Friday, December 29, 2023

Two Americas: The Hamiltonian Perseverance of a Republic

 In the previous essay, I gave an account of American history through the lens of Jefferson. A typological heuristic, Jefferson's vision of democracy (economic and political), expansion, material wellbeing (in his peculiar form of Epicurean Deism) has been termed an empire of space. It has been the reigning vision that has captured not only America, but through its Wilsonian permutation, the entire world. But it has not been the only sense of American civilization, faith, and history. While it is easy for many to blame today's plastic globalism upon America, with its hegemonic cultural exports (ranging from Hollywood comic movies to Black Lives Matter), that is not all there is to America. While there are common bonds that link freebooters fighting in Latin American Independence to US mercs floating about the Ukraine, there is an alternative way to see American culture. Rather than the triumph or zenith of Americanization, the current world order is a betrayal of America's original revolution, original founding, original principles; or, at least, they are a betrayal of an equally ancient conception or tradition.

Before giving a rapid overview of American history, combing over the same periods from a different vantage, I will define this alternative Hamiltonian-republican vision. Unlike the Jeffersonian vision, which remained unified through a singular party-system (usually in or around the Democratic Party), the Hamiltonians were always a minority and scattered. They did not always agree on the best strategy or policy, yet they did find unity around a few core ideas. 

First, the Hamiltonian idea of America is aristocratic. It is the demarcation, popular not so long ago, between a republic and a democracy. It is not the effort to repristinate an ancien regime of hereditary titles, but to defend a Whiggish sense of natural nobility. Great men, through ability, will surpass the common herd, and a political system should exist to reward this kind of energetic intellect. It might appear connected to business, or in some other competitive enterprise, but the few should not be yoked to the many. Rather the few should lead for the benefit of the many. The founding of America was to conserve the local elite, who demonstrated themselves through public service, not reinvent the world. Hierarchies will appear and these may be good. Leveling is utopia and destructive. Governance is how to let hierarchies of greater and lesser thrive together.

Second, the Hamiltonian idea is distinctly Christian (specifically Protestant). There is a founding faith culture that determines what an American is (from what one is not). This is not to say that there could or ought to be a church establishment at a national level. Rather, the Hamiltonian idea adopted the irenic Protestant Interest of eighteenth century Britain, a unity of many Protestant "denominations" that operated in a spirit of unity. No exclusive privileges were allotted to one church over another as "true" or sole. Rather, again, an internal competition would see the best Protestants thrive and worst dissipate, but all under the supreme guidance of Scripture, with lesser lights of reason and tradition offering guidance. This sense of culture defines America more than naked individuality (first as white men, then just as white, then mere Humanity). America exists to be a faithful people, forged in a particular way, not to simply absorb all things indiscriminately. 

Third, the Hamiltonian idea is nationalist. America was a nation conceived out of British cultural norms and British kin ties. While early America allowed (even encouraged) immigration, it was limited to a particular part of Europe. Northwest European Protestants could immigrate and be absorbed into a new ethno-genesis, that diverged, but was not fundamentally different, from Great Britain. America was not to think universally, but continentally, focused on its own internal developments. It should guard its own borders, not endlessly expand them. It should foster ordered liberty through stability and industrial growth. America was to be a world-power, though one that develop incrementally, not cancerously. To be an America was to belong to a particular place, with particular cultural norms, that could unite various regions in one.


Obviously this saga begins with the man himself, Alexander Hamilton, but it stretches back far beyond him. When Hamilton took up his pen against the parliamentary loyalist Samuel Seabury in The Farmer Refuted, he drew upon a deep well of British political tradition. The Whigs, who had ties back to parliamentary agitation against Charles I, had formed against royal efforts to foist a Catholic successor upon a Protestant nation. With the Glorious Revolution forcing James Stuart off the throne, a period of awkwardness set in. The first party-system, of Whigs and Tories, mutually recognized the throne of William III and Mary II, but on what grounds? Loyalists to the old king - Jacobites - threatened to embarrass the new regime. A king being chased out of his country, by a foreign army landing and marching towards the capital, was in no way a licit abdication. The legal fiction of an empty throne could not reasonably sustained. And not all Whigs rejected this reasoning. Some, such as scribbler John Trenchard or bishop Benjamin Hoadly, accepted that the nation had indeed risen up against a tyrant. It was not a democratic upheaval, but a form of that older Protestant notion where lesser magistrates had a right to resist the supreme magistrate when he violated his oath and law. It was the lords, the clergy, and the gentry who had refused to allow James to erode parliamentary privileges and covertly reestablish Rome within Great Britain. It was not abdication, it was the national right to defend the law and the faith of the realm. These Whigs remained vocal outliers to the main thrust of British politics, self-styled as patriots, though they were never far from the court of power. The Hanoverian succession, bringing German kings who respected parliamentary right and a wide sense of Protestant faith, secured this new arrangement, with Tory's discredited through their silence during the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. Whiggery had become dominant in the metropole, as well as fanning out through the colonies.

The question was: what kind of Whiggery? When Seabury defended the motherland as 'The Farmer', he was not postured as an arch royalist. It was the novel doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty over the colonies that he defended as a sure security for English liberty in America. When Hamilton took up his pen (joining other luminaries in New England and Virginia), he took it up as a patriot whig. He placed himself under the mantle of those advocates of William that had so embarrassed the establishment. While it is true that Hamilton, among a few others, attempted to defend the cause of American resistance to taxation through an appeal to old Stuart royalism (a strategy that Eric Nelson detected in his work, Royalist Revolution), it was not out of a reactionary turn towards absolute monarchy. Rather it was to establish colonial assemblies as parliaments for their particular corner of the empire. Westminster had no right to legislate internal affairs within these disparate colonies. It was the loss of parliamentary privileges for these assemblies that mobilized them to resist. And resist they did, eventually declaring in 1775-76 that the Continental Congress had a right to dissolve allegiance to Parliament (and even the king!), as America was and ought to be an independent nation. The compact between the colonial assemblies and Parliament had been dissolved through the latter's tyranny. It was novel application of the lesser magistrate doctrine to defend a patriotic whig settlement.

This revolution was not a precursor to the soon French Revolution (or that was not how many American "True Whigs" saw it). It was a conservative revolution to preserve their rights, whether it was mercantile impoverishment that Boston (and, by extension, all of New England) suffered or the threat to property/gentility that many Virginians detected. Even Friedrich von Gentz, an Austrian statesman and ally to arch-conservative Metternich, considered the American Revolution to be defensible in counterrevolutionary terms (against novelties within the British parliamentary system) and not comparable to what had happened in France. Not all republics were intrinsically "revolutionary" in this novel sense of the term. The Swiss, Venetian, Genoese, and Dutch republics all preserved a social order against radical leveling. It was in this spirit that much of the revolutionary generation ascended to authority, first under the Articles of Confederation (which effectively continued the Continental Congress) and then the Constitution of 1787. It was a revolution to preserve and enhance the government, a national establishment that could preserve the liberties of the individual states from internal convulsions and civil war. Shays' Rebellion only demonstrated that this need was great, as Massachusetts drowned in debts. Hamilton (among other young patriot whigs) took the initiative.

It was no surprise then that these talented men took up the reins of government behind the paragon of the revolution: George Washington. In no way a proto-jeffersonian, Washington was a patriotic whig through and through, influencing Hamilton as much as Hamilton influenced him. It is possible to call this a Washingtonian paradigm as much as a Hamiltonian one. America needed strong leadership, a natural hierarchy, and a defense of Christian virtue; all of these needs intensified after the unfolding of the French Revolution. Wary of anything more than a constitutional monarchy (and even this accomplishment had been done violently by an assortment of radicals), Washington steered a neutral path away from any open support for the new French Republic. Even former critics of the Constitution of 1787, such as Patrick Henry, rallied to the party of the government, the "Federalists," when they proved willing to resist the Jacobin atheism that threatened to spill over into America. Washington's government (with Adams as spiritual extension) saw an ordered expansion into the Old Northwest Territories, planned to construct infrastructure to bind the country, support America's trade with her old mother England, and promote wide Christian virtues.  It was an ordered liberty of limited government, an aristocratic air, and a Protestant nation that motivated these former Whigs to become the willing government. Jefferson threatened this as a rabid democrat and atheist (despite attracting not a few Christian Evangelicals, who found the older Protestant establishments too stuffy and hierarchical). Despite warnings of imminent collapse and revolutionary bloodletting, 1800 did not see America radically transformed, but it did see the mortal wounding of the Federalists, a new age and spirit had dawned.

Hamilton, notoriously, perished in a dual with Vice President Aaron Burr (a man that Hamilton considered to be far more dangerous than Jefferson, a Caesarist with rabid ambitions). However, the lead up to the duel is rarely considered as symbolic of this republic tradition. Hamilton worried about Jefferson and wrote, in 1802, that the former Federalists should rechristen themselves as a Christian Constitution party; opposed to Jefferson's blithe deism and willingness to subvert the republican order of the federal constitution. This posture was not cynical either; Hamilton, like many of the revolutionary generation, seems to have moved into the warmth of Christian orthodoxy as the French Revolution threatened a very different kind of Enlightened spirit than what had dominated America during the 1760s and 70s. The herd threatened to level all differences, nature being destroyed along with Human civilization. Hamilton had embraced a kind of amor fati before his duel, condemning the practice in an essay written before the final confrontation. On his deathbed, Hamilton reached out to several pastors, finally securing the permission of the Episcopal bishop of New York, to be received into the church and given communion before passing on into eternity. From this moment on, the Federalists were in disarray as the Jefferson victory seemed guaranteed and assured.

However, not all was well within the Jeffersonian coalition. Former Federalists joined with some former Jefferson allies who believed their chief had betrayed his vision. Some southerners were in favor of Jefferson because of his strict construction of the Constitution (despite Jefferson believing every successive generation should write its own constitution) and states' rights. But these had been strategic maneuver before a federal government dominated by Washington and Hamilton. Jefferson's agrarianism had even moderated, accepting that industry could find a place within a national republic. These critics of Jefferson, the tertium quid, sought to preserve something of the old hierarchy in the South, not just white masters over black slaves (which some northern Federalists had criticized) but also elite whites over poor whites. They sought limited federal government to preserve southern rights as much as to preserve southern hierarchy. John Randolph and John Taylor offered a conservative Virginian criticism against both nationalism and democracy. These seemed to be able allies with northern Federalists who disdained Jefferson's illegal purchase of Louisiana and radical embargo policy, both of which seemed to empower the federal government. Madison's moderation was also strained with a new war against Britain - the War of 1812 - to settle boundary issues. American perseverance (even if not achieving victory) demonstrated that the federal system could work.

