatsoever. No one can disagree, and so we rend our garments and gnash our teeth at the inadequacy of response after the fact and the impossibility of preventing attacks altogether. Nevertheless, the answer is obvious. While we cannot predict and prevent with certainty, we can mitigate the results of an attack. One thing can be done, immediately. We can limit access to the semi-automatic weapons that wreck havoc on a mass scale. While it is not a perfect solution, for those who slip through the cracks of our burgeoning surveillance state, it would limit the number of casualties in any particular "tragedy." We seem, however, politically incapable of doing so, and it begs the question why?
One answer, of course, is money. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Sportsman's Warehouse, for example, offers 257 different types of MSR or semi-automatic weapons for sale. In this regard, it's no secret that mass shootings are good for business, insofar as gun sales spike anticipating that this particular shooting will be the straw that breaks the camel's back and leads to a ban. It's not the biggest business, but it is a big enough business -- big enough that the NRA donated what? 21 million? 35 million? to the Trump campaign. To be honest, I don't know the exact number, but I am reasonably sure it's more money than I'll ever see in my lifetime. Before we cluck disapprovingly over the influence of money on politics, however, we should take a step back. Yesterday, my wife spent an hour "unfriending" people on her Facebook page that had immediately jumped to the defense of the guns. One such friend had passed on a picture of a 15 year old boy holding an AR-15 rifle that, ostensibly, he had bought with money earned at his part time job. Apparently, his father owns one as well. All this to say, there is a demand for such weapons, and satisfying that demand keeps business booming despite the individual and social costs, and the booming business generates the excess capital needed to hire advocates like the NRA, and for that matter Trump and the other politicians who accepted the NRA donations. If there were no demand for such weapons, there wouldn't be 257 different models available from Sportsman's Warehouse, and there wouldn't be an NRA protecting the "interests" of the gun industry, all of which begs the second level question, from whence the demand?
That, I cannot answer. I understand hunting, and really have no objection to responsible hunting, but the AR-15 is not a weapon designed for hunting deer. I also, to a lesser degree, understand the felt need for self-protection, but protection from what? invading Russians? the encroachments of the federal government? If the American people feel the need for the AR-15 rifle, then the paranoia runs deeper in the American psyche than even Richard Hofstadter imagined. Having said that, I'm no doubt missing the point entirely, and I have this vague suspicion that testosterone and the psychology behind the masterbutory violence in first person shooter games. I don't "get" first person shooter games either. Aside from any moral objection, I find them, well, boring. So, suffice it to say, all in all, I have no personal desire to own such a weapon, and to be honest, have little inclination to understand those who do have such desires -- those who repost Facebook memes showing a 60s style poster of Obama with a caption that reads, "How many of these shootings must I orchestrate to get rid of your guns?" Regardless whether they believed it, or just thought it clever, it was in extraordinarily poor taste, and I wonder if they would be so quick to chuckle if they were the parents of the shooter or one of the 17 slain children?
My lack of understanding, along with my lack of any desire to understand, brings me round to Levitsky and Steven's How Democracies Die. Though my every instinct pushes me to be "reasonable," to understand and even accommodate the views of others, to play devil's advocate even with myself, more and more I find myself a partisan as extreme as those I've been discussing above, which leads me to believe our democracy has already received a terminal diagnosis. Levitsky and Stevens write, that "democracies work best -- and survive longer -- where constitutions are reinforced by unwritten democratic norms." They highlight two such norms, "mutual toleration, or the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals, and forbearance, or the idea that politicians should exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives." They go on to write:
The erosion of our democratic norms began in the 1980s and 1990s and accelerated in the 2000s. By the time Barak Obama became president, many Republicans, in particular, questioned the legitimacy of their Democratic rivals and had abandoned forbearance for a strategy of winning by any means necessary. Donald Trump may have accelerated this process, but he didn't cause it. The challenges facing American democracy run deeper. The weakening of democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization -- one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture. America's efforts to achieve racial equality as our society grows increasingly diverse have fueled an insidious reaction and intensifying polarization. And if one thing is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, it's that extreme polarization can kill democracies.
Of course, in the way of such things, both sides of the divide see themselves "saving" American Democracy, although the conservatives would place much greater emphasis on the "American" in American democracy, and would see themselves as the saviors of a "true" America, an exclusive white Christian nationalist version of America. Those on the so-called liberal side, like me, would place much greater emphasis on the "democracy" in American democracy, and would take a more technocratic view -- that is to say, would see democracy as a network of institutions and programs designed to serve inclusively an increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-racial people.
There's a back and forth implicit in this.
One article from The Federalist, for example, asks the question "what kind of society condemns people for praying after a school shooting?" They go on to write "When it comes to mass shootings today, public expressions of sympathy and calls for prayer are increasingly answered with scorn and derision. In the hours following yesterday’s tragedy, thousands of people took to social media denouncing prayer. As of the time of this article, #ThoughtsAndPrayersDoNothing is trending." To be fair, I have heard a bit of mocking, but it is not aimed at the prayer itself, and certainly not at the public expressions of sympathy. It has been aimed at the hypocrisy of those who are positions of power and can do something (anything?) more than call for prayer and make public expressions of sympathy, but then do nothing. The article hints at this, writing, "it will probably not surprise readers that most of the attacks on 'thoughts and prayers' come from the left, particularly those who advocate tougher gun laws as the primary (or exclusive) solution to gun violence." The writer then goes on to offer a defense of religion for several paragraphs, as though the "left" were engaged in an attack on religion itself. I won't repeat his argument, in part because it would only convince the already convinced, and ultimately he actually concedes the "left's" point, writing, "when president Roosevelt took the oath of office at his 1905 inauguration, the Bible upon which he placed his left hand was opened to James 1:22-23, which read: "but be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves." He goes on to affirm that "we must not simply speak and hear. We must act -- especially when it is within our power to do so." Even granting that "tougher gun laws" may not be the primary, and certainly not the exclusive, solution -- even granting that "to act on an issue as important as reducing gun violence in America (especially mass shootings at schools) would be foolish without guidance from above" -- the article ends without affirmative solution.
