Isegoria

In our lifetimes, American democracy has been radicalized:

The idea of equality has been extended beyond the carefully defined political sphere where the American Founding placed it, to the idea that everything is equal, that all types of men, all types of behavior are equal. The goal of equality has supplanted all other cultural and moral values and become the sole legitimating principle of this society. Today we have notions of absolute “life-style” equality; absolute cultural equality (as in multiculturalism); absolute equality of the races (as in the demand for statistical equality of results, and the belief that the ethnic and racial composition of our society should be a matter of complete indifference to us); and absolute sex equality (as in the feminization of the military). When you press people on these issues, you find that they have an implicit feeling that normative distinctions, upon which civilization just happens to be based, are inhumane. In order to avoid being inhumane to out-of-wedlock mothers, we must say that illegitimacy is as worthy of respect as legitimacy; and we end up with a nation of fatherless children. In order to avoid being inhumane to illegal immigrants, we give illegals virtually all the privileges of citizenship; and so on.

In earlier generations, Americans spoke not of “democracy” so much as of freedom. But freedom used to have a more complex meaning — it meant ordered freedom, freedom within the constitutional and moral order that makes that freedom possible.

Working class authors of the pulp era — such as Robert E. Howard, Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour — came from an oral-storytelling tradition and knew the history of their Scotch-Irish ancestors, James LaFond notes, so they wrote about the adventures of poor white heroes — some of them more than simply poor:

Below is an example of one boy’s fate, that may well have been shared by any of the ancestors of men 100 years ago, who still had an oral link to their colonial past.

Although my white slave ancestors were a mixture of Irish POWs sold to English Catholics and English orphans sold to French Canadians, my father-in-law has an ancestor who was a Cornish/Irish slave, sold to a Manhattan-based plantation owner — a Dutchman, I think — and who eventually escaped into the hinterland, settling around Syracuse New York. His history more closely mirrors the norm for white America slaves.

Below is a summary adapted from a tract by Michael A. Hoffman’s, They Were White and They Were Slaves, referencing the book The Life and Curious Adventures of Peter Williamson, Who was Carried off from Aberdeen and Sold for a Slave.

1743, Aberdeen, Scotland

Peter Williamson was kidnapped in Aberdeen and sold to the captain of the White Guineaman [a merchant ship that hauled white slaves and other cargo] the Planter. The Planter hauled 71 kidnapped Scottish children and ‘other freight.’

Eleven weeks out to sea, the Planter ran aground on a sandbar off of Cape May at the mouth of the Delaware River. [Which indicated that these kids were to be sold in the Philadelphia area, to the ever slave hungry Quakers and Amish of William Penn’s slave colony.] The ship began listing and taking on water, so the crew took the ship’s boats to the mainland and waited out the night. The Planter did not sink, however, and the crew returned and took off the children and other cargo in the morning.

Peter was next bought at auction by Hugh Wilson, an escaped slave from a southern colony, who had fled north out of bondage. Hugh bought Peter for the sole purpose of saving him from death at the hands of an owner, as most boys were worked to death before adulthood. His foster father paid for Peter to be educated in a school, and, when he came near to death, willed his horse, saddle and little bit of money that he had accumulated, to Peter.

Peter fought Indians in the interior as part of his effort to literally carve a home out of the wilderness for his wife and friends, away from the slave-based economies of the coastal towns and piedmont farms.

Peter eventually returned to Scotland, published his book in Aberdeen and was arrested. His books were ordered burned. He was then fined, released, and banished from Aberdeen. He did not give up, but went to the Edinburgh Court of Sessions and made such a good case against the slavers of Aberdeen and the corrupt judiciary there, that the slave cartel in Aberdeen was ordered to pay him 100 pounds sterling.

As long as families of literate frontiersmen, farmers and artisans, continued to educate their own children at home, the life of their race remained an open book to their descendents. However, with the mass immigration of Irish — who had been formerly enslaved in their homeland by absentee British masters, and were, during the Civil War, conscripted as slave soldiers — mass public re-education of the kind employed to cleanse aboriginal culture and folk memories from American Indians, was mandated across the United States. Grey and 1990s author John R. Musick, wrote plainly about white-on-white injustice and how the colonial slave masters used Indians as a check on lower class freedom. But, by the time Howard wrote, such subversive ideals that had been preserved by his frontier clan, were best offered as fantasies cloaked in otherworldly horror.

