STILL THE DOMINANT FLAVOR

 

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.

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[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).