Author: John

Coins of the Realm

~ John ~ Leave a comment

So what is an American?

People of diverse political stripes have lately invoked the ghost of Sen. John McCain — which has barely had time to escape his mortal remains — to bless one agenda or another.  Then last Wednesday, an anonymous senior White House official turned NYT editorialist joined the chorus, asking in McCain’s name for “everyday citizens” to shed their partisan labels “in favor of a common one: Americans.”  Reading these words on air the other night, Rachel Maddow pronounced herself perplexed: “I mean, being an ‘American’ does not exactly come with a set of instructions.”

My high school required a tenth grade civics/history class called “What is an American?”  It featured eyewitness accounts of the American Revolution, contemporary racist justifications for slavery, and original sources on the Civil War.  The question in the course title wasn’t meant to have a single answer, or perhaps any answer at all.  It was the 1970s, and everything was, you know, relative.  A conservative might argue that this cultural relativity was exactly the problem leading us down the path to Rachel Maddow’s peaked eyebrows.

Still, relativity is baked into McCain’s patriotism, in the same sense that it’s minted into every coin we carry in our pockets, with the words E Pluribus Unum.  The phrase derives from Cicero: “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many (unus fiat ex pluribus).”  Of course, the actual practice of such selfless love is as common in today’s politics as, well, quoting Cicero.  In the original Latin.  While wearing a toga.

It’s more common to understand the phrase as celebrating diversity: the elixir of our one-ness flowing from the fountains of our many-ness.  It’s a change from the original Latin meaning, but not really a stretch from the Founders’ rallying cry, as they tried to pull together a nation state out of diverse colonial enclaves. Nowadays liberals will stress the pluribus while conservatives stress the unum, with the net result that as a nation we fail at both.

Still, there’s one aspect of the Founders’ gloss on E pluribus unum in which McCain always believed, but with which other conservatives have long disagreed: that the unum of America is a universal set of ideas, and not a territorial birthright.  The difference between these two ideas about where rights come from traces from a philosophical clash between the conservative icon Edmund Burke on one hand, and the revolutionary icon Jean Jacques Rousseau on the other. Hannah Arendt, whose Origins of Totalitarianism grows more relevant by the day, sums up this conflict as “the Rights of Englishmen versus the Rights of Man.”  She points out that once you conclude that rights derive, not from your humanity, but from where you were born, it is a short stride to believing that races of humans originating from other places have no rights at all.

These two contradictory strands of belief have fought a silent war inside the word pluribus for over 200 years.  Our democracy has thus far survived.  Now, though, there are 7.6 billion people on Earth, and fears over mass northward migrations have sharpened this conflict to a dangerous edge.  Changing US demographics are bending our politics to the point of inflection into a new world.  Leaders are rewarded for gunning our economy past the redline, regardless of long-term consequence. Scrambles for resources, environmental and food crises exacerbated by climate change, and worsening income inequality are all likely to challenge the next generation in ways that will further stress our political institutions.

It is therefore understandable that many Americans want to retreat into the safe harbor of Burke’s “rights of Englishmen” mentality, and to restrict the entitlements of the American idea to those born on our soil. But John McCain, who was, after all, born in Panama and spent his most formative years in Vietnam, believed that America is more idea than place.

Our generation has reached a fateful moment in history, for we can no longer have it both ways.  We can choose universal rights, and keep our democracy. Or we can choose lifeboat ethics, and let it go.

Lords and Peasants

~ John ~ 3 Comments

It’s cathartic to blame the state of the world on the current president – especially when he’s of the opposite party, and especially, if you’re liberal and the president is you-know-who.  But honest conservatives knew our problems didn’t begin with Barack Obama, and realistic progressives know their nightmares won’t end with this incumbency.  So this summer I decided to look further back.  WAY further back.

When I was in my first round of grad school, ostensibly pursuing a PhD in sociology but actually pursuing my soon-to-be spouse, I read a book called “The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World,” by Barrington Moore, Jr.  It compares the early modernizations of England, France, the US, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, and India, in an effort to derive universal laws about what leads societies to become democratic or dictatorial.  A huge undertaking to write, and at 550 pages of close argument, something of a doorstop to read.  But it fundamentally changed my worldview.

Moore focused on the relationship between landowners and peasants as one fulcrum for the development of a democratic society.  In England, lords forcibly kicked peasants off the land to pasture sheep – so peasants moved to towns.  This “enclosure” movement, combined with 17th century English Civil War, broke the absolutist power of the monarchy, greatly reduced the number of people under the thumb of a rural lord, and put England on the road to parliamentary democracy.  We think of England’s democratic evolution as “peaceful”, Moore argues, only because they got their major violence out of the way in the 1600s.  The French monarchy, in contrast, kept absolute power, and French aristocrats kept absolute control over the rural peasantry.  So in order for democracy to take hold, there had to be a bloody social revolution – which there was, in 1789.  In Germany and Russia, the local aristocracy retained still tighter control over the peasants and crushed any revolts until the 20th century, leading to a socialist revolution in Russia and fascism in Germany in the 20th century.

Moore’s fundamental point – greatly oversimplified – is that you cannot have a democratic society where, in the countryside, a few people effectively control the destinies of all the others.  Call it plantation slavery, peasantry, peonage, sharecropping, latifundism, reservations, or colonization — the basic dynamic is the same.

Back in the 1960s when Moore was writing, and in the 1980s when I first read him, the book had a self-congratulatory aura, as in: “this is what we democracies did right, and all those bad dictatorships did wrong.”  But the book has sat on my shelf all these years, and I decided to take it on my summer vacation, because of my dim recollection of his chapter on the United States.  The voice of that chapter has been calling to me lately.  Not a voice of prophecy, exactly, but of prescience.