In the meantime, as the Washington Post report, "the Florida House of Representatives was in session on Tuesday, considering several issues," one a "motion to consider a bill banning the sale of assault weapons," and one a "resolution declaring pornography a public health risk." As they go on to report, "the House chose not to consider the bill that would lead to stricter gun control," but did pass "a resolution claiming that porn is dangerous." In some respects, their inaction follows the same pattern. Even on the issue of pornography, "a resolution claiming that porn is dangerous" is not affirmative action to mitigate that danger. While it's easy enough to condemn pornography -- both the religious right and the feminist left would have something to say on this matter -- it's always trickier to offer a concrete action, in part because any proposed action will quickly reveal its imperfections. Had the Florida legislature been confronted with a motion claiming that assault weapons are dangerous, they may have had some luck in passing it, but a ban on sales is an affirmative action which quickly reveals its imperfections. No one really believes, for example, that such a ban would eliminate school shootings altogether, and its an open question whether a state ban would even help mitigate the damage, when the same weapons can be purchased out of state and imported. Still and all, the technocratic left wants to do something, whether guidance on the issue comes from above through prayer, or preferably through research, and the inability to do anything leads to palpable frustration. “Unfortunately, just five days after 17 people were gunned down at a Florida school, the Florida House just passed a bill that declares pornography a ‘public health risk,’” state Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D) told the Independent. “Basically, what they have determined is that these are the Republican priorities in 2018: Wasting our time with debate and legislation that declares porn as a health threat, meanwhile we can’t even get a single debate, vote, or hearing on anything related to assault weapons."
In some respects, I am saying both sides are to "blame" for the "extreme partisan polarization," and it does occur to me that the AR-15 (and gun stockpiling in general) was, for many extreme conservatives. a symbolic act of resistance to the increasing hegemony of the technocratic and multi-cultural state epitomized by Obama. In this regard, the election of Trump represents a counter-coup, an attempt to reinstate the cultural hegemony of white, mostly protestant, mostly evangelical values of heartland America. Having said that, however, there is an asymmetry that is more deeply troubling, and why, more and more, I find myself increasingly partisan in my rejection of the impulses motivating conservatives and the conservative movement. There is another norm, foundational to "mutual toleration" and "forbearance" -- human (and humane) kindness. Increasingly, the conservative party would extend kindness, but only to their kind. Some of our "unfriended" Facebook friends, for example, don't really object to the technocratic state, per se -- they collect their disability, their workman's comp, their social security, their Medicare, even their Obamacare. They do object, however, to undeserving others receiving the same benefits, and often the undeserving are blacks, Hispanics, immigrants. Increasingly, one hears in the rhetoric of the so-called conservatives, the sort of language that dismisses, demeans, dehumanizes not only those who do not share their racial, ethnic or cultural background (which is bad enough) but also those who do not share their world view and do not offer blind idolatry to their current standard bearer. Trump's obsessive "nick-naming" is a case in point. One might dismiss it as adolescent posturing, but ultimately it is the rhetoric of warfare -- where the German people become "krauts," the Japanese people become "nips," the Korean and Vietnamese people become "gooks," and the various middle eastern people become "rag heads" -- and it is aimed, not at a foreign enemy (which is bad enough) but at other Americans. It is, perhaps, not surprising that the shooting at Parkland, which is located within an affluent district, provoked student activism from the survivors, who were not content with prayers, sympathy, and counseling. The Week, for example, reports "at far-right Gateway Pundit, Lucian Wintrich managed to ... [cast] aspersions on 17-year-old survivor David Hogg by noting his father is a retired FBI agent, and accusing him of having been coached on 'anti-Trump lines' due to being suspiciously articulate and repeating himself a few times in a taped interview." They are calling him, among other things, a shill. There is little in the way of mutual toleration or forbearance, much of what, under other circumstances, could at best be called bullying.
It's not a far step from language that demeans and dehumanizes to actions that demean and dehumanize. Perhaps that is another understanding I've been searching for -- the AR-15 is not an instrument or tool, but the symbolic representation of an emergent culture of cruelty. Publishing a photo of a 15 year old boy, about the age of the shooter in Parkland, brandishing the weapon that killed 17 students, expresses an indifference to cruelty and suffering. Possessing an AR-15, regardless of one's intent for it, is a profession of allegiance to a cultural vision that, I feel, must be rejected out of hand and resisted.
Tuesday, February 20, 2018
Wednesday, February 14, 2018
Richard Hofstater -- The Age of Reform
I have just finished reading Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform. I was familiar with his essays on anti-intellectualism and the paranoid style in American politics, both of which struck me as having grasped fundamental truths. One of the concluding paragraphs of Age of Reform reads:
Much of America still longs for -- indeed, expects to see -- a return of the older individualism and the older isolation, and grows frantic when it finds that even our conservative leaders are unable to restore such conditions. In truth we may well sympathize with the Populists and with those who have shared their need to believe that somewhere in the American past there was a golden age whose life was far better than our own. But actually to live in that world, actually to enjoy its cherished promise and its imagined innocence, is no longer within our power.
I have often made the comment (which I may have picked up somewhere, and if so, my apologies to the original) that history does not repeat itself, but the present does echo the past. Now, about a century later, I have also commented that we are echoing the period following the civil war, reconstruction and what follows. My basic contention would be that the civil rights movement and the national rending produced by the Vietnam War are the echo of the abolitionist movement and the Civil War proper. Of course, the analogue is not exact, but an echo, and I wouldn't want to press it too closely because, as with all such arguments, the devil will be in the details.
That said, we are (re)living the aftermath of reconstruction. Hofstadter characterized the general theme of "progressivism" as "the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine; and with that restoration to bring back a kind of morality and civic purity that was believed to have been lost." Though they would be aghast at hearing the label "progressive," that particular label having been appropriated by the democratic party, he nevertheless could have been describing the Tea Party, and the more populist wing of the so-called conservative party. The "great corporation" is pivotal in all this, and renders both the conservative and the liberal arguments ironic, and I will return to it later.
