Posts by AndrewHartman:

    Early Marx Reception in the United States

    January 12th, 2017

    By Andrew Hartman.

     

    The divergent responses to Marx’s death in 1883 anticipated the diversity of Marx reception even before the Russian Revolution, which kickstarted a vibrant and heated debate about Marx and his legacy that continues to this day. Most American newspapers ignored the death of “the best hated and most calumniated man of his time,” as Marx’s longtime friend and collaborator

    Friedrich Engels described him in his memorial. Those American newspapers that did take note of Marx’s death sounded triumphalist anti-socialist notes. The Daily Alta California informed its readers that Marx’s “life was not a success, and at the time of his death he had witnessed the failure of every extensive project on which his hopes had been set and for which he labored with such ability.” The 1871 Paris Commune, which Marx supported from afar and which was crushed by the French army, and the “dreaded” International (the International Workingmen’s Association), which Marx helped build but which was disbanded in 1876, were cited as proof of Marx’s failures. The Daily Alta concluded of Marx that “no one was better aware of his own utter failure than himself.” [1]

    In stark contrast to this conventional response—what Marx would have seen as a reaction typical of the bourgeois press—the newspapers representing the vibrant American labor movement, especially the German immigrant based labor community, memorialized Marx as a figure of world-shaking consequence. Marx, the New York Volkszeitung declared, “is a man who belonged to no nation, no country, no era. His name will live eternally in the human Pantheon—in the purest, noblest temple of fame whose gates will remain closed to the ‘great’ exploiters of mankind.” [2] 

    On March 20, 1883, thousands streamed into the Cooper Union in New York City to memorialize Marx—a meeting remarkable not only for its size but also for its ideological diversity, as socialists, anarchists, Knights of Labor, single taxers, and other radicals filled the hall. John Swinton, former managing editor of the New York Times and founder of the fiercely pro-labor John Swinton’s Paper, gave one of the more memorable speeches at the Cooper Union memorial service, comparing Marx to John Brown. Both men made humanity better by combining intellectual genius with “supreme moral qualities,” Swinton preached, but both men were also treated shabbily during their lives. John Brown’s cause was venerated shortly after his death. Swinton hoped the same for Marx’s. [3]

    Although the American press barely noticed Marx’s death a few outlets sent reporters to London to interview the socialist thinker while he was still alive. These published interviews are telling artifacts. One of the reporters who called on Marx at his humble flat was impressed and even intimidated by Marx’s learnedness. The reporter introduced the interview by describing Marx’s bookshelves: “A man can generally be judged by the books he reads, and you can form your own conclusions when I tell you a casual glance revealed Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Moliere, Racine, Montaigne, Bacon, Goethe, Voltaire, Paine…” But despite this favorable impression the reporter spent most of the interview inquiring about a number of conspiracies that involved Marx, including the widely circulated rumor that he masterminded the Paris Commune. [4]

    Another American reporter set an even more dramatic scene for his interview with Marx: “Yes, I am tête-à-tête with the revolution incarnate, with the real founder and guiding spirit of the International Society, with the author of the address in which capital was told that if it warred on labor it must expect to have its house burned down about its ears—in a word, with the apologist for the Commune of Paris.” By the 1870s, the liberal American mind had already imagined communism as something sinister, even conspiratorial. Marx was the lead conspirator in such fevered dreams. And yet the American left welcomed Marx. In fact, as I am discovering in my research, the American left only became an American left in the twentieth century, and only after embracing Marx and Marxism in some fashion. More on that controversial claim in later posts–or, as they say, wait for the book. [5]

    [1] Philip S. Foner, ed., Karl Marx Remembered: Comments at the Time of His Death iSan Francisco: Synthesis Publications, 1983), 11, 79.

    [2] Foner, Karl Marx Remembered, 69-70.

    [3] Foner, Karl Marx Remembered, 86.

    [4] Foner, Karl Marx Remembered, 250-257.

    [5] Foner, Karl Marx Remembered, 242.

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    The Neoconservative Counterrevolution

    August 17th, 2015

     

     

     

    By Andrew Hartman.

     

     

    Norman Podhoretz, one of the leading figures of neoconservatism, at the Commentary office in the 1960s. Gert Berliner

    Norman Podhoretz, one of the leading figures of neoconservatism, at theCommentary office in the 1960s. Gert Berliner

    In the anti-sixties backlash, neoconservatives were the most formidable intellectual opponents of social progress.

    If New Leftists gave shape to one side of the culture wars, those who came to be called neoconservatives were hugely influential in shaping the other. Neoconservatism, a label applied to a group of prominent liberal intellectuals who moved right on the American political spectrum during the sixties, took form precisely in opposition to the New Left.

    In their reaction to the New Left, in their spirited defense of traditional American institutions, and in their full-throated attack on those intellectuals who composed, in Lionel Trilling’s words, an “adversary culture,” neoconservatives helped draw up the very terms of the culture wars.

    When we think about the neoconservative persuasion as the flip side of the New Left, it should be historically situated relative to what Corey Robin labels “the reactionary mind.” Robin considers conservatism “a meditation on — and theoretical rendition of — the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.”

    In somewhat similar fashion, George H. Nash defines conservatism as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary, and profoundly subversive.” Plenty of Americans experienced the various New Left movements of the sixties as “profoundly subversive” of the status quo. Neoconservatives articulated this reaction best. In a national culture transformed by sixties liberation movements, neoconservatives became famous for their efforts to “win it back.”

    Neoconservatism was the New Left’s chief ideological opponent. In assuming such a duty, neoconservatives set themselves up for a hostile response. Fortunately for them, their prior experiences had prepared them well for the task.

    Many of the early neoconservatives were members of “the family,” Murray Kempton’s apt designation for that disputatious tribe otherwise known as the New York intellectuals. They had come of age in the 1930s at the City College of New York (CCNY), a common destination for smart working-class Jews who otherwise might have attended Ivy League schools, where quotas prohibited much Jewish enrollment until after World War II.

    Gertrude HimmelfarbIrving Kristol, and their milieu learned the art of polemics during years spent in the CCNY cafeteria’s celebrated Alcove No. 1, where young Trotskyists waged ideological warfare against the Communist students who occupied Alcove No. 2. During their flirtations with Trotskyism in the 1930s, when tussles with other radical students seemed like a matter of life and death, future neoconservatives developed habits of mind that never atrophied.

    They held on to their combative spirits, their fondness for sweeping declarations, and their suspicion of leftist dogma. Such an epistemological background endowed neoconservatives with what seemed like an intuitive capacity for critiquing New Left arguments. They were uniquely qualified for the job of translating New Left discourses for a conservative movement fervent in its desire to know its enemy.

    In 1965 Kristol started a new journal along with his fellow New York intellectual and former Alcove No. 1 comrade, the sociologist Daniel Bell. Originally Kristol and Bell sought to position their journal above the ideological fray. This was made clear by its title, The Public Interest, which derived from a telling Walter Lippmann passage: “The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.”

    The journal quickly became renowned for its profound skepticism regarding the merits of liberal reform. In fact, The Public Interest was instrumental in undermining the liberal idea that government policy could solve problems related to racism and poverty. It consistently featured influential scholars who considered such notions naive and ultimately dangerous in their proclivity to make things worse.

    Kristol, who had showed early signs of pessimism about liberal reform, led the magazine’s charge in this direction. Although throughout most of the sixties he claimed to support a generous welfare system for poor Americans, the title of a Harper’s piece he wrote in 1963 — “Is the Welfare State Obsolete?” — testified to his latent suspicions.

    In 1971 Kristol conveyed his misgivings more explicitly in an unfavorable Atlantic review of Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s “crude” and “quasi-Marxist” book Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare. Whereas Piven and Cloward contended that poor people deserved welfare benefits that were more generous and came with fewer strings attached, Kristol believed that welfare had become “a vicious circle in which the best of intentions merge into the worst of results.” Anticipating a slew of later conservative welfare critics, Kristol argued that a more generous welfare system would create more dependency.

    Even though Kristol acknowledged in 1963 that he considered some aspects of the Democratic Party’s efforts to expand the welfare state dubious, his allegiance to the party of Cold War liberalism persisted through 1968, when he voted for Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey. But a mere two years later Kristol was dining at the White House with Nixon, the two men brought together by their shared hatred of the New Left.

    According to the New York Times, which reported on the Nixon-Kristol dinner as part of a story on the administration’s intensification of surveillance measures in the wake of New Left bombings, Kristol agreed with Nixon’s crackdown, comparing “young, middle-class, white Americans who are resorting to violence” to the privileged Russian Narodniki who murdered Czar Alexander.

    In 1972 Kristol joined forty-five intellectuals, including Himmelfarb and several other incipient neoconservatives, in signing a full-page advertisement that ran in the New York Times just prior to Nixon’s landslide defeat of George McGovern. “Of the two major candidates for the Presidency of the United States,” the signatories declared, “we believe that Richard Nixon has demonstrated superior capacity for prudent and responsible leadership.”

