Once the Southern threat to the United States had been eliminated, and for that majority of Americans who were prepared to overlook the white South’s record on race, the attitudes of the rest of America toward the Old South were by no means as hostile as Southern defensiveness would suggest—the enormous popularity of the prettied-up plantation romanticism of the Gone with the Wind tradition being one example. As part of the reconsolidation of America as a white herrenvolk democracy, Northerners joined with Southerners in denouncing the period of Radical Reconstruction as a disastrous mistake and the blacks as unfit for government.114
The Confederacy’s glorious military struggle against overwhelming odds was quite soon reincorporated into the military legend of the United States as a whole: a process symbolized by joint meetings of Union and Confederate veterans, by mass Southern enlistment to fight in the War of 1898, and, somewhat later, in a tradition of literary, Hollywood, and television portrayals of the Civil War that continues to the present.115
This was something in which the white South was glad to join. Having itself abandoned the dream of independence, the South responded to Yankee patronization by seeking to outdo the Yankees in American nationalism, and especially to outdo the effete and gutless Yankee in a willingness to fight for America. Linked to this was a return to pre–Civil War patterns in which Southerners were the most ardent proponents of American imperial expansion.
At the same time, however, other schools of Americans were beginning to celebrate the South almost precisely for the fact that it had been defeated: as a kind of badge of honor and tradition for those who in a range of different ways felt alienated from or defeated by the dominant values of bourgeois America. This tendency might be dubbed Henry Adams on a Harley-Davidson, and has been heavily colored by the romance of the “Lost Cause.”
At one end of the spectrum, it has included Yankees and others who reacted against the greed, corruption, vulgarity, materialism, and self-satisfaction of the post–Civil War “Gilded Age” and have continued to react against these features of American life until the present day. In the process, some of them rediscovered the conservative and aristocratic critique of capitalism developed as part of the South’s intellectual and cultural defenses by writers like George Fitzhugh before the Civil War, and perpetuated by Southern intellectuals like Allen Tate in the mid-twentieth century, and to some extent by Eugene Genovese and others in our own day.116
At the other end of the social and intellectual spectrum, as John Sheldon Reed has noted, for many southerners and others, Confederate symbols came to represent a version of the “Don’t Tread On Me” slogan:
Sometime around the middle of the last century [i.e., the twentieth century], the Confederate battle flag took on yet another meaning: Especially in the South, but not only there, it began to send a message of generalized defiance directed at authority, and to some extent at respectability. People who use it in this way may not care for Black folks or Yankees, but those groups are somewhere behind high-school principals on their list of targets…As one girl said, “When I see the Confederate flag I think of a pickup truck with a gun rack and a bumper sticker that says “I Don’t Brake For Small Animals.”117
The adoption of Confederate symbolism by alienated members of the Northern white working class (including many Irish, Poles, and others from outside the old white core ethnicities) reflects three elements in the Confederate tradition. The first is, of course, white racial supremacy. The others, however, are more attractive. One is the “good ole boy” or redneck Southern tradition described above and celebrated, for example, by the popular TV series The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–1985). This is a tradition of great innate attraction to hell-raisers everywhere, and dignified by the Confederate “Rebel” label—as in the choice of name for “Rebel Yell” Bourbon whisky.
“Redneck” culture, often originally rooted in that of the less respectable Scots-Irish, is much more attached to country music, fishing, and beer than to evangelical religion, or at least church attendance—which is, of course, not necessarily the same thing, as the record of many country singers who have mixed deeply religious sensibility with utter wildness tends to demonstrate.118
Another aspect of Southern culture that has spread to sections of the wider American working classes, and fed strongly into American nationalism, is the picture of stoicism, tenacity, and gallantry against overwhelming odds presented by the Confederate soldiers of the Civil War.119 This is an image of great emotional force for many white Americans who feel defeated by economic and other circumstances beyond their control and excluded from wealth, power, influence, and fashion. And, of course, those who feel this are also, by instinct, culture, and tradition, American nationalists. When they felt let down by their rulers and generals during and after Vietnam, they listened to ballads of betrayed working class patriotism by Bruce Springsteen or Johnny Cash, not to the protest anthems of Don McLean or Bob Dylan. Such people therefore require a symbol that is rebellious and yet part of the American national, and especially the military, tradition.
My own acquaintances in Troy, though overwhelmingly of Confederate descent and very proud of it, had also by the 1970s moved a long way toward this wider identity and sentiment. Though they still harbored certain old Southern prejudices against “Yankees” in general, these had become something of a self-confessed joke, although one that retained a bitter flavor.120 Their most intense and vivid loathings had become of a more generic “heartland” kind: of the “East Coast elites” and unpatriotic liberal intellectuals in general; of the “fruit and nut states” of California and (southern) Florida, and the homosexual and hippy lifestyles they were held to represent; and of New York City, for which the hope was frequently expressed that it would be towed out to sea and sunk. Cultural, religious, ethnic, economic, historical, and geographical distance meant that they only to a very limited extent regarded the people of New York as fellow countrymen.
