Posted on 05/09/2004 6:38:43 PM PDT by quidnunc
America 2004? Actually, no. This was the lamentable state of affairs in mid-17th century England, as it teetered on the brink of civil war. But there certainly is something disturbingly familiar about this description of a body politic dividing into two unbreachable camps.
Like England under Charles I, when the Cavaliers — the royalist supporters of the king — and the Roundheads — Puritan upstarts led by Oliver Cromwell — went at it for seven years of war, the United States today is becoming two nations. This is not merely the age-old split between income groups, as Sen. John Edwards kept suggesting in his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but something even more fundamental — a struggle between contrasting and utterly incompatible worldviews.
Some describe the conflict as one between the "red" and the "blue" states, the right and the left, conservatives and liberals. But even though no one is about to behead our ruler and overthrow the government, as Cromwell's forces did when they captured Parliament in 1649, I find the parallel of the Cavaliers and the Roundheads to be the most apt. They grew to hate each other so much that they could no longer accommodate a common national vision. "I have heard foul language and desperate quarrelings even between old and entire friends," wrote one Englishman on the eve of conflict, and much the same could be said of us today.
The questions in our own uncivil war are: Is anyone winning? Which America most likely represents the future of our country?
The political division has grown wider in recent years. Now a clear geographic and cultural divide is emerging as well. Demographic studies show that Republicans and Democrats are less likely to live next door to each other, attend the same churches or subscribe to the same media.
America's Roundheads cluster in the South, the Plains and various parts of the West, while the Cavaliers inhabit the coasts, particularly the large metropolitan centers of the Northeast and Pacific Northwest. Each side has its own views, confirmed by its favored media. Fox TV, most of talk radio, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Sean Hannity speak for the Roundheads, supporting President Bush and America's global mission. The mainstream media, the universities and the cultural establishment, including most of Hollywood, are the voices of the Cavaliers, whose elites, like many of England's Cavaliers and Charles I's French wife before them, are most concerned with winning over continental opinion and mimicking the European way of life.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
Fort Devens Gone. Pease Air Force Base Gone. South Weymouth Naval Air Station Gone. Loring Air Force Base Gone.
Hanscom Air Force Base Going-----Portsmouth Naval Base going (despite 4 Republican Senators)-------Lincoln Labs Going sooner than you think
Instead of retired military expertise we'll have the "expertise" of retired EPA bureaucrats and welfare recipients
Do you mean the claim or the actuality?
No I'm not. However I believe the poster I was responding to was of that opinion, wrongly I believe. However, from the National Guard's webpage they do consider themselves their respective state's militia. Before the 16th President called for 75,000 'volunteers' to fight in his tariff war, these men reported to their governor and not to the President. The standing army was much smaller
Perhaps, but the Great Awakening seems to have come over the pond and was spearheaded by Scotch-Irish Calvinists. These were Cromwell's allies against the Catholic Irish. These guys went to the frontiers, as well as the coastal cities.
Sam Watkin's, in "Company Atch" ( a helluva book) wrote : "They are descendants of the good old Plymouth Rock stock, and we of the South are descendants of the proud and aristocratic stock of the Cavaliers." I'm sure this was partly tongue-in-cheek, and depicts the image Southerners had formed of themselves. It's a myth, which is why it persists. Pat Robertson is a descendant of old Virginia Cavalier stock, and is the antithesis of Cavalier, as understood today.
I'll go with the designation of Round-hat for conservative, both North and South. One issue today is the same as then: cosmopolitanism vs. self rule. The Cavaliers of old wanted to allow a world entity greater influence in England; that entity was Rome and Charles I was their agent.The new Round-hats oppose a different kind of external influence, that of the EU and the UN.
Oh well, I can see why Charles II would have been interested!
I'm not a yankee. My ancestors were Southern Republican Unionists and my religious heritage is that of the uptight, rock-ribbed, scowling, Protestantism that wants to ban alcohol (okay, so that's a problem when coming into Noachism!) and opposes state lotteries.
I was actually aware that the original Puritans drank (in those days, who didn't?), though their "liberal" descendants were early advocates of prohibitionism (which was finally enacted with Bible Belt support).
There's more to religion than deliberately attempting to live up to every "killjoy" stereotype someone has.
I am aware of that as well. However, as an old time Southern Republican whose roots lie not in Goldwater Dixieocracy but in the Federalist/anti-Masonic/Whig tradition I feel left out in the argument between liberals and cavaliers (I honestly don't think anyone even remembers Prohibition any more). As a Noachide I must acknowledge the validity of the Halakhically-permitted forms of alcohol, slavery, polygyny, and concubinage (quite a blow to my heritage), but I still identify with the long forgotten strait-laced Republican Puritan of previous generations who wouldn't play the lottery. If I wave this stereotype about like a flag it is because I am the only one on the conservative side of the spectrum who seems to remember it with all this libertarian garbage floating around.
And that is the first problem of your argument. You are confusing the hivings away from Puritanism by groups that have partial and common origins with Puritanism's lineal evolution, which is Unitarian. There is no doubt that fundamentalism had significant New England contributions to it and that it differed substantially from Old Virginia Anglicanism. But those fundamentalists became what they are by deviating away from Puritanism-proper, not by continuing it. Even Jonathan Edwards, the famed fire and brimstone "puritan," exhibited the beginnings of this split.
So was Edwards a proto-liberal or a proto-Fundamentalist?
The post "Great Awakening" churches had too much of a revivalist ring to them for the old guard strict English Puritan glastonbury thorn burning fanatics.
