A GENERAL INABILITY

 

Funny how national events – or events that capture the national attention – stir one’s memory.  To this writer, the attack on the national Capitol last January 6^th was such an event.  He recalled something he read some years ago.  That being the late Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism.[1]  When Lasch wrote that book, he seemed to be motivated in part to explain the prevalence of leftist, anti-war demonstrators and of the then popular cultist movements.  It seems that what he had to say then, in the late seventies, has relevance today.

          His basic area of concern is how bourgeois society has lost its ability to meet challenges.  Not only was the Western world unable to think of big solutions, but there also seems to be a lack of willingness to even try.  And that state is not a reaction to a lack of such challenges; they are out there and threaten to overwhelm those societies, including the US.  One can say that even though Lasch wrote this work some thirty years ago, his concerns are still affecting those nations today.

          It is as if classical liberalism,[2] a central strain of belief in the West, has lost its ability to account for multinational corporations or be able to sustain a welfare state.  More targeted in his comments is that that liberalism’s approach, that of science, has not developed effective policies to address the ongoing human/social problems that keep afflicting the West. 

For example, while the loss of manufacturing jobs in the West to developing, low wage countries – mostly in Asia – has left behind segments of those western countries in dire economic straits, none of the western countries seem to devise the policies that would meet that challenge.  Here is one account of this lack of development:

Even if the loss of manufacturing jobs in advance economies may have contributed relatively little to aggregate inequality in advance economies, the negative consequences appear to have been sizable and persistent for some groups of workers and their communities.  Expanding access to programmes that facilitate the reskilling of displace workers and reduce the costs of their reallocation, as well as strengthening safety nets and targeted redistribution policies, can help soften the blow imposed by structural transformation and help ensure that the gains of productivity growth are shared more broadly.[3]

While this transformation has been going on since the seventies, this cited account was written in 2018.  In all that time no meaningful program has been developed to provide the reforms that would reestablish those workers’ prior standing.  They, the dispossessed, instead have become prime candidates for radicalization.

          Lasch writes, “The natural sciences, having made exaggerated claims for themselves, now hasten to announce that science offer no miracle cures for social problems.”[4]  Why this interruption to a history of ongoing successes and advancements?  According to Lasch, one change has been significantly less reliance on the study of history. 

And he not only points out that there is a lack of objectified history (which scientific bias would prefer), but a history soaked in “moral dignity, patriotism, and political optimism.”  That is a history that not only tells of the past but does it with a dose of encouragement, praise, or castigation when a historical tale merits such an account.

          The assumption was that before the post-World War II period, the people were able and disposed to learn from the past, but now the message is that the past is irrelevant.  It stems from the notion that now is modern and then was, well, then and irrelevant to modern challenges.  And this sense for contemporary conditions and their qualitative qualities seems to have affected those in power up and down the political power grid.  And when problems are not fixed or are not even meaningfully addressed, distrust by those in harm’s way follows.

          Recently, after giving conservatives a healthy dose of criticism, this writer pointed out that liberals have their own shortcomings as well.  He then stated that that criticism waited for another venue to express some of that message.  Here it is.  Yes, over reliance on government has led to the diminution of local governance.  This nation, in many areas, has experienced over-governance by empowered, far-off bureaucracies with dehumanizing regulations about how local things should be done.  Please do not interpret this with a non-nuanced eye.

          It is not an either/or issue, but one of degree.  In a world of multinational corporations with enormous power, it is often the case that only central governments can meet the challenges they, the corporations, create or ignore.  The trick – as it is with most of life – is to hit the right combination.  But there is more to this general problem area than merely not reading history.  And addressing that other area or areas will be done at some later posting.

          But for now, this posting leaves the reader with this quote from Lasch:

The inadequacy of solutions dictated from above now forces people to invent solutions dictated from below.  Disenchantment with governmental bureaucracies has begun to extend to corporate bureaucracies as well – the real centers of power in contemporary society.  In small towns and crowded urban neighborhoods, even in suburbs, men and women have initiated modest experiments in cooperation, designed to defend their rights against the corporations and the state.  The “flight from politics,” as it appears to the managerial political elite, may signify citizen’s growing unwillingness to take part in the political system as a consumer of prefabricated spectacles … not a retreat from politics at all but the beginnings of a general political revolt.[5]

Well, now thirty plus years later, as events in Texas this last week indicate – and while the problems with the power there is due to the mismanagement of a state, not a national entity – that revolt still has a way to go. 