In the meantime, Hofstadter is correct when he suggests that the "American tradition of democracy was formed on the farm and in small villages, and its central ideas were founded in rural sentiments and on rural metaphors (we still speak of grassroots democracy)." It is the "freedom" and "democracy" celebrated in country music, and their patriotism is not necessarily extended to either New York or Los Angeles, neither of which are seen as part of the real "America." I could spend considerable time unpacking the notions of "freedom," but mostly its a notion of "positive freedom" --- that is to say, the ability to do what one damn well pleases, and if there are moral restraints on what pleases, they come mostly from community sentiment and consensus, and from religion, especially the sort of sentimental religion that we still hear celebrated in country gospel. If there are political and legal restraints, they should be local, very local, in scope. The more distant the "government" imposing restraint, the less tolerable the restraints become, and the more likely they are to be labeled "socialism," even if one generally might agree with the restraint.
So far as economic individualism is concerned, the story is more complex. Hofstadter makes a convincing case that the "family farm" or the "family business" provides the core metaphor. If one is to be successful, it is fundamentally necessary that one "work hard," and this finds its moral imperative in old timey, and mostly old testament religion -- it's the sweat of one's brow that brings forth bread. Hard work might be necessary, but most realize it's not sufficient, and there is a strain of popular sentiment that valorizes those who have worked hard without the reward. Their reward, no doubt, will be in heaven. Indeed, it seems, the more physically demanding and physically debilitating the fruitless work, so long as they don't lose faith, the greater their reward in heaven. For those who are successful, however, it is just generally assumed that they "worked hard" for their rewards and their "hard work" gives the rewards, like those of Job, moral sanction. They "earned" their rewards. It is also generally assumed that they had other defining characteristics that helped bring in the bread -- mostly a form of "savvy," not to be confused with "intellectual prowess" of the sort that earns PhDs and university professorships. Quite the contrary, the popular sentiment would see "intellectual prowess" and "savvy" in inverse proportion to one another, the latter acquired through the "hard knocks" of experience. It's the sentiment captured in the bumper sticker slogan, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
All of which might have been appropriate, when "being rich" was more modest, a time when one's riches were centered on the family farm and aligned along main street in the family business. As Hofstadter goes on to write, "up to about 1870 the United States was a nation with a rather broad diffusion of wealth, status, and power, in which the man of moderate means, especially in the many small communities, could command much deference and exert much influence. The small merchant or manufacturer, the distinguished lawyer, editor, or preacher, was a person of local eminence in an age in which local eminence mattered a great deal." Of course, as Hofstadter implies here, and details throughout, there were several transformations of American life that began after 1870, not least the increasing industrialization, which generally speaking made America more urban than rural, and which concentrated more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Although one could argue that the "local eminences" carried on as before, with little diminishment of their actual wealth, it was clear however that, relative to the Carnegies, their wealth was modest and that the deference and influence was limited to the local, and a mass communications revolution with the telegraph and telephone, along with new forms of journalism, reinforced their diminished stature on the national stage. Hofstadter designated the Mugwump type, those who were "progressives not because of economic deprivations but primarily because they were victims of an upheaval in status." These were men who "suffered from the events of their time not through a shrinkage in their means but through the changed pattern in the distribution of deference and power."
Several have made similar observations about our current situation. Trump's brand of populism might be better seen as a new Mugwump type. As Buffalo Springfield might have put it, "there's something happening here, and what it is ain't exactly clear," but there are echos. Contrary to the industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th century, America is going through a process of de-industrialization. Just as in the past fewer and fewer people were employed in agriculture, today fewer and fewer people are employed in manufacturing. Part of this deindustrialization can be attributed to the outsourcing of labor to emerging nations, part can be attributed to the automation of labor, with the former (I believe?) giving way to the latter. Just as the mechanization of agriculture meant fewer and fewer hands in the field growing food, it's not that manufactured good aren't being made, and sold, but rather it takes fewer and fewer hands. This has the salutatory effect of keeping stuff cheap for the shelves of Walmart, but it also has a significant impact on manufacturing sector employment. And speaking of Walmart, following a familiar pattern of concentration and monopolization, they have made small scale retail virtually impossible in most small towns and cities across the US. They are welcomed because they offer "jobs," but not the sort of proprietorship that peopled main street and stoked civic pride. Then too, Walmart may eventually be "disrupted" by the on-line sale and distribution of goods. All of which suggests that the "new Mugwump type" is emerging as a "local eminence" that finds even its local deference and influence threatened, if not rendered irrelevant, by an emerging economy that has little use for them, and to top it off, by a new forms of celebrity influence fueled by the so called "social media," which ultimately might be bettered labeled sociopathic media. Consequently, the yearning for a golden age (with the usual elisions of nostalgia) is comprehensible, and helps explain why the Trump voter aren't only those who have suffered actual economic dislocation, but those who feel their deference and influence in the world threatened.
There is another shift regarding "work" and the "work ethic." It's not unusual for the older generation to look at the younger and decry their lack of work ethic, but here again there's something happening, though the full outline isn't yet clear. One of the shifts that happened along with the industrialization of America was a shift from the economic independence of "self-employment," to the dependencies of "wage labor." On the order of "self-employment," think of the family farm, the proprietor of a small business, or the professionals -- not the cowboys, but the doctors and lawyers and such. Part and parcel of economic individualism was the underlying assumption that, if one worked for someone else, and if one possessed the necessary drive, sufficient savvy, a dollop of thrift, then one could parlay that work into self employment. One could be, so to speak, one's own boss. For the vast majority of people, the hope for fiscal independence was delusional, and the need to engage in "wage labor," to hold down a "job," became a more or less permanent condition of life. Although economic independence was still the desired state, the wage laborer found themselves caught up within webs of dependency over which they had little influence, much less power. As an aside, it strikes me that the incipient forms of unionism were caught within a fundamental tension, or paradox, the felt need to assert some level of economic independence as well as a modicum of deference from the "powers that be," a felt need that could be satisfied only through another form of dependency, solidarity within a class identity and a dependency on others of that class, a solidarity and dependency that rankled against the felt need to assert one's self as an individual.
