"Only an equally determined collectivism can effectively resist those who ended the liberal era, or what became a pale imitation of one." -Paul Gottfried, Marx was not Woke
In a recent article, Gottfried (a paleocon historian of Marxism & 20th c. leftwing movements) countered the common-claim that "Woke" originated from Marxist collectivism. He does note, rightly, that Woke emerged out of the New Left liberalism that had absorbed much of the Frankfurt School's radical reworking of Marxist theory. Rather than a scientific analysis of material conditions and class struggle, the new Marxists often combined analysis with social-psychological phenomena, primarily the work of Freud. Thus the explanation for the failed revolution and proletariat class-consciousness was found in other factors that impinged upon individual development. Sexual repression and racial oppression both had retarded the process of revolutionary change. It was not in the working masses of Europe, but in the 3rd world anti colonial revolutions, where substantive transformation occur. Thus Fascism was not simply a reactive rearguard for the Capitalist order (as the Internationale had claimed), but part of an "authoritarian personality" that had seized control to reenforce the old regime of patriarchal religion and property relations.
Old Marxists found these novelties to be a fundamental betrayal of the revolution, a reactionary turn towards bourgeois immorality and decadence. Gottfried notes that Eastern Europe, despite having belonged to the Communist bloc, is far more socially conservative on issues of feminism, homosexuality, and transgenderism than many western nations. The support for radical rightwing parties comes from the former East Germany far more substantially from the West. Commenters have speculated that such was a result of the east not being properly de-Nazified, and Gottfried agrees that in a manner of speaking this is true. The NATO bloc was more open to the transformation of the old authoritative liberalism into the New Left than any Soviet satellite. The "old left", which had a mixed relation with Stalinism, found itself outvoted and overthrown. The colorless labor prince, Hubert Humphrey, found himself assaulted on all fronts in 1968, where the changing of the guard began in force. The "marching through the institutions" that "Eurocommunists" pursued was fairly effective. The New Left, with its Marcusian focus on overthrowing sex/gender/racial repression, gained a hold over many institutions (academic, corporate, government, etc).
How one sees this shift was often colored by presuppositions. For many on the right, this New Left victory was a clear case of leftwing revolution, whereas Marxists on the increasingly defunct "old left" denounced this change as the triumph of reaction from bourgeois sentimentalism. The latter may seem more obvious if one assumes Marxism was strictly an economic program, and it was in terms of its scientific analysis of how social developments will proceed. However, while Marx was never "woke" in the sense of carrying about racial discrimination or sexual liberation, there was an excitement (even if it was considered necessary and inevitable) about how all traditional bonds (religion, kinship, custom, culture) would dissolve before the onslaught of Capitalism. Marx celebrated the impact of the bourgeois revolution, toppling the Ancien Regime of crown and altar. Of course this process was inevitable, as material conditions reduced civilized countries, who had undergone liberal revolution, to owners and workers. When this did not seem to work, where different peoples appeared "stuck", and the bourgeoisie were not inextricably predisposed to see all things as material prosperity (no matter how many claims to the contrary that these attachments were ideological superstructures). Something else, then, must occur. If there is no eschatological break, there may be, at least, a drifting towards a progressive future. We may surf the wave of the future as all things turn to air.
Minor adjustments besides, Gottfried was nevertheless right that orthodox Marxists, especially of a Stalinist variety, deplored this shift. And it was not they who had given way to these new forces who claimed the mantle of the revolutionary pantheon, but the "old" liberal establishment in the West. I put "old" in scare-quotes because this liberalism was itself new in relation to even older, or classical, liberalism. The origin of liberalism was in the defense of individuals, especially individual property-owners, against "irrational" forces that had cropped up through historic accretion. Liberals were in no way opposed to monarchy, or aristocracy, except when these hindered the free operations of rational actors. However, it is entirely unclear where liberalism had emerged or what it originally was until it was already an established constellation of doctrines. It bubbled up some time in the eighteenth century, and as the term suggests, it was not native to English. "Liberalisme" marked out French provenance, but those who held the term would hardly appear liberal by other standard (namely, the nearly revolutionary and disruptive theories of the Physiocrats). Adam Smith was obviously, to some extent, apart of this tradition, but even he reconciled from the nearly utopia programs that his French counterparts pursued. The focus, generally, was the removal of legal hinderances to political participation (even if this did not always include universal suffrage), an economizing of politics (no government intervention in the market, or intervention to remove blockages), and increasing freedoms for movement, speech, worship, and so on.