Because of the Iranian hostage crisis, the people of Troy were in a more than usually nationalist mood, and “Iranians” had joined the existing gallery of international hate figures. However, in a sign of what were to prove extremely dangerous confusions after 9/11, a commonly used word for “Iranian” was “Arab.”
The General Will
The United States therefore possesses strong elements of an antithesis to its publicly accepted national “creed.” Indeed, this antithesis appears to fit all three of what Eugen Weber called the “three Rs” of extreme nationalism: “Reaction against the tendencies of the present; Resistance to Change; and Radicalism, which has radical change in mind.” As of 2012, these are very strongly marked features of the Tea Party movement.121
Compared to conservative and nationalist radicalism in the history of most of the rest of the world, however, one very important and widespread element has been absent in the United States: namely, the impulse to authoritarian dictatorship characteristic of the vast majority of radical nationalist and radical conservative movements in the world. The autocracies that have been pursued by different movements at different times have differed greatly, taking the form of traditional royal autocracies, military caudillismo, the Fascist Duce principle, or the charismatic leadership of groups of young nationalist radicals, à la Garibaldi (which later in turn fed into Italian Fascism). In most countries, however, the impulse to authoritarianism and the leadership principle has seemed inherent to this kind of nationalist tendency. Nor has this been wholly lacking in America, if one remembers the number of successful (and unsuccessful) American generals elected to high office, or encouraged to aspire to it.122
But in the United States, such threats have in the end always been contained by the institutions of American democratic constitutionalism, and this has been thanks not only to the institutions themselves, but to the strength and uniformity of the democratic national political culture and ideology sustaining them. Although at their further fringes the forces of the American antithesis shade over into fascistic manias like th
at of the terrorist Timothy McVeigh and the various militia movements, the great majority are not opposed to the formal democratic aspects of the American Creed; on the contrary, they take enormous pride in them, and regard them as the core of American grandeur. As the last chapter explored, the Tea Parties worship the Constitution, or rather what they take it to be.
For most of American history, American tendencies to authoritarianism have taken what might be called a communal form, and have been phrased and even thought of in terms of a defense of the American liberal democratic system—what Seymour Martin Lipset has called episodes of “Creedal passion”—not a revolt against it. In Louis Hartz’s words, America’s commitment to an absolute form of liberal nationalism “does not mean that America’s General Will always lives an easy life. It has its own violent moments—rare, to be sure, but violent enough. These are the familiar American moments of national fright and national hysteria when it suddenly rises to the surface with a vengeance, when civil liberties begin to collapse, and when Fenimore Cooper is actually in danger of going to jail as a result of the Rousseauan tide.”123
As this passage suggests, certain collective aspects of democratic America have a close affinity with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s prescription for the ideal state, and with the role of the general will in the life of that state: that each individual citizen should, when making up his or her mind on a public issue, ask him- or herself what decision would be in accordance with the general will. In Rousseau’s conception, this is a mechanism based on the shared moral and ideological consensus of society—which in turn is shaped by a universally held civic religion. This “saves the ideal of liberty, while preserving discipline” and also preserves a national capacity to make decisions.124 As noted by J. L. Talmon, Rousseau’s vision possesses implications that point to a form of collective authoritarianism, or even totalitarianism, though this suggestion has been widely viewed as overdrawn.125
Rousseau’s portrait of the general will is not only prescriptive, but also to a degree descriptive—of the ethnically, culturally, and religiously homogeneous world of his native Swiss city-state of Geneva (an insight that would not have pleased Rousseau himself, at least after Geneva burned his books for immorality). The idea of the general will as formulated by Rousseau can therefore be seen as an attempt to extend the powerful and admirable, but also stifling and repressive atmosphere of a culturally homogeneous small town to the life of an entire nation. But as it actually existed in Geneva—and in other closed, homogeneous communities where homogeneity is maintained not by repression from above, but by the community itself—a form of general will has emerged naturally from the community’s history.
For many populist nationalist Americans, the general will, and “liberal nationalism,” have never been just about an absolutist adherence to liberal democratic institutions. They have also involved a conviction that being American means adherence to a national cultural community, one defined by its values, and in the past at least, also by race, ethnicity, and religion. And this has been true from the start. Whatever one thinks of his present agendas, when Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed writes that “the centrality of faith to the maintenance of democratic institutions was once considered axiomatic,” he is being completely accurate historically.126
This combination explains how many Americans can combine in themselves elements of both the American thesis and its antithesis; Americans can, as Louis Hartz has argued, be genuinely devoted followers of the American Creed, on a basis laid down by John Locke and developed by the Enlightenment, and yet can combine this with a sense of cultural, religious, and national community that is decidedly pre-Enlightenment. After all, if the Enlightenment contributed critically to the American Revolution and the national institutions it generated, it is equally true that many Americans felt—as their Parliamentarian ancestors in England had done during the Civil War 130 years previously—that they were fighting for ancient English liberties against the innovations of an autocratic monarch. At least some aspects of the American Revolution itself were founded in a “dread of modernity.”127
And the numerous descendants of this tradition have had a strong sense, fostered originally by many years of racial warfare in North America, that this community is threatened by alien and savage “others.” They also have a sense that they constitute in some way the genuine American people, or folk—the backbone of the American nation, possessing a form of what German nationalists called the gesundes volksinn (“healthy consciousness of the people”), embracing correct national forms of religion, social behavior, and patriotism. With time they have come to accept people first of different ethnicities, then even of different races as members of the American community—but only if they conform to American norms and become “part of the team.”128 Hence the attempt by the Right and the Tea Parties not to attack Barack Obama’s race and color as such, but rather to brand him as a Muslim and non-American.