    Kristol and his colleagues might have remained Democrats in 1972 had their only major point of contention been with the party’s well-intended if ineffective welfare policies. They pulled the lever for Nixon rather because they believed the New Left, in the form of the “New Politics” movement that enabled the McGovern nomination, had captured the Democratic Party. 1972, in sum, was the year Kristol became a full-fledged member of the conservative movement.


    Although the McGovern nomination represented a breaking point for Kristol and many other Cold War liberals, their frustration with the increasing influence of the New Left had been bubbling toward the surface for years. The earliest flashpoint was the controversy that engulfed what became forever known as “the Moynihan Report.”

    Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an urban sociologist who regularly contributed to The Public Interest and who went on to a long career in politics that culminated in a twenty-four-year tenure in the US Senate, wrote a polarizing paper in 1965 while serving as assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration.

    In his controversial report, officially titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Moynihan argued that the equal rights won by blacks in the legal realm — fruits born of the civil rights movement — brought newfound expectations of equal results. But achieving equal results would prove more difficult because blacks lacked the cultural conditioning necessary to compete with whites. For hard-boiled skeptics like Moynihan, the idea that culture impeded liberal reform efforts was an illuminating lens through which to view black poverty.

    The Moynihan Report quickly became a national sensation. In part this was due to the violent race riot that exploded in Watts that summer: Moynihan’s theory was the conventional explanation for why blacks revolted so angrily even after passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The Wall Street Journal spelled out Watts in an article inspired by the Moynihan Report, titled “Family Life Breakdown in Negro Slums Sows Seeds of Race Violence — Husbandless Homes Spawn Young Hoodlums, Impede Reforms, Sociologists Say.”

    Beyond this mindless echo, though, reactions to the Moynihan Report were diverse. A self-described “disgusted taxpayer” from Louisiana sent a caustic letter to Moynihan that encapsulated the racist response: “People like you make me sick. You go to school most of your life and have a lot of book learning but you know as much about the Negro as I know about Eskimos. There has never been a Negro family to deteriorate, that is, not a family as white people know a family.”

    Moynihan expected such bitterness from Jim Crow apologists. But he was caught him off guard when a host of civil rights leaders and intellectuals denounced the report’s gratuitous emphasis on black pathology, worrying that it would be used as justification for limiting the scope of reform. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Christopher Jencks critiqued Moynihan’s “guiding assumption that social pathology is caused less by basic defects in the social system than by defects in particular individuals and groups which prevent their adjusting to the system. The prescription is therefore to change the deviance, not the system.”

    Owing in part to the ideological success of the sixties liberation movements, especially Black Power, a large number of critics sharply rejected the logic that undergirded much of the Moynihan Report. In particular, Moynihan’s left-leaning detractors dismissed the conceit that African-American culture was a distorted version of white American culture. They also repudiated the corollary assumption that assimilation to prescribed norms — to normative America — was the only path to equality.

    In his bitter takedown of the Moynihan Report, William Ryan, a psychologist and civil rights activist, coined the phrase “blaming the victim” for what he described as Moynihan’s act of “justifying inequality by finding defects in the victims of inequality.”

    Just as Black Power theorists Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton explained racial inequality in institutional terms, Ryan emphasized how the American social structure favored whites over blacks. The behavior of poor blacks, whether actually dysfunctional or not — and Ryan raised concerns about the validity of this claim — was nothing more than a red herring.

    Moynihan’s shift from liberalism to neoconservatism, perhaps more than that of anyone else who traveled these grounds, was partially due to the personal anguish he suffered when his left-leaning critics accused him of “blaming the victim,” a polite way of calling him a racist.

    “I had spent much of my adult life working for racial equality,” Moynihan later reflected, “had helped put together the antipoverty program, had set the theme and written the first draft of President Johnson’s address at Howard University, which he was to describe as the finest civil rights speech he ever gave, only to find myself suddenly a symbol of reaction.”

    In his 1967 article describing the fallout, Moynihan concluded that honest debate about race and poverty was no longer possible. “The time when white men, whatever their motives, could tell Negroes what was or was not good for them, is now definitely and decidedly over. An era of bad manners is certainly begun.”

    From Moynihan’s perspective, the failure of the Left to address the causes of urban disorder meant that it had become “necessary,” as he told an audience of stalwart Cold War liberals in 1967, “to seek out and make much more effective alliances with political conservatives.”


    Included among the prominent intellectuals whom Moynihan counted as Nixon’s allies was Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary, another magazine crucial to the formation of the neoconservative persuasion. Like Kristol and the other New York intellectuals, Podhoretz grew up in Brooklyn, raised by working-class Jewish immigrants. In contrast, however, Podhoretz had attended Columbia University. Ten years Kristol’s junior, he was among the first generation of working-class Jews admitted to Ivy League schools in the years immediately following World War II.

    In the 1970s Podhoretz joined Kristol as a leading light of the conservative intellectual movement. But to reach this final destination the two traveled somewhat different roads. Unlike the Alcove No. 1 generation, Podhoretz was never a Trotskyist. He positioned himself as a Cold War liberal throughout most of the 1950s, but in contrast with the focus of the former Trotskyists, anticommunism was not yet his chief concern at that time.

    Like Moynihan’s, Podhoretz’s break with the Left was motivated in part by personal factors. And like Kristol, Podhoretz gave off early signals that such a break was coming. In 1963 he wrote an essay forCommentary, “My Negro Problem — and Ours,” that generated buzz among the literati for its honest admission that most whites, even liberals, were “twisted and sick in their feelings about Negroes.”

    In a conversation with James Baldwin, who convinced Podhoretz to write “My Negro Problem,” Podhoretz said he had grown weary of black arguments for special treatment, given that Jews never received such treatment and yet had managed to overcome past discrimination. He pointed to his childhood memories of the black children in his Brooklyn neighborhood: rather than focus on their studies as he and his Jewish friends did, they roamed the streets terrorizing Podhoretz and the other white children.

    In writing this piece, Podhoretz claimed his intention was merely to demonstrate the difficulties presented by racial integration. But plenty of readers interpreted it differently. Stokely Carmichael, never one to mince words, proclaimed Podhoretz, simply, a “racist.”

    In the aftermath of this and other literary dust-ups, Podhoretz distanced himself from New York intellectual life, where he had become persona non grata. He even took a hiatus from Commentary. During this interlude, he had what he later described in religious terms as a conversion experience. By the time he returned to his editorial desk in 1970, Podhoretz was an unapologetic neoconservative. He earnestly commenced an ideological offensive against the New Left, the counterculture, and all that he deemed subversive about the sixties.

    In one of his first post-conversion editorials, Podhoretz argued that the lesson to learn from the sixties was that heady political optimism was more damaging than the pessimism that had pervaded the 1950s. He also rationalized his own political peregrinations by claiming that he and the New York intellectuals arrived at their various positions, including radicalism, “via the route of ideas,” as opposed to most New Leftists, who followed “the route of personal grievance.”

    Podhoretz and the neoconservatives assumed that their political cues were abstract, impersonal, and objective. In contrast, New Leftists — student radicals, feminists, and black militants — responded to a set of particular, personal, and subjective signals.

    Podhoretz thought that nothing less than the soul of America was at stake in his campaign to stamp out the New Left’s undue influence. By the early 1970s, he had declared ideological war against those who had taken up the cause of the Beats, those New Leftists and counterculture enthusiasts who cast middle-class American values “in terms that are drenched in an arrogant contempt for the lives of millions and millions of people.”

    “Are they not expressing,” Podhoretz asked, “the yearning notto be Americans?” He and his fellow neoconservatives were unable to sympathize with people who hated a country that had given them so much opportunity. Where else could Jews from working-class backgrounds achieve so much, they wondered.


    In seeking to explain an attitude that seemed to them almost inexplicable, the neoconservatives developed a persuasive theory about a “new class” of powerful people whose collective interests were inimical to traditional America. They innovated this theory by reworking an older Soviet dissident discourse founded by nineteenth-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, whom the anti-Stalinist Left deemed a prophet for anticipating that Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” would devolve into “the most distressing, offensive, and despicable type of government in the world.”

    “New class” thought gained a larger audience in the United States after the publication of Yugoslav dissenter Milovan Djilas’s 1957 book The New Class, which postulated that the communist elite gained power through the acquisition of knowledge as opposed to the acquisition of property. Used interchangeably with “the new class” was Lionel Trilling’s observation of the popularization of “adversary culture” that had migrated from bohemian enclaves into the masses.

    For neoconservatives, these ideas were powerful tools for understanding the anti-American turn taken by those in academia, media, fine arts, foundations, and even some realms of government, such as the social welfare and regulatory agencies.

    Where “new class” thought differed from previous strains of conservative anti-intellectualism was in how neoconservatives formulated it specifically to the task of understanding the New Left. Intellectuals of the older right, in contrast, never worked to get inside the mind of the New Left. More commonly they understood the New Left simply as liberalism followed to its logical conclusion.