To this day Southern Primitive Baptists condemn any form of revivalism or missionary activity because salvation and damnation depend solely on divine election and on nothing else. As I said, there's a Primitive Baptist web page that actually quotes with approval Cromwell's theologian.
When the fundamentalist and evangelical calvinists drifted away both theologically and geographically, those old guard strict puritans remained and from them we eventually got unitarianism.
The Southern Calvinists drifted away to Arminianism (except for the Primitive Baptists who retain their original Calvinism). And the liberal Unitarianism of New England was a rebellion against the Calvinism of their ancestors. There may be some continuity (just as there may be some continuity between religious and Marxist eschatology) but the Puritans who became unitarians did so because they rejected the orthodoxy of their ancestors.
You are also forgetting something else. The South is the home of a unitarianism of its own, the so-called "oneness Pentecostals" who reject the "tr*inity" and insist that Heaven was vacant for 33 years. These people are the "holy rollers" and "snake handlers" of the Appalachian highlands, which, need I remind you, adhered to the Union during the Civil War. Kentucky never seceded, West Virginia seceded from Confederate Virginia and rejoined the Union, East Tennessee might have done the same had it not been for the presence of a Confederate army, and western North Carolina and northern Georgia were also home to Union sentiment. What do you have to say to this?
As a Noachide, btw, I do not believe in the "tr*nity."
Not really. Today's Bible Belt ascribes to a substantially more populist theology than Puritanism ever was and manages to combine it with two additional elements that Puritanism employed only sparingly or never at all: ideological agrarianism and an underlying strain of political conservatism.
There is nothing conservative about populism. It is identical to democracy in that it assumes a too optimistic view of human nature and that the majority will always choose the correct course. How any conservative could call himself a "populist" or a "libertarian" is absolutely beyond me. The fact that a libertine central government injects itself into local situations and nullifies local laws does not imply either populism or libertarianism (much less the abolition of the state).
As for agrarianism, for most of its history the entire United States was an agrarian society. The Midwest, though in lifestyle closer to the South, certainly joined New England in the War. And the Pilgrims did not start "grubbing money" the moment they got off the Mayflower. Until relatively recently, New England always had its share of yeoman farmers. Have you ever read the poetry of Robert Frost?
And as for conservatism, I suppose it depends on how you define the term. A "conservatism" whose only job is to conserve whatever institutions exist is just another humanistic ideology. It is the conservation of G-d's sovereignty that matters. And for most of the "19th" and "20"th Centuries New England was very conservative. Do you not remember that in 1936 it was only Maine and Vermont, not the South, that voted against FDR? Huh? Do yuh? Or perhaps you think Calvin Coolidge was some sort of red radical. And of course the income tax (now the bane of "populists") began as a populist measure aimed against "money grubbing yankees" and was supported by the South and opposed by the Northeast. Any comments?
And of course there is the uncomfortable fact that "radical" New England and its "unitarian" clergymen were the ones who opposed revolutionary France and saw Jacobins behind every bush in the "1790's" while the "conservative" South and its aristocrats (such as Thomas Jefferson) supported the Jacobins. Isn't this an embarrassment? The South seems to have come by its "anti-Jacobinism" rather late. Even William Lloyd Garrison and William Cullen Bryant were opponents of the French Revolution and Jefferson's support of it.
Finally, whatever links may exist between John Brown and the contemporary Left (and remember, Brown allowed his children to whip him when they had misbehaved in order to teach them the doctrine of the "atonement" and later expressed horror at the liberal tendency of his sons), the worship of Thomas Jefferson and H. L. Mencken (may his bones rot!) by "conservative Southerners" is absolutely infuriating to me. Just which side would these "conservative Southerners" have been on in Dayton, TN in 1925, GOPCapitalist? I know which side Mencken was on and which side Jefferson would have been on.
The single most interesting factoid on the entire thread. I shall ponder its strange charm all day.
The theological controversies that led to the separation of the Unitarians from the older Congregational body have been only briefly alluded to... The controversy which began in 1805 continued for about twenty years. The pamphlets and books it brought forth are almost forgotten, and they would have little interest at the present time. They gradually widened the breach between the orthodox and the liberal Congregationalists. It would be difficult to name a decisive date for their actual separation. The organization of the societies, and the establishment of the periodicals already mentioned, were successive steps to that result. The most important event was undoubtedly the formation of the American Unitarian Association, in 1825; but even that important movement on the part of the Unitarians did not bring about a final separation. Individual churches and ministers continued to treat each other with the same courtesy and hospitality as before. That the breach was inevitable seems to be the verdict of history; and yet it is not difficult to see to-day how it might have been avoided. The Unitarians were dealt with in such a manner that they could not continue the old connection without great discomfort and loss of self-respect. They were forced to organize for self-protection, and yet they did so reluctantly and with much misgiving. They would have preferred to remain as members of the united Congregational body, but the theological temper of the time made this impossible. It would not be just to say that there was actual persecution, but there could not be unity where there was not community of thought and faith. (Source.)
Will you admit you were wrong and the Unitarian did indeed "split from old guard puritanism"? My guess is no. You're too dishonest.
You thought I was calling on the President to call out the National Guard??? Not sure where you got that. I didn't say anything about them and do know the difference between the four branches of the military, the Guard, and the militia.
The only problem I can foresee with the President calling up the militia is that that role rightfully belongs to the Congress, as specified in the Constitution. However, I believe we can handily get around that when Congress is incapable of acting in the face of a clear and present danger to the country (as is the case when a significant number of the bastards are traitors who conspired amongst themselves and with our foreign enemies prior to going to war).
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