In addition to being the birthday of Publick Occurrences 2.0′s senior proprietor, February 27 is the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s famous Cooper Union address in 1860 (making this the sesquicentennial, come to think of it).  I was actually walking near Cooper Union this past evening, which gave me the chance to reflect on great men of American history and great American historians.  A fine way to say farewell to this short month.

There has been a crush of interesting recent articles on the contemporary tea party movement, which I thought I’d highlight.

Today’s New York Times has a very long feature that tries to tie together the tangled strands of the movement.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

…

The ebbs and flows of the Tea Party ferment are hardly uniform. It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure. Not everyone flocking to the Tea Party movement is worried about dictatorship. Some have a basic aversion to big government, or Mr. Obama, or progressives in general. What’s more, some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party.

But most are not. They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars. Online, they discovered radical critiques of Washington on Web sites like ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”) and Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind.”).

…

The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.

…

Local Tea Party groups are often loosely affiliated with one of several competing national Tea Party organizations. In the background, offering advice and organizational muscle, are an array of conservative lobbying groups, most notably FreedomWorks. Further complicating matters, Tea Party events have become a magnet for other groups and causes — including gun rights activists, anti-tax crusaders, libertarians, militia organizers, the “birthers” who doubt President Obama’s citizenship, Lyndon LaRouche supporters and proponents of the sovereign states movement.

It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny.

Other articles of interest:

In the New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky observed the protests of September 12, 2009.

Earlier this month, Ben McGrath took stock of the tea party movement in a nice piece for the New Yorker.

On the Washington Post website, David Waters was skeptical that the Christian Right would join forces with the tea party movement (H/T John Fea).

In HNN, Jim Sleeper offers a cursory comparison of the Boston Tea Party of 1773 and today’s tea party movement, and (rather too optimistically) tries to link today’s tea party movement to anti-corporate sentiment.  While there were anti-corporate elements in the original Boston Tea Party, as  Thom Hartmann points out here, I think Sleeper goes too far in hoping that Sarah Palin’s Nashville audience will take up Hartmann’s cry.

Finally, at Jeff Pasley’s request, I’m linking to the videos of two lunchtime talks I gave at the Old South Meeting House in December 2009.  John Fea kindly mentioned the videos on his own blog (which all of you should be following), but in any case here is the first talk and here is the second.  The talks are called “Teapot in a Tempest: The Boston Tea Party of 1773,” in part because that’s what I thought the title of my upcoming book would be.  The title has now changed, but I am happy to say that the manuscript is currently off to the press and due out in fall 2010.

I have found that even most historians don’t want to give government credit for important developments, preferring a universe in which all people are the agents of their own destinies. And that’s fine, Americans are conditioned to think that way, and at least historians usually know enough about the social and institutional details of American life to understand the stiff challenges most people have faced in trying to take control of their lives. But imagine the chore involved in selling a government program to ordinary Americans who have the same conditioning, but know none of those details, or refuse to acknowledge them. One example would be the detail that we already have a huge government-run health care system called Medicare that senior citizens would fight to keep . . . the government out of? The president speaks ruefully about some of his mail:

[Via TPM]: The Washington Post reported a similar anecdote from a recent town hall in rural South Carolina with Rep. Robert Inglis (R-SC). Someone reportedly told Inglis, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”

Bob Cesca at Huffington Post has a funny piece with those details and more, emphasizing the fact that a lot of the people disrupting these Democratic “town hall” meetings on health care are obvious Medicare recipients. I have talked to more than senior American myself who likewise touted their Medicare out of one side of their mouths and decried “socialized medicine” out of the other.

This is American political psychology at work, the same kind of self-hypnosis that a lot of military people seem to perform on themselves, depending on government for their every need while refusing to intellectually or emotionally process that fact, the better to maintain their ultra-conservative politics in the world outside the military. Perfectly happy to be dependent on Medicare, millions of older Americans have just conveniently “forgotten” the fact it is a government program that should, according to their conservative ideology, be enslaving them, destroying their initiative, euthanizing them, etc.

I think this is why the health insurance industry really should be worried about the “public option” health insurance program being enacted. If the public option exists, people and small businesses will start relying on it, and about two weeks later, they will forget all about its being an evil socialistic intrusion and the thing will be as hard to get rid of Medicare and Social Security, which is to say nearly impossible.  Even the next Republican administration will be trying to expand it. The smarter right-wing ideologues and industry lobbyists know this very well. I hope the president and the congressional Dems are ready, because the onslaught of disinformation and disruption is not going to stop. Certain people have too much money and ideological crediblity at stake.