Liberalism, over the years, transformed across the Euro-American world. The revolutions of 1848 championed liberal ideas, even as it sometimes dovetailed with divergences within liberalism towards the pre-Marxist concepts of Socialism and Communism. In the United States, it was primarily the Democratic Party which harbored (or was adjacent to) the revolutionary impulse that could be seen in Fourierist utopia socialists, as well as Working Men's movements that pursued free-trade against corporate conspiracy. Marxism was, in someways, a radical shift within the liberal tradition of political economy, moving towards the mystical allure of the new sciences away from sheer empiricism and historicism of other economic schools. It was in this way that Marx has been considered the last political economist, completing the traditions of Smith and Ricardo, the same way Spinoza or Leibniz were the last scholastics. They were both the end of one tradition and the beginning of something new (whether truly or in being reified). Liberal revolutionaries, pursuing national identities (some more historic, some more fictitious), were at war with the Ancien Regime. However, the openness of liberal ideas was also its severe weakness. The belief in free speech or a free press could also court disaster when this very freedom was allowed to overcome the very system that allowed it. Thus liberals, or even critics of liberalism, were aware that the forces of reaction (or a pernicious mutation of the true revolution) could bend these same goods to destroy them. Per the vomitous nostrum, democracy must be protected from demagogues who would use democracy to end democratic government. Liberalism must have safeguards to protect liberalism.
It was in this sense, especially in Britain who had lost its manufacturing edge and began to shuffle off its "free-trade empire", that a "new" liberalism emerged to overcome these flaws. Figures ranged from Karl Popper, John Hobson, Hans Kelsen, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey to deal with these new problems. Many cut their teeth on the thought of John Stuart Mill and the increasingly radical individualism that included women and non-white races, decriminalizing sexual deviancy and sodomy. However, to protect this freedom, new measures were necessary to curtail the effects of this radicalizing individualism, especially as proletariat revolution appeared to threaten this new order from the left. This new liberalism (or New Freedom, in the case of Woodrow Wilson's Progressive Democracy) would not flee from the use of governmental or state power, but eagerly embrace it. Free-trade could only persist, as well as the social and material benefits, if the state actively guarded it. New Liberals in Britain and America saw the revolutionary potential in breaking up the old empires that had grown (which were far more haphazard and pragmatically than according to a vision of conquest, as both Cain/Hopkins and Darwin have demonstrated) over the century or so. The empire, rather than a defense of old liberal values such as private property and the white Briton proletariat, was an enemy to these other liberal ideas. An old Machesterian like Joseph Chamberlain launched a subversive campaign to gain control of the Tory party for a Dominion bloc. The loss of a free-trade empire meant a trans-Atlantic empire of Britons, not the transmutation into an increasingly global system of government. Most British pols, in both the Conservative and Liberal parties, were not ready to take either extreme. However, in retrospect, this Fabian liberalism/socialism became increasingly more dominant, especially with the triumph of the United States as western hegemony after two world wars.
This Liberal Consensus, what was the new liberalism of Walter Lippmann who argued democracy could only persevere through manufacturing public opinion through concentrated mass media, was the reigning paradigm of 1945. Leftists may have still pointed to Stalinism, or hope that the USSR could be persuaded to ameliorate to a global liberal consensus (the same way it seemed to have happened with Lenin's pragmatic NEPmen), but they had no serious rightwing contenders. Fascism, as a conglomerate of mixed forces, had broken many European rightists. The US right found itself in retreat after failing to stop Roosevelt's New Deal (which was consecrated into myth, despite visible failures, after the Second World War). Conservatism in America was never quite the same thing as it was in Europe. There was no nobility or church, let alone a rooted gentry (though something like this propelled the early Virginia dynasty of presidents). However, in contrast to those like Chomsky who said the US never had a conservative tradition, there was something of it that morphed through Federalists, Whigs, and the GOP. There was an emphasis on a para-church Evangelical Protestantism, a national economic program (the American System and its derivative elements), and a rooting hierarchy that linked family and labor with industrial changes. There was an American civic culture that could, with time, absorb the many European immigrants. Despite contemporary histrionics about the specter of "Christian Nationalist", most GOP nominating conventions belted out "Onward, Christian Soldier" as they concluded their electoral slate. The progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism could combine elements of the new liberalism with an almost patrician defense of an older liberalism (with Roosevelt's views more akin to Chamberlain than what would be the New Deal or Labour swallowing up many Liberals in Britain). Nevertheless, the myriad traditions that could constitute a conservatism in the US hit the shoals of a victorious Liberalism that formed the US.
