The Altar of America: Civil Religion, Neoliberalism, and a Review of Walter Macdougall's 'The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy'

 In The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (2016), Walter Macdougall gives a generalized crash-course on American civil religion. His goal is to explain how a nation that sought no foreign entanglements (Washington) or was not out to slay foreign monsters (John Q Adams) became the "crusader state" (a term from his previous work). It's an ideological history, not so much about how this came about, but how American politicians and rhetoricians justified the change. Even as America rapidly became an empire, the reasons behind it struggled to keep up. Not a few were uncomfortable with any American empire, let alone an empire welded to a moral crusade. Macdougall tells the story of how an elite minority opinion became the assumed majority position among American people. Such is the work of ideology: it's not whether the majority of Americans believe in the idea of a crusading state (most probably don't), but whether they accept it as simply the norm on the table (all candidates accept these positions, no alternative to electoral participation). And so how did this ideology become the defactoist position among American ideologues and idolators? Macdougall charts these changes under "civil religion", the broad public veneration of the nation and how they conceive (through corporate ritual) the identity of the nation in the world. America became the exceptional republic to the exceptional empire, the seeds of the latter buried in the former.
 
I found it hard to nail down, precisely, where Macdougall was coming from. He defends Nixon, but in a relatively tame way (his crimes were not outrageous and he was quite normal for his day). In someways, Macdougall sounds like a Buchanon-esque paleocon: sympathizing with an American tradition that no longer exists. He is not against American civil religion (or at least the concept of civil religion), but detests Wilson's liberal internationalism (i.e. America must bring the light of democracy/civilization to the world, by force if necessary). Sometimes Macdougall comes off as a papal sympathizer (if not a Roman Catholic), noting that only Roman Catholicism has the resources as a civic alternative to the current American religion. It's a position that Orestes Brownson, a rather wild 19th c. American political commentator, came to when he embraced Rome. However, Macdougall also positively quotes C.S. Lewis and ends his work with a quote from Thomas Pynchon. All in all, Macdougall is an interesting (and many times insightful) history of American ideology and civil cult.

To begin, Macdougall relies on, what I would consider questionable, historiography about the Reformation to ground his account of the American Revolution. The Reformation was not primarily a national movement and it was not any more statist than Roman Catholicism. Jesuit opposition to royal control of church affairs was due to non-Roman monarchs. When hardliners pushed against Roman monarchs, they got the boot (France, Spain, Portugal in the 18th c.). For many Protestants, Rome represented a supranational body of control that not only sought universal control but was corrupt. If you could control papal elections, then a favorable pope would play the international relations game to your favor (as happened in the wars between France and the Habsburgs). In someways, late Medieval supranational ecclesiology, with Rome as the fount for the ius publicum Europaeum, depended upon mammoth backers. Rome was to the Hapbsburgs in the 16th c. what the US has been to the UN through the 20th c. (mainly a tool to pretend international universalism).

Nevertheless, the American tradition of civil religion had developed out of the British Enlightenment. In Britain, the established churches were deactivated for a broader coalition of British Protestant civil nationalism. America adopted a less distinctively Christian form of this ecumenical civil religion. It was a means to bond a society along common values than adherence to a particular institution (part of the broader shift from personal and organizational loyalty to ideological conformity). America became the first nation united by ideas: a process that was often slow and halting among actual Americans, who had more loyalty to local institutions than nation. It was this ideological focus that made up American civil religion. It was the nation (drawing on centuries of America as New World) as the exceptional that motivated American involvement in politics. All in all, it was quite small scale and tame (and it's hard to say how many people ever bought into any of the propaganda). Yet it provided a framework for the nations. America's foreign policy embraced an ideology that snapped the modern synthesis for an embrace of the future. In the British Enlightenment, the modern was a balance between the ancient and the present (modern). Rather than reject the present for the past, it sought to bring the past and present into a conversation opened to the future (novel combinations, not slavish adherence). American foreign policy saw itself, in broad brushes, as fundamentally future oriented. The Revolution had shifted the political discourse from a defense of English rights to human rights. America was the nation of the future, untainted by the corruption of past traditions. This mode of thought was present among both Jeffersonians and Federalists, even if it amounted to very different things. But the former's far more passionate embrace of it led to the victory of this vision, even if it was pluriform and inherently unstable (the split between Jacksonian Democrats and national-republican Whigs, let alone the rise of southern Cotton Kingdom nationalism).

