Author Archives: Julian O. Long

Big pig, little pig

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I Win, We Lose:
The New Social Darwinism and the Death of Love, and Other Writings

by John Hall Snow
edited by Frederick Stecker
229 pp., Wipf and Stock, $34

White Trash:
The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg
476 pp., Viking, $28

 

During the years I worked at Fort Bragg I had various old cars as companions along the country roads of North Carolina. I’ve already written about my 1959 Porsche in another context. But I drove and fiddled with a Karman Ghia coupe for a while as well. The Karman Ghia had a tendency to throw fan belts, and I always carried a couple of spares with me.

One night when I was on my way home to Durham the little VW engine began to overheat. I pulled over, turned the car off, and opened the rear boot to let the engine cool a little. Then I got out some tools and sat down on the shoulder with my legs underneath the back of the car.

My head was fairly close to the edge of the boot cover, too, as I bent into the engine compartment; and that turned out to be important in a few minutes when I was startled by some strange noises coming my way from an open field just off the road. I straightened up suddenly, banged my head on the boot cover and knocked myself out.

When I awoke after what I took to be just a few minutes, I didn’t worry about what had startled me, and I was too shaken up to finish the work on my car. I locked things up, hitchhiked back to the base, took some aspirin for my headache, called home, and spent the night on a cot in my office that I kept there for just such emergencies.

The next morning early I hitchhiked back to my car. When I got there I saw that there was a small herd of medium sized hogs in what I had taken for an empty field the night before. They had been turned out to forage in the stubble of whatever crop had been harvested in that field and were still snorting around quite contentedly.

That was my introduction to the practice of turning hogs loose to forage in fields and woods. I didn’t know then but do now that the practice has a long and complex history that has been productive of culture of various kinds. It has given us songs about the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and the War of 1812, songs about cowboying, prospecting, going to Texas, being seduced by fancy men, and other profundities, in addition to providing us with lots of feral hogs. It has also given us the expression, “Root, hog, or die”—self reliance or nothing, you’re on your own old buddy—which might have meant something to me on the road back then if I had thought of it. Here’s a verse from an old song, for which I am indebted to Wikipedia.

I’m right from old Virginny wid my pocket full ob news,
I’m worth twenty shillings right square in my shoes.
It doesn’t make a bit of difference to neither you nor I
Big pig or little pig, Root, hog, or die.

The speaker would appear to be a slave, “worth twenty shillings right square in [his] shoes.” Though it dates the song 1856, the year of its first copyright, Wikipedia traces the expression “Root, hog, or die” to a time “well before 1834,” that date being the date of the publication of Davy Crocket’s Autobiography, which quotes the expression as “an old saying.”

Before he became enshrined in Texas history as one of the heroes of the Alamo, Crocket had a considerable career as a politician in Tennessee and served in the United States House of Representatives. He was a tireless defender of squatter’s rights and of the landless poor. Nancy Isenberg attributes the saying to Crocket that “It’s grit of a fellow that makes a man.”

In her new book, White Trash: The 400-year Untold History of Class In America, Isenberg also writes of the complex and racially charged history of social Darwinism among us, whose cultural roots are probably older than any songs about them. Indeed, the cluster of ideas we subsume under the social Darwinist rubric has been around in America since before we had a term for it, before Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), and before the career of Herbert Spencer, who gave the phrase “survival of the fittest” its characteristically modern spin.

On the other hand, the Rev. John Hall Snow’s analysis of social Darwinism, as revealed in a new book edited by the Rev. Frederick Stecker, doesn’t explore its folkloric or other cultural antecedents, perhaps because Snow seems less interested in social Darwinism’s American history and more interested in the corporate consequences of the faith (after it had become a faith), particularly in its having resulted in a culture of winners and losers. Indeed the most telling and interesting sections of I Win, We Lose concern how winning came to be the American conception of “survival of the fittest.”

