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A plague on both your houses - part 1: the historical background
This is the first of my long-meditated series of articles about the deficiencies and corruption of the contemporary political system. I shall begin with American politics, for several reasons: because the largest number of LJ readers are American, because even those who are not have a deep interest in things American, and because - in my view - most people are more nearly wrong about American politics than about any other. Most Europeans, for instance, and many Americans, however little they may know about European politics, will have a perception that Berlusconi and Chirac are scoundrels and that Zapatero is an extremist; and those perceptions will be correct so far as they go. But they will also have a perception that President Bush is a religiously-motivated, dangerous and aggressive authoritarian who is out to squash American constitutional rights and international cooperation as far as he can; and this is as grossly and absurdly wrong as it gets. I report with astonishment that a lecturer in the University of Tubingen (one of the world’s leading universities) called George W.Bush, a member of the Methodist Church, a “Fundamentalist”, and did so as if the thing were too obvious to discuss. To anyone who knows anything about American religion, this is fantastic, and it gives us an idea of just how false the perception of America is in Europe. The corruption of the international mass media industry, after all, is itself part of the story I am going to try to tell. But let us begin with the American party system.
1.
The American party system in its classic form, such as existed from about 1860 to about 1970, was not easy for European minds to understand. In Europe, politics organized itself according to the extent of the sympathy of the various parties with the ancient institutions and sources of authority of the countries concerned. The parties of the right originate as parties of the Throne And Altar, supporting a fundamentally paternalistic and stratified vision of society. The extreme right includes all those groups, however differing among themselves, which fundamentally protest against the legitimacy itself of any questioning of Throne And Altar, and wish the space of liberty in society to be reduced or abolished. From the centre to the left, we speak of parties that have a growing extent of distaste for and disagreement with traditional authority; ending, in the extreme left, with parties – mostly Communist – which genuinely present themselves as the nuclei of a whole alternative society. These parties regard the alternative or future society they envisage as the source of moral legitimacy, and in the name of that they contest or refuse the whole legitimacy of the state.
The structure of American politics did not, until recently, have anything to do with this. To anyone who thought in terms of left and right, of authority and reform, it would have been a puzzle that some of the most determined and successful reformers of American history – Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia – came from the ranks of the respectable Republican party; or that the roots of the Democrat party were as much among the racist and reactionary whites of the southern states, with their Ku-Klux-Klan eruptions and their visceral hatred of “Communism” and Catholicism, as from the working-class districts and the Irish neighbourhoods of industrial cities.
In point of fact, the common bond here was between respectability and exclusion, between ordered, bourgeois living and all those communities which, for some reason or other, felt themselves at a distance from the central institutions of society. The United States of America were founded by respectable, settled Protestant folks, with a number of definite ideas about respectability and proper behaviour. Subsequently they suffered the terrible schism between North and South – whose losses still are the highest suffered by the USA in any conflict – which exacerbated the process of impoverishment already evident in the South and virtually excluded Southerners from government for more than fifty years. They also suffered the massive influx of immigrants from Europe, most of them not Protestant and very rarely respectable or educated, who formed whole new social strata in the very heart of the old Puritan colonies.
The Republican party stood for the enduring tradition of the original Protestant bourgeoisie. It was unlike any European conservative party, because it did not stand for any kind of settled authority, but for a set of abstract rules and forms of behaviour accessible to everyone. Anyone could be a Republican: you just have to join one of the mainline Protestant churches, live a very settled family life, concern yourself with local politics and the life of the community, and impress all your neighbours as a solid citizen. It helped if you lived north of the Mason-Dixon line. Conversely, the Democrat party represented all the social groups, however heterogeneous, which had no purchase in this staid Republican world: industrial labourers with no prospect of settled and sober suburban living, Southern whites with more pride than respectability, Catholics and Jews. The division was not between attitudes to authority, but between social groups.
There was also, however, a very definite ideological divide; one, again, which does not correspond to anything in European experience. To any European, “republican” and “democrat” are virtual synonyms; because, however far away one moves, European historical experience is still dominated by the memory of the revolt against overweening royal power, and Republic and Democracy are both words of denial, fortress words. They are words that say, thou shalt not; thou shalt not establish an irresponsible and individual power; thou shalt not give orders to the people, without being delegated by them, and without leaving them the authority to send you back where you came from.
I did not understand, until I came across an American constitutional dictum, that in a different set-up – one in which the memory of irresponsible unelected power did not dominate the historical landscape – the two words might work as opposites. The dictum is: this country is a republic, not a democracy. And to understand it better, we have to remember that the USA have, for all practical purposes, never experienced irresponsible one-man power. The settlement of British colonists in North America was massive, larger in numbers than any by any European country; and it came from a smaller power. The kingdoms of Britain, summed together, had less than half the number of inhabitants of France in 1757; yet the British colonies had three million inhabitants, and New France in Canada less than a hundred thousand. Politically, too, Britain was too distant and feeble to impose its will on these communities as they were incubating in the New World. Between the first settlement of Virginia in 1608 and the collapse of the French colonial empire in 1763, which left Britain and her colonies for the first time face to face, Britain had experienced three changes of dynasty (from Tudor to Stuart, from Stuart to Orange, from Orange to Hannover), two civil wars, one Dutch invasion (the ridiculously misnamed “Glorious Revolution”), two Irish wars and one Scottish one. This was not a country that could impose royal control over its own overseas communities like Spain, France, or even Holland or Portugal managed. By 1763, the Colonies were used to managing their own affairs, and took intrusion that was, by Spanish or French standards, comparatively mild, as intolerable tyranny. From the beginning, then, American experience is the experience of self-governing communities. They had to find a way to express and explain their own experience to themselves; and they turned, in the main, to the Classical roots of Europe. They called their highest assembly the Senate, their hill Capitol Hill; and they spoke of democracy, originally, in the light of Greek theories.