The result of this war was a further metastatization of Jefferson's party. The spirit of democracy continued to range, as Americans moved with breakneck speed across the vast undeveloped continent. The second Great Awakening exploded further, as a democratized spirit of Evangelicalism manifested in a variety of ways. For some, the 2nd Great Awakening was an intensification of American Protestant faith, though with more emotion than the stuff rationalism of more established denominations. This distinction further intensified the process of rationalism, as Unitarianism (though still committed mostly to a Hamiltonian vision) separated further from the evangelical Calvinism of Presbygationalism (as the fusion of the two carried on apace). Baptists and Methodists, emphasizing Human effort, also further spread across the Continent like a lightning strike. But this religious fervor also intensified in more radical directions. Some found more utopian visions more compelling, not only in founding various cults (e.g. Shakers, Mormons) but also in secularized hopes for the future. The pre-Marxist socialism of Charles Fourier or Robert Owen influenced some who sought to build a new world, devoid of stultifying tradition or orthodoxy. These divisions helped stiffen some Evangelicals against this rejection/destruction of Christianity, welding to the ordered liberty of a commercial republic.

Thus, the growing sense of national well-being attracted some former Federalists to join with those Jeffersonians that had embraced industry and mild aristocracy. These National Republicans drew hostility from those conservative tertium quid, but also from the shifting bulk of Jefferson's republicans, who did not like this seemingly preferential treatment to those natural elites (whether in truth or not) who had become powerful in business, finance, and land owning. While these would catalyze around Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party, the National Republicans had a temporary victory in John Quincy Adams, who painted a grand and glorious vision of the American republic in his inaugural address. The grandiose vision for a national academy, observatory, university, crisscrossed with national roads and canals, was laughed to scorn. This vision was not only national from the son of a former president (who smacked of aristocratic privilege), it was also distinctly Christian. America was to be a land of faith and freedom, where liberty was power. But this vision passed away with the National Republicans, now broken down to an impotent opposition against The People's President. The war against privilege carried into Jackson's bombardment of the Second Bank of the United States. The question was not about state banks or hard money (both of which Jackson was ambivalent about), it was about the influence of aristocracy over The People. Nicolas Biddle, president of the Bank, was notorious for his frank aristocracy, who not only conducted finance, but unleashed a Hellenic revival in architecture and sponsored literary magazines. The end of privilege was at hand.

The National Republicans had not lost hope. Under the wily and energetic leadership of Henry Clay, the rump party spearheaded an effective (though somewhat incoherent) opposition. Jackson's religious flippancy, combined with his Freemasonry, helped to spark a grassroots Christian backlash in New England. The Anti-Masons (America's first third-party) detested the silk-stockings of the National Republicans, but they saw the churches (and republican government) under threat from the growth of the lodges. Free Masonry was not just a secret society, but degraded the exoteric Protestant faith of Evangelicals. Similarly, though the tertium quid had backed Jackson's limited government and hostility to infrastructure, they disdained his executive tyranny as The People's Tribune. Still suspicious of northern industry, these disgruntled southern conservatives joined with the others to form a party drawing on that old republican tradition: Whiggery. As those parliamentary lords and gentry resisted a tyrannical king, so too did the American Whig Party resist King Andrew and his systematic level. Civil government had long ceased to drawn the talented and gifted. Rather civil office was now to reward the victorious party; to the victor goes the spoils. When in office, the Whigs practiced the same, though now the second-party system seemed to reflect the first. It was the elitist captivity of America by the Whigs or mob-rule in the Democrats.

The Whig coalition struggled to hold together. Their victory over Jackson's heir, Martin Van Buren, brought internal division. William Henry Harrison, a moderate of a National Republican persuasion, perished early, leaving the presidential chair to John Tyler, an old tertium quid. The National program of infrastructure smashed against the immovable shoals of His Accidency's intransigence. Conservatism meant limiting federal expenditure that disadvantaged the old chiefs of Virginia. There was not to be a new national bank, no new national infrastructure, and the protective tariff (that had threatened to tear apart the Union through South Carolina's nullification) was tabled. Tyler's presidency led into a resurgent Democracy, unifying the Whigs once again around Henry Clay (only to lose), who carried on opposition to expansionary plans. The New Jackson, James Polk, had betrayed northern Democrats by refusing any further expansion into British Canada, but he had set his eyes on south's border with Mexico. Northern and Southern Whigs unified in opposition to this war, as well as to any territorial expansion (considered an unjust vote-catching expedition to expand slavery by the freshman representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln; a sentiment shared among many Northern Whigs). The war ended in victory, though with some mild territorial concessions (including California and the southwest), seeing the Democrats smart as the heroic general Zachary Taylor took the Whig's banner. However Taylor's candidacy (and victory) in 1848 was not done out of party partisanship. Taylor saw himself in the spirit of Washington, a patriot and republican seeking to preserve Union against intriguing faction.

However, Taylor had also spelled the end to the incoherent conservative unity within the Whig party. Slavery had become the chief issue debated on the national stage. Northern Whigs and Democrats (for various reasons) became increasingly opposed to an indiscriminate expansion of the Peculiar Institution. Southern Whigs and Democrats (for differing reason) were opposed to any infringement on Southern Rights, namely the right to move to new territories with one's chattel. While Southern Whigs had opposed territorial expansion, they now had no choice but to resist. Thus, this conservative opposition found itself leagued with Southern Democrats, as well as that heresiarch John C Calhoun, who advocated a new national birth - an independent South. Whigs tottered on with the death of Taylor, under the presidency of Millard Fillmore. The old Hamiltonian spirit seemed to be in retreat and in confusion. Southerners were without a party, or rapidly displaced within the Democracy. Northern Whigs were torn between rival movements. For some, slavery had become a pernicious institution that retarded the national industry, and must be withered. Some Northern Evangelicals began to see the institutional as fundamentally incompatible with a Christian republic. And given its racial basis, slavery also smacked as dilution of the national character (why not free them and send them back to Africa viz. Colonization societies?) 

There was also a new substantial problem: immigration. It was not only that Catholics had begun to immigrate to America in greater and greater waves (from Ireland and Germany). It was that naturalization had become almost frictionless, minting new voters at a harrowing rate. Cities became slums and voting became increasingly open demonstrations of fraud, as votes were bought, voters intimidated, and ballot boxes stuffed. Whig countermeasures were often anti-democratic, deleting votes that were from unworthy electors. Nevertheless, the threat of these non-Americans (despite them being white) and non-Protestants (despite them being Christian) seemed to threaten the basis of republican government. The ordered liberty was transformed into the material pandering to the Irish. Freemasonry and infidelity was on the rise with a Roman Catholicism that rejected Protestant norms of Sola scriptura and Sola fide. These native Americans believed immigration must be curbed and naturalization could only come through assimilation. Public schools were founded to teach the basics of American Protestant civilization to the new immigrants, as well as basic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic. As Whiggery imploded, an American Party could take its place. Or, at the least, they could become a controlling caucus in the other alternative party: the Republican Party.

As much a nod to the post-Jefferson National Republicans as it was to a broader tradition of free government against tyranny, the Grand Old Party unified around the slave issue. Southern conservatives resented these black republicans, who made common cause with some northern Democrats who had radicalized into Free Soil. The election of Abraham Lincoln, who idolized Henry Clay and was a consummate centrist in party politics, saw the conflagration of the nation and the bloody hurricane of civil war. The details of the war are not necessary, but it is important to note that the unquestionably dominant GOP in Congress during these years took efforts to restore the Hamiltonian spirit. Protective tariffs were passed, infrastructure bills were passed, railroad development through land sales was passed. There was a need to restore the sense of ordered liberty that had eroded during the Jacksonian years. The war's end and the death of Lincoln unleashed a wave of radicalization to punish the defeated and broken South. The supplanting of Lincoln's Vice President, Andrew Johnson (a staunch old-fashioned Jacksonian), with the conquering Ulysses S Grant led to further GOP domination, but also divisions. Northerners were disgusted with the growing labor radicalism that had associated further with the Northern Democracy. Monetary inflation, labor protection, and leveling threatened to tear apart of natural aristocracy of Free Labor. In other words, wealth was generated through skill and hard work; efforts to redistribute or debase the currency were a government policy to equalize. Northern Democrats appeared as a new kind of Jacobin, one that had the flare of the Paris Commune behind it, after another minor revolution in France during 1873.

Southerners were also divided. The slaves were freed and Southern property-holders had to make sense of what to do. There was easy enough unity in resisting Reconstruction and radical proposals of Reconstruction, but even those had begun to fade. The behavior of the freedmen and the agitation for redistribution had soured many Republicans, even former radicals, on these efforts. The most staunch radicals often found themselves back into the Democratic Party (e.g. Salmon Chase, Benjamin Butler). But what was the basis of Southern Unity? Should the Democracy reform as the party of White unity? Could conservative Democrats (even some Republicans) rally the votes of the freedmen to recreate an ordered society? Often the strongest cries for Jim Crow came not from the old planters or masters, but poor whites who were forced to live cheek by jowl with those deemed inferior (though now competing for jobs). Poor white hostility to slavery translated into poor white hostility against blacks, asking for exclusionary legal measures (now that programs for Colonization died off). The Republican election of Rutherford Hayes marked a kind of effective transition: Reconstruction was over, the South could handle itself, but the pull of government was in that industry that could propel America to national greatness.