Establishment Liberalism coasted through the middle of the twentieth century without challenge. In their own ways, Truman, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Nixon continued this tradition. But, as seen above, it dissolved as it conflicted with the New Left's new liberalism. It may have claimed the mantle of revolutionary Marxism, but its focus on sex and race certainly marked out older liberal concerns about the plight of the negro or the enfranchisement of women. For unreconstructed Stalinist, these were bourgeois preoccupations and self-indulgent. Homosexuals were degenerates who struck a moral blow against the worker's state and the party. The victory of the working-class, without concern for gender or race, was the priority. But the old liberal establishment could not sustain its still common-sense white Judeo-Christian paternalism, even as it opened spaces for those women or minorities which merited consideration. This "color-blindness" or "gender-blindness" of, say, a 1950s Levittown with a white-collared husband and wife was now seen as deeply reactionary. The Freudian restraint, to repress those aberrations which threatened to devour civilization, gave way to the delights of excess. Despite Humphrey's attempt to bridle these factions with a "politics of joy", the New Left overcame. Despite a period of glosses (eg Carter's fuddy-duddy pseudo-establishment liberalism) or conservative reaction (Reagan's "Neo-liberalism" of readjusted establishment liberalism), there was little to stop the tide. The New Left found positions of authority in universities, government bureaucracies, media, and corporate departments. The liberal insistence on free-speech and exchange of ideas could not overcome the logic that speech, if unrestrained, could undo the very ends to which liberalism existed. What good was establishment liberalism if an old New Dealer like George Wallace could wield the threat of segregation from the bully pulpit? If the liberative potential of welfare was part of the adjustment of classical liberalism to a new world, then criticism of racial minorities or women, and eventually sexual minorities, was forbidden. Thus, the hollow shell of an old liberalism, despite efforts to resist in the occasional pseudo-conservative turn, seems incapable to resist. The old skin-suit is in tatters. And corporate wealth, finding its guarantees and protections secured, is more than happy to throw a salute to the BLM, rainbow, and pink-blue flags.
What is there to be done? As the recent dustup with James Lindsay has shown, not everyone is comfortable with Gottfried's solution that a collective rightwing was the only thing to oppose a collective leftwing. The specter of "Fascism" looms over any such counter-argument, but this would only be historical illiteracy (as Gottfried has shown, with both Fascist and NSDAP diversity). The fusion between "paleoconservative" and "paleolibertarian" figures has offered some fruitful discussion, despite whatever disagreements over free-market regulation. However all agree that something new must be done because the old liberalism (of whichever variation) was never powerful enough to cast a substantive vision, whatever common-sense agreements (over culture, Christianity, sex, family relations, and so on) were presumed upon. Liberalism cannot survive, a horse that has been beaten to death from every single corner of the intellectual mindscape. To make this conjecture is almost as trite and tautological as saying all good things must come to an end. Fantasists like Lindsay are the most obnoxious kind of reactionary, worse than those who look to King Charles for restoring the Ancien Regime of Tory Socialism. These kinds of reactionaries have no substance or sense of time, they only pine for a world which was wrenched out of their hands.