Throughout all of this emphasis on radical novelty, a rejection of the past, and an embrace in the can-do commonsense of practical men working for the future, there was an emphasis on containment. There is continuity between enlightener Tom Paine and Jacksonian propagandist John L. O'Sullivan, emphasizing expansion across a "wilderness" for the common man with common sense. Yet it was aimed for the settler, the (white) American pioneer who wanted to expand the republic. It did not involve the conquest of other people or controlling their destiny. On the one hand, it promotes a kind of international isolationism and aversion toward empire and war. A dark lining to this doctrine comes when you realize Americans have invaded the lands of other peoples (Mexicans and various Indian nations). These people cease to exist in the American political imaginary. Such has ranged between ignorance (i.e. general unawareness that these people still exist in their own ways) to genocide or coercive assimilation (e.g. Indian boarding schools). Nevertheless, the fact that these events become memory-holed or invisible reflects how Americans generally understood themselves and their country. They were the country of the future, but this future was to remain within the boundaries of the republic. While Macdougall grasps the larger continuities, I don't think he sufficient grasps the connection to what I'd call "ultra-modernism", this fundamental rejection of tradition, which drives forward this new ideological cult. But Macdougall does acknowledge what came later was a mutation from what came before. While providentially unique, America's vocation was for America alone. It had no call to disciple the nations.

Hence, even as America emerged as an international power after the Spanish American war, many Americans were uncomfortable with the ideas of empire. The Civil War had radically transformed the relationship between many Americans and the federal government. It had the uncontested right as the national government, which would be involved in larger development projects. The Republican party rapidly dropped its Free-Soil, small farming/manufacturing, self-ownership, contingent (most of whom returned to the Democratic party) and became the corporatist party of business. The consolidation of powerful businesses allowed the US to flex its natural wealth and industry in the face of other nations. Yet the dominant Republican party was committed to protectionism and national development. "The chief business of America is business" still remained a slogan among old Republicans after the Wilsonian shift (Macdougall sees Calvin Coolidge as the last president who adhered to the old civic religion). But both parties increasingly turned towards a kind of international crusader mentality. Progressives became a powerful faction in the Republican party and, eventually, the Democratic party. TR's Square Deal sought to wield corporatism in a broader way for the American people; Wilson's New Freedom gutted the old small-ownership model for a "new liberalism" of international intervention. Progressives, who sought a simultaneous international and hyper-American world-order, emerged from the constraints of previous civic religion. America as the future meant that its blessings should transform the world.

Christianity, in all of this, often was a tool for these ideological shifts. A major element within the Fundamentalist-Modernist divide was how churches related to this mutation in the civil religion. While some Fundamentalists, perhaps, started to question the entire model, not a few Fundamentalists adhered to the old civil religion. It wasn't that they thought America wasn't God's chosen nation, rather they thought this vision was distinct for America. William Jennings Bryan was an old school Jeffersonian, which motivated not only his fundamentalist adherence to the old Evangelical movement, but also his isolationism, free-trade, and relative pacifism. The retreat from public life was due to being on the outs of the institutions that manufactured this new propaganda (universities, seminaries, newspapers, etc.) and turned to new forms to advance their message (radio). The Social Gospel motivated many Modernists to not only reform American cities, but reform the world. To many of his critics, Wilson was a stuffy Presbyterian preacher. Mounting the national pulpit, using the presidency as an American high-priesthood, Wilson would exegete the world and the need for American intervention. Macdougall rightly picks up that this position was not internationalism, so much as supranationalism. Wilson's pitch was to Americanize the world, to make the United States the model nation. America was not simply a member of the community of nations, but it was the paragon for what these nations would be. It was an indirect form of imperialism and a new kind of conquest (conceptually similar to Great Britain's liberal free-trade empire in the mid 19th c.). Many European powers reviled this new arrangement, but they walked a dangerous tightrope as they all needed American credit more than ever.