As a bass line beneath, there lurked notions of accountability and responsibility. Although Hofstadter would accuse me of overstating the case, I will go ahead and point out that the American soul is principally a Protestant soul and we have "inherited the moral traditions of rural evangelical Protestantism." Implicit in the Protestant soul is an "ethos of personal responsibility." Broadly speaking, it is the sense that we are primarily accountable to ourselves and responsible for our own salvation, not only in the exalted religious sense and in the mundane sense of subsistence. While the sense of accountability may extend outward to family and from there to one's local community, the further out one goes the more tenuous the accountability. I may have a duty to my wife and children, and I may need on occasion to be my brother's keeper, but I am not responsible for my neighbor's happiness. If Emerson saw the greatest sin as "limitation," the petty conformity to sanctified community standards, he would agree that, for the protestant soul at large, the greatest (if not the most salacious) sin was dependence, the failure to be self-reliant.
This "ethos of personal responsibility" works well enough for those who are self-employed -- particularly within that Jeffersonian, Jacksonian mythos of an agrarian America -- less well within an industrial America with systemic need for wage labor, where one is no longer accountable to oneself, but to an employer, who sets the terms and conditions to which they will be held accountable. The employee meets his responsibilities and consequently behaves responsibly when he or she conforms to the terms and conditions of work and can, thereby, not only support himself, but also meet his familial obligations. There is some autonomy associated with wage labor, insofar as it is not outright slavery, and one is bound only to the implicit contract that exchanges labor for cash. So long as he remains working, the wage laborer avoids dependence on others -- the extended family, charitable institutions, the government -- but unlike the small stake farmer, who was dependent only on his own labor, nature, and nature's god for his subsistence, the wage laborer is unambiguously dependent upon his employer, who not only sets the terms and conditions of work, but provides the work itself. The vast majority of wage laborers are not free not to labor, and to be without work is felt to be shameful, not only because one can no longer "support himself," but also because, having work, being gainfully employed, was an individual responsibility. So long as there is work to be done, jobs to be had, this ethos of personal responsibility seems justified, and those without work could perhaps be accused of a character flaw, the least of which was laziness, which kept them from labor.
While the "ethos of personal responsibility" may have had it origins in the traditions of rural evangelicalism, and while the wage laborer felt the obligation to work, the employer, subject to the imperatives of capitalism and imbued with the same ethos of personal responsibility, did not feel the same obligation to provide work, and when they did provide work, did not feel the obligation to provide necessarily "a living wage." By the "logic of capitalism," I mean simply this: business owners do not hire people out of a sense of largesse, or patriotism, or obligation to their employees, or because tax cuts have provided them with additional cash on hand. They hire people only in response to demand, and then they incur the expense of an employee only when they must to meet demand. To exact the greatest return on their investment, it is in their interest not only to keep the number of employee, but also their wages as low as possible. The imperatives of capitalism work on both large and small business, though for the latter, caught up within and subject to a local community, the imperatives of capitalism might find it necessary to compromise within "a preponderantly rural society with a broad diffusion of property and power," not to mention the American tradition "of unusually widespread participation of the citizen in the management of of affairs, both political and economic." As Hofstadter goes on to point out, however, "the growth of the large corporation, the labor union, and the big impenetrable political machine" were at some remove from and no longer particularly subject to local communities, or perhaps more precisely, no longer subject to the Mugwump type, those who commanded more localized wealth and influence. While the large corporation and the labor union had competing agendas, both were subject to the same unresolved tension, both stood against economic individualism and both were "clotting society into large aggregates and presenting to the unorganized citizen the prospect that all these aggregates and interests would be able to act in concert and shut out those men for whom organization was difficult or impossible." As Hofstadter notes, to a degree, "the Progressive movement was the complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of organization," or to put it another way, those who had lost a commanding voice in how things were organized.
There are two ironies or perhaps hypocrisies in all of this. The first and most obvious might be called the "for me" syndrome. The greatest of the great capitalists, of course, believed deeply in the economic individualism and the "ethos of personal responsibility" -- that is to say, they were deeply committed to their own autonomy, their own individual freedom to do as they damn well pleased to secure and increase their wealth. They were responsible for and therefore deserving of their wealth and entitled to exercise the influence that came with it. In other words, for the greatest of the great capitalists, economic individualism was a great thing "for me," though others should be subject to corporate economic and organizational needs. Moreover, for the greatest of the great capitalists, the rhetoric of economic individualism was a great thing "for me," in part because it justified their wealth, in part because it justified their efforts at organizing the social and economic structures to meet the needs of the modern corporation. Others are perfectly free to become "just like me" -- and clearly, if they had the necessary drive and savvy, they would become "just like me" -- but clearly they have failed. They clearly lack drive and must be compelled into labor, if not by whips and chains, then by push of penury. They clearly lack savvy and so must be subject to the terms and conditions of those who provide remunerative labor -- that is to say, accountable to the needs of the modern corporation.
The second and less obvious might be called the irony of progress itself. As Hofstadter points out, against the wholly independent individuals, "the processes of modern technology and machine industry -- not to speak of the complex tasks of civic life (much, much, much more so the complex tasks of urban life) make organization, specialism, hierarchy, and discipline utterly necessary." Within the agrarian world of Jefferson and Jackson, one can imagine the atomistic (or Adamistic) individual believing they were more or less a jack of all trades, the master of his own small piece of the world, subject to no one but himself, nature, and nature's God -- and so far as God is concerned, with sufficient piety, like Job, believing also that they could turn even nature and nature's God to account. As Hofstadter points out,
It had been their tradition to believe that prosperity and economic progress came not through big or monopolistic businesses -- that is, through the gains and economies of organization -- but rather through competition and hard work and individual enterprise and initiative. They had been brought up to think of the well-being of society not merely in structural terms -- not as something resting upon the sum of its technique and efficiency -- but in moral terms, as a reward for the sum total of individual qualities and personal merits. This tradition rooted in the Protestant ethic itself was being wantonly defied by the system of corporate organization.