The GOP era of the Gilded Age has often been maligned as the time of Robber Barons - those unscrupulous capitalists who the state under the most vulgar form of party patronage. Pennsylvania and Ohio's politics appeared to be mere appendages of Rockefeller's Stand Oil empire. Grant's notorious corruption had briefly sparked a backlash in the Liberal Republican movement - only to fold as it collapsed under its own incoherence. The spirit of a talented elite that ought to guide the government converted not a few Republicans into staunch liberals. Free-trade, gold-standard, laissez-faire governance. Was this a repudiation of Hamilton, the man who had advocated quasi-protective tariffs and subsidies for industry? Not exactly. America was not a fledgling nation of underdeveloped potential. It was now the leading producer for Europe and the world. American industry dominated on the world-stage, displacing Great Britain and slightly above Europe's other major heavy-weight: Germany. Reforming taxes, tariffs, civil service, and various regulations was to free up America's great potential. It was how a number of these Republicans combined with Democrats to elect the only disruption of GOP domination in the White House: Grover Cleveland. But as Populists, who would soon take over the Democracy in the name of Jefferson, put it: Cleveland was an arch Hamiltonian. He was conservative Democrat, more similar to the tertium quid in the past, who opposed federal tariffs/taxes/infrastructure in the name of the old Constitution. However, even as Liberal Republican Mugwumps disagreed with the Stalwarts of the party, they shared the old vision. America was a distinctly Christian nation, affirmed in New York vs Trinity Church, marked with a Protestant commitment to education (seen in evangelizing efforts, warts and all, to the Indian tribes out West). America had a unique national culture, which ought to absorb all the European immigrants who sought to be citizens (Asian immigrants were often disqualified from naturalization). America possessed a natural aristocracy, manifest through competition. The so-called Robber Barons were not titans far beyond all control; many times Rockefeller was nearly destroyed by other, more agile, competitors. He never had a total grip on the market that later progressives saw. Instead, a natural elite should shepherd America into greatness.

While some liberals then, following Cleveland, disdained empire as a perversion of the American republic (also threatening national dilution through bringing other, non-white, races into the nation), others saw America's role on the stage as the great imperial republic. A Christian Rome had taken the world-stage once again. The agitation of this spirit led to smash&grab of the Spanish-American War. The rise of Theodore Roosevelt marked this interpretation of national greatness. To think continentally meant also to think in terms of the sea. Great powers waxed and waned upon the open waters. The Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine - authored by John Quincy Adams that ratified Washington/Hamilton's continental mercantile neutrality - was in someways a logical extension. America's continental focus must include the Caribbean and Latin America. The Panama Canal was not just a question of conquering over *there*, it was for the well-being of American trade. The Open Door policy in Asia was to secure national wealth through a policy of limited free-trade (at least for all the major powers). Roosevelt, though marked with his association with Progressivism, saw his role as America's natural nobility leading the masses. Reforms and regulations were a means to protect the least people from abuse; that was the role of a public servant. With Roosevelt's quarrel with his successor Taft, the Democracy had a resurgence in Wilson. And while Wilson would eventually shove America into a global role, Roosevelt had been the first advocate for Britain and the Great War. Why? Did he want to make the American flag the flag of the world? Did he seek to construct a League of Nations? No: it was a question of America's honor as a great-power, standing against her chief rival.

With the war's conclusion, Republican domination returned through the 1920s. Immigration restrictions took root, as industrial need (as well as foreign agitation) was met. Moral reforms of the Christian republic carried on, with the prohibition of alcohol to cleanse the national spirit from its corrupting effects. Abraham Kuyper's earlier visit to America, that Dutch theologian and counterrevolutionary prime minister, came with his stern genealogical warning. Good Protestants (especially Dutch Protestants) must remain loyal to the GOP - the Christian Party of Hamilton against the Jacobin Party of Jefferson. Despite Cleveland (and later Wilson) being Presbyterians, and many GOP candidates being, like James Blaine or Taft, Unitarians or agnostics, it was about the general ethos of what the party's represented. The GOP had within itself a tradition of aristocracy, nationalism, and Christianity that had fueled Independence's counterrevolutionary tendencies. It was not mere wild speculation as the GOP pushed to cleanse pornography, prostitute, drugs/alcohol, and various other forms degrading smut from the public (whether this worked or not).

But this was not to last. While Warren Harding had shut-off the foreign policy (and subsequent domestic policy) revolution of Wilson, this catechonic personage could not last. Hoover was the last to resist through restraint, but inaction was interpreted as failure and callous indifference. The Great Depression appeared to intensify without government intervention (whether bank-holidays, price freezes, wage-improvements, or state insurance) and the GOP's protective tariff seems to have made all worse (as America's international market withered). The rise of Franklin Roosevelt, and his coalition, shattered Republican resistance. The tepid GOP counterattack in Alf Landon broke against the New Deal wall. Eventually the GOP, or aspects of it, made its peace with Roosevelt, though the Courts smashed the most radical elements of the New Deal and Second New Deal. The issue was now foreign policy, and Dr New Deal through off his white coat for the military accoutrement of Dr Win the War. GOP resistance to a war in Germany was battered through accusations of brownscare (that behind every peacenik was a Hitlerite), but also through the carrot of mutual support. FDR promised to support a defense of the Open Door against the rampaging Japanese Empire, if the GOP would back a European war. The deal was struck, the attacks came, and the US awoken as the world giant against the world's two other major industrial powers: Germany and Japan. The Soviet Union had exhausted the onslaught of the Germans (equipped with give-away military supplies through FDR's Lend-Lease) and Japan had nowhere near the potential to win a sea war against an America that had turned fully to wartime production.

The end result of the War saw no new Harding to put a stop to a new global world order. The United Nations soared into existence, running roughshod over the few isolationist naysayers. GOP opposition seemed to twist primarily into slowing the foreign/domestic policy revolution that the booming post-war years ushered in. Robert Taft, senator of Ohio and arch-critic of FDR, was set aside for Eisenhower, the victorious general who had embraced being a Me Too Republican - a New Dealer in a lower gear. This impulse carried on through America's world market dominion. GOP could make barbs at Democrats being insufficiently focused on the right area (Truman's focus on Europe had allowed Asia to go Communist). Additionally, Roosevelt Liberals who had hoped to be partners with the USSR in this Wilsonian world-order were tarnished with Communism, especially as Stalin showed no interest in this project. The Redscare of the late 40s and 50s, combined with Truman's failure in Korea, helped launch the Republicans into power, but with little sign of changing tact. Civil Rights had become a new sticking point, with Eisenhower intervening in the South. Christianity was removed from schools, secular health/psychology education settled into the public schools, and the fairly agnostic Eisenhower's "faith in faith" was sufficient to posture believing America against atheist Soviet Union. Nixon's narrow loss to Kennedy's theft only carried on the pendulum swing, as Democrats punched against Republicans for being too weak on the Soviets. This carried onto into Vietnam, where libertarian adjacent Barry Goldwater was tarred with being too extreme in his hawkishness. America could not go it alone to smash its communist enemies (no Curtis LeMay or Douglas Macarthur nuking Communist China or Vietnam).

The failures of the newest renditions of the New Deal, the transformation of the liberalism and leftism within the Democratic Party, and the loss of Southern Whites in the Dixiecrat revolt, allowed Nixon to gain the presidency and, through his geopolitical realism (ending Vietnam and finding peace with China), gave him a smashing victory over New Left McGovern. But what was Nixon's policy? He was a Me Too Republican and the kooks - who advocated for isolationism, anti-communism, Christian nationalism, allowing states/local communities to deal with racial problems in their own way, and allowing businessmen to what they wanted when it came to labor relations - were mere instruments. The kook insurgency (whether on the outside fringe in the John Birch Society, or made more mainstream through William F Buckley's National Review) continued apace. Nixon's disgrace, Ford's even more tepid Me Too liberalism, and Carter's anemia saw the rise of Ronald Reagan. This, in many ways, was a Hamiltonian counterrevolution. In light of geopolitical realignments, with America's manufacturing supremacy flagging, Reagan allowed the kind of pivot away from New Deal domination. Not only were taxes slashed to free up investment (even if it is something of a bogus economy), but protective tariffs were passed against Japanese dumping. The air controller strike was smashed, even as Reagan praised the autoworker's union. Racial concerns had broken off many ethnic whites who had been core Democratic voters, frustrated over forced bussing, loss of jobs, and cultural radicalization. As insincere as it was, Reagan's open praise for Christianity and God seemed to rearticulate an older whiggish vision. Reagan, however, was nothing more than a head. He was not a statesman, but a vessel, carrying both this old conservative vision, but also the watery neo-Me Too policies of Republican liberals. After the Iran-Contra debacle, this latter faction, in George Bush, James Baker, and Admiral Poindexter gained ascendency. Immigration restrictions were further relaxed, NAFTA was sketched out under the presidency of Bush, and a rules-based international order (as opposed to a clear-cut nationalist focus) took initiative.

Democrats had learned from their losses and adjusted to the new dimensions of the political economy. The New Democrats won a smashing success with Bill Clinton, who maintained some of Reagan's economic policies while ejecting all questions of religious or ethnic nationalism. Clinton was undefeated against GOP efforts to challenge, though Republicans issued efforts to roll back the culture war, which had (since the 70s) normalized abortion, drugs, pornography, homosexuality, and a variety of other practices that fundamentally rejected any sense of America as a distinctly Christian (let alone Protestant) nation. The GOP victory over Clinton's successor Gore was nothing but a Pyrrhic victory. Using the old Whig tactic of tossing out "hanging-chad" votes, Bush ran on his father's moderate Me Too internationalist against the hawkish humanitarianism of the Clinton years. 2001 changed Bush's posture, embracing the most radical Neo-Wilsonian "Neo-conservative" elements who believed America alone could bear the force of global democratic revolution. Being purged by 2004, the old internationalists came back. But what was left of the GOP? Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul both represented displaced fringe, representatives of that older Conservative milieu that found a place (no matter how awkwardly) at Nixon and Reagan's table. George W Bush could fight good culture war in defense of traditional marriage and with faith based initiatives, but these were watered down through ecumenism (Muslims and Jews, not just Christians were welcome as part of an American faith). Immigration continued apace. The TARP Act, in light of the Housing Market crash, was the last straw. An insurgency formed in the Tea Party to reject this federal overgrowth, which threatened to destroy the last vestiges of an old national Christian republic. Yet the result within the GOP was to nominate two moderates (McCain, Romney), who aped the popular outrage while having no interest in carrying it out. 2015/16 seemed to be another year of this, off the clear victory Obama had brought to the Democratic Party, until the unexpected Donald Trump gained success. Whatever his personal commitments, he rhetorically postured on the side of cultural conservation (despite being neck deep in smut), anti-immigration, and scaling down internationalism for Reagan's old nationalist slogan: Make America Great Again.