Perhaps if the states’ civics curricula were guided not by a natural rights point of view – one that blends in with Lasch’s observation for a preference of objectified studies – but one guided by federation theory, then, at least, how young people are taught about government and politics might help.[6]  It has come to this writer’s attention that the state of Florida is going to consider in its legislature’s next session a mandated change in its public schools’ civics curriculum to offer a more local emphasis.  Hopefully, that comes about, and the resulting change will be effective.

If change along the lines that Lasch suggests does not take place, what then?  He goes on to address the way this whole current situation creates the conditions that generates a generation of radicals such as those who took it upon themselves to attack the US Capitol.  As hinted to above and reflecting the reason this writer presently took up this topic, when this blog again addresses it, it will share Lasch’s attempt at predicting in more detail.

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[1] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism:  American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, NY:  W. W. Norton and Company, 1979).

[2] One can see classical liberalism as a main element of the natural rights view, that his blog claims has taken prevalence since World War II.

[3] Oya Ceasun and Bertrand Gruss, “The Declining Share of Manufacturing Jobs,” Vox(EU)/CEPR (May 25, 2018), accessed February 23, 2021, https://voxeu.org/article/declining-share-manufacturing-jobs .  British spelling.

[4] Ibid., xiv.

[5] Ibid., xv.

[6] If the reader agrees, this writer’s book, Toward a Federated Nation, might assist educators and interested citizens to bring about such a shift.  See Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation:  Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).  Available through Amazon.

WHO TO TRUST?

 

The very first sentence of a book by the Nobel Prize winners Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo over economic challenges is “We live in an age of growing polarization.”[1]  Early in their book they cite the following: 

·       81% of Americans who identify with one of the major parties has a negative opinion of the other party;

·       61% of Democrats classify Republicans as being racists, sexists, or bigots; 55% of Republicans dismiss Democrats as spiteful; and

·       Roughly one of every three Americans express their disappointment if a close family member married someone of the opposing political party.[2]

Other works cited in this blog support this overall descriptive conclusion by providing further relevant statistics.

          These feelings of disdain have become so much a part of the political environment that one tends to define politics as including this sort of emotional response to having political disagreements.  But this is not new.  Thomas E. Ricks, in telling the story of four founding fathers, describes how reluctant their acceptance of political parties and their entailed level of factionalism was.  But then he goes to describe that once accepted, with the exception of George Washington, they were not shy in practicing a fairly virulent form of the practice.[3]

          But to get back to the two Nobel laureates, their point is, and is supported by a good deal of related responsible theorizing, that to sustain a healthy democratic polity, such dissent needs to be reasonably respectful and that demands for a level of understanding.  Understanding of what?  Well, at minimum one should attain an understanding of the contentious issues under debate, of the affected interests of the other party, and of the motivations – both recognized and hidden – that encourage people to act as they do.

          And since the current stage is polarized, the highlighted issues under contention do not stand alone.  As this blog has also explained, there are political forces at play that have become operative because of the system’s polarization itself.[4]  Banerjee and Duflo describe these issues as coming “together as a bunches of grapes.”  But they go on to say that at play are certain core beliefs that determine these various opinions over the array of concerns.

          These beliefs refer to such aspects of life as gender roles or the role of hard work.  With these more fundamental biases, they lead one to believe, for example, if one supports liberal or restrictive immigration policies, supports liberal or restrictive trade policies, or active or limited government role in the economy. 