Along with Thoreau, for example, they might critique the railroad as only an improved means to an unimproved end, but it nevertheless represented an improved means, and very few really want to forego the benefit of improved means. One could say the same thing about modern medicine, that it is only an improved means to an unimproved end, but when the "end" is saving and improving lives, it would seem foolish to reject wholly the benefit of its "improved means." Within a world that includes such "improved means," it is more difficult to imagine the atomistic (or Adamistic) individual as the master of his own small piece of the world, and as Hofstadter points out, "the progressives, object though they might to the many sacrifices of traditional values that the new society demanded, did not seriously propose to dismantle this society, forsake its material advantages, and return to a more primitive technology." Or in other words, I am suggesting that both the turn of the century "progressives" and our more current conservative radicals were and are "trying, in short, to keep the benefits of the emerging organization of life and yet to retain the scheme of individualistic values that this organization was destroying."
There is, perhaps, a third irony or paradox. The very idea of "democracy" seems deeply connected to the Protestant ethic as well -- society seen not as a structure, but as "we the people," or as Hofstadter put it above, "the sum total of individual qualities and personal merits." I'm not sure who said it first, but it is accepted as a truism that there are essentially two dangerous classes of people, the very poor and the very rich, those who have nothing to lose and those who have everything to lose. To put it simply, the many who have little tend to form mobs, while the few who have much tend to form repressive regimes to suppress and control the mob. Having few other tools at its disposal, the mob tends toward violence, which in turn is met with violence in order to maintain some semblance of social order. The French revolution is the principle case in point, and it is often accepted also as a truism that the American revolution escaped the fate of the French because there was greater social and economic equality within American society. Our political system can be democratic largely because the majority of people belong, neither to the very poor, nor the very rich, but rather to a broad segment of the population that could be considered "comfortable," or at least "comfortable" enough that they had no desire to over-throw the existing order of things, in part because they had the hope of joining the ranks of the "slightly more comfortable."
Then too, it is also accepted more or less as a truism that democracy and laissez faire capitalism go hand in hand, the "market place" being the place where "the people" go vote with their wallets, where the "sum total of individual economic decisions" act as a self-regulating "invisible hand" guiding the economy. A business competes for market share, or popular approval, and if a business succeeds (or fails) it does so because "we the people" have decided it should succeed (or fail) with our pocketbooks. There is, however, an inherent difficulty with laissez faire capitalism and the Jeffersonian idea that government is best when it does least, when a hands off approach, benign in an agrarian society, becomes cancerous. Within a wage earning society, where the comforts of the comfortable are contingent upon having secure employment, the imperatives of capitalism tend to work against the stability associated with the so-called "middle class," those who are comfortably neither very rich nor very poor. The more "laissez faire" the capitalism, the more the imperatives of capitalism work against the wage earner, suppressing employment, and where that is not possible, suppressing wages. Within a wage earning society, I probably don't need to point out that the imperatives of capitalism are ultimately self-defeating, insofar as employment and wages can be suppressed so effectively that they constrain demand, which further suppresses employment, which further suppresses demand, et cetera, into a vicious cycle of collapse. At this point, one of two things can happen. On the desirable side, at least from my perspective, "democracy" kicks in, not as laissez faire capitalism, but rather as government imposing constraints and mandates on laissez faire capitalism through redistributive taxation, relief for the poor and unemployed, various forms of economic stimulus, all designed to improve demand and reinvigorate employment. On the less desirable side, "autocracy" kicks in, and exercises its monopoly of power to "protect property" -- repressive measures designed, for the most part, to protect the power and influence of the rich against the growing discontent of "the people."
Neither the implicit "socialism" of the former nor the various styles of "autocracy" are particularly conducive to "individualistic values." The former does make one dependent upon the "state," reducing the whole human individual to a set of bureaucratic criteria that determine the amount and type of "assistance" available. The latter can "feel" more supportive, if not of "individualistic values," per se, then of certain "identity values," defined typically against race, religion, and ethnicity. They offer, not a redistribution of wealth per se, but a redistribution of power and influence, or more to the point, a reaffirmation of the prestige of the majority race, religion, and ethnicity -- particularly when the majority "feels" the erosion of power and influence and is seeking targets of opportunity for blame. (If not the Jews, then the Mexicans and Muslims.) They offer, again not a redistribution of wealth per se, but symbolic gestures aimed at "the people" while consolidating actual wealth among the autocrats. (The current tax cuts are a case in point, while everyone got a tax cut, they will not make a significant difference in the lives of "the people," but they have taken significant steps to consolidate and perpetuate the power and influence of the already powerful and influential.)
At the moment, the real threat to American democracy comes from the very rich, the incipient autocrat in the white house, his facilitators in the house and senate, and his so-called base, those white male protestants who feel most acutely the erosion of their power and influence, their prestige. At one point, Hofstadter writes that "one of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged." At the moment, I'm not sure where the sympathies lie. It seems clear enough that they don't lie with the "needs and sufferings of the underprivileged," else the "black lives matter" movement might have garnered more steam, and there would perhaps be a bit less vituperation directed at minorities generally. The so-called "me-too" movement might be a point of light, focusing attention on victims of sexual harassment, except that I'm pretty sure the movement is less about the Hispanic chambermaid accosted in a hotel room, more about those who seek the moral affirmation of being victims while enjoying extreme forms of celebrity privilege as they "come out." Even my wife finds it difficult to feel very sorry for the victims of Harvey Weinstein. It's not altogether clear, however, that the sympathies lie with the "power and achievements of the very successful" either. The sort of disdain aimed at "elites" is a case in point. Though he has in his actions come down squarely on the side of privileged, rhetorically Trump plays both sides of the fence, his "success" serving at once as sufficient evidence of his drive and savvy, while at the same time placing him outside and above the influence of the hated elites, particularly wall street and government elites who are, or so it is felt, uniformly corrupt.