The MAGA realignment came off the heels of the Tea Party, whose prime candidacy of Ron Paul was shutdown in 2012. Despite Trump being fairly centrist on a number of economic and cultural issues, he had returned the Reagan emphasis on freeing up industry and using tariffs against economic antagonists (this time China). His lost in 2020 has only galvanized supporters. What will this amount to? Will there be a resurgence of "A Republic, not a Democracy" rhetoric against "Our Democracy" of the rules-based order? Even if Trump himself is nothing but a bomb, will there be a resurgent Hamiltonian spirit: one that values nationalism, Christianity, and a natural elite that does not cow before the masses? This alternative account is to fill in the first. Jefferson and Hamilton are heuristic lenses to see American history. The material, expansionary idealism of Jefferson, the one most associate with America, is not the only tradition. There is another way to frame American history, and I hope this short, and incomplete, essay will spark imagination to further conceptualize what possibilities are at hand, or lay dormant, waiting to be stirred

Monday, October 16, 2023

Upon the Roads of Time: A Niche Intersection of Geass & Deus Ex

 **This analysis is an essay based on the three endings of the 2000 video game Deus Ex read alongside the anime Code Geass. There are plot spoilers & this is probably of no interest if you do not know either**



The intersection of time, and the potential springing forth in any direction, is a pregnant possibility for the sons of men. The tripartite infusion of Past, Present, and Future (all dwelling within one another) cries out for Redemption from Eternity. Every Future requires a Past to supersede, even Present suspends Past and Future, every Past requires a Future to eject. In these two worlds, the Eternal Marriage of Time is fleeting, but this Marriage can only come about through an Opening, that is, the priority of the Future. I will offer my own analysis of conjuncture between the three final forces in the world of Geass, alongside the possible endings for the messianic JC Denton in Deus Ex. Hopefully some mental sustenance will emerge:


Past: One option, often prized among some wooden traditionalists, is to overcome the struggles of time through snapping connection with the Future. The Present is swallowed in a Past state that is valorized and no permitted to move on. Instead, a novelty is opened through the shutting down of temporal flow. Change is no longer possible, and thus a kind of creaturely paradise is opened. It would be like Adam being returned to the Garden without the possibility of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil (however the Garden will no longer expand). It is a prison, but it is happy.

This corresponds, in Geass, to the plans of King Charles zi Britannia. At the outset of the show, Charles appears as simply a cruel meritocrat, forcing his children to compete for succession, proving their worth. His stated ideology is Darwinian, forced competition on a ruthless field so that the best may rise to claim the throne. But such is all a rouse, for Charles has much greater intentions. With his brother VV and the relocated mind of his beloved Marianne, Charles hopes to overcome the deep flaw within mankind: secrecy. It is the universal boundaries of Mind, which Charles calls 'God', which allows men to remain separated from each other. If, using the power of Geass, a machine was built to shatter this psychic web (unleashing his planned Ragnarok) 'God' would die and people would be liberated from lonely (and malevolent) secrecy. It was this ability to hide yourself that led to the mortal wounding of his brother (leading to his semi-immortal Geass state). Salvation for man would be when all shared a single consciousness, no longer able to be left behind or lost. Lelouche puts an end to this project (at a cost), but it represents an attempt to freeze the Past. The return to the Golden Age is at hand.

Though it may not seem like it, this analogously fits the Helios decision in Deus Ex. Helios, the fused AI who controls the world's networks, may seem like a way of the Future. Man desires to worship, to receive judgement, and the gods of our own hand (ie AI self-altering algorithms) will provide this for us finally. While the nomenclature Helios (who is the fusion of the Icarus and Daedalus AIs) may appear to be the next form of Mankind, it is rather a sophisticated way to Return. Worship of the Sun is the zenith of ancient temple worship, the high point of civilization (in all its bloody splendor). The Sun is the symbol of empire and unity, flooding the world with its light. It is benevolent autocracy, which Helios will finally allow. Access to govern all things and manage all people, order would be restored without self-interest. Merged to Denton, Helios will be able to feel and think, in a way its data-processing algorithms cannot. With clear messianic connections ("we will be what we will be"), Helios is the godman, but one that is a reverse. Man took a Spirit and dwelt in the Cloud. This is, seemingly, a way to square the Human problem, to restore the Past (but now right), but it obviously raises a question: how do we know this will work? How will man live if he is absorbed into a Total democracy, where every feeling, sentiment, thought, and interest can be considered and cross-referenced? The Future is closed, the Past is the End, and the Demiurge reigns.

Present: Another solution is to shut off the Present from both the Past and Future and eternalize itself. This is what prince Schneizel represents through the use of the FLEJA system, most radically introduced through the Damocles project. This is basically the state of universal empire through nuclear arms. Resist and be obliterated. The age of resistance is over, but there's no real completion. Britannia has finally achieve a kind of global dominion, that it struggled to gain over its main competitors (China, Europe). FLEJA is the ultimate nuclear deterrence (if it works), stalling out history. There is no completion, there is no return to a golden age. Whatever Now is, it won't get any worse. Humans are malleable and they can accept a permanent order that, even as chronos continues to flow, there will be no more kairos. History has come to an artificial end under a universal empire and the fiction of a sovereign emperor.

This is not so different from siding with the Illuminati and liquidating Bob Page. The Illuminati were, in a sense, the source of all the trouble in the game. Their tech created the basis of Majestic 12, with the AIs, the manufactured bio-war plague, the vaccines, and a whole host of awful beasts and machines. But Page was a rogue, if the Illuminati return they can tighten their grip. As JC's brother Paul explains: the Illuminati would restore some freedoms, but re-implement the corporate dominion of 20th c. capitalism, where shell companies of shell companies hide the real basis of power, a conspiracy of elites linked to a shared idea of progressive harmony. The Earth would be led into the light, step by step, slowly, when they are ready for it (an ever fleeting horizon), anymore than Damocles would stop when people are ready to accept their place in this cosmic order. There is no Future horizon, the Past is erased, there is only Eternal Present

Future: The last option (the correction) option is to refuse glorifying the Past or compromising with the Present, but rather creating an Open towards a Future, a genuine novum that is not expected. This is not to say Geass or Deus Ex is in any way Christian (these themes are primarily eisegetically harvested), but the Open is the way through which God appears (parousia). Without the Open, Man will crowd out the possibility of History, the possibility of the Eternal, through their idols and shifty deals. The Sadducees made a deal with the Romans, while the Pharisees falsified history to manufacture an End through a kind of Return. But there is no Return. There is no Golden Age. Eden is locked and fiery angels will not be deterred. Man may bluster, but will never storm Heaven. The mocking laugh of Heaven refuses these demands.

Thus Lelouche vi Britannia, the hidden prince, becomes the means to open the Future. He not only seeks to end Damocles, to end the use of FLEJA, but to put an end to world-empire. Britannia must fall and the nations be allowed to resume their borders (especially Japan). How will this be done? Lelouche comes up with a plan to, effectively, become the sacrificial lamb. He chooses to forgo his leadership of the Black Knights (a resistance group against Britannia), "betray" his comrades, and assume a dictatorial position as the new king of Britannia. He intentionally alienates all through a scorched-earth campaign against his predecessors (incinerating their tombs). By erasing Britannia's past, Lelouche appears as the consummate authoritarian, obliterating the Past and absorbing it into his Present. Thus when his friend (and former political enemy) Suzaku Kururugi (who himself suffers inestimable guilt for his actions) dons the mantle of Zero, leader of the Black Knights, to assassinate Lelouche, the Empire is broken. Britannia is in shambles, the world is re-Open to the forces of History. What will man do? Will it be chaos? Will there be death? Will there be something New? Who knows. But the power of Geass is shattered and now something else may emerge.

Similarly in the Tong ending, Denton decides to pull the plug on the global system of networking. No more internet, no more connections, no more threat of global government. The world enters a new dark ages, with a return to the local. Politics will be broken down back into original constituent pieces. This may seem to be a return to the Past, but it's rather an Open. Denton will hear threats throughout the game that this scenario changes nothing, only causes chaos before someone will rebuild another internet, another AI god, another Helios synthesis. It's a matter of time. Or is it? Is human history determined through sociological forms that replicate again and again, like some sort of Aristotelian entelechy found in our politics? Or could something else emerge? Can Man live without idols? Can he not live under the judgement of God, but find a way Out? Can the New Jerusalem appear? (For the promise in the New Testament is the New Jerusalem descending from Above, not being built up from Below). What will become of things? The messianic vocation of JC Denton (as much as Lelouche Lamparouge) is to fundamentally refuse the Question, to introduce a Void. Here on a threshold a new world may very well emerge. It is up to us (or Someone) to choose otherwise.

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Two Americas: The Jeffersonian Victory of Democracy

 Who is the Protagonist of American History? There are two ways of approaching this question (with, obviously, many sub-elements that offer minor deviations and move closer/further from mainstream self-conceptions). One way way to think this question is through the Two Party structure. There is a way to tell American History through the Democratic Party, and a way to tell it from the Federalist-Whig-GOP parties. However the effective Uniparty, and the narrative party-shuffles, can make this more confusing than I intend it to be (large conceptual histories are more heuristic than scientific). Thus, perhaps the easiest way is to tell this dual story through two archetypal persons: Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. Again, this is typological and used to group events/policies/visions, not absolute scientific assessment of reshuffling. Individuals are nearly infinitely complex, and each biographic twist can distort the bigger picture. But a Forest still exists even if it's not clear how many Trees constitute *it*. In that same vein I shall begin. First with Jefferson, the widely accepted protagonist, and then I will offer the other vision in another essay.

It might be hard to see Jefferson, the slave-owner denounced for his *possible* affair with his thrall Sally Hemings, as *the* protagonist for the modern Democratic Party (& its accomplices in the GOP, among other parties). Jefferson has been denounced personally, but his spirit is still the governing principle in the main-thrust of American history. This is a history focused on economics and equality, and the quest to build a perfect world through an "Empire of Space" (a term taken from McCoy's The Elusive Republic).

Jefferson was the consummate Democrat, even as he was an elite. He was, perhaps, the most sanguine for democracy among the Founding generation (which was, generally, positively hostile to the notion). Jefferson's vision for America moved away from the English cultural patrimony (of British politics, religion, norms, laws, etc), even as he was still clearly a product of the same. For Jefferson, drawing on the Commonwealthman thought of James Harrington (as JGA Pocock has demonstrated), the ideal Republican was one that was landed & self-productive. However, a landed republic could only ever function if there was broad equality in ownership. Most of the Founders accepted broad inequalities, but divided over how they should be overcome or ameliorated. For Jefferson, the farmers (defined more abstractly for us as self-producing and modestly well-off) were God's people. But there was, obviously, going to be a future where there would be potential farmers, but no land. Jefferson's Empire of Space was the necessity to overcome this problem through Expansion. The acquisition of the vastly underpopulated Continent was an obvious boon to a truly free American republic. It was the government's responsibility to gain this land (preferably by peace) to created this leveling Empire of Liberty. Obviously Jefferson was way beyond his means (spending exorbitant sums on creature-comforts from stylish Europe), but he did not base his vision on his personal life, but on his Ideal. None shall be too poor (& none shall be too rich).