Civilization depends on the health of the traditional family, Rod Dreher argues:

That sentiment has become a truism among social conservatives, who typically can’t explain what they mean by it. Which is why it sounds like right-wing boilerplate to many contemporary ears.

The late Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman believed it was true, but he also knew why. In 1947, he wrote a massive book to explain why latter-day Western civilization was now living through the same family crisis that presaged the fall of classical Greece and Rome. His classic Family and Civilization, which has just been republished in an edited version by ISI Press, is a chillingly prophetic volume that deserves a wide new audience.

In all civilizations, Zimmerman theorized, there are three basic family types. The “trustee” family is tribal and clannish, and predominates in agrarian societies. The “domestic” family model is a middle type centering on the nuclear family ensconced in fairly strong extended-family bonds; it’s found in civilizations undergoing rapid development. The final model is the “atomistic” family, which features weak bonds between and within nuclear families; it’s the type that emerges as normative in advanced civilizations.

When the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, the strong trustee families of the barbarian tribes replaced the weak, atomistic Roman families as the foundation of society.

Churchmen believed a social structure that broke up the ever-feuding clans and gave the individual more freedom would be better for society’s stability and spent centuries reforming the European family toward domesticity. The natalist worldview advocated by churchmen knit tightly religious faith, family loyalty and child bearing. From the 10th century on, the domestic family model ruled Europe through its greatest cultural efflorescence. But then came the Reformation and the Enlightenment, shifting culture away from tradition and toward the individual. Thus, since the 18th century, the atomistic family has been the Western cultural norm.

Here’s the problem: Societies ruled by the atomistic family model, with its loosening of constraints on its individual members, quit having enough children to carry on. They become focused on the pleasures of the present. Eventually, these societies expire from lack of manpower, which itself is a manifestation of a lack of the will to live.

It happened to ancient Greece. It happened to ancient Rome. And it’s happening to the modern West. The sociological parallels are startling.

Why should expanding individual freedoms lead to demographic disaster? Because cultures that don’t organize their collective lives around the family create policies and structures that privilege autonomous individuals at the family’s expense.

In years to come, the state will attempt economic incentives, or something more draconian, to spur childbirth. Europe, which is falling off a demographic cliff, is already offering economic incentives, with scant success. Materialist measures only seem to help at the margins.

Why? Zimmerman was not religious, but he contended the core problem was a loss of faith. Religions that lack a strong pro-fertility component don’t survive over time, he observed; nor do cultures that don’t have a powerfully natalist religion.

The temperance movement was central to the transformation of America in the early 19th Century, as Daniel Walker Howe explains in What God Hath Wrought:

Americans in the early nineteenth century quaffed alcohol in prodigious quantities. In 1825, the average American over ?fteen years of age consumed seven gallons of alcohol a year, mostly in the form of whiskey and hard cider. (The corresponding ?gure at the start of the twenty-?rst century was less than two gallons, most of it from beer and wine.) Workers typically took a midmorning break and a mid-afternoon break, both accompanied by alcohol, as well as liquor with every meal. To entertain guests meant to ply them with several kinds of alcohol until some fell down. All social classes drank heavily; college students, journeyman printers, agricultural laborers, and canal-diggers were especially notorious. Schoolchildren might face an inebriated teacher in the classroom. Although socially tolerated, drunkenness frequently generated violence, especially domestic violence, and other illegal behavior. In such a society, intemperance represented a serious issue of public health, comparable to the problems of drug abuse experienced in later generations.

