Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy
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The names for this event vary. Some call it the Great Enrichment or the Great Divergence. I prefer the Miracle for a fairly straightforward reason. Miracles defy explanation. Nearly all scholars agree that the Miracle began in the West, but there’s precious little agreement on why it happened there.2 In his afterword to the third edition of the European Miracle, Eric Jones surveys the intellectual cacophony around the question of why modernity happened and, with a mix of exasperation and jest, writes: “Perhaps there was something supernatural about Europe’s rise after all.”3
Alas, there’s no God in this book, and so that explanation is unavailable to us.4
The next best explanation for modernity is: England did it. There’s a great deal to recommend this theory of the case. Indeed, if you’re using “where” figuratively, then the origins of capitalism and the Miracle remain a mystery. But if you literally mean “where,” then we know the answer to that question: England.
“We are still experiencing the aftereffects of an astonishing event,” writes Daniel Hannan in his brilliant, unavoidably provocative, and widely misunderstood book, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. “The inhabitants of a damp island at the western tip of the Eurasian landmass stumbled upon the idea that the government ought to be subject to the law, not the other way around. The rule of law created security of property and contract, which in turn led to industrialization and modern capitalism. For the first time in the history of the species, a system grew up that, on the whole, rewarded production better than predation.”5
The original working title of this book was The Tribe of Liberty. The reason I liked that title is that Hannan’s view is the one I hold nearest to my heart. And for this and other reasons, the idea that liberty was born as a cultural quirk of an obscure people deserves a bit more explication than some of the other theories of where modernity comes from.
A vast sea of literature, dogma, doctrine, and social science has been dedicated to the question of “Why England?”
They can all be summarized with a single statement: England was weird. When I say “weird,” I do not mean it with a hint of insult. It was gloriously, wonderfully, fantastically weird. Monty Python is weird. My father was weird. Marriage is weird. Most of the joyful and precious things in life are weird, and it is the weirdness that makes them joyful and precious.
Why for the first time ever did this weirdness manifest itself? Daniel Hannan identifies five widely agreed-upon crucial factors:
1. The development of a nation-state. One needs a certain amount of cohesiveness and order to let the Miracle emerge. And that only comes from a regime that can “apply laws more or less uniformly to a population bound together by a sense of shared identity.”
2. Closely related to this is a healthy civil society full of competing and complementary institutions that serve to root the society and serve as a counterbalance to the arbitrary power of the state or crown. The sovereignty of the individual as a cultural artifact is deeply rooted in, and at least partly derived from, the role of mediating institutions. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “The spirit of individuality is the basis of the English character. Association is a means of achieving things unattainable by isolated effort….What better example of association than the union of individuals who form the club, or almost any civil or political association or corporation?”
3. Island geography. The importance of being an island is not obvious at first. But it was crucial for two reasons. First, islands have natural protections from foreign invaders. This allowed for England to be less militarized than other nations. War was for the most part reserved for fending off foreign invaders. The Anglo distrust of standing armies is a direct product of this accidental arrangement. Second, and very much related, this made political absolutism less necessary. Kings evolve absolute powers for the same reason “stationary bandits” are welcomed by victimized peasants: to protect the populace from foreign threats. The lack of an absolute ruler not only gave space for civil society and competing power centers to develop, it prevented the king from claiming that he “owned” the country (the people and their stuff), as was common elsewhere.
4. Religious pluralism. This strikes me as incontrovertible insofar as religious hegemony in general deters innovation, which, until very recently, was seen as a kind of heresy or apostasy. Prior to the Reformation, religion wasn’t a separate sphere of life from work and family. Even laboring differently was seen as a threat to the established order. More on this in a moment.
5. Last, and Hannan argues most important, common law: “a unique legal system that made the state subject to the people rather than the reverse.”6
It’s a good list, and Hannan makes a good case for it. But we still have the problem of English weirdness. By that I mean, if modernity arises only once and in one place, it is almost impossible to know for sure why it happened there. The scientific method would require a true test, and none is available. If modernity happened someplace else, say Japan, we could compare and contrast and distill the commonalities and come up with a testable hypothesis.
There is one objection to this point: the Netherlands, a great merchant republic, which competes with England as the birthplace of the modern corporation. Perhaps unfairly, I am giving short shrift to the Dutch. The problem is that the two nations were deeply enmeshed in each other’s cultures, even when they were at war with each other. Indeed, I think you could make a good case that neither would have become capitalist without the other. It’s a bit like the problem of identifying the first state. No one has identified a “pristine state,” i.e., one that arises all on its own. Instead, archaeologists and anthropologists can only locate “competitive states”: states that emerge in order to compete with or resist some other state. This captures the dynamic between England and Holland.7 I have no doubt that some partisans of the Dutch would make the case that the Netherlands pulled England into the Miracle, not the other way around. And I am open to that argument. But from the evidence I’ve seen, the causality works more the other way around, despite numerous Dutch contributions. It’s like two great basketball players who become better because of their competition with each other.