As any student of US history knows, Jefferson was uneasy about slavery, abhorring it as an institution, but ambivalent on the solution of a black population. This crack will produce a heresy of Jeffersonian thought that shall occur later, but it all belongs to the same spirit.

However, Jeffersonian politics initially took a backseat. Jefferson was the disgruntled Secretary of State (& then Vice President) under Federalist administrations. Less a party than an original set of policies formulated by Hamilton, Federalists resisted Jefferson's Idea. They were uneasy about expansion (unless controlled and regulated). They were uneasy about democratic leveling. They had a different idea about the role of government. While it has often been confused by Conservatives, Jefferson was not exactly a Classical Liberal and he was not antithetical to government power. His strict-constructionism of the Constitution was strategic: he believed every generation should write up a new constitution. It was about limiting the power of a national government over the States, which ought to be strong enough to deal with local needs. The federal government's role was to provide a means for this equality, which came through access to land (not the promotion of trade or industry). Additionally, Jefferson abhorred Washington/Adams' unwillingness to support the new sister-republic of France. Early disease from Federalists was met with popular hostility. The French republicans, whether Citizen Genet the Girondin or the later Jacobins, were building the kind of new world that Jefferson applauded. In one of his more nightmarish fits of idealism, Jefferson was willing to countenance the complete destruction of the French people if only a single Adam and Eve were left to repopulate a free country.

What was Jacobinism? The seeming statism of Robespierre's Committee for Public Safety is known well-enough, as well as Robespierre's later praise from Socialists and Marxists. However, Jacobinism was in many ways anti-state. It was a mere means to an end (the liberation of The People), which could take on more universalist or more racial forms. It was a crusade to not only save the French (not France), but also to Francofy the globe. As demonstrated in Hont's The Jealousy of Trade, Jacobinism was willing to meltdown the state for the Nation, a nation of equals (excepting the vague legal discriminations between Active and Passive citizens). Jefferson would later shrink from French excesses, and denounce Napoleon's tyranny, but Jacobinism and Jeffersonianism shared some key details. The role of the government was to effect equality, which in an American sense meant acquisition of territory (not the widespread social-engineering needed to remove the aristocracy and the church).

Against recrudescent aristocracy and Anglophilia among the hated Federalists, Jefferson overcame his enemies in a popular swell. The election of 1800 (and the subsequent 12th Amendment) solidified Jefferson's democracy and party-government. Flanked by critics for abandoning the spirit of the Kentucky Resolution, Jefferson did not contradict his earlier ideas. The Quids were agitated that Jefferson morphed into a corrupt courtly monarch, but he was consistent. Jefferson's shift to manufacturing was an expansion of his leveling vision (now applied to shop-keeps and producers). The Embargo of 1807 was a harsh government interference in the economy towards resisting an enemy and protecting American goods. The illegal Louisiana Purchase (which even Jefferson recognized) was again justified by the means. Jefferson didn't violate his strict constructionism of the Constitution, he simply broke the law in the service of The People (the highest law). Military adventure in North Africa against the Barbary was similarly a foreign design to protect American lives elsewhere. Jefferson's reforms were popular and his reign provoked the collapse of his opposition. The Federalists were dead and Jefferson was the flaming lamp of liberty.

Madison and Monroe carried on Jefferson's policies, including the passage of the 2nd Bank of the United States and the War of 1812. Jeffersonian ideals burned strongly among the so-called War Hawks who wanted to put an end to British influence in America and on the Sea. It was something of a suicidal gambit, but American resolve proved the national mettle of this newly independent republic. America could win. Thus, Jeffersonians began to fragment somewhat in light of *how* this vision should be carried out. Should the US government do more to help level the field for American manufacturers and merchants (especially with the booming Cotton trade)? Should national power be used towards this end? Or should the US government focus more on farmers and territorial expansion? This would give birth to the 2nd party system.

National Republicans, as they were called, pursued Jefferson's vision, but had begun to mix in Federalist elements. They were more willingness to embrace inequality, political aristocracy, and a commercial focus (that often benefited the North). Corruption was rife on all sides, but some began to worry that a government of elites was no longer responsive to the People. Combining all of these frustrations was the military hero, Andrew Jackson. Against the ex-Federalist National Republicans (eg Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams), who were often lumped together with moderately Jeffersonian Henry Clay, Jackson waged his war against central corruption. Jackson's presidency was not about "limited government", as the Constitution was putty in his hands, but to preserve Jefferson's visions. Strict constructionism against the 2nd Bank of the United States flowed with the illicit remove of the funds (violating the Congressional law), the dubious placement of these funds in varied banks (which had little constitutional warrant), and the effort to regulate the sale of land to preserve the economy from fat-cat bankers. Jackson's refusal to enforce the Supreme Court's decision in favor of the Cherokee also reflected his appeal to the Salus Populus to justify his laws. Indians and whites could not intermix, and restricting the latter from acquiring land would damage the equality of The People. And obviously Nullification was a crisis that drew on the Federal government against the Jeffersonian heretic Calhoun (who we shall revisit later). All in all, the Jacksonian revolution in government did little to "weaken" government or "limit" it. Instead, the central government must be strong enough (and staffed by The People, not elites) to effect the kind of equality among the people. Lower tariffs (though not complete reduction) was to balance the consumer farmers in the South, while also helping out some small northern manufacturers/merchants.

The Democracy was a lightning rod to force political alignments. Their opponents were in disarray, reflecting a variety of frustrations with this new set of policies. National Republicans lost all initiative, fearing conflation with the Federalists while also losing the sympathy of The People. There was also the far more important backlash of the Anti-Masons. A popular Yankee uprising against secret societies, it would be easy to dismiss this party (as many have done) as conspiratorial kooks that could not understand the changing world. But the Anti-Masons were much more than that: they resented the cultural disposition of the Democracy, which Free-Masonry and Jackson both represented.

What Jefferson-Jackson and the Democracy represented, in terms of American identity, was a nationality stripped from strong markers. The English political culture and civil religion were scrapped. America was not a distinctly Protestant (or Christian for that matter) nation. Government was not to be involved in theological questions. Thus when New York City underwent a cholera epidemic, Jackson refused to conduct a national day of prayer. Though not particularly religious himself, Jackson represented a trend that the United States was a secular government (though having a religious and moral people). Accusations of Jefferson's atheism allowed the underbelly of the Democracy to become fairly radical. While opponents overwhelmingly were part of the para-church unity of Evangelical revival, Democrats were able to join together Free-Thinkers and stodgy confessionalists who opposed moral government. Free-Masonry represented this ecumenical disposition, often allowing anyone who could recognize a creator god (thus Christians, but also Jews and Deists as well). Democrats often opposed blue-laws, temperance, blasphemy laws, and government subsidies for specifically Christian organizations. It was the growing tide of Democracy in New England that saw its churches become disestablished. Religion was not despised, but it was a private affair and had little to do with the framework of government. Civic virtue was a strictly natural affair (with grace relegated to domesticity). The Anti-Mason attack on societies that diminished the public role of the church (in conjunction with the meeting-hall) was resistance to this new liberal age.

And this liberalism continued its course. The primarily reactive coalition against Jackson's "executive tyranny" (hence Whigs) depended on their opponents to set the agenda. Jackson gave way to Van Buren, whose fiscal policy was blamed for exacerbating the economic depression (it was not a question of the gold-standard). Additionally, Van Buren's northern ambivalence over slavery meant questions of expansion were muted. Van Buren was not opposed to slavery for the South (as demonstrated in the Amistad case), but he was worried about losing control of the national dimension of the Democracy. This failure to fulfill the Jeffersonian end of leveling equality through land (even if land for slave-owners) saw his failure in 1840. However the Democracy roared back to life with the pseudo-Democratic presidency of His Accidency John Tyler and the actual victory in 1844 of James Polk. The latter's Mexican American War and Independent Treasury program cemented his Democratic bona fides (though his failure to pursue Canadian territory alienated Northerners). Here is the rupture within the Democracy that births the Civil War and the Jeffersonian Heresy of Calhoun.

Jeffersonian equality meant the formation of the Nation around *something*. What was it to be "American"? If certain English hierarchical norms and civil religion was rejected, what was left? The Democracy was willing to treat with Atheists and Roman Catholics within its ranks. What was left, it seems, was the sheer existent Man, and particularly the White Man. The Young America movement attempted form a broader cultural history, but it was vague and incomplete (America was still young and fairly uncultured). The excitement for war and expansion was part of sculpting a glorious legacy. Slavery was an uncomfortable issue, but all sides agreed that the black man was not part of this shared vision. Some historians have tarred this vision as herrenvolk democracy, but plenty of Democrats were uncomfortable with the permanent existence of slavery. Even future Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, hoped expansion would eventually lead to extinction. The Democracy defended the equality of [white] men around economic opportunity, whatever their religion or origin.

Calhoun's heresy was to recoded this vision back into an Anglo vision of hierarchy. Slavery was no longer a necessary evil, an alien race that has to be dealt with, but a positive good. Slavery allowed the economic gains of the South and it established a natural hierarchy that could mesh with Jefferson's vision. The equality of the white man could only proceed with a natural inequality of the black man. The South's form of slavery was perfect precisely because it befit Nature. There would be no confusion about master and slave, empirically or morally. Blacks were bred for docility and labor, thus their role as slave befit nature's beneficence to them. Thus Jeffersonian expansion (which Calhoun became a moderate critic of if it threatened the South's stability) could meld with a kind of English aristocracy. While many Calhounites had to be careful around the Southern Democracy, which was far more hostile to Calhounite planter-aristocracy, they could form temporary alliances to defend the South.

Similarly, Northern Democracy was finding itself squeezed. The equality of white men (with some heresies to include the equality of *all* men, found among Salmon Chase's Liberty Party) was jeopardized if slavery was allowed to produce wealth inequalities. The small white farmer could not compete against the slave-owner, who could easily plow his resources back into future land-acquisition. As Calhounites insinuated themselves among agitate Southern Democrats, Northern Democrats began to contemplate alliances with anti-slavery Northerners. The result was the birth of the GOP, which allowed ex-Federalists, Whigs, and Nativists (a movement to protect American Protestantism from foreign Irish Catholics) joined with these more radical Democrats. Not all Northern Democrats were willing to jettison the party or the vision (hence the temporary failed solution of Stephen Douglas' Popular Sovereignty), but the sectional strain forced a temporary realignment. The election of Lincoln in the 1860s saw a resurgence of the old Democratic enemy, but Lincoln's coalition depended on radical Northern Democrats willing to bolt the party (as they had done, temporarily, with Martin Van Buren in 1848, which allowed another Whig presidency).