    Unlike traditionalist conservative thinkers who conflated liberalism with the New Left, neoconservatives believed the New Left had infected the liberal intellectual culture they loved. That they detected such a change was one of the central reasons for their political conversion; it was one of the primary reasons neoconservatives proved so useful to the modern American conservative movement.

    By siding against contemporary intellectual mores, Bellow and the neoconservatives aligned with the more authentic sensibilities of average Americans. In other words, the neoconservative mind was the intellectualization of the white working-class ethos. As a Commentarywriter put it: “Three working men discoursing of public affairs in a bar may perhaps display more clarity, shrewdness, and common sense” than a representative of the “new class” with his “heavy disquisitions.”

    In this way neoconservatives helped make sense of the seemingly incongruous fact that some of nation’s most privileged citizens doubled as its most adversarial. These were the people the Catholic intellectual and budding neoconservative Michael Novak labeled the “Know-Everythings”: “affluent professionals, secular in their values and tastes and initiatives, indifferent to or hostile to the family, equipped with postgraduate degrees and economic security and cultural power.”

    Beyond its polemical uses, “new class” theorizing was believable because it was grounded in plausible sociology. Take academics as a case study. By the sixties, the university credential system had become the principal gateway to the professional world, a sorting mechanism for white-collar hierarchy. In this sense, class resentment aimed at academics made sense, in a misplaced sort of way, since they indeed held the levers to any given individual’s future economic success.

    The number of faculty members in the United States increased from 48,000 in 1920 to over 600,000 in 1972. As this growing legion of academics tended to lean left in their politics, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, where debates about the promise of America framed the curriculum, Podhoretz’s claim that “millions upon millions of young people began to be exposed to — one might even say indoctrinated in — the adversary culture of the intellectuals” did not seem so exaggerated.

    The intellectual who best elaborated neoconservative anxieties about the trajectory of higher education was Nathan Glazer, another product of CCNY’s Alcove No. 1. In 1964 Glazer took a position in the University of California sociology department. Teaching on the Berkeley campus perfectly positioned him to observe the radicalization of the student movement, from the 1964 Free Speech Movement to the antiwar movement of the later sixties.

    In 1969 Glazer argued that student protests menaced the freedoms that had historically thrived at universities. “The threat to free speech, free teaching, free research,” Glazer warned, “comes from radical white students, from militant black students, and from their faculty defenders.”

    For Glazer and the neoconservatives, the American university stood for all that they valued about American society: beyond being a forum for free inquiry, it was a meritocratic melting pot where smart people, even working-class Jews, could thrive. An attack on the university was an attack on them.

    For this reason, student uprisings arguably did more than any other issue to galvanize formerly liberal intellectuals against the New Left. A host of neoconservatives, including Glazer, Kristol, Bell, philosopher Sidney Hook, and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, wrote or edited books about “academic anarchy” and the “rebellion in the university.”

    In his 1968 Columbia University commencement speech, given minutes after several hundred radical students staged a walkout, Richard Hofstadter preached that “to imagine that the best way to change a social order is to start by assaulting its most accessible centers of thought and study and criticism is not only to show a complete disregard for the intrinsic character of the university but also to develop a curiously self-destructive strategy for social change.”

    Political scientist James Q. Wilson took this argument a theoretical step further in a 1972 Commentary piece where he contended that higher education was digging liberalism’s grave by being far too open to the adversary culture that had taken root in its hallowed halls. “Freedom cannot exist outside some system of order, yet no system of order is immune from intellectual assault.”

    In issuing an ominous warning that “the bonds of civility upon which the maintenance of society depends are more fragile than we often admit,” Wilson hinted that the United States manifested conditions precariously similar to those of Weimar Germany, a specious comparison that nonetheless became a neoconservative mantra.


    In his Commentary article, Wilson listed a number of changes to higher education that he disliked, including the controversial “adoption of quota systems either to reduce the admissions of certain kinds of students or enhance the admissions of other kinds.” Neoconservatives were the first and most vociferous critics of racial quotas, embraced by many universities in the sixties as a way to comply with President Johnson’s Executive Order 11246, which mandated that “equality as a fact” necessitated affirmative action.

    In 1968 political scientist John Bunzel authored a critical article forThe Public Interest about the newly formed black studies program at San Francisco State College, where he taught. Bunzel worried that black studies would intensify the groupthink tendencies he believed were inherent to Black Power and other identity-based movements and that it would “would substitute propaganda for omission,” “new myths for old lies.”

    Quotas were formative to neoconservative thought because they drove a wedge between Jews and blacks, an interethnic alliance that had helped cement the powerful New Deal coalition that had dominated Democratic and national politics since the 1930s.

    Of course neoconservatives typically made their case against quotas in nonethnic and nonracial terms. Podhoretz, speaking as an abstract American, contended that quotas fundamentally upended the “basic principle of the American system,” that the individual is the primary “subject and object of all law, policy, and thought.” Podhoretz’s point willfully ignored that Jews merely ten years his senior, including Kristol, had been unable to attend Ivy League universities due to anti-Jewish quotas.

    Moynihan, as a Catholic, addressed the issue in a way his Jewish intellectual friends could not. “Let me be blunt,” Moynihan stated. “If ethnic quotas are to be imposed on American universities and similar quasipublic institutions, it is Jews who will be almost driven out. They are not but three percent of the population.”

    In other words, since the end of the older quota system that protected WASP privilege, Jews had made remarkable advances, especially in higher education and in the professions that required advanced degrees — advances disproportionate to their overall numbers. As a result, Moynihan and other neoconservatives reasoned that race and ethnic based policies, particularly proportional policies, would only hurt Jews.

    Yet far from being ugly racists on the order of Bull Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety whose name became synonymous with the southern white defense of Jim Crow when he unleashed attack dogs and water cannons on nonviolent civil rights activists in 1963, urbane New York intellectuals frowned upon provincial bigotry.

    And yet the neoconservative belief that black Americans could overcome racism if only they would work hard — if only, in other words, they would heed the example of Jewish Americans — belied their cosmopolitan pretensions. Neoconservatives were blind to the enormously significant fact that black Americans, as historian David Hollinger writes, “are the only ethno-racial group to inherit a multicentury legacy of group-specific enslavement and extensive, institutionalized debasement under the ordinance of federal constitutional authority.”

    Neoconservatives’ obvious misreading of history quite possibly stemmed from the fact that they understood their own peculiar circumstances to be more universal than they in fact were. In this, neoconservatives viewed America through the lens of the typical assimilated immigrant, more learned, for sure, but still typical. As Jacob Heilbrunn argues more broadly about the neoconservative shift from Left to Right, the way to appreciate it “may be to focus on neoconservatism as an uneasy, controversial, and tempestuous drama of Jewish immigrant assimilation — a very American story.”

    By moving discourse away from overt racism and toward a “color-blind” defense of individual merit — “Is color the test of competence?” — neoconservatives also pivoted away from Black Power–inflected discussions of institutional racism. In this neoconservative racial thought melded with microeconomic forms of social analysis that were gaining a foothold in academic and policy circles.

    Neoconservatives, in other words, turned the cultural radicalism of the New Left on its head by arguing that adversarial ideologies made for both bad culture and bad economics. They interpreted New Left movements as both hostile to traditional American values and dangerously anticapitalist. Neoconservatives tapped into a powerful American political language that separated those who earn their way from those who do not.

    As George H. Nash convincingly argues, the conservative turn taken by the Jews at Commentary demonstrated that Jews were more of the mainstream than ever before.

    “In 1945, Commentary had been born into a marginal, impoverished, immigrant-based subculture and an intellectual milieu that touted ‘alienation’ and ‘critical nonconformity’ as the true marks of the intellectual vis-à-vis his own culture,” Nash writes. “Two generations later, Commentary stood in the mainstream of American culture, and even of American conservatism, as a celebrant of the fundamental goodness of the American regime, and Norman Podhoretz, an immigrant milkman’s son, was its advocate.”

    In celebrating the “fundamental goodness” of America and its institutions, neoconservatives believed they were providing an important service to the regime they loved: they were protecting it from the New Left that they thought was out to destroy it. This shouting match between the New Left and the neoconservatives — this dialectic of the cultural revolution known as the sixties — helped bestow upon America a divide that would become known as the culture wars.

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    Hollinger on the Protestant Dialectic

    September 26th, 2013

    By .

    The July 2011 edition of the Journal of American History includes David Hollinger’s article, based on his Presidential Address, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity.” In it, Hollinger describes the social thought of those mid-century Protestants, whom he calls “ecumenical Protestants,” who quit thinking in particularistic Christian and American terms and instead began to recognize that “the diversity of the human species and the diminution of inequalities within it were intimately bound up with one another.” Seeking justice between peoples became a more important calling than seeking to convert non-Christians.

