Tea & Culture
At Plumb Lines, David Schaengold raises a good question about my latest round of teablogging:
Isn’t there some worry that Friedman might be right? That we’ve reached precisely that stage of history where innovation requires despotism? Hence all the articles about the future of Authoritarian Capitalism. In which case despotism would still be despotism and liberty still liberty, but Friedman, while wrong to prefer despotism, would be right in a technical way. And of course the friends of liberty would in that case face a much more diabolical foe than the Mustache of Understanding. […]
This folly hardly seems unique to Friedman. Isn’t it shared by most thinkers about what we now call politics? Is this the same as the Front-Porch critique of the GWB “go shopping” moment or the persistent reference to American citizens as “consumers”?
As potent as the critique of go-shopping Republicanism can be, anyone who’s followed this past year’s back-and-forth between FPR and Pomocon probably at least senses that my line of attack is fairly different. It’s not that I think organic food is ridiculous, or that I want Walmart to finish conquering the world and deliver cheap, safe drugs to the masses in partnership with the federal government. A Rieffian insistence on the importance of cultural authority does not need to extend, I think, to the culture-first communitarianism often advanced by conservatives utterly disenchanted with the American political environment in general and movement conservatism in particular.
Again, it isn’t that I don’t appreciate the possibilities and disciplines opened up in one’s life by a Porcheresque or Crunchy Con turn. After all, starting a family, as I did last year, is an absolute obstacle to careerism, especially of the type that requires long idle thoughtful moments at the keyboard; after all, a family demands a certain amount of space, and I’m in the process of moving into a residence with a front yard, a back yard (with garden plot!), and — lo! — a front porch. Though I will not be raising chickens, I will be painting large canvases in the sun, etc.
What is it, then? I won’t accuse my culture-first friends of being antipolitical; they’re often fans of Christopher Lasch, for whom any culture worthy of the name had to craft true citizens. Lasch’s left conservatism deserves, in this bottom-up way, a comeback that its top-down, Carteresque complement does not. But it still seems to me that critics of go-shopping Republicanism most often take proper citizenship to be an offshoot or consequence of a certain kind of culture. The right politics, that is, is derivative from the right culture. I don’t think they mean this in the way somebody would who sought to focus our attention on the kind of citizen a free individual will be when he or she is religious. Rather, the desired orientation is toward the kinds of citizens that believing members of religious communities will be.
There’s no reason why Americans sympathetic to one or the other of these approaches shouldn’t be natural political allies — especially when the partisan alternatives they confront are animated by economic individualism on the one hand and economic collectivism on the other. Yet this array of allies and adversaries tends to mask, and has masked, the degree to which a certain strain of conservatism — the one I am associating with the tea partiers — opposes the excesses of economic individualism and collectivism more for politically foundational than culturally foundational reasons. Those who make culture foundational see individualist and collectivist economic thinking (and let’s make no mistake: these go together well) as inimical primarily because they destroy the social character of culture that rightly orders everyday life. Those whose problem with individualist and collectivist economic thinking is grounded in politics, not culture, have a much different issue. For them, economic individualism and collectivism are bad because both erode political liberty and our taste for it.
In the crude terms of our current understanding, the former camp is paleoconservative and the latter camp is neoconservative. But some of those in the latter camp — a more significant number, I bet, than we’ve got ourselves thinking — are just as seriously religious as their paleo or paleo-ish brethren. Their faith, however, is much more individualist and stoic in a manner neither at all captured by, say, moralistic therapeutic Deism. Sometimes, they are mega-church evangelicals, but the strain of faith I’m thinking of is much better symbolized by the semi-rural chapel than by the buddy-Jesus superdome. If you want an oversimplification, think of the country-gentleman’s piety of Lee and Jackson. I suspect their kind of piety has an underinvestigated lot to do with their appeal, where that appeal exists. True, as an organized strain of faith it was shattered by the failure to adequately confront slavery on the one hand and the decimation of the South’s cultural officer class during and after the Civil War. But it is a powerful ribbon running through the history of American Christianity, and the frustrations it has faced in maintaining political liberty through coalition-building have been coming to a head for some time now. To one side, economic individualists and Perot quirkiness; to the other, ’80s and ’90s-‘00s evangelicals, whose moral agenda, though generally shared, was so intense that too much in the way of political liberty was up for trade or sacrifice. Those coalitions having failed, along with, in a stroke of nice timing, establishmentarian party politics, there is a fresh opening for a fresh coalition. The working out of this coalition is what makes watching the tea partiers so fascinating, and the practical stakes so high.
“…a certain strain of conservatism — the one I am associating with the tea partiers — opposes the excesses of economic individualism and collectivism more for politically foundational than culturally foundational reasons.”