For these self-professed liberals, they lament the loss of irreverent 90s cultures, which combined social libertinism with tax cuts and free-enterprise. Elon Musk, Glenn Greenwald, Scott Adams, Matt Taibbi, and many connected to outfits like Turning Point and Daily Wire, they only aspire to return to an age where some crass and insensitive humor was bundled with modest government intervention in the economy. 90s Clinton Democrats appear (or will appear by the end of the 2030s) as a conservative image of an American lost. It was a time where you could eat McDonalds, crack tasteful jokes about minorities, mock religious sentiments, and mess around with girlfriends as a red-blooded American. Ironically, it is the dangerous and far-right Trump supporters who image this lost world more than any other. They're ok with casual vulgarity, flaunting sexuality, and teasing the sacred cows of the day. And so Greenwald Republicans, who will claim the LGB without the TQ, will be considered dangerous radicals. It is a vision found already fully-formed in Europe, where Marine LePenn's radical right is defending the European traditions of Feminism and gay rights from foreign hordes. Nevertheless, the future of the success of a Trump or anyone who appears, no matter how faintly, in the visage of traditional conservative ideas (involving immigration restrictions and defense of American manufacturing) must reconcile to the world as it is for success.
However the above revanchism must not be confused for anything but a posture in the current order. One does not require the acceptance of *our* homosexuals and transgenders who reject the snowflake efforts to censor criticism. However, the same problems emerge and only the current Woke left seems fully aware of them and able to mobilize their own forces to adjust the political realities. It's not Communism, it's something else, which calling it "Woke" is perhaps good enough as a description. It's leftwing and progressive, it seeks to acquire a certain kind of equalitarian leveling, but one in favor of select identity collectives who form the democratic Majority-of-Minorities. This Identity Politics may be fairly plastic and malleable, as ethnic kinship plants far deeper-roots than sexual preferences or vague racial homogenization. And it may be, as Communists accuse, be a decadent expression of "late-stage Capitalism" (or, it reflects the virtuality and cosmopolitanism of finance). However, it's durable enough to capture institutions and provide the basis of some kind of civic cult that can maintain the "rules-based order" that came into being with the UN. Lobbyists can continue to alter the cultural window to allow these kinds of virtualized people to flow along with a virtualized economy. Slamming your fist on the table and demanding a return to the age of simply free-speech and empty signifiers (such as simply the intolerance of intolerance) will only reinscribe the problems of the day for a time kicked down the road. Without institutions and organizations, there would be no way to offer any counter-vision. Digging your heels in because you don't want to take things so seriously is building a castle in the clouds. To question commonsense assumptions on race, sex, gender, or whatever, should not be simply because no one should take these things too seriously. An exhausted nihilism, which was the default sentiment of the Gen X which came to maturity in the Clinton years, is no solution. It's just a nostalgia for when things didn't appear so crazy.
However, again, the specter of Fascism or Nazism seems to appear on the horizon with any rightwing posture that would talk severely about questions of ethnicity, culture, borders, and national well-being. I have never been able to fully reconcile myself to any conservatism proper because I am not sure that these things, in this current world, can sustain themselves, but I will return to this later. Nevertheless, these are simply boogeymen without substance. Serious thought has not depended upon regurgitating Roman salutes and revisionist arguments. The exhaustion of these positions, which are often self-destructive transvaluation than anything substantive, reflects the broader social change. We no longer live in a world of mass-mobilization and concentrate corporate power that a state may sit upon. Fascism, Communism, the authoritative old Liberalism, National Socialism, and varied other forms of corporatism have all passed away. In contrast, the diffusion of state power and the increasing blur between private and public domain, along with smaller efficient organization of production and combat, suggests looking at a different period and era to understand a "collective Right" to match the current "collective Left" and its diffusive organization.
First, I want to discuss how one may discuss a "collective Left" in light of what may be termed "Wokeness" or more generically as Identity Politics. In contrast to some mass-mobilization according to class through unionization or parties, instead there's a fragmentation into various protected minorities. While a crop of class-conscious Socialists exist, their claims are mostly meaningless. To consider a service-worker as "working class" is incoherent, especially in light of wider Marxist theory. Seizing the means of production means the workers get to own a warehouse to stack boxes or espresso machines to make lattes. The skin-suit of Marxism is a gloss for what is simply demanding higher wages and collective bargaining, which requires nothing distinctly Socialist to advance. The reason union membership has collapsed is not because of some greedy capitalist conspiracy, contrary to the fantasies of Occupy Wall St aftershocks, but because they're inefficient for the fragmentation of many corporate entities. Big Labor has discredited itself over the decades and dissolved into a rump of what it formerly was, begging from scraps from the Democratic Party. The same applies generally across the North Atlantic. Instead, "class" has often been blurred into the melange of the Majority-of-Minorities that constitute leftwing organization. Whether it's race, gender, or sexual orientation, and the intersection of these, such constitutes smaller communities that cooperate towards a collective and communitarian egalitarianism. Thus Black Lives Matter is important for the gays, as much as 'People of Color' march for trans-rights. These groups hold together through dispersed online communities and "influencers" who set discursive topics, fueling electoral marshaling. Thus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exercises political power through streaming more so than caucusing, as much as Trump's limited ability to govern depended on setting the conversation on Twitter. Of course this is not running parallel to older institutions, but the older institutions have absorbed or adapted to these new virtual dispersals.