I will not renarrate or relitigate the Civil War, which saw Democrats on both sides fight for their section (with some becoming ardent Radical Republicans and others become Copperheads). The unifying factor was hostility to slavery's expansion, and eventually the entire institution, abolished throughout the war and ended with the 13th Amendment. The death of Lincoln and besiegement of Andrew Johnson (an awkward conservative Jacksonian) saw the rise of the GOP as an unstoppable force. But it was internally divided, which would then form the basis of the new political alignments of the late 19th c. As Heather Cox Richardson's Death of Reconstruction demonstrates, the GOP's enthusiasm for Reconstruction and abandonment of the same derived from a different vision for the Freedmen to acculturate. The failure of this policy reflected growing trends among black-majority government in the occupied states of the South. Whatever accusations of racism and exaggeration aside, the chaos from the war, the shocking influence of Carpet-Baggers, and the corruption of Scallawag opportunists all contributed to a united political backlash on all sides. Republicans (possessing, in general, a different vision from Hamilton) were appalled, while Southern Democrats were sectionally militant. The result was the end of reconstruction (which failed on its own terms), but also the bolting of radical northern Democrats back out of the GOP (eg Benjamin Butler, Salmon Chase).

What did the blacks in the South, the small white farmers, and Northern Radicals share? According to Richardson, it was they saw the need for the government to carry out the equalizing project. Whether it was government handouts to poor farmers (white and black) in the South, or growing hostility to larger corporate interests (especially the railroads) in the North. Republicans believed in the idea of self-disciplined labor, not government intervention to level. Black use of the GOP was an obvious self-interested version of this (which will explain, later, how blacks will switch parties, even as the Democracy was full of ardent opponents). However, the Democracy would also become home to the Populists, who became frustrated with the unity coalition of Democrats in the South. For many old planters, who may have been Whigs, there was no future. They could try to control the Democrats, but they had no interest in the GOP. Some conservative reformers in New York could join forces and form the Bourbon wing of the party, but this was an awkward coalition pressured from all sides. While these Democrats elected Grover Cleveland to break the GOP stranglehold on the White House, this reprieve was often considered a Hamiltonian victory. At first, the future seemed to be outside of the parties. It was the spirit of Jefferson that formed Populism, originally The People's Party before it fused with the Democracy. Contrary to sloppy use of the word today, Populism was about government intervention to restrain corporate interests, create more opportunities for the little guy, and to use the government to reapportion excess wealth from major corporations. Populists wanted trust-busting, income tax, regulation, subsidies, bimetallism, and lower tariffs. Populism was, and is, a leftwing movement in the American political sphere.

However, the Democracy was in the doldrums, often suffering the accusation of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion. Most Americans had tired of waiving the bloody flag (especially among opportunists like James Blaine), but the religious boom in the country under effective, if somewhat faceless, GOP administration won enough support. The national mood had accepted this Hamiltonian spirit, even as it waned, manifest as much in the victory of Cleveland as the victory of a Garfield, Harrison, or McKinley. But Populism was a rising tide, and The People would not be silenced, especially as GOP efforts to pander to immigrants from central/Southern Europe began to fade. Populist farmer-centric policies could alienate urban labor, even as their Catholicism and non-American folkways were not an easy fit with the Evangelical fervor within the GOP. While some classical Liberals flirted with both parties (who had originally began, but bolted, the Liberal Republican Party, as well as being the Mugwumps that helped elect Cleveland), classical liberalism itself was undergoing a crisis. Free-trade, gold-standard, all of these which were believed in out of an idealistic leveling (hence the odd combination of limited-government with socialism found in Georgism and the land-tax), these seemed to be failing. British liberals started to undergo crisis in the 1870s, when Britain's manufacturing dominance began to slip. The future of this new liberalism required a government that respected the liberal spirit found in Adam Smith, David Ricardo, JS Mill, as well as the Gladstone governments. However it would require greater intervention. Thus birthed Progressivism, in all its different modes and forms.

Progressives found a home in both parties (as well as new 3rd parties, like the Socialists), but they were ultimately unified through a distinctly Americanized Jeffersonian political vision. The Populist need for government intervention to protect farmers from railroad freight rates and guaranteed foreign markets could fuse to urban Progressivism regulation of industry. The city slums provoked a backlash among good Evangelicals, though they mainly doubted the government's ability to solve these social ills. Instead of religion and reform, the Progressives took a scientific cast, put religion to the side (or mutated it into a skin suit for social activism), and believed an active and strong central government was the only counterweight to corporate titans, without provoking a chaotic upsurgence from the masses. Socialism could be absorbed, in pieces, without threatening the system. Such had been done in Disraeli's hysterics of National Conservatism, as well as the steely statism of Bismarckian Germany. However, the fracture of the GOP over its old guard and its Progressives saw the rise of new liberal Democrat who self-consciously carried on Jefferson's spirit: Woodrow Wilson. It should also be pointed out that Wilson's great critic, Eugene Debs the Socialist, also formed his vague sloganeered Communism through Jeffersonian reform. Populist and Progressive could see in Government the means to save the little guy. The frontier had closed, new markets were open, the world was full of oppressive empires and their colonies. Additionally, even if this vision was to make the Earth safe for the White Man, Wilsonian progressives included advocates for female and colored equality as well. Wilson's victory saw the Democracy finally return in a winning coalition. Jefferson had won.

Of course Wilson's victory was tarnished with his idealism. The American people were not willing to swallow the full Jeffersonian pill, for what would an Empire of Space do if it ran out of places to expand? Where would equality of means form? Where would markets for American goods go? The solution was obvious, found in Jefferson's organic-conservative Jacobinism: America was The World. As MacDougal noted this in The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy, Wilsonianism was a translation of Jeffersonian vision to geopolitics and foreign policy. It was not anti-Americanism to try to goad the United States to join the League of Nations, it was hyper-Americanism. America must lead the world, absorb the world, for America is the empty-signifier of The World. A world made safe for Democracy was an American world. This was too bitter for a tired and bamboozled American people, who woke up to Wilson's insane piety and heavy-handed propaganda for World War One. The brief reaction of the Harding-Coolidge years reflected a disgust with what the Empire of Space required, but the collapse of the World Economy heralded the beginning of a new order. 

Herbert Hoover was just as much a Progressive as the Roosevelt clan, but he still had a sense of restraint. The victory of FDR, who ran on being Change, radically transformed the American situation. It's not so much the passage of the New Deal (most of which failed and was repealed), but the legacy of the New Deal in conjunction with America's rebirth in World War Two. Pushing war fever along as his mentor Wilson did, Roosevelt believed in the same universal American project. Ending German dominance on the continent (as well as throwing a bone to GOP businessmen worried about Japan invading China) allowed American uncontested supremacy. Fabian socialists in England had already hitched their hopes to a kind of Anglo-American world-order, joining together the pathways of the British Empire to the crusading Wilsonian America. The victory of the Allies cemented this, and discredited the GOP who stood in its way. Now, as the Whigs had done, the GOP was strictly a reactive force, imitating Democratic leadership.

This new-order was disrupted on account of an unforeseen antagonist. Many Anglo-American progressives were excited for the Soviet Union (or at least what it could become). Tsarist bigotry and reaction had been buried. The Soviets would open up to a World-System, with a World-Market, and fulfill a socialist system (though one that deviated from Marxist-Leninist interpretations of class-warfare). It was ameliorative and located in the United Nations, under the pink Progressives that helped invent the institution. But it was not to be, due in part to Russian chauvinism as well as Stalin's tactical departure from such a plan. Many Progressives in England and America would be embarrassed from their sanguine support for the Soviets, which was now branded treason. But red-baiting was almost always strictly anti-Soviet (and anti-Mao) than anti-communist. The fringe of the GOP, found amongst the Old Guard and some disaffected Southern whites waking up to the New Deal's dumping of them, took a hard-line, but it was often derivative. Truman and Kennedy drove the narrative forward, even as Eisenhower allowed a brief GOP interlude (but, as a Me Too Republican, by accepting the general thrust of the Post-War order). Kennedy ran as a far hawkish anti-Soviet than Nixon (even if the latter still won sans voter fraud). But the point of democracy, and The Democracy, is not in actual head-counting, but legitimacy. Nixon learned this lesson very hard.

The vision of maintaining the Democracy and the spirit of liberalism required greater government intervention, especially among the denser population sections. Southern Democrats, who had been staunch Populists, soon found themselves holding the short-end of the stick. They had ardently supported FDR, and reaped the benefits of the Tennessee Valley Authority's electrification program. Southern Democrats, excepting Bourbon conservatives, had championed government intervention to open markets, regulate corporations (most of which were Northern), freeze prices during downturns, and involve in greater currency manipulation. But the balance of power was shifting. The Democracy did not need the South, or at least it could depend on it as it shifted. The focus was now on the urban North, among blacks and ethnic whites especially. This alliance itself was highly fraught (as Polish Americans protesting against black tenements in Chicago during WW2 show), but it was still functional. 

Southern Democrats either swam with the current or got off the boat, dazed as they tried to make sense of the new world. Some of these former Democrats found themselves among the Conservatives, who were willing to throw in with the GOP finally. Others maintained their rebellion in a separate party. As academic historians have noted, George Wallace in 1968 was far more a traditional New Dealer than either Humphrey or Nixon. The problem wasn't the populist Jeffersonian intervention, it was who it was for. The equality of man that Jefferson had proclaimed had expanded. It wasn't just white men, it was swarthy Europeans with strange names as well as blacks and Jews as well. It even included women! America was the engine to effect true democratic equality within a society. Thus is the center-left establishment of American Politics exported abroad. The CIA and the State Department helped fund, support, organize, and seed various European parties, ranging from Socialists (France), Christian Democrats (Italy, Germany), and Labor (Britain). These parties would help adjust to this new Anglo-American Fabian order, to fulfill Jefferson's vision (along with English liberal luminaries like Bentham and Mill) against European reactionaries and colonizers. Hostility to Soviet-adjacent Communists dovetailed with hostility to Conservative politics (eg deGaulle, Salazar). Hence US agents would offer support to Yugoslavia's Titoist heresy or Hungary's goulash communism. This helped to cement an order the prioritized parliamentary politics as a means to broader democratic ends. Such is not strictly statism, because the state is not an end in itself (this is the dividing line between Fascism and the New Deal). Rather, the state (or something else) is supposed to satisfy the kind of access and equality needed for formal cooperation.