In this context, then, a “republic” stands for a complex of settled laws and rules, embodying the values of the community, and made to be obeyed; while “democracy” stands for the appeal to the power of the majority, of the people assembled and clenched like a fist to obtain what it wants. It becomes clear, then, that the two are opposing and significant views of a popular form of government. “Republic” places the power, the authority, even the moral compulsion, in the institutions; “Democracy”, in the public. That is not to say that the one must outlaw the other. This is an opposition within a system, not a contradiction. The laws of the republic are ultimately guaranteed by the democracy; and the power of the democracy is validated by the principles of the republic. The two great parties stood for equally necessary poles of one common experience.
The connection of “Democracy” in that sense with Southern racism – which is undeniable in the history of the Democratic Party – becomes clearer when you remember that the most “Democratic” state in ancient Greece, Athens, was a slave society which may have had as many slaves as free citizens. If the power of the State is vested in the assembly of free citizens, the issue is who is a free citizen and who is not. Indeed, personal freedom is valued the more, the more it is contrasted with the condition of less fortunate persons. Slavery does not only create a class of people without value or pride; it also creates classes of people – even very poor people – who invest enormous amounts of pride and self-respect in their own separate status as freeborn citizens. The European term that best defines the old, pre-McGovern Democrats is that they were a populist party. A populist party can be, and often is, profoundly conservative and even nationalistic. Berlusconi has recently successfully introduced this kind of politics into Italy, but until his rise, Europe had always resisted it. Poujade, Uomo Qualunque, Chesterton’s Distributists, and so on, have always ended up either remaining no more than ginger groups, or falling to bits after one election, or else being swallowed up by the great conservative or Catholic political forces. In the United States, however, the principle of the party lasted for a century, in spite of the incredible disparities in its midst: Trades Unionists and klansmen, Catholics and Marxists and Jews, found an instinctive common ground in their common opposition to the respectable, staid, Protestant world of the Republican ascendancy. Each of them felt the unconscious arrogance of the Protestants/Republicans in a million acts of exclusion, vanity, prejudice; each of them, knowing himself for a free American citizen and as good as the next man, resented these prejudices violently. This was the basis of classical American politics: the dialectic of outsider-insider, institutions-citizen, within a society that had never known a king.
1.
The American party system in its classic form, such as existed from about 1860 to about 1970, was not easy for European minds to understand. In Europe, politics organized itself according to the extent of the sympathy of the various parties with the ancient institutions and sources of authority of the countries concerned. The parties of the right originate as parties of the Throne And Altar, supporting a fundamentally paternalistic and stratified vision of society. The extreme right includes all those groups, however differing among themselves, which fundamentally protest against the legitimacy itself of any questioning of Throne And Altar, and wish the space of liberty in society to be reduced or abolished. From the centre to the left, we speak of parties that have a growing extent of distaste for and disagreement with traditional authority; ending, in the extreme left, with parties – mostly Communist – which genuinely present themselves as the nuclei of a whole alternative society. These parties regard the alternative or future society they envisage as the source of moral legitimacy, and in the name of that they contest or refuse the whole legitimacy of the state.
The structure of American politics did not, until recently, have anything to do with this. To anyone who thought in terms of left and right, of authority and reform, it would have been a puzzle that some of the most determined and successful reformers of American history – Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Fiorello La Guardia – came from the ranks of the respectable Republican party; or that the roots of the Democrat party were as much among the racist and reactionary whites of the southern states, with their Ku-Klux-Klan eruptions and their visceral hatred of “Communism” and Catholicism, as from the working-class districts and the Irish neighbourhoods of industrial cities.
In point of fact, the common bond here was between respectability and exclusion, between ordered, bourgeois living and all those communities which, for some reason or other, felt themselves at a distance from the central institutions of society. The United States of America were founded by respectable, settled Protestant folks, with a number of definite ideas about respectability and proper behaviour. Subsequently they suffered the terrible schism between North and South – whose losses still are the highest suffered by the USA in any conflict – which exacerbated the process of impoverishment already evident in the South and virtually excluded Southerners from government for more than fifty years. They also suffered the massive influx of immigrants from Europe, most of them not Protestant and very rarely respectable or educated, who formed whole new social strata in the very heart of the old Puritan colonies.