The "Great Awokening" has provoked commentary on where, if anywhere, these ideas emerged from. Trite genealogical commentaries have been produced to blame puritanism or liberalism or some other censorious -ism that is stern and severe (which supposedly 'woke moralism' is). Nevertheless, as Gottfried noted and Lindsay refused, there is no way to respond to this general effort to police social norms without some other collective organization. However, in contrast to the view of 'woke moralists' as fun police (which has led to some use of arch-perverts like Paglia), there is a libidinous excess to the "woke" left. It may be cliche and hardly transgressive, but many confabulate their bold fight against Fascism as if America was on the edge of becoming a Lynchburg Theocracy like Escape From L.A. It rarely occurs to them that they have the support of hedge-funds, fortune-500 companies, and the reigning party, but this is considered disingenuous at best. This kind of neurotic approach is helpful for constant mobilization, which has made these groups more effective. Every dead black man or woman is a return to Jim Crow. Even the trans-shooter in Tennessee is a sign that the trans-community is under siege. Rioting, temporary occupation, and unending range of sexual experimentation in more public domains are framed as self-defense against an evil power (even as most of these receive permission from the same local institutions and governments). This movement is not conserving anything, but progressing towards some undetermined future of equality and prosperity (even if this vision receives zero serious hard-headed theorizing). Screaming in a bull-horn and marching about is, in a sense, a politics of fun that is not so different than 60s radicals. It may be more delusional and farcical, but it is no way a somber militancy that marked Oliver Cromwell's Roundheads.
Then why the misdiagnosis? Why would a 'woke' have a conniption about misusing pronouns, but not mocking white culture about lack of spice on their chicken and lack of rhythm in their dance? Because there are always boundaries, as the stale Popperian "intolerance of intolerance" claim would recognize. Then what? The 90s Liberal effort to restore "normalcy" is treating a superficial cut in response to a cancer diagnosis. It is also a radical misdiagnosis for an era that had made "politically correct" speech more normative. Well, as some rightwing communitarians (usually of a Traditionalist stripe) argue, why not just impose a different form of intolerance? Racial or gendered humor is fine, but ban the libidinal excesses of pornography and anti-religious speech. How? Usually it's at this moment that coherency breaks down. There is often a wistful hope for a brand of Caesarism, often linked to Trump, that an authoritarian figure will simply stomp out the degeneracy and save 'The People' who are decent. However, besides the fantastical questions of how this would come about (Caesar had a veteran military loyal to him), there is also the wide overestimation of how popular these restrictions would be. There is a growing resentment to woke pressures, but these are almost entirely negative. Most people are comfortable with the changing dimensions, most especially Trump who is no different than a 90s Democrat on many issues (though this means something different now). Finally, this again presumes upon the lost world of a centralized and mass-mobilized state, and thus ironic (or not so ironic) Hitlerismo will lead nowhere.
Instead, I hope to excavate some ideas from within the American tradition. I hope to revisit the Pocockian thesis of Anglo-American republicanism.
Per Pocock, republicanism was in contrast to nascent ideals of liberalism. Instead of certain de-politicized zones of non-interference, there were locally organized communities of citizens committed to their self-regulation. This marked out English whig thought as much as the American patriots, who declared independence over a defense of their traditional rights. Against the Imperial reorganization of Britain's parliament and George III's virile patriot-kingship, colonial elites divided on acceptance of these changes (even as it hurt their own privileges) and the extent to which they would resist them. Arch-critic of the Stamp Act, John Dickinson, vociferously attacked movements towards independence. Thus, as many have noted (positively or negatively), the Patriot movement was primarily, or originally, conservative of colonial liberties. Hence Alexander Hamilton and John Adams called themselves True Whigs, in contrast to the "Tories" who would abandon representative government to an autocratic king and imperial parliament. Whether it was out of skittishness to leave the Empire or commitment to these new changes whatever the consequence, these adaptations were just as novel, if not more, than the defense of a United States.