    Hollinger’s essay claims to make two important contributions. First, he argues that a better understanding of mid-century ecumenical Protestant thought helps us come to terms with “the dialectical process by which ecumenical Protestants lost their numbers and their influence in public affairs while evangelical Protestants increased theirs.” More: “Politically and theologically conservative evangelicals flourished while continuing to espouse popular ideas about the nation and the world”—such that the United States was an exceptional nation because it was founded as a Christian nation—ideas “that were criticized and abandoned by liberalizing, diversity-accepting ecumenists.” Ecumenical leaders did not speak for their congregants. In this, Hollinger adds complexity to accounts of secularization that focus on non-religious free thinkers, such as David Sehat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom. Not enough intellectual historians focus on what my friend Bo Peery calls the Christian Left, except perhaps to take note of Niebuhrian realism. So I find this claim uncontroversial.

    Hollinger’s second claim is more provocative. He contends that ecumenical Protestants might have lost their grip on Protestant America, but they helped pave the way for a more diverse multicultural America. In making this argument he draws a compelling analogy. I quote Hollinger’s penultimate paragraph in its entirety to give you a flavor:

    However we assess the contemporary scene and however we may speculate about the future, certain historical realities ought to be clear. The evangelicals gained the upper hand in the struggle for control of Protestantism just as the Republicans gained the upper hand in the struggle for control of the South. In both cases, the triumph was facilitated by the decisions and actions of the rival party. This analogy, like any, can be carried too far, but just as the nation got something in return for the loss of the South to the Republican party, so, too, did the nation obtain something in return for the loss of Protestantism to the evangelicals: the United States got a more widely dispersed and institutionally enacted acceptance of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural diversity. This sympathetic engagement with diversity that has become so visible and celebrated a feature of the public life of the United States is the product of many agencies, but prominent among them are the egalitarian impulses and the capacities for self-interrogation the ecumenical Protestants brought to the great American encounter with diversity during the middle and late decades of the twentieth century. Those impulses and capacities generated a cascade of liberalizing consequences extending well beyond the diminishing domain of the mainstream churches, running through the lives and careers of countless post-Protestant Americans distributed across a wide expanse of secular space. Our narrative of modern American religious history will be deficient so long as we suppose that ecumenical Protestantism declined because it had less to offer the United States than did its evangelical rival. Much of what ecumenical Protestantism offered now lies beyond the churches, and hence we have been slow to see it.

    Compelling stuff, perhaps. But were ecumenical Protestants that influential? Isn’t it more plausible to argue that they were caught up in a new zeitgeist that they had little to do with? In other words, is it correct to attribute, even in part, multicultural America to the influence of ecumenical Protestants? Does Hollinger’s celebration of the ecumenical-multiculturalist vanguard ignore the ways in which multiculturalism has worked so well alongside corporate rule, as I have discussed here and here and here? Obama is a nice synecdoche for this matrix. As the nation’s first black president, he calls attention to a “more widely dispersed and institutionally enacted acceptance of ethnoracial, sexual, religious, and cultural diversity…” And yet Obama has proven time and again to appease corporate interests—made evident yet again in his role in national debt ceiling ridiculousness.

    – See more at: http://jacobinmag.com/2011/08/hollinger-on-the-protestant-dialectic/#sthash.682bSBHc.dpuf

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    The Disestablishment of American Religious History

    May 19th, 2013

    By Andrew Hartman.

     

    The following guest post by Cara L. Burnidge is a response to Ray Haberski’s “Why Academia Found God” and John Fea’s “Biography and American Religious History.”

    This past weekend, Florida State University held its first Religion and Law Conference. The Religion and Law student group had the pleasure of hosting Winnifred Sullivan who, during her keynote address, asserted that the history of religion in the United States is a narrative of establishment(s) and disestablishment(s). Using Richard Cover’s foreword to the Harvard Law Review’s summary of the 1982 Supreme Court term as the basis to her remarks, Sullivan explained that our approach to studying religion and law is best understood as “Nomos and Narrative”: “the codes that relate our normative system to our social constructions of reality and to our visions of what the world might be are narrative. The very imposition of a normative force upon a state of affairs, real or imagined, is the act of creating narrative.”[1]

    This rubric can also be applied to the historiography of American Religious History. As a doctoral candidate in American Religious History and frequent reader of USIH, I appreciate Raymond drawing attention to the “tsunami” of monographs engaging American religions. What makes this wave so interesting and, perhaps even overwhelming, is not the amount of recent monographs that engage the topic of religion (though from my vantage point that is refreshing), but rather the ways in which scholars now engage religion. As Andrew Hartman rightly noted via the resulting twitter conversation, this new wave of scholarship is disinterested in its approach to studying religion in American history. Indeed, the historiography is at a point in which a critical mass of scholars have distanced themselves from a confessional model of religious history, in which the historian’s religious affiliation no longer drives their study of religion and these historical approaches no longer consider “religion” to be, primarily, a matter of the religious affiliations of historical actors.

    On two counts then American Religious History finds itself disestablished: first, as more scholars are religiously unaffiliated or separating their faith traditions from their methodologies; and second, as the field generally regards studies of churches (individuals and their institutions alone) as outdated. For instance, earlier this month Randall Balmer gave the Plenary Address at the Southeastern Commission for the Study of Religion’s Annual Meeting in Greenville, South Carolina, providing his own narrative of the “Rise of the Religious Right” and the resulting culture wars. A Christian historian studying the history of Christianity, Balmer did not concentrate on the theological perspectives of historical actors, or for that matter himself; instead, he narrated the Religious Right through an economic and legal lens via Bob Jones v. United States (1983).

    The distance from a church history model has grown so wide that at the Winter Meeting of the American Society of Church History outgoing President Laurie Maffly-Kipp’s Presidential Address asked members to consider what has been lost since members abandoned the model in the late twentieth century [2]. ASCH members as well as the field at large turned away from “church history” because of the convincing work by Robert Orsi, David Hall, Colleen McDannell, Catherine Albanese, R. Laurence Moore, Albert Raboteau, and others who pointed to the limited nature of textual analyses that focused on white, Protestant ministers and their institutions as the center of American Religious History while neglecting lay people, religious minorities, non- and anti-institutional traditions, and Christian traditions other than Protestantism (especially Catholicism, African American Christianities, and transnational Christian traditions). While recognizing the need for this turn away from church history, Maffly-Kipp noted that these methodological approaches left the social structures historical actors themselves valued unattended. It is a telling historiographical moment when ostensible church historians need to be convinced that histories of churches still matter.

    Raymond rightly pointed to the Young Scholars of Religion Program as one of the sources of this historiographical turn. A scroll through the roster of YSR classes reveals the wellspring of “new” religious histories. [Sullivan, Mafly-Kipp, Dochuk, Sutton, Thomas Tweed, Phillip Goff, Paul Harvey, Edward Blum, Kathryn Lofton, Julie Byrne, Kathleen Flake, Sylvester Johnson, Tisa Wegner…the impressive list goes on and every work is a product of and continuation of the tsunami]. This is the wave of American Religious History scholarship that blends historical method with theoretical developments in Religious Studies.

    As a result, these histories of American religions are disestablished from the notion that theology is alone a “force” of causation and are sensitive to more complex interpretations of “religion”—as a category of thought, as lived experience, and as immaterial reality made known through material life—that emerges in other “forces” within history, like law, economics, consumerism, diplomacy, labor, and so forth.

    Those of us submerged in the tsunami (for instance, graduate students at Florida State with former YSR mentors John Corrigan and Amanda Porterfield) often take this turn for granted, because it is our normative understanding of the field. For instance, it is less surprising to recognize “religious undertones” as “thoroughly secular,” because of Culture and Redemption by former YSR mentor Tracy Fessenden, who persuasively argues “secular” space was framed by an implicit Protestant perspective. While headlines suggest that Americans are losing their religion, we know better. Affiliation may be on the decline, but the data is not. The naming and claiming of what is and is not properly “religious” continues, perhaps even is on the rise, as Americans distance themselves from formal institutional affiliations [3].

    These historians of religion must not be confused for religious historians. “Religion” is not a personal descriptor of the scholar, but the topic of one’s scholarship. The religious persuasion of a historian, while as relevant as any influence that potentially shapes a narrative, is less meaningful than the conceptual framework applied to their notion of religion and the rigor with which critical inquiry is applied to historical topics. Consequently, I find John Fea’s assessment that “many American religious historians study religion because they are religious or were raised in religious environments” an outdated assumption of the field and also an odd rubric with which to assess scholarship.

    Fea is certainly not alone in this anecdotal conclusion (which he readily admits was less “theoretical” than others supplied in the comments section of Raymond’s post). In the wake of the tsunami, I find it more interesting that encounters “with religion”  (as if it is an object to possess or an identifiable space one can enter) is considered to be authoritative evidence in the first place, as in the statement “it is striking that so many [American religious historians] have had religious experiences in their lives or attended very religious schools.”