The Republican party stood for the enduring tradition of the original Protestant bourgeoisie. It was unlike any European conservative party, because it did not stand for any kind of settled authority, but for a set of abstract rules and forms of behaviour accessible to everyone. Anyone could be a Republican: you just have to join one of the mainline Protestant churches, live a very settled family life, concern yourself with local politics and the life of the community, and impress all your neighbours as a solid citizen. It helped if you lived north of the Mason-Dixon line. Conversely, the Democrat party represented all the social groups, however heterogeneous, which had no purchase in this staid Republican world: industrial labourers with no prospect of settled and sober suburban living, Southern whites with more pride than respectability, Catholics and Jews. The division was not between attitudes to authority, but between social groups.
There was also, however, a very definite ideological divide; one, again, which does not correspond to anything in European experience. To any European, “republican” and “democrat” are virtual synonyms; because, however far away one moves, European historical experience is still dominated by the memory of the revolt against overweening royal power, and Republic and Democracy are both words of denial, fortress words. They are words that say, thou shalt not; thou shalt not establish an irresponsible and individual power; thou shalt not give orders to the people, without being delegated by them, and without leaving them the authority to send you back where you came from.
I did not understand, until I came across an American constitutional dictum, that in a different set-up – one in which the memory of irresponsible unelected power did not dominate the historical landscape – the two words might work as opposites. The dictum is: this country is a republic, not a democracy. And to understand it better, we have to remember that the USA have, for all practical purposes, never experienced irresponsible one-man power. The settlement of British colonists in North America was massive, larger in numbers than any by any European country; and it came from a smaller power. The kingdoms of Britain, summed together, had less than half the number of inhabitants of France in 1757; yet the British colonies had three million inhabitants, and New France in Canada less than a hundred thousand. Politically, too, Britain was too distant and feeble to impose its will on these communities as they were incubating in the New World. Between the first settlement of Virginia in 1608 and the collapse of the French colonial empire in 1763, which left Britain and her colonies for the first time face to face, Britain had experienced three changes of dynasty (from Tudor to Stuart, from Stuart to Orange, from Orange to Hannover), two civil wars, one Dutch invasion (the ridiculously misnamed “Glorious Revolution”), two Irish wars and one Scottish one. This was not a country that could impose royal control over its own overseas communities like Spain, France, or even Holland or Portugal managed. By 1763, the Colonies were used to managing their own affairs, and took intrusion that was, by Spanish or French standards, comparatively mild, as intolerable tyranny. From the beginning, then, American experience is the experience of self-governing communities. They had to find a way to express and explain their own experience to themselves; and they turned, in the main, to the Classical roots of Europe. They called their highest assembly the Senate, their hill Capitol Hill; and they spoke of democracy, originally, in the light of Greek theories.
In this context, then, a “republic” stands for a complex of settled laws and rules, embodying the values of the community, and made to be obeyed; while “democracy” stands for the appeal to the power of the majority, of the people assembled and clenched like a fist to obtain what it wants. It becomes clear, then, that the two are opposing and significant views of a popular form of government. “Republic” places the power, the authority, even the moral compulsion, in the institutions; “Democracy”, in the public. That is not to say that the one must outlaw the other. This is an opposition within a system, not a contradiction. The laws of the republic are ultimately guaranteed by the democracy; and the power of the democracy is validated by the principles of the republic. The two great parties stood for equally necessary poles of one common experience.
The connection of “Democracy” in that sense with Southern racism – which is undeniable in the history of the Democratic Party – becomes clearer when you remember that the most “Democratic” state in ancient Greece, Athens, was a slave society which may have had as many slaves as free citizens. If the power of the State is vested in the assembly of free citizens, the issue is who is a free citizen and who is not. Indeed, personal freedom is valued the more, the more it is contrasted with the condition of less fortunate persons. Slavery does not only create a class of people without value or pride; it also creates classes of people – even very poor people – who invest enormous amounts of pride and self-respect in their own separate status as freeborn citizens. The European term that best defines the old, pre-McGovern Democrats is that they were a populist party. A populist party can be, and often is, profoundly conservative and even nationalistic. Berlusconi has recently successfully introduced this kind of politics into Italy, but until his rise, Europe had always resisted it. Poujade, Uomo Qualunque, Chesterton’s Distributists, and so on, have always ended up either remaining no more than ginger groups, or falling to bits after one election, or else being swallowed up by the great conservative or Catholic political forces. In the United States, however, the principle of the party lasted for a century, in spite of the incredible disparities in its midst: Trades Unionists and klansmen, Catholics and Marxists and Jews, found an instinctive common ground in their common opposition to the respectable, staid, Protestant world of the Republican ascendancy. Each of them felt the unconscious arrogance of the Protestants/Republicans in a million acts of exclusion, vanity, prejudice; each of them, knowing himself for a free American citizen and as good as the next man, resented these prejudices violently. This was the basis of classical American politics: the dialectic of outsider-insider, institutions-citizen, within a society that had never known a king.
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You might like this eminently readable exposition of the 20th century from Mark Rosenfelder. I sure did. (N.B. If it wasn't obvious, it's written from his quirky moderate American liberal perspective.)
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