Making temperance a Christian cause constituted an innovation, for traditional Christianity had not discouraged drinking. Indeed, Beecher recalled, ministerial conferences during his youth had been occasions for heavy convivial drinking. Unlike a later generation of crusaders, Beecher never thought the legal prohibition of alcohol a practical solution; he relied purely on changing public attitudes. This was no mean feat. To take stand against the strong social pressures to drink took real courage, especially for young men. To help them, temperance workers paid reformed alcoholics to go on speaking tours, published temperance tracts, put on temperance plays, and drove the “water wagon” through towns encouraging converts to jump on. Publicists and organizers like Beecher struck a nerve with the public. The temperance cause resonated among people in all walks of life, rural and urban, white and black. Although it began in the Northeast, temperance reached the South and West and exerted powerful and lasting in?uence there.” At ?rst the temperance advocates restricted themselves to encouraging moderation (hence the name “temperance”); in this phase they condemned only distilled liquors, not beer and wine. At the grassroots level, however, it became apparent that total abstinence made a more effective appeal. Beecher endorsed this shift in Six Sermons on Intemperance (1825). Those who signed a temperance pledge were encouraged to put a T after their names if willing to take the extra step of pledging total abstinence; from this derives our word “teetotaler.”

The campaign to alter age old habits and attitudes proved amazingly successful: consumption of alcohol, especially of hard liquor, declined steadily and dramatically after 1830, falling to 1.8 gallons per person over fifteen by the late 1840s.

This became the template for American civic associations:

The American Temperance Society, founded in 1826, served as a model for other movements. Through such issue-oriented organizations, reformers transcended geographical and denominational limitations to wage nationwide campaigns. The voluntary associations became a conspicuous feature of American society from that time forward. They distributed Bibles and tracts, supported missions foreign and domestic, and addressed such varied social problems as poverty, prostitution, and the abuse of women, children, animals, convicts, and the insane. Most momentous of all their activities would be their crusade against slavery.

These movements led to national organizations, but most of their work was done by local chapters at a local level, T. Greer explains:

This partly reflected the limits of communications technology during the late 19th and early 20th century. It also reflected the broader distribution of political power in American society. More Americans lived in towns and farm communities in those days; school boards, city councils, and township assemblies were also more numerous than they are today, despite the smaller population of that era. City and county governments were responsible for many things now handled by the state and federal governments. So civic organizations would agitate to transform their own communities before trying to enact national reforms. This was the pattern that Prohibition followed. By the time the 21st Amendment was passed, dozens of states and hundreds of smaller political units had already gone dry. It is doubtful that Prohibition would have been possible without the thousand small victories won by local chapters Women’s Christian Temperance Movement before hand. In this environment the most important task of a civic group’s national leaders was to make sure that all of its locations of operation had functioning chapters. Visiting these far flung locations and ensuring that the leaders of each chapter had been properly trained absorbed most of the leadership’s time and attention.

During the 1960s things began to change.

Theda Skocpol discusses this narrowing of civic life:

Back in the 19th century, when Frances Willard was working to build the nationally influential Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, she traveled across the country recruiting organizers to found and sustain a nationwide network of local chapters. By contrast, when Marian Wright Edelman was inspired to launch the Children’s Defense Fund, she turned to private foundations for grants and then recruited an expert staff of researchers and lobbyists. And the founder of Common Cause, John Gardner, used a few big donations to set up a mailing-list operation.

To be sure, as the Children’s Defense Fund illustrates, certain kinds of advocacy groups can enlarge our democracy by speaking on behalf of vulnerable citizens who could not otherwise gain voice. Nevertheless, in an associational universe dominated by business organizations and professionally managed groups, the mass participatory and educational functions of classic civic America are not reproduced. Because patron grants and computerized mass mailings generate money more readily than modest dues repeatedly collected from millions of members, and because paid experts are more highly valued than volunteer leaders for the public functions of today’s public-interest groups, the leaders of these groups have little incentive to engage in mass mobilization and no need to share leadership and organizational control with state and local chapters.

In mailing-list organizations, most adherents are seen as consumers who send money to buy a certain brand of public-interest representation.

Since then we’ve seen the rise of social media and hashtag activism.

Everything frightens Americans, Fred Reed notes:

The United States has become a nation of weak, pampered, easily frightened, helpless milquetoasts who have never caught a fish, fired a gun, chopped a log, hitchhiked across the country, or been in a schoolyard fight. If their cat dies, they call a grief therapist.