But while such mental posturing has always functioned in this way, more seems to be at play presently and this blog, as just alluded to, has addressed earlier this more encompassing political environment.  The concern here is a more specific consequence, that being that the current state has become so prevalent within the current arena that a qualitative augmentation has taken place.  “We seem to be back in the Dickensian world of Hard Times, with the haves facing off against the increasingly alienated have-nots, with no resolution in sight.”[5]

So, does this situation just reveal or reflect the Marxian dictum, that all social maladies boil down to class warfare?  Banerjee and Duflo claim that nations are doing little to solve the basic conditions feeding the polarization.  One does not read or listen to reports in the news or other sources describing a turnaround in how wealth or income is becoming less inequitable, only that they are becoming more so.

And one finds that the general attitude among people is not to look to economists for explanations or proscriptions as to what to do.  Generally, they are not seen as reliable sources of good information or so claims Banerjee and Duflo.  This was supported with a survey study they conducted.  They found that only 25% of Americans trusted economists know what they are talking about when it comes to economics.  Is that the worst judged professional group?  No, politicians do worse.

Further they report other research that points out how much economists disagree with the basic opinions of average people.  They can’t seem to agree on tariff policy over steel and aluminum, much less what one would consider prudent in terms of controversial issues such as the economic effect immigrants will have on an economy as a study asked in the case of Germany. 

And the gap between economists – who, by the way, don’t always agree among themselves – and common folk can be quite significant.  In administering an opinion questionnaire of twenty questions, the gap of disagreement was as high as 35 percentage points between how the economists answered a question and how others did so.  It’s no wonder that one can observe people ignoring economists.

Hence, a goal for this blog is to investigate this gap.  Why?  Because this writer does have faith in what economists have to say as long as they back it up with evidence.  That is, he at least believes they, the economists, are not out to lie to their fellow citizens.  Having experienced the “academic” way of finding the truth, he generally holds as truthful academic efforts to report what’s happening and why.

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[1] Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times (New York, NY:  Public Affairs, 2019), 1.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles:  What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (New York, NY:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2020).  He analyzed George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison with telling information regarding Alexander Hamilton.

[4] See, for example, Robert Gutierrez, “Twiddle Dee and Something Else,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics” (August 14, 2020), accessed February 18, 2021, https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/2020_08_09_archive.html .

[5] Banerjee and Duflo, Good Economics for Hard Times, 2.

FOUR ELEMENTS

 

A little research into the origins of American political thought brings one to the fact that there are at least two or three overall approaches to how and from where those ideas and ideals come.  One school, represented among others by Daniel Elazar, Donald Lutz, and the Center for the Study of Federalism harkens to the role of local government. 

A second school looks to the influence of classical thinkers such as those of ancient Greece and Rome.  Here, an example scholar is the historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks.  And yet a third school is a “bottom up” approach, that this writer considers to be a critical theory approach and is exemplified by Ray Raphael.  This blog supports and promotes the federalist approach of Elazar, et al. but suggests to interested readers that they should avail themselves to all three to attain a well-rounded exposure to the nation’s history.

Key to this federalist view is the identification and analysis of founding documents.  Lutz provides a thorough review of colonial documents in his edited book, Colonial Origins of the American Constitution.  In that volume, he presents eighty of those documents.  As is often the case, the federal strategy seems to find a compromise between those influenced by perennialism – a philosophy in education that good education consists of studying the classical thinkers – and those who look to the common folk, the bottom up approach, for what pushes social and political agendas.

In comparing the first two approaches, the more elitist, perennial approach and the federal view, Lutz writes,

… there are two constitutional traditions running through colonial documents.  The first tradition can be found in the charters, letters-patent, and instructions for the colonists written in England.  In certain respects, the United States Constitution favors this tradition.  The second tradition is found in the covenants, compacts, agreements, ordinances, codes, and oaths written by the colonists themselves.  While the U.S. Constitution embodies aspects of this tradition as well, it is in the early state constitutions that we find the full flowering of this second tradition.[1]

With a bit of license, this writer sees this quote as indicating that while the influence from Europe – emanating from English elites and classical education – was real and of consequence, local American sources in their rule making provide a great deal of direction as to the practical, everyday concerns of the colonists. 

