One thing only occurred to me over the weekend, about the American politico/social environment - and to be honest, I feel a bit retarded for not having twigged to it 20 years ago.
Simply, America had its revolution 200 years ago, unlike say England & the Continent, and the ideas that got embedded were a lot more weighted in favour of large land owners, fat cat mercantilists, and social stability, and quite disdainful of the common clay of working people ... and while the 19/20th century social revolutions that brought up the power of the working class didnt completely skip the USA, to a huge extent all of it was just suppressed/oppressed/killed off.
I mean, I know how the Union movement was anathematized and slaughtered (quite literally), and driven into a headlong bullheaded opposition to corporations, which still lingers, but it hadn't quite sunk in, the extent to which all of the accompanying social evolution just got kinda ... missed.
More later I hope - this week bids fair to be frenziedly busy (everyone trying to cram stuff in before the end of the year budget thing!)
2 comments:
I hear you.
One thing I constantly had to check myself when I lived in the US was base assumptions about the connection of the individual to society, the responsibilities of that society to the individual, the responsibilities of that individual to the society, conceptualisations of egalitarianism, what basic understanding of 'freedom' was, etc. These root things were simply not the same.
And it wasn't just me as a foreigner being confronted with cultural differences, rather it was assumptions and conceptualisations that exist every where else in the western world were either simply not present, or not developed to any degree.
I realised this because I had not experienced the same thing at all when I lived in the Netherlands. And moreover, those foreigners I spent time with in the US were coming up against and experiencing precisely the same disconnects, despite being from different western countries than me.
The biggest thing that I kept running up against was the role of government. I take as a given that government is supposed to make life easier for us, to smooth the way, to make a society civilised. Without a government doing such, we have anarchy, and the powerful taking advantage of the weak, which we tend to think of as Bad Things.
Whereas Americans seem to think of government as a necessary evil, as something that they must have, and because of such, minimise it as much as possible. My rather obvious choice between trusting the market, whose bottom-line is profit, and trusting the government, which in theory at least has a bottom-line of our welfare, the latter being picked seemed like a no-brainer. My American friends would look at me strangely, as though I said the world was flat.
Add in the fact that American society maintains its isolationist historical cultural tendencies, despite being contemporarily imperialist, it's very easy for the American public to pay no attention to the rest of the western world, and how we do things.
The current Health Care reform 'debate' is a classic example of this. I am STILL hearing conservative congress-people saying that they have the best healthcare system in the world, even though it is patently obvious, according to every measure out there, that it is considerably behind numerous countries in such. Hell, they have a higher infant mortality rate than Cuba.
I've been asked by a number of people back here in NZ since returning home to explain what the hell is going on there, and I have to go into the above in quite some detail.
But yes, America definitely seems to have missed some crucial social-historical moments that informed the rest of the western world.
OK, I have been too lazy to set up yet another freaking email account [YAFEA], so I'm using the library backup account.
You have to realize that you are in the South. Capital D Dixie. You are spot on about land-owner class but that is most important in the South. Little known, for instance, is that the Sam Walton may have started with one "Five & Dime" but his family owned tracks of land in Tennessee and descended from a Georgia Signer of the Declaration. Land was the basis of wealth in the South well into late 20th C.
In the North, capital was the basis of power and professional skills that built capital were valued.
In the West land was too fluid; fortunes were made and lost but dynasties are rare. Except in Southern California where the building of LA did produce the Chandlers and amassed wealth built the Hearst dynasty but you note that both built their real power on newspapers to shape opinion.
There are three Americas that trace back to the Civil War - North/Union, South and West. Any particular state is mostly one of the three but most mix. Oklahoma started Northern/Western with Little Dixie a backwater but has trended since the '50's to Southern as the Northwest half of the state emptied out and Texans and Southerners moved in. And always there was the poison of the Gaylords and their Daily Disappointment rag.
Also, I think you underestimate the extent that the American Civil War was a second revolution on the model of the 1848 revolts in Europe. The North and to an extent, the West moved on to the "Liberal" world view in the 19th Century meaning. look at some of Lincoln's remarks about the relative value of Capital and Labor and it becomes obvious he was conversant with same ideas that were sparking rebellion in Europe. Anyone using Abe's words today would be immediately branded an old school Marxist.
It was the South that never moved and the failure of Reconstruction meant Dixie has acted as a break on first the Democrats as they returned to a national stage with FDR, Truman and Kennedy [Wilson was a Virginian]. LBJ was a Texan and culturally Western and Union [Austin was pro-Union and essentially occupied] as Southern and so he broke the Dixiecrat base went the Western side won out on Civil Rights.
Nixon's racist Southern Strategy has now made the Republicans the Southern party, Which illustrates that Southern is a more enduring characteristic than Republican or even Capitalist. It is as immortal as a cancer, an apt description of the region.
What you see amplified is the more stratified nature of Southern society where the English poorer sons of gentry grabbed land early and the clan culture of the Scots-Irish poor whites lead them to accept the patron status of the already wealthy.
There is also an authoritarian streak in the South. That is behind their Fundamentalist leanings as well as accepting the word of the privileged as long as the privileged make an effort to show they are part of the clan [W was "someone you could have a beer with."]. BTW, Jeff Davis was always more dictatorial and ran rough shod over states rights far more than Lincoln.
The South does have bouts of rebelliousness but the patronage class channels it into hatred of the different be it blacks, Hispanics or gays.
Another example of the mixed nature of the states is West Virginia. It stayed with the Union because slaves never took hold there and was a hot bed of union organizing. It was always poor and broken up by terrain so no large land owners initially took hold. But the poor white, Scots-Irish culture and fundamentalism has moved the state more conservative.
My point is largely that the US is much more granular than you might think and the place of the the Civil War in the wider 19th C movement is ignored in both Europe and the US.
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