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Now playing: Ideal Free Distribution – The American Myth
via FoxyTunes

I need to finish up the Ozark travelogue soon, but first thought I would share another instance of political fantasy in real life, from a news article in our local Sunday paper. It seems that Barack Obama’s rise to power has coincided with a boom in weapons and ammunition sales (and applications to go packin’ in public) that continues to the present day. This has all developed, I might add, without the slightest hint or tell from the president or his official supporters that any kind of crackdown on gun owners is in the offing. I rather think Obama has his hands full enough leading the country through economic crises and major policy changes and a Supremes nomination without opening any new culture war fronts. Then again, you get the sense that some of the people mentioned in this story are expecting other kinds of wars entirely:

For whatever reason, guns and all things gun-related are a hot commodity these days.

Local law enforcement agencies are seeing an increase in the number of applications from residents wanting to carry concealable firearms, a continuation of a trend that started last year. At the same time, ammunition prices are up because of increased demand coinciding with more gun sales.

The Boone County Sheriff’s Department has received more than 250 new applications this year from residents wanting to carry concealable firearms after accepting 449 applications in all of 2008, sheriff’s Maj. Tom Reddin said. The sheriff’s department received only 116 applications in 2007, Reddin said.

[snip]

“I think a part of it is crime,” he said. “I think a part of it is politics and the national administration. I think a part of it is the hysteria.”

Another Columbia firearms trainer, Tim Oliver, said demand for his beginning firearms course has increased since last summer. He offered two courses a month last year but has increased that to nine courses a month. “All of my classes have been booked to capacity since October,” he said, attributing the increase to both crime and fear of stricter gun control.

Ammunition also has become a precious commodity.

“A lot of people are kind of grabbing up and hoarding ammo,” said Barry McKenzie, manager of Target Masters firing range and gun store in north Columbia.

McKenzie said a lot of dealers have placed limits on how much ammunition customers can buy in an effort to decrease demand, but his store has not.

“People are afraid” of increased federal regulations, McKenzie said “There’s just a lot of rumors out there right now.”

And then there was this additional testimony from the news story’s online comments section:

SickSigma says…

I worked for a shooting and reloading company before and after the election. Believe me, the election has a lot to do with what is going on. The call volume increased to staggering proportions immediately after the elections. People were grabbing everything they could, and that still has not subsided. Now prices are incredibly high becasue every dealer is out of stock. I am one of the lucky ones who stockpiled before prices skyrocketed. I have enough guns and ammo to form a small militia. [Let's hope it's a well-regulated militia.--JLP]

This jibes with what I was told last fall by a student who was working at what I imagine is the same business. An outfit called Midway USA has a rather unmarked facility west of Columbia. From what I have seen, there are few better places to experience Middle American cyber-aggression in action than the comments section of newspaper guns n’ crime stories.

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Now playing: Close Lobsters – Got Apprehension
via FoxyTunes

Not that I claim to be a great mind. Too much TV as a kid. (I owe my scintillating vocabulary all to Stan Lee and Marvel Comics.) At any rate, I wanted to highlight a couple of items sent in by readers:

1. Down in the previous post’s comments, Josh Brown reveals that the Republicans are invoking much BIGGER terror fears than even I previously suspected. Go look at the full-sized version. It’s much funnier than my post.

2. At the very respectable U.S. Intellectual History blog, they are discussing the politics of the new Star Trek reboot, even providing a sort of review of the scholarly literature on the young, vigorous [as in, roughly the same age as your host] science fiction franchise. It seems that the popular culture studies universe only recently got the memo about the original series being a tissue of American Cold War self-regard wrapped in the brightly colored synthetic fabric of liberal internationalism.  Did they miss the Kennedy-esque opening credit narration about how “we must be bold” to go “on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked?”