And while official documents of early Americans, in part, were also written by well educated colonists, they had to live with the everyday reactions of their fellow companions in mostly frontier environments or small towns and cities.  That is, the politics they faced were close and personal.  And, as background, those conversations were within certain parameters. 

One, there was the perceived need to write basic laws and this seems to emanate from two traditional, legal/cultural movements.  And two, what was established by these early Americans had staying power and can readily be cited as part of the current situation of today.  They, therefore, came from, one, abroad and, two, from domestic sources. 

From England, one had a written constitution, but it was a compilation of common law and legislative ordinances.  This was more or less stitched together and, to a degree, lacked definitive direction.  The other tradition was the accepted practice of Americans writing out their own basic law made possible by the practical expectation that England could not rule them from far away as it ruled its citizens in England.

But in addition, there was one more factor to this second tradition.  Besides the practical inability of English government ruling Americans in the various colonies was the congregational tradition that the initial Puritanical settlers brought with them.  Not only were they disposed to writing foundational documents for their religious communities, but this practice seemed a natural mode of establishment for government as well.  And setting the tone for this was the original motivation to reestablish themselves in this new uninviting environment as they escaped another such environment.

That is, many of them made the trip to escape religious discriminatory practices in Anglican England.  Serving as an underlying factor was the hierarchical structure of the Anglican Church – headed by the monarch who replaced the Pope under Henry the VIII – and the horizontal, congregational structure of Puritanism.  This variance from traditional, centered religious structure had its effect on governance in general as being something to avoid.

And moving to this newer setting in America meant they could run their affairs as they saw fit.  Of course, a set of rules is still needed and that tradition of writing and expressing agreement with a covenant provided the method by which those rules were devised, argued, and agreed upon within the various congregations.  Lutz further writes,

… [They used] self-written covenants as part of their political definitions.  It is a very short step move to a blending of these two traditions wherein Americans would find themselves writing single, amendable documents constitutions.  The Pilgrim Code of Law, for example, begins by referring to both the charter from the king and the Mayflower Compact as its legal basis.[2]

And these foundational documents, according to Lutz, eventually had four recurring elements.

          Element one is “the founding or creation of a people.”  That is, a group identifies itself as having a combination of attributes or characteristics apart from other people and that that group decides to identify that fact and formerly announce to the world that it exists under that identification.  It can be based on an allegiance to a place, a set of ideas and/or values, and/or other cultural elements.  It is significantly more substantive than a fandom of some team or community; it has a wholeness that profoundly defines its members as in “we are Americans.”

          Element two exists when such a transcendent declaration demands “the founding or creation of a government.”  When this is so, the foundational document provides for it.  Apparently, John Locke points out the following distinction, that element one is a unanimous decision and, element two, establishing a government is a majoritarian agreement. 

And these first two elements suggests a structured arrangement within such documents:  first one identifies the people, “We the people of the United States…”, and then, after listing some reasons, states the origins of that people’s government, “,,, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States.”  But one asks:  this is a “constitution” of what?  And the answer is, of a government.

To further define matters, there is the third element, “the self-definition of the people in terms of shared values and goals so that the founded people may cross generation.”  That is, the document shares with the world on what basis this people define themselves.  This is the origin of bills of rights that begin to appear in these constitutions, and they appear just after the declarations of elements one and two.  Unlike with the federal constitution, if one looks at state constitutions, one finds this order:  a people, an establishment of a government, and a statement of basic values.

And why not at the federal level?  Initially, the idea was that the Declaration of Independence already fulfilled this function.  But that was not good enough for those who had doubts about ratifying the constitution of 1787.  Its defenders promised that as the first order of business when the new Congress convened was to submit a bill of rights as amendments and that promise was kept.

And finally, the fourth element is “the specification of a form of government through the creation of institutions for collective decision making.”  Interestingly, this term constitution is originally only applied to this fourth element of the document but through use it has now been ascribed to the whole document. 

This later change is a bit unfortunate in that it leads people to miss the importance of the whole document being a compact and by so doing the miss the fact that it, the constitution, creates a partnership among its members and their posterity.  In addition, by pointing out these elements, one can compare any foundational document with other such documents.  For example, how do American institutions compare to those of other established governments and their people. 