Although this culture is devoted to freedom, it is not devoted to “negative freedom,” as Isaiah Berlin defined it, but to a kind of “positive freedom.” First, freedom is restricted to members of the moral, cultural, and (formerly) racial and ethnic communities: “Free, White, and Twenty-one” was the old saying. The racial qualification has disappeared, but a sense that freedom can only be exercised in certain ways and by certain kinds of people is still very much alive.129 In the words of Merle Haggard’s song Okie from Muskogee, they believe not only in “bein’ free” but also in “livin’ right.” One might almost say that they believe in being free in order to live right.130
Second, and as a consequence, freedom is tightly circumscribed by communal culture. It is a form of “positive freedom,” a freedom to—in Immanuel Kant’s phrase—“obey the laws you yourself have made.” The freedom of aliens, who do not share this culture, or deviants, can therefore legitimately be circumscribed by authoritarian and even savage means, as long as this is to defend the community and reflects the will of the sound members of the community.131 A survey of Southern Baptist ministers with premillenarian beliefs in 1987 revealed rather low levels of willingness to allow Socialists, civil liberties activists, and “secular humanists” even to speak in public, run for public office, or teach in schools.132
The following description by Walter Russell Mead has deep implications for the Tea Party movement and for American nationalism abroad as well as at home:
Death to the enemies of the community! It is a legacy from colonial times, confirmed by the experience of two centuries of American life, and one of the most deeply ingrained instincts in the Jacksonian world…Jacksonian realism is based on the very sharp distinction in popular feeling between the inside of the folk community and the dark world without. Jacksonian patriotism is an emotion, like love of one’s family, not a doctrine. The nation is an extension of the family. Members of the American folk are bound together by history, culture and a common morality. At a very basic level a feeling of kinship exists among Americans. We have one set of rules for dealing with one another; very different rules apply in the outside world.133
This is the tradition that produced figures such as John Ashcroft, former governor of Missouri and attorney general in the Bush administration. Ashcroft was responsible for formulating laws and measures that greatly increased federal powers of surveillance, interrogation, and detention without trial, which would seem hostile to the legalism that is a core element of the American Creed and self-image, in which Ashcroft himself professes to believe passionately.
Nor is this belief in the rule of law on the part of figures like Ashcroft hypocritical. It is merely qualified by two very large conditions: that in a crisis, written laws can be suspended for the sake of the defense of the community; and that the law in any case only applies to a limited extent to aliens, above all those who are suspected of being enemies and of having behaved in a “barbaric” manner.
The most dramatic and chilling result of this historically derived attitude has been seen since 9/11 in
the approach of the Bush administration to the torture of prisoners captured in the course of the war on terrorism and the response of a section of the American public to what happened. In the spring of 2004, hard on the heels of the evidence of gross maltreatment of Iraqi detainees by U.S. interrogators and guards at the prison of Abu Ghraib, came the exposure of secret memos by administration lawyers advocating the torture of prisoners. This episode also encapsulated some of the contrast between the forces of the American Thesis and those of the American Antithesis.134
On one hand, probably a majority of Americans, and certainly a majority of the media, seemed not only outraged by what had happened but also genuinely and deeply surprised that U.S. troops could do such things. Mainstream papers and television channels gave extensive coverage to agonized discussions of the brutalizing effects of war on ordinary, decent people. The outrage was of course both understandable and correct. The surprise, however, was somewhat surprising, given the record of the U.S. military in Vietnam. Certainly Abu Ghraib would not have come as a surprise to the Vietnam veterans with whom I spoke in Alabama.135
But another very considerable section of Americans were not surprised at all by what had happened and indeed approved it. In an opinion poll commissioned in May 2004 by the Washington Post and ABC News, 34 percent of respondents said that torture is acceptable in the case of “people suspected of involvement in recent attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq or Afghanistan,” with 64 percent rejecting this. When asked if physical abuse short of torture is acceptable, 45 percent said yes and 53 percent no.136
What happened can also clearly have come as no surprise to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who in a memo to the president of January 25, 2002, described articles of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of prisoners as “quaint” and advised that they be abandoned (Colin Powell strongly dissented). Later, lawyers in the Justice Department (August 2002) and in the Pentagon (March 2003) advised the administration that a U.S. President in his capacity as commander in chief has the right to override both U.S. and international law and sanction physical abuse of prisoners as part of the war on terrorism.137
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