The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans. Radical change was called for. (One thinks of Franklin Roosevelt raging against the "economic royalists" and asserting that "we need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.")
But there has been no radical change, only caution and timidity and more of the same. The royalists remain triumphant, and working people are absorbing blow after devastating blow. More than 1.2 million of the long-term jobless are due to lose their unemployment benefits this month. (Bob Herbert)
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Precisely because republics required civic virtue and disinterestedness
among their citizens, they were very fragile polities, extremely liable
to corruption. Republics demanded far more morally from their citizens
than monarchies did of their subjects. In monarchies each man's desire
to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by fear or
force, by patronage, or honor. In republics, however, each man must
somehow be persuaded to sacrifice his personal desires, his luxuries,
for the sake of the public good. Monarchies could tolerate great
degrees of self-interestedness, private gratification, and corruption
among their subjects. After all, they were based on dependence and
subservience and had all sorts of adhesives and connections besides
virtue to hold their societies together. Monarchies relied on blood,
family, kinship patronage, and ultimately fear. Gordon Wood, The
Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1993, p. 105.
Wood
is talking here about the "corrupting" system of dependency and
patronage that typified the oligarchical/monarchical system in England, France, and elsewhere in
the 18th Century. It was a society in which only the rich were truly free,
because everyone depended on them for favors, for work, for
appointments. They were the primary employers and the primary consumers.
Any hierarchical patronage system perpetuates itself through dependency, co-optation, and fear. As wealth and power become more concentrated at the
top of the hierarchy, everyone below becomes dependent on those above. The people at the bottom are perceived as barely human scum. I think we have to ask whether America is really republican in its fundamental ethos anymore. We have the form of a republic, but the soul of an oligarchy.
The "revolution" in
Wood's title is not so much the political one, especially in the
traditional political sense of the oppressed revolting against the
oppressor. The American revolutionists were not particularly oppressed,
but they were smitten by republican fever. Their revolution was
primarily one of social values, from monarchical social imaginary to a republican one. Wood is entertaining
in his describing how "republicanism'' was the 18th Century radical chic of the
aristocracy in both England and pre-revolutionary France. Everybody was
a republican in his "views." The Americans, however, decided to create
a republic rather than just to talk about it.
But it was possible to effect this internal social transformation in America because the distance between the richest and the
poorest in America was never nearly so great as the distance between
them in Europe. It was also very difficult for the richest Americans to force dependency in a country in which there was so much land for
the taking and so many other alternatives to live independently. That's no longer the case. The distance between the richest and poorest in this country is immense and growing, and more people in the middle are being pushed to the bottom. These are not the conditions for a flourishing republic.
A big part of the American revolutionary sense of what "liberty"
meant was to be free from these entangling networks of patronage and
dependency, to be able to be one's own Man. Either one was independent
or he was a slave. Chattel slaves were just the lowest level of slavery
in the monarchical system in which almost everyone was dependent on
whoever was the next level higher in the very well-defined social
order.
So the idea of the American republic largely rested on this sense
that citizens were independent from these networks of dependency. One
of the chief reasons women and men without property were not allowed to
vote was precisely because they were dependent on others and so could
not participate as free actors–they would vote the will of those upon
whom they depended. Read your Jane Austen to get a feel for what life
in such a society is like even for the relatively well off.
Austen, of course, makes fun of this system, but she also understands that it
is the reality she has to live in, and the consequences for not
following its rules were severe. In America, at the same time Austen
was writing, those rules were very self-consciously abrogated. Perhaps
less so in the South, however, where the planters tried to
replicate and sustain older ideas of aristocracy and oligarchical
control. Some historians argue that slavery replaced the system of
indentured servants precisely because control over workers was
weakened by the indentured servant's freedom to leave and work his own land once
his indenture was up. Early on the main benefit in owning slaves was their providing a stable workforce with whom the owner did not have to bargain because they could not leave. Europe didn't need slaves because their peasantry had no place to go.
And so as admirable as this late 18th and early 19th century
republican ideal and practice was in America, it depended on two
factors that disappeared in the decades after the civil war–One, a
largely agriculture-centered, non-industrial economy and, two, the open
frontier. By the turn of the century in 1900, the country was hardly recognizable in the ways imagined by the founders, and by the
turn of the century in 2000, it bore no resemblance whatsoever. In 1860
80% of Americans lived in rural communities. By 1900 it was down to
60%, and by 1920, more Americans lived in urban areas than in rural
areas.Now 2% of Americans work in agriculture.
Conservatives think the founders' ideals are being trod upon by the
proponents of big government as if social and economic changes in the
last 200 years don't require adaptation. We've become an urban,
industrialized international society, but it's as if conservatives are
still operating with a 19th century political model–as if we still live in an isolationist, agriculture centered-society in which almost everyone is an independent farmer or tradesman. Most of us are not that, most of could not become that even if we wanted to. Opportunities for independence in the founders' sense started shrinking in the late 19th Century, and they will keep shrinking if we continue to allow Herbert's "royalists" or Digby's Big Money Boyz to dominate our politics.
I understand the resistance to bigness, and the discomfort people feel with social complexity and one's being implicated in systems we can't even begin to adequately comprehend. But pretending we can go back to the 19th Century is delusional and destructive. Destructive because it captures the imaginations of conservatives who because of this delusion become obstructions to creative solutions that will benefit them and their children, and because this delusion leads them unwittingly to support the stratification agenda of those who want us dependent on them.
Once again, it's not about whose values–traditionalist or cosmopolitan–are better in some moral
sense; it's about whose values are more adaptive to the reality in
which we're living.
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