Posted on 11/11/2004 5:34:31 AM PST by A. Pole
If Bush wins," the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, "fascism is possible in the United States." Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions. She's wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush's security state as "soft fascism" in the Guardian last month. So is the endless traffic on the internet.
In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton persuasively describes it as "... a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity". It is hard to read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.
But this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don't understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.
Puritanism is perhaps the least understood of any political movement in European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption of Republican America. But Puritanism was the product of an economic transformation.
In England in the first half of the 17th century, the remnants of the feudal state performed a role analogous to that of social democracy in the second half of the 20th. It was run, of course, in the interests of the monarchy and clergy. But it also regulated the economic exploitation of the lower orders. As RH Tawney observed in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Charles I sought to nationalise industries, control foreign exchange and prosecute lords who evicted peasants from the land, employers who refused to pay the full wage, and magistrates who failed to give relief to the poor.
But this model was no longer viable. Over the preceding 150 years, "the rise of commercial companies, no longer local, but international" led in Europe to "a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before" and "the subjection of the collegiate industrial organisation of the Middle Ages to a new money-power". The economy was "swept forward by an immense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry". The kings and princes of Europe had become "puppets dancing on wires" held by the financiers.
In England the dissolution of the monasteries had catalysed a massive seizure of wealth by a new commercial class. They began by grabbing ("enclosing") the land and shaking out its inhabitants. This generated a mania for land speculation, which in turn led to the creation of sophisticated financial markets, experimenting in futures, arbitrage and almost all the vices we now associate with the Age of Enron.
All this was furiously denounced by the early theologists of the English Reformation. The first Puritans preached that men should be charitable, encourage justice and punish exploitation. This character persisted through the 17th century among the settlers of New England. But in the old country it didn't stand a chance.
Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God. From his doctrine of individual purification, the late Puritans forged a new theology.
At its heart was an "idealisation of personal responsibility" before God. This rapidly turned into "a theory of individual rights" in which "the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed". By the mid-17th century, most English Puritans saw in poverty "not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion ... but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will".
This leap wasn't hard to make. If the Christian life, as idealised by both Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of the individual soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and protected by the medieval church, becomes redundant. "Individualism in religion led ... to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric."
To this the late Puritans added another concept. They conflated their religious calling with their commercial one. "Next to the saving of his soul," the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman's "care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go." Success in business became a sign of spiritual grace: providing proof to the entrepreneur, in Steele's words, that "God has blessed his trade". The next step follows automatically. The Puritan minister Joseph Lee anticipated Adam Smith's invisible hand by more than a century, when he claimed that "the advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public". By private persons, of course, he meant the men of property, who were busily destroying the advancement of everyone else.
Tawney describes the Puritans as early converts to "administrative nihilism": the doctrine we now call the minimal state. "Business affairs," they believed, "should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality." They owed nothing to anyone. Indeed, they formulated a radical new theory of social obligation, which maintained that helping the poor created idleness and spiritual dissolution, divorcing them from God.
Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush's people in that they worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as people who believed that "the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian."
There were some, such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who remained true to the original spirit of the Reformation, but they were violently suppressed. The pursuit of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal distraction for the increasingly impoverished lower classes.
Ronan Bennett's excellent new novel, Havoc in its Third Year, about a Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable. An obsession with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush's America.
So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the US this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush's government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it's up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.
www.monbiot.com
Puritanism, as George Monbiot remarks (Comment, November 9), is little understood today. Sadly he only confuses the matter and tells us nothing about the roots of George Bush's view of the world. Far from viewing the concept of society as "redundant", English Puritans (like Calvin in Geneva) were inspired by the dream of building a godly, fair and disciplined new order. Inevitably this required constant intervention in people's lives and, whether they applauded or detested it, contemporaries would have agreed that the Puritan model was the exact opposite of Monbiot's minimal state.
Puritans also recognised a Christian obligation to help the "deserving poor" (eg the aged and sick) and acted on it. Admittedly, they rejected any obligation to help the "workshy", but that was wholly in line with the Elizabethan poor law and with attitudes in continental Catholic Europe - and indeed with New Labour and Democrat thinking, as well as the right, today.
It is also grossly unfair to label Puritanism the religion of bankers and industrialists. Most were country squires, yeoman farmers, small tradesmen and artisans. Very few confused the religious and commercial calling. John Bunyan and Oliver Cromwell, two archetypal mid-century Puritans, were indeed both "driven" men, but emphatically not driven by profit.