The US boom, and the clear-cut social democracy of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy (as well as Eisenhower) began to hit the wall. The Unions had become a powerful aspect to Democratic politics, an element we've yet to fully unpack. American Unions, unlike European counterparts, often lacked the class-consciousness as Proletariat. Instead, American workers were little businessmen. Unionism was to help them negotiate, and even as foreign elements radicalized some unions, the general thrust of the American Federation of Labor (under Gompers) was giving the worker a fair shake in the world of business. It was about organization and cooperation. Foreign elements, forming the Congress of Industrial Organizations as a counterpart, eventually found their way into the wider Democratic sphere. Eugene Debs' primary support came from radicals (especially Jews and Slavs from Eastern Europe), but it was couched as American economic democracy. Union victory came clearest during the Roosevelt administration, but it was in a cooperative way. Management, labor, and consumers all had a right to equal access and wealth. Regulation wasn't to knuckle under the corporations to the State or the Party, it was asking them to pay their fair share as equal citizens. The Department of Labor, combined with the fairly cozy relation between management and labor, allowed peaceful growth. It also helped that the CIA fielded labor organizers (like Dubinsky or Lovestone) to help anti-Soviet organizing elsewhere. However, this was not sustainable. These arrangements depended on dominant corporate behemoths that would suffer no competition. The restoration of (west) Germany and Japan to the industrial market made American production, sales, and wages suffer. Who would give?

The Vietnam War (which has all the marks of a Wilsonian crusade) further depended the alienation. Begun, under Kennedy, to protect the authoritarian social democrat Diem, the war expanded as a check against the Soviet-China access that seemingly backed Ho Chi Minh. However, Ho (like Castro before) were Socialists who admired the US decolonization effort before they were put on the back burner. But it was Eisenhower that allowed Batista to fall (and whose CIA probably armed/aided Castro), and allowed the French (as well as the Vietnamese crown-prince Bao Dai) to fail. The ideal of a Wilsonian war for Hearts and Minds, to realize the American Way of Life, suffered in the jungles of Vietnam. Likely Kennedy's willing to abandon this (with his rough patrimonial style of government) got him killed. Also the Golden Triangle was a good source of black-ops money. Thus the war provoked the split. While many 60s radicals would want nothing to do with racist patriarch Jefferson, they (in many ways) continued to imbibe his spirit. Of course some tried to slough off the entire American ideal altogether, with visions of Maoist liberation spreading throughout the West. But for those Liberals who were against the stuffy environment of post-war liberalism, the New Left seemed poise to introduce something new. Now the Spirit of Jefferson was increasingly mutated, to defend and promote the equality of all races, creeds, genders, even (for some fringe groups) sexual orientations. The main currents of the movement were being fed back into the mainstream. Martin Luther King's civil rights crusade was done in the "spirit" of the American founding, that all men were created equal (and the imputed implications of the same). Protests against the war were marshaled from the fact that it could not be won. Lyndon Johnson, a southern Democrat swimmer, attempted to harness this movement, but he only appeared a warmonger and hypocrite (which he may well have been). He wanted to build the Social Democratic ideal, the Great Society (and maybe get his face put somewhere in DC or on a mountain). But this was all crumbling from a failed war-effort. Hawks saw weakness in a refusal to fully pursue anti-communism (just nuke them). It was a disaster.

The rise of Nixon, who softened his image, ended up in a temporary return to an older order. Nixon was not exactly an ardent Hamiltonian, but his geo-political realism led to a cynical use of Vietnam to triangulate a thaw with the Communist powers. As any analyst knew, China and Russia were not on the best terms (to put it lightly), thus they could be pried apart. Nixon also allowed the subtle shocks to adjust to America as a waning power in the world-market. Watergate (propelled along by Hawks and Liberals) destroyed Nixon, his legacy, and ultimately his peace (with the Soviets at least). But with Ford (representing the increasingly pressured Me Too Republicans within the party) and Carter, the readjustments continued. The New Left had been partially absorbed into the party. Equality could not come within the economic realm as clearly as before. Instead, the equality of man could focus on those minorities that found themselves agitating for more rights. Southern whites had gotten the short-stick before, not ethnic whites in the North were frustrated. Hate speech, gender equality, even curbing restrictions on public degeneracy, combined with social-engineered business campaigns, frustrated many. Carter's clean image, counter-balancing Nixon's corruption, could not really hold back a wider frustration. What was American anyway? If she was fighting Communism, what was it for? God? Freedom? What did these mean?

The Moral Majority, which had less impact than it appears, helped catapult the GOP back into power, winning over some disaffected Democrats. Reagan himself was still a Cold-Warrior hawk of a liberal establishment that had been transformed. Obviously the Reagan coalition never lived up to expectations, ballooning deficits and increasing regulation, but it became a legendary moment of a return to *something* else besides limitless expansion. Or, at least, the expansion could now be redirected. Again, the flagging rates of American industrial production (manifest in real wage decreases) could not find Jeffersonian equality through badgering businesses. The Empire of Space included cultural deconstruction as well as economic democracy. Focus on the empty form Equality allowed a different cultural tact. Distinct Christianity (Protestant or Catholic) was downplayed, for a growing generation had little/no interest or exposure to formal religion. Additionally, Jews had greater public role to play, alongside women, blacks, and even the occasional homosexual. Reagan's refocus allowed the Democrats to recapture the initiative. Human Rights, the Wilsonian Democracy of Man, became the watchword, as government policed violations of interpersonal equality. The Reagan years (including Bush) gave birth to the Clinton years, which accepted Reagan regulatory reforms for the most part. This era is often called "Neoliberalism", a concept that has varied use. In essence, Neo-liberalism refers to the turn away from the state to effect the same goals of market participation. The goal is reliance on private powers to exercise the role of the state to authoritatively direct the market. Supranational organizations like the WTO or World Bank could do this, as well as the US government, or a cabal of hedge-funds and banks. The Neoliberal seeks the fruits of liberal-socialism, by adhoc means. Given Jefferson's ambivalence over the state itself, in a way this spiritually fulfills the goal of Jacobin universalism (for a Global republic and a global France were one in the same; the twi-colors were the Human flag).

Thus, Clinton fulfilled Bush's NAFTA, opening markets and regulating finance (to curb little/middling forces that could screw up market-signals). Human Rights crusades marked the Clinton years, bombing Serbia and Somalia. George W Bush's victory was a kind of Me Too Republicanism again (channeling conservative frustrations over idealistic crusades). The War on Terror itself was a kind of idealogical crusade once again, though it could wear the mask of the Neo Conservative boogeyman, who stoked Islamophobia. In reality, Samuel Huntingdon was awarded by Clinton. Bush turned out no different than if Al Gore had won, except suckering Evangelicals to back the crusade. Jacobin Democracy, an idealistic war, there was a temporary shift to the GOP in this regard, but the same Jeffersonian idea remained to make the world safe for the Democracy. Bush's failures only continued through the Obama administration, which pivoted away from failed Middle Eastern state-building (confused as a kind of return to realpolitik) towards open China-baiting and restoring conflict with Russia (which Clinton ran on). Trump has melded some of these legacies to keep the office from Clinton, and his continued popularity may show a possible resurgence of *something else*, but he too has done little substantive policy changing. Biden has carried on the farce, where a corpse leads a massive sprawling administrative-state.


Obviously this is a sprawling history with many holes and contested claims. The way the Democratic Party operates now is vastly difference than the party of Jackson or Jefferson Davis, let alone Benjamin Butler or Grover Cleveland. For the most part, the average Democrat has tepid admiration for Jefferson, if not total contempt as a white patriarchal slave-owning capitalist. How can I claim that Jefferson's spirit still lives on? Again, this is a heuristic, trying to see how there is *some* genetic continuity through the centuries. The changes are too obvious to mention. If Jefferson were alive today, he would be called a Nazi (but probably simply have a heart-attack from the shock of such an insane world). Recall, Jefferson is an *archetype*, not an actual person. His Idea exceeds the personal policies, preferences, and proposals he had. Instead, it is a particular drift in American Politics, one that makes the most sense. Conservatives will bumble about with notions like "nationalism", "liberty", or even "conservative" itself. But what do these mean? And how often are they simply negations of the predominant thrust of things. A Republican activist stamping his feet about schools transing kids is simply in opposition. Remove this novelty, but what is it that you want? Roll back how far? Many of today's GOP-adjacent talking-heads were Clinton Democrats (not unlike Trump himself). Reappraisals and conversions are fine, but in what way have they changed? What do they want that isn't just a rosy view of not so distant past? Were the 90s so great if you were to ask a GOP voter back then (or even a labor Democrat, maybe a kook like Jim Traficant)? Obviously not if you read what was written back then, even if people today can't remember. What is there to conserve if you don't know have a reason for going back? You just jam your heels in the dirt and let the cart take you away. Even mainstream GOPniks will waffle on defining what a woman is (just please don't let the kids decide this question!). So what's really at stake?

The legacy of Jefferson is simply the Idea that America is an equal people. The definition of equality and people have changed (and bred heresies in reaction), but the spirit remains. America exists as an Idea, a commitment of civic ideas that can be transmogrified into any particular people of any particular creed. This includes white protestants, Jews, brown hindus, anyone. Most Republicans have this exact same spirit. If this is true, there is no America outside of formal equality. It has no particular language, culture, cult, or place. To be an American is to believe in America. That's the new world Jefferson only began to imagine, a Democracy that took root and conquered Heaven and Earth.



Saturday, August 19, 2023

Test the Spirits, or Against the Re-Enchantment Project

 An essay like this comes too late, like Athena's Owl that only takes off at dusk, when a fad-phenomenon is already at its dusk.