This may be true, but I bet there is a huge overlap in cultural concerns (and identites) between teapartiers and jesus soldiers. But beyond that, as a group, teapartiers economic concerns and “policies” are ridiculous. “The deficit is too high, we need lower taxes.” “The deficit is too high, we will not stand for any cuts in medicaid.” Really, most of what youget from them in inchoearent anger, a lot of which is racially based, with race being a symbol for the abundant evidence of decline of this groups cultural dominance.
Maybe you have some sort of detatched scholarly interest in this “new” type of conservative, but I really hope that you don’t identify with these morons or think their will somehow be good for the country and/or you political preferences.
— cw · Jan 26, 12:44 AM · #
“failure to adequately confront slavery”
getting closer…
— matt · Jan 26, 02:10 AM · #
Can you give a brief definition regarding economic individualism and how it goes together well with economic collectivism?
— mike farmer · Jan 26, 12:54 PM · #
Your points about unreconstructed piety ribbons and failed coalitions are quite obvious, but how are they relevant to James Cameron’s race of blue planet-huggers?
— Gil · Jan 26, 05:12 PM · #
Country gentleman’s piety of Jackson? You mean Stonewall, the Presbyterian? A good general, but otherwise a very different cat than Bobby Lee.
— Joe S. · Jan 26, 08:44 PM · #
But, if you’re too busy, I understand.
— mike farmer · Jan 28, 12:04 AM · #
Like that famous line in The Limey, the South is more of a vibe, really. Not an entity at all. It’s raw, then processed, then fast, then slow — and everything is mediated by manners and ambition, except for the nights of drinking and crackery and the weekends where everyone is off work and on the lake or at the bar drinking $3 pitchers of High Life or Coors and singing Hank Williams or White Stripes while playing darts or pool and looking to get laid.
In other words, the American South is New York or DC minus the bullshit, the pose, the clothes and the pressure. It’s truly the last redoubt of the absurd man, and the best kept secret on the planet. Go Vandy.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 28, 04:42 AM · #
The “south” has been a pain in this country’s ass for 200+ years. I think we really have to consider if the “south” has every really bought into the American ideal.
— cw · Jan 28, 05:50 AM · #
“I think we really have to consider if the “south” has every really bought into the American ideal.”
What’s the American ideal? I’ll be playing darts and drinking pitchers of beer as y’all think up answers to my questions.
— mike farmer · Jan 28, 01:10 PM · #
It takes a dick to fuck an asshole.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 28, 03:56 PM · #
So you dispute that.
— cw · Jan 28, 04:51 PM · #
No, I think you’re right. Seriously. But sometimes, as my man Friedrich said, increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus.
Plus, life is better in the South — for me at least. Regardless of what the country feels in its bum, my South fucks me gently and tenderly in the most American of ways.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 28, 06:32 PM · #
I tried to figure out what that means and the best I can come up with is that evern though the south has been a pain it has added vigor to the country. Which I can kind of see. My comment of the night befor was pretty cranky and I’m glad that you don’t seem offended. I certainly wasn’t talking about individual people but rather the South as a cultural and political entity.
And I can see that it can be a good place to live. I just sometimes think it would have been better to have two countries, or three or four. Although, who knows what the south would have ended up like if it could have proceeded with it’s project unobstructed.
— cw · Jan 28, 07:19 PM · #
My south is an awesome lover. At least when we fuck you, we’re polite and say “Come back, now, y’hear?”
— mike farmer · Jan 28, 07:19 PM · #
Mike – I am too busy – right now. I’ll get to it, though!
— James · Jan 28, 10:37 PM · #
I’m not sure why I decided to write an encomium to the South. Lesson: drinking and wifi, bad.
Mi dispiace per il mio impertinenza, Poulos, and congrats with Jeopardy.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Jan 29, 01:00 AM · #
Thanks, James — it was a sincere request — three of my favorite topics, economics, individualism and collectivism.
— mike farmer · Jan 29, 01:04 AM · #
linking neoconservatism’s understanding of religion with Lee and Jackson?! Seriously?! How can the utterly different religious practices of two Southerners and the faith of a collection of post-ethnic Jews and Catholics be more than tangentially related?! In all seriousness, that’s ridiculous! I understand the distinction you’re trying to make, but you mangle U. S. religious and intellectual history in the process of trying to support it. That’s pretty shocking considering that you must work with at least a few of the latter group.
— Boz · Feb 1, 01:54 AM · #
Since the dawn of civilization the good thinking and all that is good are culture. It is complete picture of life. It represents what we do in our daily life. Language ,music,ideas about what is bad and good,ways of working and playing, and the tools and other objects made and used by people in the society-all these are part of a society’s culture.Cultures vary from society to society or country to country.
— Chiropractic Marketing · Feb 3, 10:39 PM · #