In terms of the US, those institutions would include popular elections, majority rule, minority rights, separation of powers, bicameralism, checks and balances, among others.  Along with these institutions are their accompanying structural features such as the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches.

And this last bit of concern hints at what this blog will address next when these foundational documents are again taken up.  That will be the definition of key terms associated with these documents and their developments.  Eventually, the plan of this writer is to look at a sample of these early documents, and test the notion that early on Americans shared, as a dominant view, a federalist understanding of what governance and politics is and/or should be.

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[1] Donald S. Lutz, “Introductory Essay,” in Colonial Origins of the American Constitution, ed. Donald S. Lutz (Indianapolis, IN:  Liberty Fund, 1998), xxi.

[2] Ibid., xxii.

AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART III

 

The last posting gives the reader a ranging view of how Americans have developed in terms of their philosophical ideas.  Just stating that, it sounds pompous to American ears.  And the fact that it does brings one back to Allen C. Guelzo’s[1] claim as to the pragmatic bias this nation has exhibited for being doers not thinkers.  And yet the academic history of the nation stretches back almost to its very beginning.

          And for this, one can cite the founding of Harvard just six years after the settlement of Boston in 1630.  One can further credit the religious enterprise, in this case that of the Puritans, to seek answers to the more metaphysical questions of life.  While this tradition is noted today for its very strict, moralistic theology, it attempted to discover reality that is not readily observable in the material world. 

Now all of this development was a complex mix of views and biases; for example, thrown into this was the common-sense philosophy of Scottish thought in the eighteenth century (more on this below).  But central in the beginning there was Puritanism that along with its fire-and-brimstone sermons was a strong commitment to congregational arrangements and their covenantal origins.

          Puritanism represents the stoic side of American thinking and one name that emerges as one studies these various influences is that of Jonathan Edwards who was a leader of the Great Awakening, a reemergence of Puritanical allegiance that was reestablished in the mid to late 1700s.  That movement was a sincere effort to bolster Puritanical morals after some slippage due to initial successes in the colonial settlements. 

This is not to claim this historical figure was some great thinker, but a thinker he was and was later designated as president of Princeton (he died as he was about to assume that office in 1758).  But even in the midst of the Great Awakening, the practical side of American thought did not go away.

          On the other side of this dual personality, the next contributor, one that overlaps in time with Edwards and his ilk, is Benjamin Franklin who published his Poor Richards Almanac in 1732 and his Autobiography in 1791 (he died in 1790).  Here one finds the practical tradition of Americans being extolled.  Uplifted were qualities of business acumen and common sense.  And in addition, as alluded to above, was the Scottish philosophic bent of Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and others who if not affecting Franklin, did have an effect on Thomas Jefferson.

Reid wrote the following:

Man was destined for society.  His morality, therefore, was to be formed to this object.  He was endowed with a sense of right and wrong, merely relative to this.  This sense is as much a part of his nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling; it is the true foundation of morality, and not the kalon, truth, etc., as fanciful writers have imagined.  The moral sense, or conscience, is as much a part of man as his leg or arm.  It is given to all human beings in a stronger or weaker degree, as force of members is given them in a greater or less degree.  It may be strengthened by exercise, as may any particular limb of the body.  This sense is submitted, indeed, in some degree, to the guidance of reason; but it is a small stock which is required for this; even a less one than what we call common sense.  State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor.  The former will decide it as well and often better than the latter because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.[2]

This statement gives more philosophical language to the very down-to-earth perspective that was common among Americans not only of those days but throughout the nation’s history. 

And this sort of leaning can readily be seen as feeding another movement that would turn out to have a profound influence that this blog highlighted in its last posting.  That is the movement known as Transcendentalism.  And these lesser religious notions or themes are picked up through the 1800s and one can cite the fictional works of Herman Melville (Moby Dick) and Nathanial Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter).  Their novels directly attack the Puritanical thinking that was judged in these works to be too inhuman in its expectations.