In that chapter, Moore focuses on the US Civil War as a “bourgeois revolution” imposed by one region on another, arguing that the system of plantation slavery in the antebellum South was fundamentally incompatible with the development of democracy in the United States as a whole.  Even though the war wasn’t driven by northern opposition to slavery, Moore argues that American democracy would ultimately have collapsed if the war not resulted in slavery’s abolition.  Still, the southern structure of land ownership mostly survived, after the North abandoned its Radical Reconstruction program.  As a result, southern plantation slavery morphed into a sharecropping system akin to the peonage that existed in Russia in the late 19th century, where landowners had almost complete control over the lives of sharecroppers.   The social structure of peonage sharecropping in both Russia and the United States gave rise to political movements towards “semi-reactionary dictatorship” in both countries.  Moore points out the similarities between the Ku Klux Klan and the marauding “Black Hundreds” who perpetrated pogroms on Russian peasants, even to the point of importing the American word “lynch” into the Russian lexicon.

So what do these analyses of lords and peasants have to do with today?  First, it is strikingly obvious that our most fundamental political divide, both in the US and in Europe, is between urban and rural.   Every nation’s recent electoral map now features polka dots of urban liberalism against fields of rural conservatism.   Though their current manifestations may be new, these cleavages are centuries old.

Second, the American south – and by an extension of the same logic the American west – has only comparatively recently emerged as a democratic society for people of color.  That process is far from complete, and it’s subject to reversal and retrenchment based on the same social forces that have shaped the development of democracy and dictatorship across centuries.

Third, the breakup of traditional social structure in the countryside can become an engine of democracy’s destruction, as local elites try to preserve control over land and power in the face of changing demographics.  In 16th century England, the engine of change was an invasion of sheep that converted farms to pastures and kicked the peasants off their land.  Today, the cultural squeeze comes from two directions – from immigrants changing the faces and power structures of rural communities, and from the cosmopolitan elites changing the faces and power structures of society as a whole.

The takeaway is that rural social upheaval is a fact that nobody who cares about the long-term health of democracy should ignore.  Currently, urban progressives tend to treat the concerns of rural voters with a combination of condescension and scorn – sort of an updated version of the old joke: “The peasants are revolting!  — I’ll say, they’re disgusting!”  This leaves the field wide open for conservatives to gain a monopoly on articulating rural concerns.  Concentrated media ownership enables broad zones of monolithic message saturation, stifling debate and reinforcing local power structures.  We vilify working people for failing to rise above generationally-ingrained — and cynically incited — prejudice. Stereotypes become reinforced to the point of dehumanization. This dynamic leads us in the direction of impending civil war, of city against country, state against militia, gang against Klan.  The predictable – from some perspectives even desirable — form of government to confront such a state of social breakdown is dictatorship.  Moore’s parallels between “semi-reactionary” tendencies in the US and Russia take on a curious and chilling significance.

Some might object that this 30,000-foot view fails to assign blame for the potential loss of democracy to the right or left.  But that’s actually my point.  To me the work of reversing the current slide toward tyranny is as much collaborative as partisan – one that involves more than voting Donald Trump out of office or chanting “lock her up.”  It requires new political alignments that cross the ancient cleavages dividing city and country.  This will require new ways of reaching across divides of class and color, forming new alliances, peeling back labels to find common interests beneath.  These are problems that have vexed European societies for hundreds of years.   Although the technologies of the eras are vastly different, the fundamental solution is the same – we have to look each other in the face.

Easier said than done, of course.  The question is, how?

What is my true point of beginning?

~ John ~ Leave a comment

The survey of an irregular parcel of land is said to proceed by “metes and bounds” – lengths of feet, at precise angles, defining the shape of its ground.  But from where?  A surveyor must derive, from established longitude, latitude, township and range, a universal pinpoint from which to start.  Every survey thus calls forth its “true point of beginning,” before chanting a runic round of metes and bounds, and inevitably returns there.

Every August I return with my family to a ranch in Montana.  I can’t claim to be a native.  Though I worked here one summer as a teenager, I make few physical contributions to it now.  I kill and eat a couple of trout, burn a little wood, and do my best to leave no other marks on the ground.  And yet I’m “from there,” in the sense that, every year, I begin here, and then follow the course of each year’s metes and bounds.

This is the first year since my mother’s death, and the nineteenth since my father’s.  You might say our parents are also a true point of beginning, and so were mine.  They set me out on terrains of privilege, duty, and freak occurrence that I still traverse today.  From my father, a legacy of land.  From my mother, a legacy of horse.

And now, from the late midlife of parents gone, kids mostly fledged, and a thirty-plus year marriage still standing strong, I’m about to begin again.  I’m struck by how, in our fragile, burning land, truth is increasingly defined by its negative, by what is not false.  Certainly it’s easier – safer — to decry falsity than to find truth.  To talk about actual “truth” sounds presumptuous, even arrogant perhaps.  And yet not to proceed from one’s own sense of truth is to get lost in a windy desert of argument, where one claim is as good as another, until the claims of the most powerful choke the sky and bury all the rest.

But then, to stay inside the yard of what we are convinced to be true makes for no journey at all. There’s a lot of that going around as well, as we fortify and police the boundaries of the known.  Leaving behind the enclaves of belief requires one to ask directions, trust strangers, be a guest. Sometimes, as you navigate contested ideas, you might even get shot at by your friends.  That’s where the accumulations of midlife come in handy.  At my age, a certain kind of risk is affordable.

So this year, in this blog, I’ll try to derive my own true points of beginning. From there, for my metes and bounds, I’ll just look around, and keep my eyes and heart open as I ask the way.