Now me, I am pretty sure the first time I actually heard JFK’s “New Frontier” speech or cracked a book on the Liberal Consensus, I was thinking, “That was just what Capt. Kirk would have said.” The discussion on the Intellectual History site has turned on whether New Kirk/Spock or the Avenging Romulan Mining Ship Captain represented George W. Bush throwing away his ancestral values in the name of revenge. Not sure about that myself — J.J. Abrams seems pretty eager to avoid any discernible political subtext or social commentary. The Federation’s quiet, if still largely white-guy-led, multiculturalism was present but updated nicely; Uhura and Spock got to make out more than Kirk, and not under mind control or reality alteration of any kind.

The new Star Trek also features a subtle subversion of the currently most prevalent form of cinematic racism, the typecasting of presumed Muslim actors as terrorists. The noble, steely captain of the first ship we saw destroyed, who sacrifices his life trying to save his crew, was played by Faran Tahir, a Pakistani-American actor that American audiences would probably instantly pick out as a terrorist if he showed up in any other action movie.  (In fact, he played the main terrorist villain in last year’s early summer hit Iron Man.) I’m not familiar enough with latter-day Trek lore to know whether that was Star Fleet’s first Muslim captain, but it was a nice touch in any case.

This one has been developing for a while . . .

Last week, I mentioned the abiding American belief in the superior efficiency of the private sector, contradicting all evidence. Since then, Dick Cheney and family’s torture offensive has raised a question I think historians do not deal with enough: the power of fantasy in American political life. I do not just mean Cheney’s fantasies about himself or the constitutional powers of his former office, or even the inconsistent tales the Cheneys have woven about Dick’s past actions. I mean the tendency to base whole policies and ideologies on made-up stories that we try to will into reality.

We knew that Cheney and the people around him were anything from nasty opponents to downright evil, depending upon one’s viewpoint, but the latest reports are lower than anything we have yet seen. Apparently Cheney’s office pushed to have not only terror suspects, but a legitimate Iraqi P.O.W., repeatedly tortured, harder than military interrogators thought was useful or humane. This torture was ordered from the highest office or second-highest office in the land, not to prevent a bombing or save troops, but instead to document a pet political talking point about the link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam, the link that Cheney kept mentioning despite the nonexistence of evidence to support it.

Cheney and company were trying to conjure two fantasies at once: the fantasy of a pan-Arab or pan-Muslim conspiracy against American civilization, somehow masterminded by failing military strongman Saddam Hussein, and the more sweeping and brutal fantasy that hidden truths can only emerge through force and pain. “Torture works” is really only one element of the second fantasy, which is part of the larger attraction in the conservative mind toward absolutist formulations and coercive solutions as the only “realistic” and lasting ones. It fits the dark, pessimistic, vestigially Calvinist view of human nature at the root of American conservatism.

Throwing Calvin in there may risk overintellectualizing, because the currently prevalent “torture works” fantasy (especially the willingness of nonconservative ideologues in the media and the public to entertain it) clearly derives from popular culture. Up through the 1960s, scenes of torture and “enhanced” interrogation were the province of only the most hard-boiled crime, spy, and war films. They were relatively rare, and almost always the audience was expected to identify with the person being interrogated. Tying people down and hurting them was for Nazis, psychotic criminals, and corrupt cops. Indeed, the use of torture was a key signifier of despicable villainy, showing the depravity and sick desperation of the people or civilization that used it. If my memory serves, in classic Hollywood films torture was generally associated with Asian enemies, from Fu Manchu to the Japanese to the Turks in Lawrence of Arabia.

That started to change with the reactionary crime films of the Nixon era, in which audiences were somewhat transgressively encouraged to identify with rough, rule-breaking cop characters like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, shooting and pistol-whipping his way to a truth only he had the “guts” to seek. This linkage between the lone hero’s true insight into the world’s evils and his willingness to shake off restraints and be brutal in exposing and destroying them helped form the key elements of the fantasy that guys like Cheney seem to be trying to live out.

(more…)

I have read through some of the material linked to in Ben’s last post and my sense is a lot of people in the blogosphere (including the left side) are taking the tea party protests a little too seriously, pondering the possible grass-roots origins of the “movement” and speculating that this may (finally) be the right’s answer to the Web 2.0 innovations (blogs, mobile devices, YouTube & other user-directed web sites) of the Dean and Obama campaigns. I am not so sure.

There may be an element of the right borrowing from the left in the protests, and I gather that the protesters did organize themselves through Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, but the major borrowing would seem to be from the goofy-to-intentionally-annoying “street theater” approach and extreme rhetoric that have long been popular with the latter-day peace movement, radical environmentalism, the 9/11 “Truth Movement,” and other hippie and post-hippie  causes. Only with tricorn hats instead of tie-dyed shirts.