Evangelicals spent 20 or so years, wasted, trying to restore a pre-modern vision in a modern world. The drab decay of Capitalism and the Demon of Mammon had made Man materialistic and individualistic, lost and lonely in this fragmenting and alienating world. As the claim goes, what Christianity lost (cribbing from Etienne Gilson's dubious historical reconstruction) was its sense of the mystical and divine. The "Christian-Platonic Synthesis" (popularized by Hans Boersma) persevered in Medieval Europe, creating the glory of Christendom. However bad-guys inexplicably appeared, as the snake crept into Eden. Scotus introduced seeds of univocity, which were fully exploited by the Nominalists of Occam's breed. These poured into the Reformation (or at least parts of it, maybe by mistake), which then formed the Modern West, which brought about the boogeymen (incidentally shared with the average DemSoc leftist) of Capitalism, Individualism, Consumerism, Bourgeois Ethics, and so on. The pedigree of each of these concepts is taken as a given, as if Weber's Benjamin Franklin is still a model for today's Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, let alone Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab (who inexplicably keeps a bust of Lenin). But let us leave off the genealogical criticism for a moment. Instead, the solution to this alienation is to retvrn to a pre-modern conception of the world, where magic and enchantment creep through every forest and river. Scorn is heaped upon the average Baptist Evangelical, who turns church into a commercial and consumer experience, looking simultaneously for emotive explosions and arid intellectual sermonizing. Liturgy, it turns out, is the solution to reverse the tide. If we only sat through something like Gothic ritual, whether the Latin mass or a salad-bar of DIY church experience, we may begin to recover a sense of the holy and numinous.

Before I continue, I would like to say that I was tempted with this belief. The majesty of certain aesthetics seems impressive, though one must wonder why so many seemingly abandoned these without a shred of memory of what was lost. Was the West really in the clutches of demons, that ruined it (even as the 3rd world was "doing better")? The most obvious crack came when James KA Smith, who built a career of writing a trilogy of re-liturgizing Human life, admitted that his entire project was overthrown by the baptism scene in The Godfather, where Michael Corleone is steeped in the richness of Tridentine liturgy, renouncing the devil, as he orchestrated the murder of his competitors. Why had the Latin mass failed? And more importantly, why did so many Roman Catholics toss it to the curb when Vatican II began the process of replacement. For a laity steeped in such a grand tradition, how did it get overthrown in a night? Was it really just a cabal of German liberals who orchestrated a revolutionary coup? Why didn't the liturgy prepare the laity for a fight?

I never found any of these grandiose visions persuasive. Additionally, these all severely gut any substantive Protestant theology (as well as the raison d'ĂȘtre for the same), which explains why many of these people find themselves swimming the Tiber, the Bosporous, or awkwardly resituate on the heavily besieged/decayed Canterbury and Wittenberg trails. Again, I am not entirely averse to the shopping mall architecture of aged Seeker Sensitive churches, or the Walmart liturgies of many non-denomination brands. I am someone who has been generally in agreement with the Federal Vision criticism of contemporary [Reformed] Protestantism, and the need to recover a proper sense of the sacraments that the Reformers themselves had. But this must dove-tail with a proper analysis of contemporary woes. Can the above re-enchantment mythicists explain why, in early America, Methodists and Baptists (not Episcopalians or Catholics) exploded among the native American population? These were camp-revivalists, grass-roots lay-led preachers, and yet it was the re-evangelization of an American population whose Christianity withered. The America that produced Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay was far less Christian than the America that produced Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland. Obviously, the piety of the average Traditionalist likely quails before a Fundy-adjacent Baptist grandma. So what went wrong?

The truth is that the Evangelical argument of the 2000s and 2010s has all been tried before ("nothing is new under the sun"). Modernists in the Early Twentieth Century felt the pressure of ecclesiastical unity around their Social Gospel vision. If doctrine was to be placed in the liberal "live and let live" box, then what exactly held churches together? Their worship! The wrong (but repeated) mantra of Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi seemed to offer a way forward to unite the various Western Protestant churches (as well as Rome). That is likely the reason why so many Mainline churches adopted Gothic architecture and the lowest level of Roman vestments (stole, chasuble, cassock), so unity would be easier. Ritualism, which put aside Reformation dogma, dovetailed with a Modernism. The result was the growing decay of any sense of wonder, especially as the horrors of the Twentieth Century imposed themselves, as well as the growing skepticism around Socialism and Communism. 

Post-Liberalism attempted to recover "catholicity" through a refocus on liturgical traditions and ancient dogma. Lindbeck and Frei attempted to save Mainline Lutheranism (and other Mainliners) through their Yale school circle. Welcoming some aspects of Barth's reworking of the Reformation tradition (especially his "Catholic turn" in Church Dogmatics), these worked with an effort to curb the decay of the mid-Twentieth Century. Many Mainliners simply began to abandon the semblance of Christian orthodoxy through the Hippy Movement and the Death of God. James Pike still wore his clerical collar as he committed adultery, was an alcoholic, and sat on panels with fellow Modernist Martin Luther King Jr in reducing the Gospel to Civil Rights. Post-Liberalism wanted to reverse this secularization, without giving up the good aspects of the Main Line Church. But all this did was produce incoherence that the average pew-sitter could barely comprehend. Avoiding biblicism and secular conversion (ala the theology of someone like Paul Tillich) meant recovering the Bible as "an event", around which a community is formed as they read through it. But what did this mean? Was it real? Speech-act theory and the "linguistic turn" in post-modern theology meant you could simply not answer the question. There was never a sense why the Bible was unique or true. Why not form a liturgical community around the Koran? Or the canon of Dr. Seuss? Sensible theologians like Jaroslav Pelikan simply abandoned for the rootless and modernist Lutheran church for Eastern Orthodoxy, while men like Robert Jensen faded away senselessly. How can one write about The Church without any historic or institutional sense? Protestants like Peter Leithart find means to cope with this fatal flaw, as the more insightful students simply abandon this path for Rome or Constantinople.

On this face, these paths obviously lead to greener pastures. But are they greener pastures? If Liturgy was the means of cultural production or formation, why did the Soviets bulldoze Orthodoxy in a generation (which still afflicts Eastern Europeans as they return to Christianity)? Again, why did Rome fold? Maybe because the reasons and claims about enchantment, about liturgy, about a pre-modern world are false. Maybe what this whole argument revolves around is a desire to play make-pretend.

Such is ok in a poetic key, as Romantic poets sought to rediscover the gods in a world increasingly filled with industrial waste and the smoke of industry. But these were small circles, of relative influence, that did not claim to the prerogative of a civilizational core. They were far more individualistic than the communitarian Modernists. So why did the Evangelicals fail? Because they tried a failed experiment, but lacked even the intellectual substance and vaulted positions their forebears held. They were not sitting in Oxbridge or Ivy Leagues, pouring over centuries of texts, they were regurgitating what their betters had done. Radical Orthodoxy, which was the closest thing to an intellectual vanguard for this movement, was pockmarked with surface-level reading and historiographical incompetence. Yet as many as there are disaffected, there will be an audience willing to read persuasive nonsense.

The reason why the magic of the premodern world failed is because it lost its persuasiveness. People did not believe in reliquaries, charms, magick, and holy ground simply because of a Social Imaginary, but that they believed it *worked*. When better things (empirically) came along, they adopted them. But we're often not much better, imbuing superstitious "it works" magic in The Science. As Ivan Illich noted long ago, the White Coat priesthood of doctors and scientists have replaced the Church's black-cassocked clergy. The efficacy of The Science has had a mixed result, though I am far from playing the relativistic card between Systems of Knowledge in a Foucaultian sense. Some things break-down and fall apart because they don't work. Often times corruption and reform roar to life because someone dared to look at what the people actually believe and do. It is easy to see the hoaried past as some bastion of mystical reverence, when peasant life (and clerical life) was anything but that. The Christian-Platonic Synthesis reigned in an age of semi-barbarous superstitions among many average people. What jaded Moderns want is to reintroduce an age of ignorance, where one actively suppresses an awareness of what is real from what is fantasy ("who can know? it's just power, man"), and eagerly clinging to their placebos. But when rubber hits the road, do they drive a sick child to an emergency care or to a shrine?

The harsh truth is that, in the Bible, the Word of God wars constantly against this fantasy dream. The Prophets condemned "the High Places" because the numinous mountain had replaced the intellective commands of God. Jerusalem was Holy because God deigned it so, not because the geography had a particularly sacred intrinsic potency. The sacrament, or the various peculiarities of Prophetic counsel, were potent because God said they were, not because they had any intrinsic power. Namaan was cured of leprosy when he dipped in the Jordan several times, but such was not open to any leper who took upon this remedy. The Lord's Supper maintains potency because of Christ's echoing command. Gazing on the host and parading it around town does nothing, the Christian was commanded to take and eat. This may seem like a particularly holy thing to do (especially if you're re-enchanting the imagination), but it is empty and false. The rules of Nature (and God's special revelation) remain despite Man's unending efforts to add and elaborate. Like the god of Persia who "ate" (when Daniel exposed it was conniving priests), so many mystical rites are simply products of Human imagination. So be it, but then entertain yourself with a video game or comic book, and spare the metaphysics.

Christians do not suffer a lack of "enchantment", but the failure of obedience. The love of God grows cold because Christians do not follow the words of Christ, which include both doctrines about God, Man, and the World, but also how to orient oneself. The unspectacular world of quiet prayer in a closet does not elicit the "seeming" world-changing impact of gold, silk, and processions. Church life should include sacramental ritual (as commanded) alongside teaching, fellowship, and discipline. But a rickety wooden shack would do just as well as marble cathedrals. The power is in the promise, and the conformity to reality. We do not suffer because of a loss of enchantment, as if we only needed to fall back asleep, but a lack of sobriety. The world is full of average people groping at numinous and mystical experiences, discovered in drug-induced ecstasy, crystals, signs from the gods-Universe found in palms or stars, and so on. Europe has de-Christianized, but it has not become less superstitious (probably more). Traditional Christian denominations are suffuse with people who mix veneration of saints or angels with tantric yoga and Wicca. Just like imbeciles complaining about Individual (when the West is all too communitarian), we do not suffer a lack of an enchantment, but an overgrowth of it.

Proper liturgy is about forming the spiritual intellect (understanding), through body and soul, but it is not some pagan spell. It is about ritual in the same sense a marriage ceremony or a dinner party is about proper ritual. Certain customs elaborate and order, but they do not unleash bad juju if botched or stuttered. On the contrary, the denigration of Language and Cult/Culture is what forms the basis of Superstition and Magic, where 'Hoc Est Meum Corpus' transmogrifies into 'Hocuspocus'. What the early Christians understood in a haunted world of paganism, as much as Medieval missionaries and the later Reformers, was that the Word of God expelled babble for speech, replacing Logos for Mythos, where the full revelation of the divine economy was on offer. The Christian was now strong enough to step over the realm of the gods, trampling down the rebellious without fear of reprisal. Nature became a book, not a prison.

Test the Spirits, discern good from bad, and let the radiance of intelligence enlighten the world.