There is, however, a strong consensus that we are divided, and that anything can become fodder for the war horses on either side of the divide, and that our divisions are more and more irreconcilable in part, or so I would suggest, because the core conservative ambition is simply impossible. It's not just that we cannot turn the clock back to a golden age -- a time when America was "great." It's that we want to turn the clock back without relinquishing the very conditions that make us want to turn the clock back in the first place. I might echo Hofstadter, and suggest that, in order to understand today's conservative sympathetically, "it is important to think of them not as stupid or incapable men who [are fumbling] a simple task, but as men of reasonable and often indeed of penetrating intelligence whose fate it [is] to attempt, with great zeal and resourcefulness, a task of immense complexity and almost hopeless difficulties." Having said that, however, I am not sure how much sympathy I want to extend, in part because there is one significant difference between the progressive of yore and the conservative of today. In the past, "the Progressive agitations turned the human sympathies of the people downward rather than upward in the social scale. The progressives, by creating a climate of opinion in which, over the long run, the comfortable public was disposed to be humane, did in the end succeed in fending off that battle of social extremes of which they were so afraid." I have suggested elsewhere that the conservative party seems no longer "disposed to be humane," and are, as I suggested in a previous post, not only cultivating a climate of fear and a culture of cruelty, but are also actively pushing us toward that "battle of social extremes."
All of which might have been appropriate, when "being rich" was more modest, a time when one's riches were centered on the family farm and aligned along main street in the family business. As Hofstadter goes on to write, "up to about 1870 the United States was a nation with a rather broad diffusion of wealth, status, and power, in which the man of moderate means, especially in the many small communities, could command much deference and exert much influence. The small merchant or manufacturer, the distinguished lawyer, editor, or preacher, was a person of local eminence in an age in which local eminence mattered a great deal." Of course, as Hofstadter implies here, and details throughout, there were several transformations of American life that began after 1870, not least the increasing industrialization, which generally speaking made America more urban than rural, and which concentrated more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. Although one could argue that the "local eminences" carried on as before, with little diminishment of their actual wealth, it was clear however that, relative to the Carnegies, their wealth was modest and that the deference and influence was limited to the local, and a mass communications revolution with the telegraph and telephone, along with new forms of journalism, reinforced their diminished stature on the national stage. Hofstadter designated the Mugwump type, those who were "progressives not because of economic deprivations but primarily because they were victims of an upheaval in status." These were men who "suffered from the events of their time not through a shrinkage in their means but through the changed pattern in the distribution of deference and power."
Several have made similar observations about our current situation. Trump's brand of populism might be better seen as a new Mugwump type. As Buffalo Springfield might have put it, "there's something happening here, and what it is ain't exactly clear," but there are echos. Contrary to the industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th century, America is going through a process of de-industrialization. Just as in the past fewer and fewer people were employed in agriculture, today fewer and fewer people are employed in manufacturing. Part of this deindustrialization can be attributed to the outsourcing of labor to emerging nations, part can be attributed to the automation of labor, with the former (I believe?) giving way to the latter. Just as the mechanization of agriculture meant fewer and fewer hands in the field growing food, it's not that manufactured good aren't being made, and sold, but rather it takes fewer and fewer hands. This has the salutatory effect of keeping stuff cheap for the shelves of Walmart, but it also has a significant impact on manufacturing sector employment. And speaking of Walmart, following a familiar pattern of concentration and monopolization, they have made small scale retail virtually impossible in most small towns and cities across the US. They are welcomed because they offer "jobs," but not the sort of proprietorship that peopled main street and stoked civic pride. Then too, Walmart may eventually be "disrupted" by the on-line sale and distribution of goods. All of which suggests that the "new Mugwump type" is emerging as a "local eminence" that finds even its local deference and influence threatened, if not rendered irrelevant, by an emerging economy that has little use for them, and to top it off, by a new forms of celebrity influence fueled by the so called "social media," which ultimately might be bettered labeled sociopathic media. Consequently, the yearning for a golden age (with the usual elisions of nostalgia) is comprehensible, and helps explain why the Trump voter aren't only those who have suffered actual economic dislocation, but those who feel their deference and influence in the world threatened.
There is another shift regarding "work" and the "work ethic." It's not unusual for the older generation to look at the younger and decry their lack of work ethic, but here again there's something happening, though the full outline isn't yet clear. One of the shifts that happened along with the industrialization of America was a shift from the economic independence of "self-employment," to the dependencies of "wage labor." On the order of "self-employment," think of the family farm, the proprietor of a small business, or the professionals -- not the cowboys, but the doctors and lawyers and such. Part and parcel of economic individualism was the underlying assumption that, if one worked for someone else, and if one possessed the necessary drive, sufficient savvy, a dollop of thrift, then one could parlay that work into self employment. One could be, so to speak, one's own boss. For the vast majority of people, the hope for fiscal independence was delusional, and the need to engage in "wage labor," to hold down a "job," became a more or less permanent condition of life. Although economic independence was still the desired state, the wage laborer found themselves caught up within webs of dependency over which they had little influence, much less power. As an aside, it strikes me that the incipient forms of unionism were caught within a fundamental tension, or paradox, the felt need to assert some level of economic independence as well as a modicum of deference from the "powers that be," a felt need that could be satisfied only through another form of dependency, solidarity within a class identity and a dependency on others of that class, a solidarity and dependency that rankled against the felt need to assert one's self as an individual.
As a bass line beneath, there lurked notions of accountability and responsibility. Although Hofstadter would accuse me of overstating the case, I will go ahead and point out that the American soul is principally a Protestant soul and we have "inherited the moral traditions of rural evangelical Protestantism." Implicit in the Protestant soul is an "ethos of personal responsibility." Broadly speaking, it is the sense that we are primarily accountable to ourselves and responsible for our own salvation, not only in the exalted religious sense and in the mundane sense of subsistence. While the sense of accountability may extend outward to family and from there to one's local community, the further out one goes the more tenuous the accountability. I may have a duty to my wife and children, and I may need on occasion to be my brother's keeper, but I am not responsible for my neighbor's happiness. If Emerson saw the greatest sin as "limitation," the petty conformity to sanctified community standards, he would agree that, for the protestant soul at large, the greatest (if not the most salacious) sin was dependence, the failure to be self-reliant.