Politically, it is a hopeful sign for liberals and Obama that the right has turned to protesting like this, it seems to me. Such tactics have never been been the road to majority support in this country, at least not since the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the most politically successful of which emphasized dignified displays of solidarity over circuses of political self-expression. Funny signs and crazy costumes are good for getting publicity, at least for a while, but the message that most average citizens seem to take away from such scenes is that the cause in question must be as freakish and cranky and unappealing as its supporters. Indeed, one might argue that colorful street protests of this type are the natural mode of expression of hopelessly-outnumbered gadfly causes that seek attention for their viewpoint rather making any real attempts at persuasion.

As usual, Jon Stewart had it exactly right, emphasizing the exchange of left-right roles involved and suggesting which role is the likely winning one:

Even beyond the right’s turn to unpopular hippie tactics, it is hard to see how colorfully-delivered but utterly boilerplate conservative complaints about high taxation in general are going to catch fire at a time when taxes have not actually been raised above the historically-low rates of recent times. As this excellent Chicago Tribune piece points out, Americans generally seem far more concerned now about the spiraling economy than vintage 70s tax concerns. Moreover, the possibility of needing some transfer payments themselves, or at least that they might actually benefit from government programs, seems to have dawned on more middle-class Americans than at any time I can remember. That is what has the Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman set so exercised. That, and other stuff I will mention in my next, on why we might need to take some of the attitudes animating the tea parties very seriously indeed.

Last night I went to one of the tax day “tea parties”–this one in lower Manhattan, by City Hall Park.  I have a lot to say about my experience there, but I want to hold off for a little while.  In the meantime, I wanted to provide readers with some of the most interesting links I’ve perused over the last few days.

Our regular readers will have already seen my previous thoughts, plus smart observations from Andrew Shankman.  The website for the NYC event I attended is here.  Wikipedia does an informative rundown of the 2009 history; see also the talk page.  I found good advance coverage by David Weigel of the Washington Independent, who followed up by reporting on the Washington DC tea party here.  Lawrence Downes was caustic about an earlier tea party event in the NYT; more interesting was this rundown of previous tax revolts in US history.

Samuel Adams biographer Ira Stoll graciously linked to this site in this Forbes piece: “Time for a Tea Party?“  So did John Fea of Messiah College, who records his observations of the Harrisburg, PA, tea party, and Jared Elosta of bottom up change, who began reporting what he saw in Boston.

Thom Hartmann offers historical perspective from the left in “The Real Boston Tea Party was an Anti-Corporate Revolt,” at CommonDreams.org (hat tip to PJT).

Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee offers a sympathetic discussion of the movement’s political mobilization in the Wall Street Journal, and Jack Balkin of Yale Law School does a great follow-up to the Reynolds article.

From the right, Ross Kaminsky combats some left-wing stereotypes about the Tea Party in “Lunatic Left Wrong About Tea Parties,” in Human Events; Angry White Dude offers his thoughts.  Supporters of the tea parties give a rundown of the day’s events at taxdayteaparty.com and redstate.com.

Skeptics have included Paul Krugman, Andrew Sullivan (also here), Amanda Marcotte, the folks at thinkprogress.org and buzzflash.com (see Ann Davidow), the Huffington Post, Robert Reich, and Rand Simberg (though he’s also somewhat of a supporter).

Anyone have other links to add?  I’m not particularly interested in television coverage; if people have links to standard press coverage (or other opinions from any part of the political spectrum) then I’m more interested, particularly since I’ve found very little on the NYC protest I attended.

UPDATE

More links: Ross Douthat from the right, and Kos, Ezra Klein (with newer thoughts here), James Wolcott and Whiskey Fire from the left.  Also, Jared Elosta (an Obama supporter) continues his Boston coverage.

Gordon Belt of the Posterity Project linked here with his own linky post (with some videos too).

And Jon Stewart is funny, but John Oliver is even funnier.

Reader BMC insists that I post on this clip from the Rachel Maddow show.  (If you want to know what all the snickering is about, I’d suggest consulting an online slang dictionary, and I’m not responsible for what you find.)