    While Fea notes that not all American Religious historians are religious and that it is, at base, a matter of intellectual inquiry (I agree on both counts), I find it curious that this reasoning surfaces at all. For instance, do we assume that economic historians went into their field because they interacted with money during their lives? Or walked into a bank? Are labor historians interested in labor history because they or their parents were labeled “blue collar”? Perhaps this is the case in these subfields, but also perhaps not. My point is that I doubt this same reasoning would be taken seriously in any subfield other than history of religion. This form of analysis is something Religious Studies folks wrestled with—and disestablished themselves from—decades ago: treating religion as a special category that self-evidently reveals anything (about an object, a person, an event, an experience, etc.) is untenable.  It is its own form of “nomos and narrative” that preferences a certain normativity about who studies religion and who does not [4].

    Admittedly, there is confessional work in American Religious History; there are scholars who do church history models; there is scholarship that continues to privilege religion as a unique category of existence that must be defended. I do not argue that these streams of scholarship do not exist nor do I mean to imply they are not valuable to the field. The historiography of American Religion would not be as robust as it is without each of the scholars named in Fea’s post or the discussions generated from their work. I do, however, want to challenge the notion that scholarship in this vein is primarily the work of American Religious historians and that this kind of approach to religious history continues to be the center of the field [5]. In the wake of this tsunami and theoretical advancements in Religious Studies over the past thirty years, the formerly established center has shifted.

    [1] Richard Cover, “The Supreme Court, 1982 Term—Forward: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97:4 (1983), 10, an online version of which can be found here: http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2705

    [2] Maffly-Kipp’s remarks can be found in the forthcoming June 2013 issue of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture

    [3] For instance, see Steven Ramey’s post at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, “Creatio Ex Nihilo: Pew Forum and the “Nones,” https://www.equinoxpub.com/blog/2012/10/creatio-ex-nihilo-pew-forum-and-the-nones/

    [4] A brief example of the consequences of the politics of “religion,” can be found at another Steve Ramey post at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion,  “Critical Theory and the Importance of Religious Studies,” https://www.equinoxpub.com/blog/2012/12/critical-theory-and-the-importance-of-religious-studies/.

    [5] See, for instance, the discussion on Mark Edward’s recent post, “Is There a Christian Approach to History” for Religion in American History in which theitinerantmind stated “that in many academic circles, to veer too far into this territory is to forfeit all credibility”(http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2013/03/is-there-christian-approach-to-history.html ).

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    Eugene D. Genovese: Recollections of a Former Student

    February 3rd, 2013

    by .

     

    The death of a favorite teacher in his or her late old age typically evokes strong emotions from former students in their early old age.  In this case the emotions are mine and the teacher is Gene Genovese, one of my professors at Rutgers when I was an undergraduate from 1962 to 1966.  We remained in contact off-and-on over the decades and I saw him last in Atlanta in July 2010.  This piece is not another attempt to offer an instant analysis of the “real” Genovese, an enterprise now well underway in cyberspace.  Rather, I want to add something to the story from the perspective of an undergraduate he taught who subsequently entered what Gene called the “history business.” 

    I first heard about Gene in the fall of 1963, the first semester of my sophomore year, from my friend Ken O’Brien (who also entered the history business).  Ken was taking Gene’s course in American Negro history.  As a naive 18 year old from a white working class-lower middle class New Jersey family, I was surprised to hear that this subject existed.  I soon learned in detail that it did from Genovese himself.  During the spring semester of 1964, the Intro US history course since the 1870s, taught in lecture by the terrifying Richard P. McCormick, allowed some students to take tutorials in small groups.  Three of us were assigned to Gene.  Our first assignment was to make sense of the currency issue in the late 19th century via debates in the Congressional Record.  No, I’m not making this up.  During the rest of the semester Gene tamped down my enthusiasm for William Jennings Bryan (a racist), delighted in my discovery that Theodore Roosevelt posed no threat to the standing order, and chided me for still liking Woodrow Wilson (the worst racist of the lot).

    During my junior and senior years I took three courses from Gene, a two semester sequence on the history of the American South and a seminar on comparative slavery in which I first heard the word hegemony spoken (by him).  I was attracted by Gene the professor rather than by the subject matter.  Nor was I unique in this respect.  The obits, which focus on Gene’s scholarship and shifting but always controversial worldview, ignore his record as a great teacher of undergraduates.  Jocks liked him as much as aspiring scholars did even though he assigned readings on ante bellum agriculture, at least some of which had to be skimmed to get through the courses.

     

    Part of Gene’s appeal to undergrads was that he wasn’t scary like Professor McCormick or their great colleague Warren Susman.  I was not alone in enjoying a glass of wine while visiting his office, an act of hospitality that now might be more likely than an endorsement of Vietnamese Communism to prompt official university censure.

    Gene offered such an endorsement at the first Rutgers teach-in on the Vietnam War in April 1965.  Speaking as a “Marxist and a socialist,” he did “not fear or regret the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam.  I welcome it.”  These two deliberately provocative sentences, quoted in the school paper, the Daily Targum, were picked up by New Jersey news media and soon became notorious. 

    Initially Warren Susman seemed to be the star of the night for his confrontation with a conservative speaker –yes, there were some on the program– who called the war a defense of “civilization.”  But Gene’s welcome of a Vietcong victory became the main issue in the 1965 New Jersey gubernatorial campaign.  According to State Senator Wayne Dumont, the Republican nominee, no one expressing this opinion should be allowed to teach at a public university.  Democratic Governor Richard J. Hughes and the Rutgers board of governors grudgingly defended Gene’s right to speak his mind.  Gene’s popularity among students remained undiminished. 

    Truth be told, Gene’s rhetorical extravagance outside the classroom was another part of his appeal to students, much as George Fitzhugh’s rhetorical extravagance was part of Fitzhugh’s appeal to Gene as a historical subject.  Gene’s fans included Wayne Valis, the foremost conservative in the Rutgers Class of ‘66 and a future aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan.  The teach-in still elicits fond memories among Rutgers alumni of a certain age and a certain sort.  At a recent reunion of the Targum staff from that era faded copies of the paper reporting on the “Genovese case” stood out among the relics of our youth.

    On the whole Gene’s teach-in speech hardly seems extravagant in retrospect. [1] He announced at the outset that he was offering a “frankly political” analysis in a setting that was “not in any sense an enlarged classroom, but a place where professors and students can speak their minds on vital questions in a manner not ordinarily proper in class.” Indeed, his self-identification as a Marxist was intended to “put you on guard against my prejudices as you should be on guard against everyone’s, especially your own.” 

    Gene placed the war in the context of the Cold War “struggle for the underdeveloped world” in which the United States supported such “thugs” as Chiang Kai-shek, Francisco Franco and the Shah of Iran as well as “whichever general is fronting in Saigon.” Fidel Castro was viewed as a threat not only because he was a Communist but also because of Cuba’s example as a “small country rebuilding a distorted economy on a socialist basis, evicting foreign capital. and suggesting to others that they, too, are entitled to be masters in their own house.” 

    American Cold War policy stood “completely naked” in Vietnam.  Having initially  built up the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem instead of seeking elections in keeping with the Geneva Accords of 1954, the United States was now “applying napalm to a people that every honest reporter admits would still overwhelmingly elect Ho Chi Minh.”  In short, the ultimate purpose of the war was “containing a rival social and economic system and punishing those who move toward it.” 

    Yet, in an echo of William Appleman Williams’s  The Tragedy of American Diplomacy,Gene said that President Lyndon Johnson, was “not an evil man.” While rightly interpreting the war as part of a purposeful Cold War strategy, Gene mistakenly credited the Johnson administration with more sophistication and forethought than the available evidence warranted even in 1965.  But one aspect of the “predatory” American strategy did seem wrong-headed even in its own terms.   Gene doubted that the People’s Republic of China planned to expand throughout Asia, but if this was Beijing’s intent, then a Communist Vietnam could serve as a bulwark.  These men and women had not bled for decades “in order to make foreigners the masters of their country.”  This passage would bring cheer to the hearts of two recent visitors to Hanoi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.  Even Gene’s two deliberately provocative sentences look astute.  If the Johnson administration had allowed the “impending” Vietcong victory to occur in 1965 or 1966, both the United States and Vietnam would have been spared enormous pain.

    Gene’s pointed endorsement of a Vietcong victory does highlight one side of his temperament.  He loved controversy and combat–but sometimes only until he had second thoughts about what he had said or written. 

    At the 1969 American Historical Association convention Gene opposed a resolution denouncing the Vietnam War on the grounds that it would divide the organization.  As a graduate student at the time, I agreed; in retrospect this position seems wrong though the issue still does not look clear cut.  As far as I know, Gene never changed his mind.  Nor did I ever hear him regret his inflammatory words urging the AHA business meeting to crush proponents of the anti-war resolution–”put them down hard.” 