This new position didn't really take until World War Two cemented America's role as the global power. The competition with the Soviet Union helped mask the United States' increasing unipolarity. Scaremongers had to paint the USSR as the chief ideological rival, when it lacked the resources (and eventually the will) to become a hegemon. Stalin represented a mild threat, but with his death the USSR lapsed into a regional powerplayer. Still dominant in eastern Europe and central Asia, the Soviets could crack down on dissent within their own regions and were still capable of international intelligence gathering. Nevertheless, the USSR needed to be treated with parity to justify increasing US involvement. The US needed not only be present in its own backyard (a metastasis of the Monroe Doctrine), but also in its business holdings in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Again, from the point of view of actual events, the post-WW2 pivot was not new. Smedley Butler blew the lid off of how imperial America had been since the turn-of-the-century. The change, as Macdougall rightly notes, was in popular perception. Media (newspapers, radio, TV) could offer more full-throated interventionism to justify various conflicts. Even if many people rejected the Vietnam war (from the beginning or over its course), the Domino Theory was sufficiently plausible that it became the stated ideological underpinning. Republican opposition to Truman was no longer isolationism, but about where America spent its resources. Whereas Truman bureaucrats, like Marshall and Acheson, privileged Europe as the key theater, Republicans like Robert Taft and Henry Cabot Lodge focused on Asia and the threat of China. The victory of Eisenhower in 1952 was, in part, a media campaign to blame the Democrats for losing the Chinese to Communism and bungling the Korean War. The American population found these arguments plausible, to say the very least.

The victory of Wilsonian internationalism perhaps came with the institutionalization of neoliberalism. Unlike the old liberalism, the new liberalism (pioneered in the work of Walter Lippmann) sought to diminish democratic governance for a more technical management of affairs. As the world became more complicated, and various parts of life became systematized as a "social science", these new professionals and managers saw themselves as the new technical aristocracy. Their mastery of nature and man made them fit to run the massive bureaucracies spanning the world. The globe was an increasingly complicated, and intricate, system that did not need the turmoil of political conflict. The average people were not competent to decide these matters, and yet their participation was an aid towards stability. The role of the media was to manufacture the consent, to sell the public on normative choices. Unlike crude propaganda of command-obey, the new science of advertising was to figure out how to convince people without them realizing it. The goal was to build new norming norms, so people simply make choices within paradigms designed for them. Democracy was to become a means of simply polling the people, to figure out whether they'd accept whatever new adjustments or developments the market (and its beneficiaries) required. Participation helped breed content and consent, whether or not it was actually a living form of government.

With the election of Jimmy Carter, the turbulence from Kennedy to Nixon was supposed to slowdown. The new liberals debated among themselves in terms of strategy and marketing approach, but they became the dominant force in both parties. There has been continuity between Carter and Obama (when Macdougall published), that saw a hyper-Americanism be pitched as both a new nationalism and an internationalism. But even as Reagan Republicans exalted the nation and Clinton's New Democrats emphasized the end of politics, the agenda was basically the same. Both factions prioritized this new idea of managing and protecting the market, a global phenomenon. The only difference is that Reagan couched things in terms of defending capitalism ("the American way of life" and Clinton defended human rights. Both invaded several countries to put down threats to their supporters and the complex of industries that depend on deactivating foreign governments. And yet all of these things are done through an appeal to ghostly authority. Whether evangelical Republican or secular Democrat, both are still religious adherents to the civic cult of America unipolarity. While the connection may be easier to see between Evangelicals and Republicans, secular Democrats flock to cultic figures like Clinton or Obama. The president is a high-priest, whose orations are like sermons. Throngs appear to offer their reverence and unwavering attention. Even as formal religion decreases (with the rise of the Nones), people still follow politics like a cargo cult. There are no real policy differences between parties, with superficial culture-war ones pitched to cause fervor. As much as I'd like to see abortion made illegal, I doubt any government agency has the will to bring it about in way that is either effective or destructive for social fabric (i.e. women turning to black market abortions). But it becomes a standard to wave to marshal votes; why would Republicans ever wreck this ideological cash-cow?