I think the easiest thing to do would be to start picking out all the bad historical analogies and use it as an excuse to guffaw at the “Tea Party” movement that’s scheduled to demonstrate on April 15, 2009 (tax filing day).  But I’m not going to do that–instead I’m going to try and be even-handed about this, and see if there’s anything to this grassroots conservative invocation of the Boston Tea Party.

Unfortunately, the ideology behind all of this seems rather vague.  For instance, here’s what the website TaxDayTeaParty.com says on its front page:

The Tea Party effort is just a small piece of a much larger movement aimed at restoring the basic free-market principles our country was built on. The Constitution, for the most part, is being ignored by our current government and we intend on working together to correct the problem.

The Tea Party effort is a grassroots, collaborative volunteer organization made up of every day American citizens from across the country. We take pride in the fact that we’ve built a 50 state network of leaders and activists using nothing more than the internet, a few websites and a burning desire to restore freedom.

There’s not much there: the protesters are in favor of “basic free-market principles” and “freedom.”  (Well, me too!)  The site doesn’t say how the government is ignoring the Constitution, exactly–and if you dig a little further, it all goes back to Rick Santelli’s displeasure with the stimulus plan and the budget.

To the extent that the 2009 tax protests are part of a grass-roots movement, I think it’s fine to invoke the Boston Tea Party as your inspiration–although many suspect that corporate lobbyists and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News have a lot to do with organizing and promoting this protest, and even Santelli himself apears to have been the frontman for a rightwing foundation.  Still, if people are responding to the movement and even organizing local “tea parties” on their own, then that does accord with the local tea protests that sprang up in 1773-1774 in the wake of (and even immediately before) the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773.

One historical analogy that fails, however, is the idea that the Bostonians aboard the tea ships in 1773 were protesting higher taxes under the Tea Act.  This is just wrong.

• First, the British Parliament first passed the tax on tea in 1767, and Bostonians had in fact purchased plenty of tea bearing the threepenny-per-pound duty during the intervening years.  New Yorkers and Philadelphians, who smuggled almost all of their tea from Holland and elsewhere, were in fact outraged at how little the New Englanders were able to stick to their “anti-tax” principles.  In this respect, the Boston Tea Party was almost an apology.
• Second, the Tea Act would in fact have lowered the price of tea for Americans–so the idea of invoking the “Tea Party” every time you think your taxes are too high is incorrect.  Instead, the Tea Party protesters were energized by a series of principles: the government was propping up a monopoly company (the East India Company), the government was perpetuating an unjust tax (the 1767 tax on tea which had been confirmed in 1770), and the government was using the revenue from that tax to pay the salaries of judges and executive officials, thus rendering them independent of local legislatures.
• Third, and most importantly: I’ve been extremely dismayed at how many of the protesters say, “Taxation WITH representation ain’t so hot either.“  (I’m not just cherry-picking a random blog comment here–this phrase is everywhere.)

Well, no, no one LIKES paying taxes, but most people recognize that you need some form of taxation in order to pay firemen and astronauts, defend the country’s borders, try to ensure that our food isn’t poisoned, etc.  The point of protest against the Stamp Act, Townshend Acts, and Tea Act in 1765-1774 was that “taxation WITHOUT representation” would lead to slavery–in other words, the colonists believed that the British ministry was arbitrarily levying taxes on Americans when those Americans had no say in electing members of Parliament.  In a democratic republican government, if you don’t like the level of your taxes or you don’t like how your tax money is spent, you have the power to peaceably “throw the bums out.”  And you certainly have the First Amendment right to protest and rail against the stimulus and bailout.  But the point is, the people of the Revolutionary Era had to fight for those rights to get rid of a constitutional monarchy–it’s hardly the case that paying taxes from a colony to a (partially hereditary) government that you don’t elect is the same as paying taxes to a government consisting of representatives and an executive that you DO have the power to elect.

On the other hand, to the extent that the tax protesters believe that their government doesn’t adequately represent them anymore, they’re arguing something more interesting.  If we stipulate that the current execution of the United States Constitution has failed, and that reform of the Constitution is needed (which many on both the left and the right have argued), then legislation and executive policy under George W. Bush or Barack Obama (or whoever) really is the product of a flawed system, and therefore (perhaps) as unjust as anything passed by King George III and the British Parliament. Still, before making this argument, I’d recommend picking up (for instance) Edmund Morgan’s Inventing the People, on how Americans came to believe that a representative government DID have the legitimate right to make laws in a way that a king did not.