    Perhaps Gene did regret this extravagant rhetoric.  Certainly he came to regret other academic controversies that had needlessly turned personal.  Gene’s clashes with his friends (and comrades) and then enemies Herbert Gutman and Christopher Lasch were especially notable. Throughout the academy the magnification of  intellectual differences is standard operating procedure even during eras less volatile than the 1960s and 1970s.  Nevertheless, the differences between Genovese and Gutman on the question of slave autonomy were slight in comparison to other scholarly disputes about, for example, the existence of an American empire or the effectiveness of federal regulation of big business.  In the final analysis both Genovese and Gutman recognized that the slaves tried to preserve as much of their autonomy and culture as possible and that the masters held ultimate control. 

    Although the methodological differences between Lasch and Genovese were more substantial, their friendship lapsed because these two eccentric intellectual giants tried to co-exist in the same history department (Note to readers:  eccentric is a term of respect in my vocabulary).  In these instances the sides of Gene’s temperament that valued intelligence and friendship triumphed over the side that reveled in controversy and combat.  He patched things up with Gutman and resumed a friendship with Lasch.  Yet there is no denying that Genovese could be a very difficult man. 

    Gene was the second of my Rutgers professors–following Lloyd Gardner–to urge me to enter the history business and he remained supportive over the decades.  Our worldviews and approach to history shared at least one important feature, a willingness to write with understanding about bigots and weirdos.  But in Gene’s view I was a wimpy social democrat who watched polls in Democratic Party primaries for Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and other fellow wimps. Sufficiently distant from his strongly held political positions–first on the left and then on the right– I was never at risk of ideological excommunication. The political never became the personal. 

    I began seeing Gene and his wife Elizabeth (Betsey) Fox-Genovese regularly when in the early 1990s I started making research trips to Atlanta once or twice a year.  Amid their extraordinary hospitality, we reminisced a lot.  Gene was always happy to hear about Rutgers students from the early 1960s who still told stories about him.  Along with Betsey, and I’m sure many others, I urged him, apparently without success, to write a memoir and to deposit his private papers in an archive instead of destroying them.  Once again I enjoyed Gene’s outrageous comments about his former, present, and future ideological allies.  I also witnessed, on a “same time next year” basis, his move to the right.  As a good Genovese student I tried to understand his rationale.

     

    The personal and psychological aspects of this transition I will leave to others if they must. But the intellectual roots of the change are not hard to find.  I liked to tease Gene that he had always hated liberalism more than he loved socialism; liberalism (in the twentieth century American sense) was intellectually too messy for him as well as insufficiently disciplined in its means and ends.  Sometimes Gene conceded that I might have a point.  A few years ago he half joked that he would tell me the single most important reason for his shift “if you promise not to laugh.”  Gene said that he had concluded that liberals in their optimism were “wrong about human nature.”  I didn’t laugh.  Neither did I offer the futile response that he might have moved a shorter distance on the spectrum to become a Niebuhrian social democrat.  I have no doubt that Gene considered this quip part of a serious explanation of his transition. 

    Although honored by conservative organizations and claimed especially by traditionalists after his return to the Roman Catholic Church, Gene in his last years is better categorized as a “man of the right” rather than as a conservative  (to recall a distinction Whittaker Chambers made to William F. Buckley, Jr.)   Even this distinction does not fully capture the continuing idiosyncrasies of his worldview.  A fierce defender of Israel, Gene nonetheless voted for Pat Buchanan at least once because he distrusted Republican neocon dreams of creating a worldwide capitalist utopia.  Despite his return to Catholicism, Gene talked often and nostalgically about the Communist party of his youth as well as about the ex-Communists and Popular Fronters who energized New York City Democratic reform politics during the early 1960s.  It is almost as if he considered Communism a necessary stage in both his own life and the life of the country. 

    In the end two legacies count above all else:  first, Gene’s enormous contribution to the study of American history which, by and large, was enriched rather than marred by his extracurricular ideological combat, and second, for those of us fortunate enough to have been his students, his excellent undergraduate teaching.

     

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    The Bleak Landscape of American Education

    January 21st, 2013

     

    Readers of this blog don’t need convincing that the current political landscape is bleak. Faced with a choice between centrist austerity-mongers led by chief austerity-monger Obama, and nihilistic anti-government Ayn Randians that go by the name of Tea Partiers, it’s no wonder that leftist intellectuals are reduced to compelling if pointless banter about what motivates the President.The landscape of American education, a synecdoche for the crumbling American welfare state more generally, is equally bleak—equally comprised of lesser-of-two evil choices. On the one hand, we have the so-called liberals in the binary equation, those like Education CEO Arne Duncan, Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp, and education-reform-darling Michelle Rhee. Their stated desire is to bring justice to the nation’s poor children in the form of better teaching. But their preferred mechanism for doing so is to introduce market “incentives” to the teaching profession, a euphemism for labor “flexibility,” another euphemism for the destruction of teacher’s unions, one of the last sectors of unionized employment that corporate America has yet to outsource.

    On the other hand, we have the Tea Partiers of the educational world, those who see the Department of Education as a bureaucratic, totalitarian nightmare. There is a long history of conservative thought hostile to public education (which I analyze at length in my book Education and the Cold War). Beginning in the 1930s with far right-wingers such as Elizabeth Dilling—whose famous 1934 catalogue, The Red Network: A ‘Who’s Who’ and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots, oriented a generation of right-wing Americans to the “truth about the Communist-Socialist world conspiracy and its four horsemen, Atheism, Immorality, Class Hatred, and Pacifism-for-the-sake-of-Red-revolution”—an alliance was drawn together by its common collectivist enemies: New Dealers, communists, and progressive educators. By the early Cold War period, as traditionalist conservatives concluded that the New Deal was at one with secular humanism, cosmopolitanism, moral relativism, and progressive education, their stance on state-run schools became one of unadulterated antipathy. This persists: in a recent blog post, conservative historian Clare Spark incomprehensibly implies that late historian of education Lawrence Cremin, quintessentially a Cold War liberal scholar in the mold of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Richard Hofstadter, had fascist tendencies for supporting cosmopolitan education reform efforts (fascism being the new right-wing boogeyman for statism, replacing the largely outmoded communism analogy.)

    Plenty of astute political analysts have pointed out that austerity works well alongside Tea Party nihilism. Obama was able to reduce federal spending on necessary and humane social programs by pointing to the threat represented by the Ayn Randians. Austerity was the only choice if we were to keep any semblance of social spending; if we were to keep the federal government up and running. But fewer education pundits have pointed out the close links between the so-called education reformers and anti-public school conservatives. Even though these connections are unmistakable. How else could Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have implemented his anti-teacher measures if not for the fact that teachers are low hanging political fruit? How else but due to the anti-teacher meme that has wormed its way into public discourse, thanks to the liberal reformers who constantly bash teachers?

    Indicative of the bleakness of the contemporary landscape of American education is that a Hollywood actor (Matt Damon) is suddenly one of the few spokespersons for teachers. (Don’t mock Matt Damon! Leave that to theorgans of the centrist middlebrow!)

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    The Enlightenment and Protestant Thought; Or, Reading Frances Schaeffer through David Hollinger

    January 8th, 2013

    By Andrew Hartman.

     

    David Hollinger will be the keynote speaker for this year’s S-USIH annual meeting, with a talk intriguingly titled, “Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Survivalism, and the Question of Secularization.” This topic fits in with his recent focus on American Protestant thought. In his 2011 OAH presidential address, “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity,” (published in the June 2011 Journal of American History), Hollinger argues that a better understanding of mid-century liberal, ecumenical Protestant thought—most famously represented by Niebuhr—helps us come to terms with “the dialectical process by which ecumenical Protestants lost their numbers and their influence in public affairs while evangelical Protestants increased theirs.” But, Hollinger contends that, in addition to losses, there were also gains. Ecumenical Protestants might have lost their grip on Protestant America, but they helped pave the way for a more diverse multicultural America. This is a compelling argument, if a touch overstated (as I argue here).

