I recently rescuscitated my blog and discovered this draft post. Written four years ago, it is remarkable how much of what it describes still rings true. And even more so now in this coronavirus pandemic, where the politicians talk of “reopening the economy,” as if they owned it. The mask slips a little. Thanks to government edict, tens of millions of Americans are faced with no way to work — they literally cannot sell they labor because the government said health was more important. We are all kulaks now, it seems.
Or perhaps even worse than the kulaks. At least the kulaks had land — real property — to strip away. Most Americans do not have any property that can support them if their job is taken away. Hence the massive stimulus program that mortgages our future for a crude and corrupt wealth transfer today.
All is not lost, though. Good things are in the works all over, as they always are. We just have to know where to look. Enjoy the post and drop a comment if you feel so inclined.
It is an election year, but I intend to only write one thing about it. The election started early and has made its pattern fairly clear over the past few months. I don't expect it to change much, not any more than I expect America to change in the time until the election or indeed afterwards.
I have no expectation of change because change means playing a role. It means taking part, and taking part means give and take. There is none of that in American politics. It has descended to its final level. It cannot experience change because there is no room for us, for Americans. The only thing this election can wreak, like all the other inexorable tendencies of our civilization, is transformation. Transformation does not give you a role. It merely performs upon you, like a surgeon on an anesthetized patient.
We are the subject and many realize this. That is the root of much of the buoyant anger behind Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. They have seen everything they have known slip away and they want it back. They want an image of the past, what America is said to be, back in some sort of renascent glory. It wasn't that long ago that everything was fine, they say. Don't you remember? We need that again. Not something different, not something that would require a long hard look which might produce a different but better result. No, we just need America again. Great America, New Deal America, Reagan's America, Unified America, let's have that.
What this assumes is that things have only recently gone bad. It assumes that within very recent memory, there was some essential qualities of America not only present and operative in the nation, but wholly diffused through it. What we need, then, is some sort of restoration of these qualities by invoking the conditions of the time we recall once sheltered them. We conjure up the half-truths and upcycled dogmas of modern progressivism and modern conservatism and say that they worked in the past and they'll damn well work again.
This is the rotting effect American exceptionalism has had on us. Right-of-center patriots are most likely to invoke it in those words, but those of the Left believe in it too in their veneration for the hallmarks of Progress which are associated with America's inherent freedom. Exceptionalism is a crock. It is an excuse for never having to change your mind or look around you. America was an exceptional country, yes, it was -- in the beginning. It was exceptional because of the circumstances it came from and the opportunities it had. Nothing -- nothing at all -- said that what followed was inevitable. Nothing said greatness was to be had, or that greatness could come without cost, or that the cost could be justified. Nothing said that the tendencies of history, which work more like laws if not attended to, would except us in our exceptionalism.
The qualities that are American must be drawn from hard facts and they must be supported over time with the same. What long distinguished America from the rest of the modern West boiled down to a handful of interconnected social, political, and economic patterns. They were based on a wide diffusion of property ownership, primacy that it gave to suffrage and agriculture, and the subsequent effect in making the local character of politics and governance. What comes out of this is a measure of self-sufficiency and independence, both for individuals and households as well as communities. They were of course a part of a country and a part of wider markets, but what is forgotten is the way the country's government and modernizing economy swallowed up and eliminated any autonomy of people and communities.
Conservatives and progressives will not tell you this, socialists and capitalists will not tell you this. That is because each of these causes is more closely linked than either would have the ordinary American believe. Capitalism could not have been built in this country without the intervention of the government. That's what Henry Clay's "American System" was. Capitalists were all for tariffs and intervention before they were against it, as many are today. Being against government intervention, though, does not mean correcting the old wrongs -- rather, it means the government heavy polices the borders of the market against any attempt by people or communities to institute their own economic defenses. Now, if we have government and capital tied together under a system of supposedly "free" enterprise, then what is socialism? More of the same; it does not overturn the paradigm, it merely reshuffles the captains at the top. Political power and economic power centralize together; there is no using one to fight the other, as both Left and Right would have us believe. Government and industry may give us riches, and it may take them away at their whim. And we are left nowhere, if our independence has been ceded to them.
If the characteristically American forms of civilization are hardly in evidence any more, can we say America is really American? And if they disappeared, when did they go? 2008? 2000? 1992? 1980? 1968? Surely it must be recently. Surely it must be within my lifetime, one says. Because if that isn't the case, then that means I have lived in a lie.
Hard facts are hard facts. The fact is that this is not an overnight thing. You can't blame it on Obama. You can't blame it on Bush, or Clinton, or Reagan. All of them played a role in it, but none of them is the evil conspirator who overturned everything. They simply accelerated or decelerated what was already in motion. What most average Americans are experiencing now -- falling wages, high taxes, economic inequality, stagnating communities, and an unresponsive political elite -- is what your average family farmer experienced seventy years ago, at the end of World War Two. Those kind of men were the canary in the coal mine, as they were the living exemplars of those peculiarly American patterns. The new, prosperous America that emerged out of the war ground them out if they didn't get on board, and quick. The prosperity that ran for the next sixty-odd years, until 2008, was built on their backs. We've exhausted that, though, and now we're facing the same paradigm.
I had my first inkling of this a decade ago, though it was nowhere as fully formed as it has become in the last few years. It drove me to research and to write, first one failed novel and now Victory Ruins. I wanted to write about the kind of people who were peculiarly American, those small town, one-mule farmers whose lives never changed much across the decades, but on whom most of our hope for democracy and peace rest. I wanted to illustrate these people because they are so different from us today, and yet the struggle they faced rings terrifyingly true to us today.
Those men are dead and gone, for the most part. We do not have them around to leaven our mass hysteria in the age of Trump and Sanders, Hillary and Cruz. We cannot count on their clear-minded appraisal and steady example which comes from hard-fought independence in a community. But if we want to understand America and strive toward recreating the kind of patterns of life which are uniquely American, then we must, paradoxically, abandon this thought of "making America great again." We must abandon easy slogans that regurgitate the very paradigm we have been in for seven decades and look at the hard facts. They do not have to be ugly and dull, these facts. They can be beautiful and irresistible. That's why I wrote them as a novel. It is my hope that I get to share it with you soon.
“[An] equality established in God brought with it neither contradiction nor disorder. Demagogy enters at the moment there is no universal yardstick, and the principle of equality is debased into a principle of identity.”