          One can than trace this other tradition to the development, years later, of Pragmaticism and the works of William James and John Dewey.  And that brings a student of this tradition into the twentieth century – Dewey died in 1952.  But how philosophical was this tradition and, for that matter, the Puritanical tradition?  Admittedly, not very.  Even the more well thought out tradition of Pragmaticism could boast of only a relatively few top-notch thinkers such as Dewey and James.[3]  But then again, its emphasis, even as a philosophy, was on doing, not thinking.

          And perhaps this lack of theorizing helped those who opposed these voices influenced by the Enlightenment.  Inspired by the Great Awakening in an around about way, and the work of Edwards, was the influence exerted by the Romantics.  While this Romanticism, as expressed in Transcendentalism, was mostly anti-religious, it was pro sentiment and emotion and reactive against pure reason and objectivism – and as such was a mixture of anti-religious dogma, but pro-religious fervor.

Antagonistic to the ideas emanating from science, from Descartes to Newton, these religiously inspired ideas and emotions became part of the American story.  In more current days, the remnants of the Romantics can be found in Born Again messaging that one can find among Evangelicals of today.  Heavily reliant on the Bible, its literal interpretation of that book provides much of what its adherents consider truthful accounts of the physical world. 

And why are these views taken as truth?  Because it feels true.  Passion, not reason, for Romantics is the essential guide.  And here, even Transcendentalism can be viewed not as a movement toward reason, but toward emotionalism, at least as it is represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  All this will be described and explained in later postings.  Links to such characters as John C. Calhoun and his representation of southern agrarianism will be pointed out.  Here, the aim is to give the reader the warning that all of this, while it can be analyzed and of which sense can be made, is not an account of a single-minded people.

One can detect the two traditions, Puritanism and the Enlightenment.  How both affect Transcendentalism and its effects, given Santayana’s overview (see previous posting), all of these combined and co-existed under an organizational and political arrangement defined by federalist principles. 

Organizational principles are not handed down from above.  They instead have to stand free with enough supportive ideals and ideas which have to be thought of, implemented, and defended to survive various challenges such as those facing the Civil War generation, and many think, the present generation.

They are the product of the human mind and are implemented through complex mixtures as those found in this nation’s past.  More will be shared in upcoming postings including a more detailed accounts of what this and the last two postings introduce and describe to the reader. 

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[1] Allen C. Guelzo, The American Mind, Part I – a transcript book – (Chantilly, VA:  The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, 2005).  Unless otherwise indicated, factual information found in this posting is derived from this source.

[2] As quoted in Gary Wills, Inventing America:  Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1978/2018), 202-203.  This quotation was utilized in a previous posting.

[3] This claim is belied by Louis Menand’s account of Pragmaticism.  See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).

AN OVERALL AMERICAN CONSTRUCT, PART II

 

In tracing American theoretical, philosophic thinking, this blog in its last posting describes the lack of such thinking among them.  It reports a general judgement; that is, it pointed out American reputation of being doers, not thinkers.  It ended its reporting by citing Tocqueville on that account. 

One can add many voices to that of the Frenchman all throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s including that of James Fennimore Cooper, Supreme Court justice Joseph Story, psychologist G. Stanley Hall, and philosopher George Santayana among others.  But it is with Santayana that this posting wants to remind long time readers of this blog, what this blogger had to offer some years ago.[1]

          The nation, during the 1800s, drifted away from the communal nature of American politicking that Tocqueville describes.  Why?  One writer who sheds some light on this question is George Santayana.  Santayana was a Spanish American philosopher who is credited with this famous quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In 1911, Santayana published an address, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,”[2] which offered a historical analysis as to why Americans had become less communal.

To begin with, Santayana points out that since the earliest days of the nation there has been a two-sided Christian view which has molded a lot of our social and political thought. On the one side, there is a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist view which bolstered concern for the ravages of sin and expressed itself as an “agonized conscience.” The other side promotes a gentler message, a social transcendentalism, developed more formally in the eighteenth century. Each encouraged its own social philosophy.