    Hollinger’s contribution to the recent Modern Intellectual History “state of the field” roundtable (analyzed as a whole by Daniel Wickberg), ostensibly about the long life of his and Charles Capper’s canonical primary source reader, The American Intellectual Tradition, includes a challenging intervention: when American intellectual life is considered as part of a wider, trans-Atlantic community of discourse, “its most commanding theme is the accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment.”  The second plenary session at the upcoming conference, chaired by David Sehat and featuring Wickberg, Joan Shelley Rubin, Jennifer Burns, and Jonathan Scott Holloway, takes this meta-statement as its provocation.
    Hollinger begins to work out the implications of the “commanding theme” in a more recent Dædalus article, “The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted.” Hollinger seeks to revise the wrongheaded notion that the history of Enlightenment thought in America largely resides outside religion, a problem that stems from the fact that mainline Protestantism is understudied relative to its numbers and influence, which were huge until its steady decline began in the sixties. The debates about the Enlightenment, the adjustment that Christians underwent in response to the earth-shattering epistemological implications of modernity, were played out within Christian communities of discourse. This historical observation is similar to one Molly Worthen made in a paper she gave at the 2011 AHA (I assume Worthen will flesh it out further in her forthcoming book, Let Angel Minds Inquire: Evangelical America and the Problem of Anti-Intellectualism).
    Worthen contends the culture wars were not just a battle between religious and secular Americans but also an internal feature of American Protestantism. In a similar vein, Hollinger writes: “Quarrels within American Protestantism revolve around the feeling among more orthodox, evangelical parties that mainstream liberals are actually secularists in disguise, as well as the feeling among ecumenical parties that their evangelical co-religionists are sinking the true Christian faith with an albatross of anachronistic dogmas and alliances forged with reactionary political forces.” This struggle famously played out at the 1979 Southern Baptist Convention, when conservatives who felt threatened by new sexual mores—feminism, abortion, and gay rights—took control of that particular Protestant sect, to the dismay of their more moderate coreligionists.
    Does Hollinger’s thesis have American exceptionalist undertones? Although Hollinger is far from an American triumphalist, he has long argued that the United States is exceptional. In his two important books on the problems of racial and ethnic diversity,Postethnic (1995) and Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity (2006), Hollinger implies that the United States has found ways to accommodate racial and ethnic diversity to a degree that most nations have not. America, as such, should serve “as an archive of experience on which the world can draw critically.” Despite his hesitations about American nationalism, mostly related to the persistent racial injustices suffered by the descendants of black slaves, Hollinger defends the American nation as a proper place to seek justice. “A stronger national solidarity enhances the possibility of social and economic justice within the United States,” he writes. “This is a simple point, but an extremely important one. Any society that cannot see its diverse members as somehow ‘in it together’ is going to have trouble distributing its resources with even a modicum of equity.”
    On the question of religion and the Enlightenment, Hollinger again contends that the U.S. is different, even exceptional. This is why “copious literature on ‘secularization’ often treats the United States as a special case,” never more true than now, when “debates about the nation and its future are so much more religion-saturated than at any time since the 1950s.” Charles Taylor, arguably the most important recent scholar on secularization in the wake of his 2007 tome A Secular Age, certainly puts the United States in a different framework than Europe. The United States has, of course, experienced secularization, not due to a decline of religious belief, but rather, in spite of its persistence. Similarly, legal scholar Stephen Carter argues in The Culture of Disbelief that the American public sphere is hostile to religiously informed action, even though, when polled, well over 90 percent of Americans say they believe in God. Taylor argues that the incommensurable steadfastness of religious belief in the United States lends credence to theories of American exceptionalism. Moreover, the doggedness of religious belief amongst a vast majority of Americans in a secular age also helps explain the culture wars.
    According to Hollinger, two forces propel the “engagement of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment,” which he terms “a world-historical event”: science and diversity. He writes that, when people are confronted with new knowledge that challenges their religious beliefs, they undergo “cognitive demystification.” The most important moment of mass “cognitive demystification” occurred in the early twentieth century, when American Protestants had to come to terms with the new scientific thinking known as Darwinism.  “In the U.S., the overwhelming majority of commentators on the religious implications of Darwinism were “reconcilers.” That is, they sought ways to accommodate Christianity to the new knowledge, out of which came liberal, ecumenical Protestantism, some in the form of the Social Gospel. “The persistence of strong creationist constituencies right down to the present,” however, “shows that the greatest single instance of cognitive demystification remains contested in the United States.” In other words, not everyone has accommodated the Enlightenment, Hollinger seems to say.
    Demographic diversification offered another stiff challenge to religious doctrine. The primary change agent in this regard was, of course, immigration. Living, working, and going to school with people whose beliefs and traditions were foreign but not obviously wrong led to a wider acceptance of diversity, and more importantly, an embrace of the knowledge that such diversity resulted in. Take the cultural relativism of anthropology, in the work of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, as an example. Hollinger writes that these pioneering anthropologists “explicitly and relentlessly questioned the certainties of the home culture by juxtaposing them with often romanticized images of distant communities of humans.” (A great book that is highly critical of such secular relativism, from a Roman Catholic, localist, traditionalist perspective, is Christopher Shannon’s A World Made Safe for Differences, which I reviewed here.)
    One of the reasons for mainline Protestantism’s decline in the wake of the sixties is because, Hollinger writes, “ecumenical Protestant leaders tried to mobilize their constituencies on the leftward side” of the issues that rocked the nation. Conservative rank-and-file Protestants often jumped ship for evangelical churches, where religious leaders were highly critical of the liberal activism of mainliners. “The accommodations the ecumenical Protestant leadership made with secular liberalism generated countermeasures from fundamentalist, Pentecostal, and holiness Protestants.” Hollinger continues: “When the ecumenical leadership finally backed away from the traditional assumption that the heterosexual, nuclear, patriarchal family is God’s will, evangelical leaders seized the idea, called it ‘family values,’ and ran with it to great success.”
    In his conclusion, Hollinger contends that ecumenical leaders lost many of their churchgoers after they made a secular, liberal turn in the sixties, much as the Democrats lost the south when they backed civil rights. However, today’s America looks much more like the nation liberal ecumenical leaders advocated for than the one conservative Protestants wanted. This was “cultural victory” in the face of “organizational defeat,” as sociologist N.J. Demerath III has put it, and echoes the arguments by scholars such as James Livingston and David Courtwright. The left won the culture wars even as it lost many important elections.
    All of this is fine as far as it goes. Hollinger’s accentuation of liberal Protestant thought, which thankfully goes far beyond the facile storyline about how Niebuhr endowed Cold War liberalism theological cover, is an important intervention. I look forward to his keynote for that reason.
    But underlining Hollinger’s thesis is the implication that only liberal Protestants accommodated the Enlightenment. Conservative Protestants, on the other hand, resisted it. Evangelicals and fundamentalists failed to reconcile or adjust their thinking to the new knowledge. Hollinger does not say as much, but his focus on how liberal Protestants were the ones accommodating the Enlightenment seems to imply that he does not think conservatives did any such reconciling.
    If Hollinger indeed thinks as much, I think he is wrong. Conservative Protestants also found ways to accommodate the Enlightenment, or adjust their thought to it, with the qualification that accommodation and adjustment do not necessarily entail agreement or wholesale adoption. In this way, conservative Protestants acted as we would expect if we buy the argument in Corey Robin’s controversial bookThe Reactionary Mind. Conservatives, Robin theorizes, are not the defenders of static, existing institutions or doctrines. Rather, the movements for revolutionary change—such as the sexual revolution unleashed in the sixties—have led conservatives to rethink their original premises. “If a ruling class is truly fit to rule, why and how has it allowed a challenge to its power to emerge?”
    The embrace of innovative evangelical thinker Frances Schaeffer, I argue, demonstrates that conservative Protestantism (and the larger conservative movement and GOP, which rode the conservative Protestant wave) found ways to accommodate secular modernity.
    Frances Schaeffer is usually mentioned in all of the important books on the Christian Right. Both William Martin and Daniel Williams include three-or-four page synopses of Schaeffer in their indispensable histories of the Christian Right. But I would argue that Schaeffer is more important to modern evangelical thought than such brief treatment indicates. As James Sire writes, not without a touch of hyperbole: “It is little exaggeration to say that if Schaeffer had not lived, historians of the future looking back on these decades would have to invent him in order to explain what happened.” Perhaps we are on the verge of an explosion of Schaeffer scholarship. One indication of a potential such impending burst is the panel of young scholars at the upcoming S-USIH conference on the topic of Schaeffer, titled, “The Expansive Legacy of Francis Schaeffer.” (For a brief introduction to Schaeffer and the 1970s Christian Right, view the first 25 minutes of episode 6 of the PBS “God In America” series.)
    Schaeffer, the hippie-like evangelical sage of L’Abri, a Swiss mountain retreat for Christian wanderers and seekers, became famous in the 1970s, late in his life, when his books and documentary films touched millions of American evangelicals. Growing up in working-class Pennsylvania, Schaeffer was “saved” at a tent revival in 1929. His theology was shaped during the great debates of the 1920s, when his mentor, J. Graham Machen was fired from Princeton Theological Seminary for maintaining fundamentalist beliefs at a time when liberal theologians—Hollinger’s reconcilers—were on the rise. Schaeffer attended the Machen-founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, a fundamentalist alternative to the liberal Ivies. Schaeffer pastored a number of churches in the northeast and St. Louis before moving to Switzerland as a missionary in 1947. Schaeffer and his wife Edith founded L’Abri in 1955 after he was purged from the missionary by Carl McIntyre, who, astonishingly, accused Schaeffer of being a communist. Although charging Schaeffer with communism was outrageous even by the standards of McIntyre, who made McCarthy seem like a dough-faced fellow traveler by comparison, living in Europe, according to Schaeffer’s oldest daughter Priscilla, resulted in him rejecting the pietism he displayed while a pastor in the U.S. Instead, he came to embrace to a more modern spiritualism, part and parcel of his newfound interest in art, music, and philosophy.