Monbiot relies too much on RH Tawney, whose vivid material reflected the very different spirit within the commercial sector of nonconformity in the late 17th and 18th centuries. The Puritan vision had been shattered by the failure of the English revolution and the survivors had evolved into a very different species, as remote from their founders as New Labour is from Karl Marx.
Prof Bernard Capp University of Warwick
Although the Diggers and Levellers who remained true to the original spirit of the Reformation were quashed in England, their political descendants, in New England, were soon pressing for free homesteads out west, and once there, were organising against the monopoly capitalism of the railroads and other "middlemen", before launching a Populist attack on the gold standard.
Had the patrician easterner John Kerry borrowed the anti-corporate policies of Ralph Nader, whose insurgent campaign consciously harked back to the Populists, he might have invigorated his campaign with the anti-big business rhetoric that another eastern patrician, Theodore Roosevelt, used to enlist support for his Republican presidency.
David Reed Northampton
Just another 'look how intelligent I am' twisting of history.
Leftists long to go back to the splendid feudal era when all peasants were obedient and grateful and didn't vote Republican.
Good call. Hayek covers that point rather well, as I'm sure you're aware.
I guess it's just more envy from across the pond.
"In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord, King James, by the Grace of God, of England, France and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, e&.
Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents, solemnly and mutually in the Presence of God and one of another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid; And by Virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the General good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.
In Witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord, King James of England, France and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini, 1620."
I think it could well be viewed as "proto-democratic" as well. In fact, it was a de facto attempt at self government on a quite small scale that was not informed by a broader political, historical and intellectual view. Also, the time may not have been ripe for any other approach.
One thing is for certain: A Socialist critique of Puritanism that seeks to slander current Christians as somehow the dupes of some sort of "corporate-facist" ideological manipulations goes beyond a deliberate misreading of history and into a realm of intellectual insanity.
We need to remember that Puritans, although very influencial, they were a marginal and quite peculiar sect within the Christiandom.
The authentic, traditional and orthodox Christian doctrine on the matters of economy and social justice are faithfully presented in the following encyclicals:
RERUM NOVARUM - ON CAPITAL AND LABOR
Centesimus Annus - Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum
What about the unfit (old, sick, crippled, retarded, deranged etc ...)? Should they eat?
Every liberal is a Christian-hating thug.
No, but many would be really surprised how many the "truly handicapped people" there are. Let us start with the retarded - if defined as those with the IQ below 70, we will have about 3%. This alone will make 8 million people in USA, add other categories and will might end up with much more.
We talk about if those who do not work, should not eat - so let us look at the food stamps program - it has a little above twenty million receipents and a little above twenty billion dollars to use. It comes to about $1000 per person per year or $80 per month. It seems to be reasonable, still many clamor for reductions in this program.
what do you propose for the partially handicapped?
Maybe partial help? What is your proposal?
And we agree on the larger point:One thing is for certain: A Socialist critique of Puritanism that seeks to slander current Christians as somehow the dupes of some sort of "corporate-facist" ideological manipulations goes beyond a deliberate misreading of history and into a realm of intellectual insanity.
It is useful to understand that the current perversion of 'welfare' principally bestows benefits on 'welfare workers.'
This has had the ironic effect of making personal charity damn near impossible because the tax burden to support the Welfare Workers is stifling.
But when personal charity is available, it works wonders.
It is ALSO useful to remember that personal charity is getting rare; one does not have to name names to understand that personal selfishness holds sway for many.
I remember a documentary a few years back in which the filmmaker inventoried the material possessions of everyone standing on a free lunch line in a economically disadvantaged section of the Bronx. He could not find anyone on the line who did not have any of the following: apartment, telephone, television, microwave and air conditioning. Some didn't have a car, but most did.
The "poor" live very well in the United States. Very well indeed.
In politics it can be relative. If the wealth disparity between top 2% and lower 50% is 1 to 1000, it is good for the aristocracy or monarchy.
But it is deadly for the republic. A person with $10,000,000 can destroy person with $10,000 very easily in a legal way. They are not equal.
Also 200 years ago you did not have to own a car or to pay electricity bill. You could get good job without perfect teeth. If you cannot afford car in today America, you are in dire poverty (with the exception of large cities). But you would not be poor in todays Poland (where public transportation can take you anywhere).
The "legal destruction" you mention of the poor by the rich sounds suspiciously like a socialist concept. In a republic where the rule of law prevails George Soros cannot destroy me, though he possesses far more than 1000 times my wealth. He didn't have much luck destroying the entire American electorate with his wealth either, you may have noticed.
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