By all means, let’s have a civil debate about Obama’s policies in the midst of the economic crisis.  And by all means, if we think that the problems we’re facing are due to underlying constitutional problems rather than the current legislative/executive solutions, then let’s talk about constitutional reform.  But (although I realize it’s too late now) please don’t abuse the analogy to the Boston Tea Party, even if such abuse (again, from both the right and left) is almost as much of an American tradition as the Tea Party itself.

P.S.  Also?  Why even mention tea bags?  In 1773 they were dumping loose tea into the harbor–the tea bag wasn’t invented until later–and you can still buy loose tea.

Often amid the news stories of the day, we’re tempted to ask, “don’t these people have any shame?”  Matthew Yglesias quotes Senator Chuck Grassley today: the senator almost calls on the AIG executives to commit ritual hara-kiri, and then settles on expecting the executives to merely show some contrition.  Yglesias is doubtful that this is possible, though:

We’ve somehow managed to construct something of a post-shame society, in which elites have convinced themselves that the rational agent model of human behavior is not just a useful modeling tool, but an ethical guidebook. There’s something to be said for the idea of a sense of honor and personal responsibility. …

in a healthy society, you see some consideration of issues of honor and duty and moral responsibility and certainly Americans of more humble means don’t strike me as being nearly as taken with the “greed is good” personal ethic.

He continues by reminding us that Senator Grassley is, after all, a Republican, whose party platform suggests that he should lecture people on “personal responsibility” and promote trust that unfettered, deregulated business elites always have our best interests at heart.  Perhaps instead, Yglesias suggests, Grassley could show his outrage by supporting a budget that taxes the rich more heavily and give greater benefits (tax cuts, health care) to ordinary folks.

Meanwhile, all this discussion of personal responsibility puts me in mind of a fascinating article by Joseph Bottum that I saw in First Things last year, entitled, “The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline.”  Since I’m on a Tocqueville kick this week, I’ll note that Bottum quotes Tocqueville as follows:

The oddity of American religion produced the oddity of American religious ­freedom.

The greatest oddity, however, may be the fact that the United States nonetheless ended up with something very similar to the establishment of religion in the public life of the nation. The effect often proved little more than an agreement about morals: The endlessly proliferating American churches, Tocqueville concluded, “all differ in respect to the worship which is due to the Creator; but they all agree in respect to the duties which are due from man to man.” The agreement was sometimes merely an establishment of manners: “The clergy of all the different sects hold the same language,” he added. “Their opinions are in agreement with the laws, and the human mind flows onward, so to speak, in one undivided current.”

Morals and manners, however, count for a great deal in the public square, and, beyond all their differences, the diverse Protestant churches merged to give a general form and a general tone to the culture. Protestantism helped define the nation, operating as simultaneously the happy enabler and the unhappy conscience of the American republic—a single source for both national comfort and national unease.

…

Think of the American experiment as a three-legged stool, its stability found in each leg’s relation to the other legs. Democracy grants some participation in national identity, an outlet for the anxious desire of citizens to take part in history, but it always leans toward vulgarity and short-sightedness. Capitalism gives us other freedoms and outlets for ambition, but it, too, always threatens to topple over, eroding the virtues it needed for its own flourishing. Meanwhile, religion provides meaning and narrative, a channel for the hunger of human beings to reach beyond the vanities of the world, but it tilts, in turn, toward hegemony and conformity.

Through most of American history, these three legs of democracy, capitalism, and religion accommodated one another and, at the same time, pushed hard against one another.

Bottum’s thesis is that now that mainline Protestantism has faded from American public life, and Catholicism, evangelicalism, and liberal religion probably can’t reconcile sufficiently to take its place, the stability of this “three-legged stool” is under threat.  The result may be that American elites don’t have the same unifying moral compass that they did when mainline Protestantism held greater sway, with dire consequences for capitalism and democracy.  The article is very long, very well-reasoned, and very well-written—so I’m not doing it justice.  But I wonder if Bottum today is ruefully congratulating himself on his predictive powers.  Meanwhile, if you’re looking for an interesting mix of early American history, American religion, and contemporary commentary (particularly on higher education), I’ve been enjoying this blog by Professor John Fea of Messiah College.