Calvinism pushed Americans to be disciplined. Hard work took on a moral status under this view. The discipline it inspired became very necessary as early Americans had to tame a frontier environment. Its harsh conditions with its dangers were met by a people armed with a view of life and morality suited to meet its challenges.

So successful was this mental and emotional framework that it became victimized by the success it allowed these settlers to achieve. Americans soon began to develop a prosperous economy and consequently, with more material security, they began to have available the finer things in life. They found it difficult to maintain their Calvinistic perspective, at least to the levels they endured earlier.

Calvinism did not disappear, but it lost its more stringent character. In the wake of a strong disciplinarian religious outlook, a strong congregational tradition survived.  Here it is useful to highlight a reference to the development of congregations.

From its earliest settlements, this form of social arrangement, the congregational model, characterized how Americans organized themselves. Key to this was organizing agreements among settlers through the utilization of covenants. According to Daniel Elazar, [3] covenants were sets of communal commitments by the settlers which established the basic social and political arrangements of the group.

The agreements were formalized as written agreements in the form of a charter or a constitution. To solidify this important promise to each other, the settlers called on God to witness the agreement. This form of organizing was repeated in the separate and isolated American colonies. The model continued into the development of state governments with the only difference being that the covenants eventually became compacts in which the initial agreements were established without calling on God as witness.

As referred to above, with a diminishing harshness of a stricter Calvinism, the “genteel tradition” or transcendentalism, an imported philosophy from Europe, became prominent. Leading this effort, Ralph Waldo Emerson helped define transcendentalism for Americans.  He, utilizing Kantian tradition of systemic subjectivism, formulated a system of thought that can be credited with initiating Americans' thinking along more individualistic lines.

Emerson strongly promoted self-initiative which was highly valued in a mostly frontier nation. The quality was easily integrated into a romanticized version of Yankee lore.  Two characteristics were emphasized in this vision: emphasis on present needs and the importance of will over intellect.

As opposed to the earlier Calvinist focus on evil, transcendental thought seemed to have a blind eye for it and rhapsodized an “up-beat-ness” and optimism. To Emerson, these dispositions translated themselves into confidence or trust in oneself, in one's ability. Along with confidence came a positive self-definition and a faith in intuition: “the perspective of knowledge as they radiate from the self.”[4] 

At the risk of being too much of a synopsis, one can see the Calvinist influence as stoic and transcendentalism as being epicurean.  The Americans’ version of federalism, if one describes it with the use of a Venn diagram, was situated in the overlap of the two traditions.  However, an imbalance seemed to emerge.

Without the previous prevalent Calvinistic source of humility, there turned out to be no internal check on the exuberance that transcendentalism promoted. Among the turmoil associated with an emerging nation, two competing social perspectives emerge, that of a marketplace and that of a commonweal.

One, the marketplace view takes hold. Two, the commonweal view competes. The marketplace view defines citizens by their role in the bargaining processes of the market. In this view, each person seeks his or her own self-interest.  One can view this development as the first meaningful challenge to a federalist perspective as the nation’s prominent view of governance and politics. 

It initiated and encouraged a transactional view to politics.  Yet, in the commonweal view, which was retained as a viscerally felt, idealistic espoused theory, citizens have undivided interests.  To this day people give it lip service.  This, according to Elazar, led to the evolution of three distinct political subcultures in America.[5]  

They are the moralistic, the individualistic, and the traditional.  While each maintained a federalist base, at least at an idealistic level, one can readily sense the origins of its demise.  But this account still has more to describe before this eventual evolvement took place.  Future postings will seek to do that.

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[1] Robert Gutierrez, “From Brimstone to Gentleness” and “Individualistic Political Subculture,” posting numbered 90 and 91 respectively (n.d.), Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics (a blog), no longer posted.  This rendering is further edited to meet the blog’s current editorial style.

[2]George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” in The Annals of America, Vol. 13 (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1968/1911), 277-288.

[3] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil)Aauthority,” Journal of Church and State 33 (Spring 1991):  231-254.  Also, for supportive argument see Andrew C. McLaughlin, The Foundations of American Constitutionalism (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972).

[4] Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” 281.

[5]Daniel J. Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States (New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966).