This "ethos of personal responsibility" works well enough for those who are self-employed -- particularly within that Jeffersonian, Jacksonian mythos of an agrarian America -- less well within an industrial America with systemic need for wage labor, where one is no longer accountable to oneself, but to an employer, who sets the terms and conditions to which they will be held accountable. The employee meets his responsibilities and consequently behaves responsibly when he or she conforms to the terms and conditions of work and can, thereby, not only support himself, but also meet his familial obligations. There is some autonomy associated with wage labor, insofar as it is not outright slavery, and one is bound only to the implicit contract that exchanges labor for cash. So long as he remains working, the wage laborer avoids dependence on others -- the extended family, charitable institutions, the government -- but unlike the small stake farmer, who was dependent only on his own labor, nature, and nature's god for his subsistence, the wage laborer is unambiguously dependent upon his employer, who not only sets the terms and conditions of work, but provides the work itself. The vast majority of wage laborers are not free not to labor, and to be without work is felt to be shameful, not only because one can no longer "support himself," but also because, having work, being gainfully employed, was an individual responsibility. So long as there is work to be done, jobs to be had, this ethos of personal responsibility seems justified, and those without work could perhaps be accused of a character flaw, the least of which was laziness, which kept them from labor.
While the "ethos of personal responsibility" may have had it origins in the traditions of rural evangelicalism, and while the wage laborer felt the obligation to work, the employer, subject to the imperatives of capitalism and imbued with the same ethos of personal responsibility, did not feel the same obligation to provide work, and when they did provide work, did not feel the obligation to provide necessarily "a living wage." By the "logic of capitalism," I mean simply this: business owners do not hire people out of a sense of largesse, or patriotism, or obligation to their employees, or because tax cuts have provided them with additional cash on hand. They hire people only in response to demand, and then they incur the expense of an employee only when they must to meet demand. To exact the greatest return on their investment, it is in their interest not only to keep the number of employee, but also their wages as low as possible. The imperatives of capitalism work on both large and small business, though for the latter, caught up within and subject to a local community, the imperatives of capitalism might find it necessary to compromise within "a preponderantly rural society with a broad diffusion of property and power," not to mention the American tradition "of unusually widespread participation of the citizen in the management of of affairs, both political and economic." As Hofstadter goes on to point out, however, "the growth of the large corporation, the labor union, and the big impenetrable political machine" were at some remove from and no longer particularly subject to local communities, or perhaps more precisely, no longer subject to the Mugwump type, those who commanded more localized wealth and influence. While the large corporation and the labor union had competing agendas, both were subject to the same unresolved tension, both stood against economic individualism and both were "clotting society into large aggregates and presenting to the unorganized citizen the prospect that all these aggregates and interests would be able to act in concert and shut out those men for whom organization was difficult or impossible." As Hofstadter notes, to a degree, "the Progressive movement was the complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of organization," or to put it another way, those who had lost a commanding voice in how things were organized.
There are two ironies or perhaps hypocrisies in all of this. The first and most obvious might be called the "for me" syndrome. The greatest of the great capitalists, of course, believed deeply in the economic individualism and the "ethos of personal responsibility" -- that is to say, they were deeply committed to their own autonomy, their own individual freedom to do as they damn well pleased to secure and increase their wealth. They were responsible for and therefore deserving of their wealth and entitled to exercise the influence that came with it. In other words, for the greatest of the great capitalists, economic individualism was a great thing "for me," though others should be subject to corporate economic and organizational needs. Moreover, for the greatest of the great capitalists, the rhetoric of economic individualism was a great thing "for me," in part because it justified their wealth, in part because it justified their efforts at organizing the social and economic structures to meet the needs of the modern corporation. Others are perfectly free to become "just like me" -- and clearly, if they had the necessary drive and savvy, they would become "just like me" -- but clearly they have failed. They clearly lack drive and must be compelled into labor, if not by whips and chains, then by push of penury. They clearly lack savvy and so must be subject to the terms and conditions of those who provide remunerative labor -- that is to say, accountable to the needs of the modern corporation.
The second and less obvious might be called the irony of progress itself. As Hofstadter points out, against the wholly independent individuals, "the processes of modern technology and machine industry -- not to speak of the complex tasks of civic life (much, much, much more so the complex tasks of urban life) make organization, specialism, hierarchy, and discipline utterly necessary." Within the agrarian world of Jefferson and Jackson, one can imagine the atomistic (or Adamistic) individual believing they were more or less a jack of all trades, the master of his own small piece of the world, subject to no one but himself, nature, and nature's God -- and so far as God is concerned, with sufficient piety, like Job, believing also that they could turn even nature and nature's God to account. As Hofstadter points out,
It had been their tradition to believe that prosperity and economic progress came not through big or monopolistic businesses -- that is, through the gains and economies of organization -- but rather through competition and hard work and individual enterprise and initiative. They had been brought up to think of the well-being of society not merely in structural terms -- not as something resting upon the sum of its technique and efficiency -- but in moral terms, as a reward for the sum total of individual qualities and personal merits. This tradition rooted in the Protestant ethic itself was being wantonly defied by the system of corporate organization.
Along with Thoreau, for example, they might critique the railroad as only an improved means to an unimproved end, but it nevertheless represented an improved means, and very few really want to forego the benefit of improved means. One could say the same thing about modern medicine, that it is only an improved means to an unimproved end, but when the "end" is saving and improving lives, it would seem foolish to reject wholly the benefit of its "improved means." Within a world that includes such "improved means," it is more difficult to imagine the atomistic (or Adamistic) individual as the master of his own small piece of the world, and as Hofstadter points out, "the progressives, object though they might to the many sacrifices of traditional values that the new society demanded, did not seriously propose to dismantle this society, forsake its material advantages, and return to a more primitive technology." Or in other words, I am suggesting that both the turn of the century "progressives" and our more current conservative radicals were and are "trying, in short, to keep the benefits of the emerging organization of life and yet to retain the scheme of individualistic values that this organization was destroying."
