Of late this blog has been concerned with
political socialization, how a people’s political ideals and ideas are passed
down to a new generation or among new arrivals from other areas. To briefly summarize, the blog drew its message
from the works of George Santayana,[1]
Daniel Elazar,[2] and
George Lakoff.[3]
Santayana provides an overview of how American
political culture evolved from its colonial days; Elazar divides that culture
into three subcultures, and Lakoff identifies two socialization models by which
Americans have passed on that culture to their children. Together, these respected scholars give one a
working understanding of the importance of this process and how it has evolved
in American history.
So, as Elazar claims, the nation has the three
American subcultures (described in the three previous postings), a general idea
where, geographically, each prevails, and data that supports Elazar’s
contentions regarding these subcultures. From that, one can deduce important descriptive
generalizations. Combining the ideas of
Santayana and Lakoff to Elazar’s subcultures, a dynamic “rig amoral” emerges
and a captivating story evolves which is still being written.
An overarching transcending cultural
perspective which is sustained, to varying degrees, over time and geography, is
a federalist bias. That bias was
demonstrated, by no other factor than the recurring structural elements of the
federal model in the respective developments of various governments. That includes the governments at the state
and local levels, which adds validity to that overall generalized influence.
That model was just assumed as being what the
original states should adopt in their organizing period[4]
– the colonial times – and carried over as the various added states were formed
and then admitted into the Union. But as
has been described earlier in this blog, individualism, which to any
self-centered degree, is inimical to federal values, began to grow. And traditionalism, as southerners felt
threatened regarding slavery and their traditionalistic biases, eventually led those
southerners to attempt secession from the Union.
These two subculture types counter the earlier
Calvinistic, moralistic foundation that, as just mentioned, so influenced the
initiation of federal ideals, values, and structures of governance. While the communal, federalist perspective
still had the dominant social and political position defining the nation’s
political relationships,[5]
individualism – through various social/intellectual movements – ate away at
that foundation. As for the
traditionalistic, it has been constrained mostly within the former Confederate
states.
The nation, toward the beginning of the
nineteenth century, was embarked on a cultural development which would result
in increasing levels of individualism.
And as previously pointed out in this blog, that would be
transcendentalism.[6] But it did not take long for federalism to be further
challenged in a nation experiencing profound changes during that period.
That is, placed against this abstract, outer
worldly intellectualizing of transcendentalism, Santayana points out, was the
increasing hum of a growing industry of the 1800s and that industry’s demand,
in the form of industrialization, for objectivity and empiricism. That would crack the façade of transcendentalism’s
“genteel tradition.”
Finally, Santayana describes how William James
articulated a rebellion against intellectualism and its pedantic rule
making. America changes too quickly,
asserted James, and nothing is permanent in the nation’s popular culture. James helped to introduce the philosophy –
pragmatism – a belief system that places its creeds and theories in estimations
that are characterized by a “local and temporary grammar of action.”[7]
While maintaining the spotlight on the
individual, as in transcendentalism, pragmatism describes the individual not as
a maker of meaning, but instead as an extraordinary observer (“radical
empiricism”) and a possessor of great feeling (“radical romanticism”). A person, according to the pragmatists,
should be about compassionately interacting with things, not with books and
idealized generalities.
By the end of the 1800s, the general popular
philosophy, the expressed assumptions over everyday concerns of the American
nation, is one that strongly emphasizes individualism above communal
morality. This perspective is further
strengthened by the industrial revolution, the popularization of Herbert
Spencer’s Darwinism,[8]
and the typical goals of the new immigrants from Europe which were about
personal advancement as opposed to community building.
This did not, as of that time, replace the
espoused values of federalism, but daily challenged them, especially where
industrial activities were taking place – factory towns and big cities. It should be remembered that as of 1900, 60%
of Americans still lived in rural areas.
Therefore, federalism, with its related views on politics, was not
totally blotted out of the American consciousness; it still defined, more than
any other view, what was moral in the political realm. As the descendants of the original immigrants
– the colonists – migrated to the western parts of the country, they took with
them their original ideals.
As a result, the nation, until the beginning of
the twenty-first century, has almost parallel lines of the cultural landscape. Yes, it is diffused a bit by the physical
barriers such as mountain ranges, bodies of water (for example, the Great
Lakes), and by localized historical developments, such as migration patterns
(e.g., the migration of ample numbers from the Northeast and Midwest into Florida).[9]
In Elazar’s depiction of this distribution in
his 1966 edition of his book, American Federalism, he not only provides
an overall view of that distribution, but also provides a national map that
breaks down how the three subcultures are distributed within each state. Again, citing Florida as the example, it can
be seen to be traditional throughout most of its geographic area, but having a
strong individualistic concentration in the heavily populated area of South Florida.
The philosopher, Santayana, adequately
describes the basis of American popular philosophy. He describes a development that enshrines the
individual through transcendentalism and pragmaticism. Along the way, Americans institutionalized various
processes that were based on pragmatic assumptions which held action, temporal
concerns, and self-initiative as implicit ideals.
But Santayana, in 1911, could still write about
an America light of heart and civil.
This cultural foundation of an increasing sense of individualism under
the precepts of pragmaticism, though, would encounter fundamental institutional
changes that would have profound sociological and psychological consequences. But before leaving the transformational
1800s, perhaps a look at how one person dealt with the great changes can
illustrate more concretely what these changes in cultural factors meant to
Americans.
Luckily, there is one case that rather takes on
special meaning even though his time on earth was suddenly cut short in
1865. That would be Abraham Lincoln and
the next posting, using the review provided by Allen Guelzo,[10]
will attempt to give the reader a sense of the importance of that example.
[1] George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American
Philosophy,” in The Annals of America,
Vol. 13 (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968/1911), 277-288.
[2]
Daniel J.
Elazar, American Federalism: A View from
the States, (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966).
[3]
George
Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals
and Conservatives Think (Chicago, IL:
The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
[4] This assumption was heavily influenced by the
experiences the Puritans had before making their way over the ocean to the
American shores. Specifically, while in
the Netherlands, they were exposed to covenantal ideas which, in turn, were
based on Judaic traditions. See Daniel
J. Elazar, Exploring
Federalism
(Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of
Alabama Press, 1987).
[5] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1996).
[6] For a description of this movement and its effects on
the US, see “An Overall American Construct, Part II,” Gravitas: A Voice for Civics (February 9, 2021),
accessed January 3, 2022, http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2021_02_07_archive.html .
[7] Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American
Philosophy,” in The Annals of America, 285.
[8] “He [Spencer] is best remembered for his
doctrine of social Darwinism, according to which the principles of evolution,
including natural selection, apply to human societies, social classes, and
individuals as well as to biological species developing over geologic
time. In Spencer’s day[,] social Darwinism was invoked to justify
laissez-faire economics and the minimal state, which were thought to best
promote unfettered competition between individuals and the gradual
improvement of society through the ‘survival of the fittest,’ a term that
Spencer himself introduced.” Found in Harry Burrows Acton, “Herbert
Spencer: British Philosopher,” Britannica
(December 4, 2021), accessed January 3, 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Herbert-Spencer .
[9] As previously pointed out in this blog. For the original depiction see Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States, (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966). For a more recent one, see, for example, “State Political Culture,” Lumen: American Government (n.d.), accessed December 26, 2021, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/amgovernment/chapter/state-political-culture/ .
[10]
Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part 2
– transcript books – (Chantilly, VA: The
Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).