    Edith (Seville) Schaeffer was raised in China by highly educated and well-heeled Christian missionaries. Consistent with such a privileged early-twentieth-century upbringing, she loved high culture, a passion she eventually shared with her husband. Edith always lived with the tension inherent to highbrow fundamentalism—a combination that most people would consider oxymoronic. According to Edith and Francis’s son Frank Schaeffer, whose captivating apostate memoir Crazy for Godshould be must-reading for all students of the Christian Right, Edith spent a considerable amount of time fretting about the effect of H.L. Mencken’s formative anti-fundamentalist satires. “But we’re not like that!” she would exclaim. “He would never have written those horrible things if he had ever met me!”
    Such anecdotal evidence reveals why Schaeffer was ultimately so significant: he (thanks in part to his wife) sought to reconcile a fundamentalist reading of scripture to modernity, or at least, modernity shorn of a modern epistemology. The younger Schaeffer writes: “I think my father lived with a tremendous tension that pitted his growing interest in art, culture, music, and history against a stunted theology frozen in the modernist-fundamentalist battles of his youthful Christian experience.” In fact, Schaeffer’s theology wasn’t stunted. In order to do battle with modernity, it incorporated all that he had learned from modernist forms. “Dad spent the rest of his life trying to somehow reconcile the angry theology that typified movement-fundamentalism, with a Christian apologetic that was more attractive.” In the mind of Schaeffer, the acids of modernity reshaped evangelical thought.
    It might be argued that Schaeffer was the perfect Christian theologian for a postmodern age because he understood the upheavals in how humans conceived truth. For Schaeffer, this was a problem in need of a correction that only a proper understanding of God could provide. It should be noted that American Protestant theologians, liberal and conservative, had long grappled with thinkers who unmasked paradigms of truth. In her excellent book American Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how American theologians voraciously read Nietzsche, not because they agreed with his radical antinomianism, but because Nietzsche was a proxy for modernity writ large, compelling them to reformulate their own truth paradigms to new contexts. Schaeffer represents, to put it in Hollinger’s terms, a similar form of “cognitive demystification” in that he grappled with the giants of modernity in order to reinvigorate his particular brand of fundamentalism.
    When the “New Evangelicals” came on the scene in the 1950s, with Billy Graham as their chief spokesperson, they presented a friendlier face to fundamentalism by not worrying so much about schisms over scriptural interpretation. But they still focused all of their preaching energies on spouting Biblical verse. Schaeffer, according to his son, “reversed the priorities of fundamentalist dogma. Instead of spouting Bible verses, Dad talked about philosophy, art, and culture.” He endowed biblical inerrancy with a wider currency. He was the evangelical answer to modernism, even postmodernism. “In the early ‘60s, he was probably the only fundamentalist who had even heard of Bob Dylan.”
    Schaeffer’s philosophical project, best articulated in his 1968 book, The God Who is There, was anti-secular humanist, secular humanism defined as “the system whereby men and women, beginning absolutely by themselves, try rationally to build out from themselves, having only Man as their integration point, to find all knowledge, meaning and value.” Schaeffer theorized that the radical relativism of secular humanism had become the epistemology of modern humanity after what he termed “the line of despair” had been crossed. Prior to this epistemological shift, even non-Christians could make sense of truth claims, despite not having a base for such claims. For example: “One could tell a non-Christian to ‘be a good girl’ and, while she might not have followed your advice, at least she would have understood what you were talking about. To say the same thing to a truly modern girl today would be to make a ‘nonsense’ statement. The blank look you might receive would not mean that your standards had been rejected, but that your message was meaningless.”
    Schaeffer essentially presented a Christian theory of secularization heavily dependent on intellectual history. He believed the whole world’s culture had become post-Christian in following “the same basic monolithic thought-form—namely, the lack of absolutes and antithesis, leading to a pragmatic relativism.” Hegel was the first step towards the line of despair because Hegel theorized that instead of antithesis—instead of the proposition that, since this is true, that cannot be true—synthesis was the proper method of thought. Synthesis, thus conceived, implied relativism, since all thought had some merit in that it would eventually be enveloped by synthesis. After Hegel, Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, was to blame for the next step towards the “line of despair” since he argued that synthesis could not be reached by reason but rather by a leap of faith. Schaeffer objected to the separation of reason and faith; he believed they were mutually inclusive. French existentialism, especially Sartre, represented yet another step towards despair. “The total, he says, is ridiculous,” as Schaeffer described Sartre. “Nevertheless, you try to authenticate yourself by an act of the will. It does not really matter in which direction you act as long as you act.” French existentialism, for Schaeffer, implied moral relativism: a person could either help an old lady across the street or attack her and steal her purse. Either way that person would “authenticate themselves.”
    Crossing over the line of despair was a frightening development. Nevertheless, Schaeffer argued that Christians should be thankful for it, since it had destroyed false optimism. Christianity is realistic, not romantic, he argued, in that it does not base hope on the goodness of people. “Christianity is realistic and says the world is marked with evil and man is truly guilty all along the line.” But Christianity, if not romantic, is also not nihilistic, because even though Christians and nihilists both see humans for what they are, Christianity offers a way out to those who embrace God. This way out is a methodology Schaeffer repeatedly terms “antithesis,” which he simply defines as such: “If a thing is true, the opposite is not true; if a thing is right, the opposite is wrong.” In other words, Schaeffer claimed to understand better than most theologians that people experienced their encounter with modernity—with a world stripped bare of confidence in humanity—as if they had been touched by a vortex. Fundamental truths that transcended the particular truth claims of humans offered stability in such a vertigo-inducing world.
    Schaeffer’s methodology of “antithesis” had specific political implications even though he avoided politicizing his theology until the 1970s. For example, Schaeffer made clear that, according to the method of antithesis, heterosexuality is right and homosexuality is wrong. One of the symptoms of despair that Schaeffer catalogued was what he called “philosophic homosexuality,” or homosexuality as “an expression of the current denial of antithesis.” “In much of modern thinking all antithesis and all the order of God’s creation is to be fought against—including the male-female distinctions.” And yet, despite the homophobic implications of his theology, his son Frank describes his father as decidedly un-homophobic. “Dad thought it cruel and stupid to believe that a homosexual could change by ‘accepting Christ.’”  Schaeffer thought homosexuality was a sin, but on par with other sins, such as gluttony. He believed all sins could be forgiven and all sinners treated with kindness. Perhaps this was small consolation, but relative to the firebrand anti-gay messages that other formative leaders of the Christian Right were propounding, it was certainly more humane. Certainly better than Tim LaHaye, who wrote a book in 1978 titled, The Unhappy Gays, in which he writes: “When sodomy fills the national cup of man’s abominations to overflowing, God earmarks that nation for destruction.”
    Being nice in his anti-homosexuality was evidence of Schaeffer’s model for bringing fundamentalist Christianity into the modern world. Once he began to gain a measure of fame—once even the families of Billy Graham and Gerald Ford became regular guests at L’abri—Schaeffer’s fellow conservative Christians recognized him as the ideal conduit to a youth culture they failed to understand. As Frank describes it: “Evangelical leaders came to L’Abri so Dad could teach them how to inoculate Johnny and Susie born-again against the hedonistic out-of-control culture that had Johnny’s older brother on drugs and Susie’s older sister marching on the capital.” As a father-son tandem, the Schaeffers became the answer to bringing young people into conservative Protestantism.
    With the help of evangelical pitchman Billy Zeoli, who had reams of Amway money, thanks to its right-wing founder Rich DeVos, Frank Schaeffer became the evangelical documentary filmmaker par excellence, and his “father’s sidekick.” This partnership produced How Should We Then Live?—a thirteen episode documentary about culture, art, history, and politics. They then made a second series that focused on pro-life issues, especially abortion—Whatever Happened to the Human Race?—the brainchild of Frank and Dr. C. Everett Koop, an ardently pro-life evangelical who was eventually appointed Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General. Both films continue to be viewed at evangelical colleges nationwide.
    Frank describes the legacy of the films in the following terms: “The impact of our two film series, as well as their companion books, was to give the evangelical community a frame of reference through which to understand the secularization of American culture, and to point to the ‘human life issue’ as the watershed between a ‘Christian society’ and a utilitarian relativistic ‘post-Christian’ future stripped of compassion and beauty.” In other words, it is quite possible that the making of abortion as an evangelical issue—not just a Catholic issue—required a different sort of Protestant thought. In part, this was because the worldly Schaeffer always argued on grounds that even non-religious people could understand. When he became an outspoken pro-life activist, he argued on the grounds of “what the genetic potential of a fetus was, or what direction we all can agree that we want society to go in.” He was not a firebrand, and he could relate to young people with his immense fluency of popular culture.
    Perhaps he was before his times, since the Falwells, Robertsons, and Dobsons also had their day. But in terms of lasting significance, Schaeffer’s modernized, highbrow evangelicalism might be more important, precisely because Schaeffer found unique ways to accommodate the Enlightenment to fundamentalism—as dissonant as that elocution may sound to the ears.
    http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-enlightenment-and-protestant.html

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