2012: Testing the American Narrative (Part I)

Who are we and what were we as Americans?  Today, there are competing narratives.  Two, though divergent, are organic, in that they grew out of the American Revolution and the founding principles. A more recent narrative that emerged out of European Marxist philosophy is being grafted onto one of the native strains.



Although united in the principles of Natural Law, the Founders were divided on the relative powers of general government, on the one hand, and the people on the other -- between the Jeffersonian model and the Hamiltonian one.  The dominant narrative in the American mythos through the Eighteenth Century (and among conservatives and libertarians today) was Jefferson's, but the reality of his minimalist government did not outlive him. 
That the Jeffersonian narrative has held together at all is truly amazing.  As unified as the Founders were in the principles of liberty, they were always divided in their vision of government's role.  Should government be a minimalist affair strictly limited by constitutional proscriptions, or should it be a force for political and economic expansion?  The former, laissez faire vision, promised maximum individual liberty, while the latter promised (with a minimal, but acknowledged sacrifice of liberty in exchange) a wealthy and powerful nation.  The story of America is strongly Jeffersonian, but the reality is mostly Hamiltonian. 

The Unified Narrative
The America that the Founders agreed upon was a majoritarian society united around the intellectual and moral precepts that informed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  An animated and adventurous America where the natural divisions among men within and among the several sovereign states were not only tolerated, but encouraged to compete.  An America in which the great majority of its citizens was held together by an independent spirit, work ethic, the rule of law, property rights, the norms of civil society, Judeo-Christian morality, personal and communal sovereignty and a native distrust of government. In short, the great American majority was joined in a civil society writ large that was informed by individual liberty balanced by a keen sense of the common good. 

That narrative, of course, glosses over the many blemishes that arise out of the human condition -- dishonesty, sloth, factional infighting, ideological clashes -- but out of its telling emerges America's foundational mythos that unites us around our ideals.  It informs us (if not perfectly) about who we are, who we have been and what we can become.  The America of mind and spirit.

The Emergent Narrative
The Founders well understood the lessons of history, from ancient times to their own experiences as colonists under the British Crown.  From the early planning through the Declaration of Independence, to the crafting of the Bill of Rights they recognized, understood and correctly feared the inevitable tension between the power of government and the liberty of the people.  They meant to balance that power by making the people (the states) sovereign over the general government.  In that they were in accord, but there were differences among them as to how balance could best be achieved.  Some, counter-intuitively known as Federalists, argued for powers in the general government that exceeded what others [2] were willing to accept in the interest of state sovereignty.

With the important exception of the Bill of Rights, the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, carried the day and held the balance of power for a decade, during which they greatly strengthened central government.  It can be argued that the Federalists accumulated powers essential to the necessary functions of a general government, but it is clear that they favored centralized power over state sovereignty.  They were the elitists of their time.  In the end, what they began led to the corrupt mercantilism (the American System) of Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln that laid the foundations of statist crony capitalism of the 20th century and beyond.


The Relativist State Narrative
Out of the Hamiltonian model grew a cozy relationship between the mutual interests of business and government, but that wasn't to last.  At least in its then-current form.  Around the turn of the 20th Century, the relative wealth of the federal government and American industry was about equal.  Theodore Roosevelt, early in his presidency, wanted to shift that balance in favor of government; if government was in control of the nation's wealth, there would be few limitations on his power to further the Progressive agenda.  The "Trust-Buster" confrontation was but a proxy contest orchestrated by Roosevelt  to seize for government control of  the power and wealth of the private sector.  Government won.  The Jeffersonian model -- long moribund -- was now dead in fact, if not in spirit.  Statism had begun its long march.  Bad as things would become during the next few decades, eventually they would get worse.  Much worse

During the last decades of the 19th Century European Marxist ideas, with the determined help of progressives, had begun to take hold among American institutional elites -- politicians, financiers, educators and public media led by the New York Times.  American progressives were attracted to Marxism because they were in perfect accord regarding the desirability of centralized power under elitist control.  The power to get things done, to make things "better" -- now!  Those ideas would steadily advance and meld more seamlessly with those of the Civil Rights Movement and politicians who were eager to capitalize on it.

But Marxism has not been an easy sell to the American people who still treasure at least the idea of liberty and its expression in capitalism.  Though liberty and capitalism are now seriously hobbled by statism, the American mythos rooted in the founding narrative still lives. 

The rise of statism has led -- as it must -- to the necessity of public conformity; to the creation of a state orthodoxy demanded by the elitists of the ruling class and enforced by the Marxist establishment.  Debate, as we once knew it has effectively shut down.  Failure to hew to the statist orthodoxy has become -- strictly speaking -- heresy.  As late as the early 1960's it was possible to to engage a person of the Left in a political debate anchored in the rules and norms of civil society.  One side might yet persuade or influence the other.  That possibility ended with the adolescent rebellion of the mid and late 60's.  Or it began to end.

Pressed to place a pushpin in the calendar, I suppose I would select the beginning of the 21st Century as the time when the traditional (and once-honorable) Left tumbled toward full-blown Marxism.  The seeds of Gramsci, finally grown to maturity, had been harvested.  No thing was superior to another, so that no thing could be judged.  Empirical fact in support of rational argument was merely an expression of cultural bias to punish the weak. America is and always was a corrupting force in the world.  At home and abroad the nation's chief business is to exploit and impoverish selected groups in order to reward and protect wealthy capitalists.

So Who Are We?
November of 2012 will test the American narrative.  The outcome will tell us more about the American people than the candidate or the political party.  In the traditional narrative Americans are independent, innovative, suspicious of and hostile to the power of government.  Will that narrative of the spirit hold?  Or will it be replaced by a competing one?  The test is coming. There is no grading on the curve.





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1.  WASP, the acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants came into vogue in the '50's as a derogatory term among academics.
2.  The Anti-federalists, who rightly believed that the name "Federalist" should apply to them, ultimately lost the politicized naming battle.  A useful chart illustrates the positions of each side.  A superficial reading suggests that this Wikipedia article is entirely worthwhile.
3.  It can be argued that capitalism has almost ceased to exist in America.  Our economy has evolved into a competition among rent-seekers; no matter how independent in spirit, any entrepreneur who obeys the law is in some way adversely affected by government regulation.  Capitalism is an expression of liberty.