However, in contrast to later liberal or libertarian interpretations, the independent and revolutionary states implemented restrictive laws on commerce, speech, and even religious expression. Quakers came under the ban of revolutionary Pennsylvania for failing to support Philadelphia militias, which Tom Paine considered a false religion to cover cowardice and treason. Extreme measures eventually gave way to measured response, reincorporating loyalists and fence-sitters, reforging colonial governments with modifications to government. Nevertheless, there was no shift towards free-trade or strictly limited government. Jefferson may have advised a strict interpretation of the Constitution, but he also had no particular loyalty to this text as permanent and indispensable. Those against the federal constitution, such as Patrick Henry of Virginia, were concerned about the liberty of their individual state, not the restriction on a variety of negative liberties. Henry had tried to defend a pan-Protestant religious establishment (which Madison gutted) and sided with the Federalists against paens to Jacobin France coming from Jefferson's republicans (even supporting the Alien and Sedition Acts). Concern over a national bank or national infrastructure program was not against state governments pursuing the same. And as a recent monograph has argued, part of the need for a stronger national government was to restrict the overactive governments of the states. Thus a libertarian may have, in fact, supported Washington and the new federal constitution against the smaller communities. Nevertheless, the point here would be, more strictly, that no ideological liberalism makes sense in early American history (or most of American history). This is not particularly controversial or interesting. However, what was this republican organization of American society and how did it operate?
As a young people, Americans were not only building many new institutions to handle the challenges of social organization, but also rapidly fanning out across North America. Despite foolish polemics that whine about 40,000 Protestant denominations, these often reflect the overlapping jurisdictions of various Protestants of different government or ethnic origin, most of whom were rapidly converging. One may speak of an Evangelical establishment through most of the 19th c., until the Darwinian-Modernist crack-up. And even as these advanced national organization to facilitate industry and trade, these were not welfare projects. Even the most ardent proponent of the American System believed in what would appear as Night-Watchman state today. Instead, it was this inter-connectivity of these various bodies that allowed republican society to flourish. Whether it was mutual support clubs, parties, churches, lodges, schools, and so on, these allowed a dynamic American society that would later give birth to the technological and social changes of the corporatist age in the late 19th and 3/4s of the 20th century.
Nevertheless, this American republicanism was the last glorious demonstration of a focus that went back to the Renaissance. This period was the "Machiavellian Moment", where centralizing government depended on a patchwork cooperation with citizenry. It was in this sense that the Elizabethan age was a Protestant republic, where the Queen depended on cooperation through the aristocracy and Parliament, a point her Roman Catholic critics recognized. There were efforts at an "alternative modernity" (as Steve Pincus clumsily categorized things) in an absolutist throne. France's Louis XIV was as much a change as the aristocratic republicanism of Whiggery and Commonwealthmen in England. The defense of particular rights and liberties, to individuals and larger bodies, was secured without the same fixation on a refusal of all positive liberties. The defense of wide weapons ownership in 18th c. England dovetailed with a prohibition against Roman Catholics of doing the same. England had an established church, but it was different than Scotland's, and this patchwork allowed a dynamic empire that could find common cause through overlapping jurisdiction. Americans drew on this same legacy, often citing Trenchard/Gordon, Hoadly, Locke, Sidney, and other of the more radical Whigs. The emphasis was less on strong institutional centralization (which marked Tory criticism of court corruption) than a wider diffusion towards greater unity. Thus criticism of crown corporations was not so much in defense of free-trade, but proliferation of access that allowed natural talent to rise.