Regardless, the spillover from England and the Netherlands to the rest of Europe was rapid in the eighteenth century, again because of virtuous competitive pressure. But also because of the shared cultural assumptions and institutions of Christian Western Europe (Russia is a different matter). “The ‘demonstration effect,’ ” writes Ralph Raico, “that has been a constant element in European progress—and which could exist precisely because Europe was a decentralized system of competing jurisdictions—helped spread the liberal politics that brought prosperity to the towns that first ventured to experiment with them.”8
As Hannan recounts in loving and patriotic detail, the roots of English democracy stretch deep into antiquity. Sources dating back to at least the 600s show that the English had a social compact between ruler and ruled, one which organically evolved in England long before any of the rules were written down. Kings met with other lords and other leaders out in the open and promised to uphold their duties as a servant of their people. The Roman historian Tacitus noted 2,000 years ago that this was a common practice among Germanic tribes as well. But only England held on to it, perhaps because being an island nation protected it from the wars that wiped out such traditions elsewhere.
J. R. Maddicott, author of the authoritative Origins of the English Parliament, 924-1327, draws a line from the early Germanic “Witans” of England to the Magna Carta and to British democracy today: “Substituting ‘earls’ for ‘ealdormen’ and ‘barons’ for ‘thegns,’ we are not so very far from the general look of an early parliament.”9 He later says that “in other parts of the West, the Germanic and Carolingian legislative tradition died out in the tenth century. Its energetic preservation and promotion in England was quite exceptional�
�.We need not baulk at the notion of English exceptionalism.”10
Oxford University medieval historian James Campbell agrees. “That representative institutions have their roots in the dark-age and medieval past is not an anachronistic view; rather it is fully demonstrable,” he writes. “It does indeed look as if the history of constitutional liberty has important beginnings in Anglo-Saxon England.”11
The formal mechanisms of democracy are not the only anatomical features of democracy that can be traced to Old Blighty. Feudalism in England was significantly different from feudalism in Western Europe and extremely different from feudalism in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and the rest of the world.
In most feudal societies, kinship rules basically made the concept of private property, particularly private land, unthinkable. In peasant societies (Alan Macfarlane’s term), the serfs worked the land for a host of reasons and, contra Marx, they didn’t all have to do with economic exploitation. They had more to do with ancient and tribal attachments to specific plots of dirt. This was their land to work because this was where their ancestors had worked and where their ancestors were buried.
Peasants in most of Europe didn’t leave their land to their children, because it wasn’t their land to dispose of. They were more like sharecroppers. In Eastern Europe, peasants had views of ownership similar to the Native Americans. They were intergenerational caretakers of the soil, and “ownership” was better understood as an eternal lease. But in England, MacFarlane found that the individual right of landowners to “alienate” their property—i.e., sell it or leave it to people other than their children—was already deeply rooted in English common law by the beginning of the 1500s.12 Marx and Engels claim in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism “has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”13 But as Francis Fukuyama observes, that was demonstrably untrue in England. Centuries before the emergence of Marx’s hated bourgeoisie, the English were treating “family” land as just another commodity. Fukuyama cites a study of land transfers in one English district; only 15 percent of transfers went to the owner’s family during his lifetime, and 10 percent at death.14 In other words, farmers could sell their land to strangers. And as early as the twelfth century, “English villeins (tenants legally tied to their lands) were buying, selling, and leasing property without the permission of their lords.”15 In other words, private property was an ancient custom in England, predating legal and philosophical justifications for it, sometimes by centuries.
Another, related advantage stemmed from the fact that hereditary castes—a near universal institution around the world—were weirdly weak in England. “On the Continent, seigniorial [baronial] justice was common,” Hannan writes. “The great magnates were the law on their own estates. But England, before the Normans came [in 1066], had no feudal aristocracy. It had its great men, as all warrior societies had, and many of them held large estates, though these tended to be fragmented across many counties. But the great men never constituted a hereditary caste with legal privileges—such as, to cite the most notorious example from Europe, exemption from taxation. They were as subject to the law of the land as anyone else.”16 In other words, feudal lords, while extremely powerful on their own lands, were not so powerful that they could serve as absolute monarchs in their little mini-states.