As an side, it's this new liberalism that is an immense threat to civil liberties. People should not only not participate on their own terms, but they should not engage in any counter- or anti-ideological rejection of these media controls. The newspeak of "micro-aggression", "antiracism", and "safe space" is the secular mirror-image to old Moral Majority canards about civility and decency. The religious right was as much identity politics as what is current on the liberal-left. While people have been, are, and will be weaponized to push these ideological platforms, they serve a more distinct purpose. The more that freedom of speech is curtailed, the more it serves the management of discourse. If something, whether about a race or a god, becomes the equivalent of "blasphemy" than it opens the door to other unspeakable words. The Warren Commission's use of "conspiracy theory" was a weapon to discredit any who questioned the narrative about JFK's assassination. But such was discursive management, not penalization. The proponents of IdPol become a battering ram to advance legislative restrictions on speech. Of course, all speech has limits. Lies and slanders can impact the fabric of society. Blasphemous speech too could destroy society, if said society was under a divine authority. The civic cult of America, as divine and exceptional nation (even its photo-negative, viz. 1619 Project, that America is exceptionally evil and needs exceptional redemption through black activists), launders this strange leap of logic. If this nation was born in a covenant with a divine figure, then blasphemy may very well be a socially deleterious action. But is America a divinely covenanted nation? Each wing of IdPol wants its own restrictions, which reflect their own pantheon of sacred figures. Such claims are either idolatry or is itself a form of blasphemy, if they invoke the living God's name for their own projects. But these are simply weaponized adherents to advance the actual goal: protecting the managerial system from criticism, so it may operate smoothly and beneath perception.

Even though Trump emerged after this book was written, he fits neatly into this paradigm. In a way, Trump was a dangerous bull in a china shop. His disrespect for the deep-state (even as he surrounded himself with figures from some of its factions) threatened their extra-political existence. Rhetorically at least, Trump actually claimed his presidential prerogatives as master over the sprawling executive bureaucracy. Liberal media had meltdowns as Trump simply laughed or shrugged at the CIA or his generals. He was a not a real threat to the system, but his lack of finesse or submission to the rhetorical protocols made hyper-American dominance unstable. If the United States acted less like the paragon nation, and more like a strong nation, then America could simply be resisted or defeated in a war of resources. Against Wilsonian internationalism, if America descended from its heavenly heights to brawl in the mud with other nations, then it diminishes America's hyper-national existence. It becomes a nation. Yet even as Trump represented this threat, he road into power on the same civic religion. People's hysterical hatred of Trump often derives from their religious commitment to this cult, they pull their hair out as he profanes the office. Similarly, obsessive devotion to Trump reflects a similar impulse. He is the prophesied anointed leader who will lead America back to glory. As Trump will inevitably pass off stage, his movement (America First or Trumpism, or whatever) will simply recycle the same religious devotion with less turbulent effects. A Trumpist Pence will simply rehash a new New Right, a neo-Moral Majority, that will speak Reaganite nationalism as his administration stabilizes American global unipolarity (or tries to, amid the rising tide of regional power-blocs). Trump's personal notion of power (loyalty to him viz. the office he won) was what ripped off the veneer of the system's operations. I hope Trump was disastrous enough to discredit this neoliberal propaganda machine, but who knows. Everyone may simply go back to sleep, until American unipolarity faces a reckoning.

Macdougall offers a clear analysis of how America morphed into an internationalist power. He charts how professional-managers mutated the old civil religion into a new one. America was not simply the blessed nation of the future, but it had to actively remake the world in its own image. It is story of how propagandists and religious ideologues justify a Babel project. It is tragic for him because America's leaders betray their people in pursuit of empire. The myth will lead people into destitution and decrepitude. In literary terms, perhaps this assessment is correct. Whether or not one has personal emotions regarding the future of America, the rise and fall on the hubris of ultra-modernism is tragic. How will the United States survive without ideological underpinnings? Other nations have a historical consciousness of living under various regimes, even as the people/territory remains the same. America has no such lineage: when the altars are broken and the god fails, when the idea loses credibility, what will happen to the nation?