Ironically, perhaps, that all of the above smacked more of "feudalism", with its many overlapping jurisdictions. An argument I'd make, though one I will not substantiate here, is that there is continuity between the Elizabethan royal republicanism of Richard Hooker (who drew extensively, politically and ecclesiologically, from Thomas and Medieval thought) and later Whigs. Benjamin Hoadly, an unduly maligned bishop and controversialist, who was a strong partisan for a strong Whiggish interpretation of the Glorious Revolution, claimed Hooker more often than not. Later American Whigs not only claimed Hoadly in state (eg John Adams), but also Hoadly in church, as I demonstrated elsewhere in the thought of American patriot bishop, William White. "Feudalism" itself must always be contained in scare-quotes because it is, in truth, no more than a heuristic to explain the overlapping jurisdictions of ecclesiastical corporations, chartered cities, freeholders, landed lords, and crowns. These relations were hierarchical and in no way equal between the covenanted. Nevertheless, just as the Framers of the Constitution posited the national government as superior to the individual states, there were still reciprocal relations. When one party failed the other, there was a right to resist until grievances were redressed, such as the case in James Madison's Virginia Declaration (though one may doubt that this included secession and separation, as was the case in 1860). However, in practice, it was through overlapping jurisdictions that freedom was allowed. It was not in a liberal absence of all authority (posited among the more radical moments in Jefferson's thought), but in overlapping authorities that true freedom existed. It was not as a sovereign individual (whatever that meant), but it was in the threshold between family, state, church, business, and nation one could find new ways forward. In a strange way this dovetails with Agamben's reading of St Paul's thought, but I digress.
What does any of this mean for today? Besides the partiality an American shows for America (even as one is not foreign to the entire panoply), it is still relevant for a wider European republican experience of thought. This republicanism was also not derived from Athens or Rome, let alone medieval Florence or Venice, but also ancient Israel. Though in no way required, the biblical polity may still be instructive. Israel had local elders, priests, judges, land-owners, family, and the king, all of which possessed overlapping authority in response to varied corruption (which was common throughout its history). Additionally there was the oracular authority of prophets claiming inspiration (rightly or falsely). Again, freedom was not the absence of authority, but its overlapping, through which a threshold for the Word of God to enter. It is not the ideal construction of a utopia, but the freedom of man under his own Heavenly fig tree and vine. King Jesus is not *somewhere* else, which the Church must replace vicariously until He returns. As King of Conscience, Christ reigns in the here and now, in and through the varied institutions, always allowing righteousness to reemerge.
Applied this means one should not focus on a fictitious hero that will come to save, let alone simply get lost in the chattering networks of social media interface. The capacity for this to have an impact, as it does on the "woke" left, depends on interface with varied institutions. American Whiggish republicanism would inspire efforts at seizing the reality of this dispersal. New organizations, or conquering old ones, that offer institutional authority. As one example, Congressman Thomas Massie has suggested efforts to deregulate the sale and use of raw milk to allow greater access to better quality dairy. Centralized agriculture may give way to smaller, and more efficient, growers who provide higher quality of product. Rather than the corporatist privileging of certain multinational corporate producer, new organizations and unions to acquire food (especially as transportation and refrigeration allow wider access on a virtualized market-place). The goal is to allow more into the trade, not less. Federal regulation, viz. regulatory capture, is no different than a crown charter.
The wider overlapping nets of authority, with competing labels of quality and health, will allow the best to compete more vigorously. In a manner of speaking, this is the true good of a free-market without the economizing of liberal laissez-faire, which is debatable if it was ever real. Instead, it's a revolt against sheer centralization, which often claims the mantle of implementing a sovereign right to force "open markets" (subject to trans-national regulatory boards and committees). Of course it is trite to simply "make your own" organizations, as if they're a home DIY project. But whether it's homeschool cooperatives, paraecclesial organizations, businesses, recognized certification programs outside of accredited colleges, and various other networks. Of course this also dovetails with a commitment to reclaim institutions that already exist (major parties, corporate entities, local/state/federal government, media platforms) and not simply abandon them. However, the goal is to use power to establish liberties and not simply create an eliminative program that apes leftist visions of collectivity. A whiggish defense of community, according to covenant, is not the hive-mind demand for communitarian coercion. Nevertheless, the covenant itself does not need to be leveled out to fit particular standards. Organizations may expel according to their own standards, and the battle between them will lead to opening to secure protections and force out perverters.
There is much to do, and there is more to reflect upon, but such is enough for now. The project must continue.