I think Hannan might overstate the point, but the core truth remains. Aristocracy worked differently in England. Hannan attributes this to the fact that, in Europe, Roman law was the norm, while in England it was something of an alien imposition that never took deep root in the soil.17 Roman law, like Napoleonic law, is “deductive”: Lawmakers determine a principle, write it down, and impose it on the society. Common law is an emergent property, bubbling up from the society itself.
Common law evolved case by case, which is why some call it judge-made law. “Common law,” writes Hannan, “is thus empirical rather than conceptual: it concerns itself with actual judgments that have been handed down in real cases, and then asks whether they need to be modified in the light of different circumstances in a new case.”18 And English common law recognized the rights of all Englishmen, which made all the difference.
I don’t want to get bogged down in the history of the Magna Carta, but it’s worth noting that the Magna Carta (the Brits don’t say “the” as we do, by the way; they simply say “Magna Carta”) came after the development of formal institutions of common law. In the late twelfth century, Henry II created a system of circuit courts and even a central court of appeals. When the Magna Carta was struck a half century later, it recognized this development, creating a written precedent for the future. Likewise, the Magna Carta’s requirement that the king rule in consultation in “common counsel of the realm” was a nod to more ancient traditions while at the same time a new, incalculably valuable precedent for the creation of a formal parliamentary system.
There are numerous other cultural idiosyncrasies that define English weirdness—or, if you prefer, exceptionalism. The right to petition authorities for redress, the rights of the individual, an almost obsessive concern with just taxation, and numerous other concepts we tend to think of in high-flown philosophical or legal terms have deep roots in English custom. They emerged not as formal deductive law but through local trial and error over countless generations.
In subsequent chapters, I will refer often to the “Lockean Revolution” to describe the gift we inherited from the Founding era of both England’s Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution. But as I will explain, the problem with the term “Lockean Revolution” is that it makes it sound like the extended order of liberty was purely a kind of legalistic creation crafted by lawyers and philosophers like Locke. The truth is it developed and evolved organically over a millennium before Locke did us all the great service of writing some of it down. Just as the Magna Carta locked in certain principles in 1215, Locke and the American founders did something very similar.
The colonists at the time of the American founding saw themselves for the most part as English. They brought their weird cultural biases with them, and their argument with the crown was an extension of the Whiggish fight for liberty that defined English history for a thousand years. As Winston Churchill observed in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, “The Declaration [of Independence] was in the main a restatement of the principles which had animated the Whig struggle against the later Stuarts and the English Revolution of 1688.”19
Just as Martin Luther King Jr. used America’s best ideals to make the case for a richer liberty in America, the Founders invoked England’s highest principles to make the case for their liberties in the New World. Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration included the line “We might have been a free and great people together,” but it was cut from the final version.20 Still, the Declaration drips with a sense of familial betrayal:
We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.21
That line about the “circumstances of our emigration and settlement here” is a reference to the fact that so many of the original colonists crossed the ocean in search of religious liberties that had been denied to them at home. Indeed, as important as the issue of unjust taxation was to the Founders, the cause of religious liberty served as a vital motivation as well. The Church of England had in the years leading up to the Revolution tried to impose an official faith in the colonies and even install American bishops, arousing a wellspring of vestigial Puritan rage. “The American Revolution was, at least in part, the result of a spasm of religious intolerance,” writes Hannan. “That this spasm should
have engendered the first truly secular state on earth, one in which all religions might compete on even terms, is close to miraculous.”22
The reason I bring this up is that I think we often fail to see the Constitution in the proper light. The profound (though at times insufficient) legal authority we invest in it tends to obscure the cultural authority of the document. And so we talk about it in formalistic terms. Section one says this, section two says that, and so on. The Whiggish legal historians, naturally, see history as a book in which each page is filled with new legal documents. But these documents almost always are lagging indicators, validations of cultural advances.
And it is fine for historians, lawyers, and lawmakers to see the past through the legal prism of the present. It is, in fact, essential for lawyers and lawmakers to look at the text and textual history of the Constitution. But the Constitution is not simply a machine on parchment or an instruction manual for the government. It is an expression of a specific culture at a specific time. And that culture comes from somewhere. Specifically, it comes from England. Patrick Henry at the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788 spoke glowing of their “glorious forefathers of Great Britain” who “made liberty the foundation of every thing.”23
Numerous Latin American countries have constitutions based on the American model, but they have struggled to re-create America’s political and economic successes because culture matters—a lot. Not for nothing did Alexis de Tocqueville describe the American as “the Englishman left to himself.”24