There is, perhaps, a third irony or paradox. The very idea of "democracy" seems deeply connected to the Protestant ethic as well -- society seen not as a structure, but as "we the people," or as Hofstadter put it above, "the sum total of individual qualities and personal merits." I'm not sure who said it first, but it is accepted as a truism that there are essentially two dangerous classes of people, the very poor and the very rich, those who have nothing to lose and those who have everything to lose. To put it simply, the many who have little tend to form mobs, while the few who have much tend to form repressive regimes to suppress and control the mob. Having few other tools at its disposal, the mob tends toward violence, which in turn is met with violence in order to maintain some semblance of social order. The French revolution is the principle case in point, and it is often accepted also as a truism that the American revolution escaped the fate of the French because there was greater social and economic equality within American society. Our political system can be democratic largely because the majority of people belong, neither to the very poor, nor the very rich, but rather to a broad segment of the population that could be considered "comfortable," or at least "comfortable" enough that they had no desire to over-throw the existing order of things, in part because they had the hope of joining the ranks of the "slightly more comfortable."
Then too, it is also accepted more or less as a truism that democracy and laissez faire capitalism go hand in hand, the "market place" being the place where "the people" go vote with their wallets, where the "sum total of individual economic decisions" act as a self-regulating "invisible hand" guiding the economy. A business competes for market share, or popular approval, and if a business succeeds (or fails) it does so because "we the people" have decided it should succeed (or fail) with our pocketbooks. There is, however, an inherent difficulty with laissez faire capitalism and the Jeffersonian idea that government is best when it does least, when a hands off approach, benign in an agrarian society, becomes cancerous. Within a wage earning society, where the comforts of the comfortable are contingent upon having secure employment, the imperatives of capitalism tend to work against the stability associated with the so-called "middle class," those who are comfortably neither very rich nor very poor. The more "laissez faire" the capitalism, the more the imperatives of capitalism work against the wage earner, suppressing employment, and where that is not possible, suppressing wages. Within a wage earning society, I probably don't need to point out that the imperatives of capitalism are ultimately self-defeating, insofar as employment and wages can be suppressed so effectively that they constrain demand, which further suppresses employment, which further suppresses demand, et cetera, into a vicious cycle of collapse. At this point, one of two things can happen. On the desirable side, at least from my perspective, "democracy" kicks in, not as laissez faire capitalism, but rather as government imposing constraints and mandates on laissez faire capitalism through redistributive taxation, relief for the poor and unemployed, various forms of economic stimulus, all designed to improve demand and reinvigorate employment. On the less desirable side, "autocracy" kicks in, and exercises its monopoly of power to "protect property" -- repressive measures designed, for the most part, to protect the power and influence of the rich against the growing discontent of "the people."
Neither the implicit "socialism" of the former nor the various styles of "autocracy" are particularly conducive to "individualistic values." The former does make one dependent upon the "state," reducing the whole human individual to a set of bureaucratic criteria that determine the amount and type of "assistance" available. The latter can "feel" more supportive, if not of "individualistic values," per se, then of certain "identity values," defined typically against race, religion, and ethnicity. They offer, not a redistribution of wealth per se, but a redistribution of power and influence, or more to the point, a reaffirmation of the prestige of the majority race, religion, and ethnicity -- particularly when the majority "feels" the erosion of power and influence and is seeking targets of opportunity for blame. (If not the Jews, then the Mexicans and Muslims.) They offer, again not a redistribution of wealth per se, but symbolic gestures aimed at "the people" while consolidating actual wealth among the autocrats. (The current tax cuts are a case in point, while everyone got a tax cut, they will not make a significant difference in the lives of "the people," but they have taken significant steps to consolidate and perpetuate the power and influence of the already powerful and influential.)
At the moment, the real threat to American democracy comes from the very rich, the incipient autocrat in the white house, his facilitators in the house and senate, and his so-called base, those white male protestants who feel most acutely the erosion of their power and influence, their prestige. At one point, Hofstadter writes that "one of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged." At the moment, I'm not sure where the sympathies lie. It seems clear enough that they don't lie with the "needs and sufferings of the underprivileged," else the "black lives matter" movement might have garnered more steam, and there would perhaps be a bit less vituperation directed at minorities generally. The so-called "me-too" movement might be a point of light, focusing attention on victims of sexual harassment, except that I'm pretty sure the movement is less about the Hispanic chambermaid accosted in a hotel room, more about those who seek the moral affirmation of being victims while enjoying extreme forms of celebrity privilege as they "come out." Even my wife finds it difficult to feel very sorry for the victims of Harvey Weinstein. It's not altogether clear, however, that the sympathies lie with the "power and achievements of the very successful" either. The sort of disdain aimed at "elites" is a case in point. Though he has in his actions come down squarely on the side of privileged, rhetorically Trump plays both sides of the fence, his "success" serving at once as sufficient evidence of his drive and savvy, while at the same time placing him outside and above the influence of the hated elites, particularly wall street and government elites who are, or so it is felt, uniformly corrupt.
There is, however, a strong consensus that we are divided, and that anything can become fodder for the war horses on either side of the divide, and that our divisions are more and more irreconcilable in part, or so I would suggest, because the core conservative ambition is simply impossible. It's not just that we cannot turn the clock back to a golden age -- a time when America was "great." It's that we want to turn the clock back without relinquishing the very conditions that make us want to turn the clock back in the first place. I might echo Hofstadter, and suggest that, in order to understand today's conservative sympathetically, "it is important to think of them not as stupid or incapable men who [are fumbling] a simple task, but as men of reasonable and often indeed of penetrating intelligence whose fate it [is] to attempt, with great zeal and resourcefulness, a task of immense complexity and almost hopeless difficulties." Having said that, however, I am not sure how much sympathy I want to extend, in part because there is one significant difference between the progressive of yore and the conservative of today. In the past, "the Progressive agitations turned the human sympathies of the people downward rather than upward in the social scale. The progressives, by creating a climate of opinion in which, over the long run, the comfortable public was disposed to be humane, did in the end succeed in fending off that battle of social extremes of which they were so afraid." I have suggested elsewhere that the conservative party seems no longer "disposed to be humane," and are, as I suggested in a previous post, not only cultivating a climate of fear and a culture of cruelty, but are also actively pushing us toward that "battle of social extremes."
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