Albion's Seed, Special Providence, and now, 10/19

America's social divides. To be discussed Monday evening

Ashley Colby writes,

the main font of wisdom at NatCon is a look to the past. Broadly, the ideas presented in the sessions fall into two camps: the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians.

She is borrowing, probably consciously, from Walter Russell Mead’s Special Providence, which sees American foreign policy as an amalgam of four traditions: Wilsonian, Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian. Mead in turn adapted his schema from that of David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed. That book described the Puritans who settled New England, the Quakers and religious dissidents from Northwest Europe who settled New York and the mid-Atlantic states, the Cavaliers who settled Tidewater areas of the South, and the Scotch-Irish “borderers” who settled in the back country of Appalachia. I will use Mead’s terminology in this essay.

Not Exactly Tribalism

When I hear the word “tribalism,” I think of irrational hatred of the other. Try going to a sports bar in Boston wearing a Yankees hat.

In the United States, we may have reached that point. But we did not start out that way. We had the four different cultures, but for most of our history we had a modus vivendi, a way of living together. At the end of this post, I will list some of the usual explanations for what went wrong. For now, I want to give the genuine cultural inclinations of each of the four traditions.

The Wilsonians want to live in a society that pursues virtue. In foreign policy, they support foreign intervention to promote their values. At home, they doubt the morality of the market. They believe in education with a strong moral component. Harvard was founded as a seminary. Today, the religion may be different, but Harvard still resembles a seminary.

The Hamiltonians want to live in a society that pursues commerce. In foreign policy, they will send gunboats to protect shipping lanes and to open ports to American traders. Domestically, Colby writes,

The Hamiltonians tend to represent the standard ideology of the Republican party: economic growth, prosperity signaled by consumer choice, drill baby drill, don’t tread on me. In some senses the Hamiltonians represent the uni-party, a class of ruling elite who guard their own interests while the civic fabric continues to unravel. It’s Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Pete Buttigieg, or Liz Cheney.

I would quibble that the libertarianism of the Quakers is not of the “Don’t tread on me” strain. It is more “Don’t interfere with commerce.” If the British had kept taxes low and allowed the colonists the same shipping rights as Englishmen, the Hamiltonians would have stayed with the Crown. Today, the Hamiltonians would be the Larry Summers wing of the Democratic Party or the Paul Ryan wing of the Republican Party. In other words, has-beens.

The Jeffersonians wanted a society to pursue agriculture. In foreign policy, they wanted to stay out of what George Washington called “foreign entanglements.” At home, Jefferson championed the “yeoman farmer.” Unlike today, farmers were thought to not require assistance from government, and Jeffersonians wanted government to be small. The plantation-owning elites liked the social order to be stable, with themselves on top. They did not want to participate in industrialization. They resented the Woke Yankees causing trouble by challenging the morality of slavery. Today, they would either be never-Trump Republicans or Natcons, depending on whether they were more alarmed by populism or Wokeism.

The Jacksonians want a society to pursue equal respect. Do not put on airs or express disdain. In foreign policy, they do not want to go looking for trouble, but if we are attacked they want to strike back hard. Domestically, you build your still in the mountains, and when a revenue agent comes to collect taxes, you drive him off using your rifle. Today, they support Trump.

In terms of my book The Three Languages of Politics, the Wilsonian progressives nowadays demonize those who disagree with them as siding with oppressors. The Hamiltonian neoliberals demonize those who disagree with them as siding with government coercion. The Jeffersonian conservatives (sounds a bit like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? I wish Mead had used Coolidge) demonize those who disagree with them as siding with barbarism.

If I were to use a fourth language to cover the populists, I would say that Jacksonian populists demonize those who disagree with them as siding with those who look down on the common people. The viral video of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is a powerful example. She singles out “financial speculators” in a way that is chilling in its conspiratorial overtones, but a charitable interpretation is that this is a dig at Mario Draghi and the Eurozone technocrats who seem to care more about Italy’s international credit rating than its people. In terms of how she demands respect for the common man, she is a far more articulate populist than any American politician, Donald Trump included.

My point is this: the differences in values that we see today can be traced back to before the colonies broke from England. These are genuine differences, not arbitrary tribal hatreds. And we lived with those differences for most of our history (not the time of the Civil War, obviously). The question becomes, why now have relationships become so uncomfortable?

For an answer, I would just point to the usual suspects: more centralized government power raises the stakes; there are incentives in the media business to make the stakes seem even higher than they are; smart phones make cultural/political phenomena seem more immediate and pressing.

Finally, the last fifty years of expansion of college education has not gone well, in that people with second-rate minds now expect to be treated like first-rate elites. In order to do that, many college-educated people have adopted a set of beliefs and attitudes that are certain to differentiate themselves from the rest of the public, because the beliefs and attitudes make little or no sense. This approach to class differentiation produces animosity all around.

We can talk about this Monday evening at 8 PM New York time. Zoom link will be provided in a separate post.