Making “provisional” sense of current American politics.

There are three historical currents underlining our current Presidential campaign which need to be appreciated if we are to more adequately grasp the dramatic and somewhat unprecedented events that have captured the American imagination and media. Let me first list them, then briefly elaborate. In future posts, I plan on discussing each of them in greater detail.

Those currents are: 1) the profound antagonisms between several of the major ethnoregional “nations” that have created the mostly dis-United States from its founding, and have been “at war” ever since; 2) the closing off, first of the national, and, more recently, of the international, “frontier” that permitted and fueled more or less continual American political, military, and economic expansion; and 3) the dynamic structure of American capitalist institutions, driven by privatization and the imperative to grow at all costs. Now for a brief elaboration.

• The determinative (American) political struggle (since 1877),” writes Colin Woodard in “American Nations”, “has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom.” (p, 295) This resulted from ideological-cultural-regional consolidation following upon the termination of Reconstruction. This tended to align the Scots-Irish of an expanded Appalachia with the people of the Far West (excluding the West Coast) under the leadership of the Deep South. These are areas that are, for the most part, militaristic, evangelical, individualistic, anti-governmental, authoritarian, with strong racist currents, and strongly anti-social reformist, rather celebrating a “private Protestantism.” They have long been in opposition to the social reformers stemming from the Communitarian “Public Protestantism” of the New England Puritans, in alliance with metropolitan New Yorkers, and that culture primarily transported from New England to what Woodard cleverly calls “the Left Coast.” Success has tended to go to that ethnoregional alliance that substantially can win over majorities of the people of the mid-west and the expanding Hispanics from the Southwest. We can see this alignment and its struggles playing out in general in the Red v. Blue (& Purple) states, and the constituencies supporting distinct Presidential candidates.
• Still more briefly, let me note that, after the closing of its continental frontier at the end of the 19th century, the U.S. pursued its economic growth through the creation of an imperial “empire”. But, with the emergence of the Cold War, followed by resistance in the Third World and South America, and then the emergence of major economic and military powers in China, India, Brazil, the EU, and even Russia and South Africa, constraints on US unlimited growth were bound to take place. (See Chapter 8 on “The American Enterprise”, in my “Critique of Western Philosophy and Social Theory” for a detailed discussion of this economic squeeze, and its expected domestic backlash.)
• Finally, the dynamics of American Capitalism require unending growth to provide an economy whose “rushing tide can lift (most) all boats,” though certainly never equitably. But, with its continually culturally destabilizing dynamic, wedded to fundamental inequities in power and wealth, the squeeze on capitalism’s growth was bound to confront a deep sense of resentment from betrayed expectations, leading to scapegoating of the more marginalized.

Such frames my understanding of the current Presidential campaign, and its prefiguring of the forthcoming challenges facing the United States. Of this, more in future blog entries.