Fr. Stecker found the manuscript of this little book among Fr. Snow’s literary remains together with a number of unpublished sermons. Indeed, some of the most valuable parts of this book are to be found in the sermon excerpts that Fr. Stecker includes as commentary on the main text. I’ve read Fr. Snow’s other books since reading I Win, We Lose. Two of them, The Gospel in a Broken World and A Vocation to Risk specifically address issues of preaching to times of great change: the first in relation to the massive social changes wrought by the 1960s and the second in relation to late twentieth century culture, which Fr. Snow perceived to be in spiritual decline. The effects of social Darwinism and the American culture of winning are themes to which Fr. Snow returned again and again in his writing and preaching.

The importance of winning grows out of competitiveness through the introduction of an adversarial component into all human relationships, according to Snow. The chapters of Snow’s book detail the effects on education, racial justice, marriage, institutional life, and environmental ethics of a cultural paradigm that views social life in all its forms as a series of sites for competition. Winning is promoted and winners are rewarded with major or minor celebrity, money, etc. This is the meaning of success in America. Losing, normally identified with performance that falls short of accepted standards of achievement, but also with wage earning and poverty, is rewarded with shame. The social consequences have been devastating, as Snow details them. His understanding of the losses to public education brought about by the competition paradigm, which Snow alleges have “removed the last vestiges of true learning from the educational process” prefigure present day concerns about high stakes testing and the unfortunate social consequences of our so-called meritocracy, for instance.

For the culture of winning requires that most will be losers. “Winners are defined by the symbolic power of what they own as well as what and how much they consume.” And as the win/lose ethos expands into the creed of American exceptionalism it comes to require “the aggressive accumulation of natural resources, wealth, and technical-scientific information for the single purpose of denying them to the rest of the world as the guarantee of the survival of those currently self-defined as the most fit, namely the richest and most powerful.” Acceptance of this view and the corollary views it requires in contemporary American life puts Christians in a particularly difficult position, because “No vision of reality could be more in conflict with what Christians believe,” according to Fr. Snow. Yet American Christians have defended slavery, Indian removal, the destruction of Appalachia and other environmental devastation by extractive industry, as well as the pervasive growth of destructive technologies the world over, as beneficial and necessary to the survival of “the most comfortable, elegant, liberated life-style in the history of the world . . . .”

Professor Isenberg has other fish to fry. She traces the history of American scapegoating of the poor and the persistence of destructive class-consciousness in America to English colonial policy and practice. Our former British rulers viewed their North American colonies not merely as a source of wealth but also as a dumping ground for human trash, for the hordes of landless paupers, “vagrants, idlers, highwaymen, Irish rebels, known whores and convicts” that filled England (particularly English cities) with what the better classes termed human rubbish. It was settled British colonial policy to transport these persons to the new world for centuries, a fact amply illustrated by the history of Jamestown as Isenberg tells the story. After 1776 the newly constituted United States adopted and extended this policy through the various stages of continental expansion. But far from being valued as pioneers and settlers, the landless poor remained objects of scorn, in some cases more scorned than people of color, described as sallow, diseased, and malformed, an inferior breed of human beings.

It is a widespread conviction that Jefferson’s ringing affirmation of human equality at the opening of the Declaration of Independence entitles Americans to believe that we have created a society without invidious class distinctions. But that belief is everywhere deconstructed by the actions of Americans past and present. We tend to perceive and address the cognitive dissonances entailed by the belief by reference to the category of race in our present-day life and to erase other manifestations both from our perception of and discourse about inequality; yet we have never successfully discriminated between the natural inequalities that abound in our experience of one another and forced or artificial inequalities that are social constructions. This blurring has contributed to our history of demagogic exploitation of inequality for political purposes. Professor Isenberg provides a wealth of examples of the political exploitation of inequality from colonial times to the present in a thick social history that lends substance to Fr. Snow’s argument. Just as race has marked many as socially inferior in our history, so extreme poverty has marked others as deserving of exclusion from the goods obtained through our social contract. Historically, those identified as white trash have been regarded as naturally inferior to their more affluent betters, along with people of color, especially in the South, and their putative natural inferiority has a long history of association with partisan attempts to exclude them permanently from society’s benefits. In its most extreme form, the belief in the natural inferiority of some humans has resembled fascism in all but name.

I owe recognition of the relevance of one of his sermons to our own historical moment to Fr. Snow’s daughter, Lydia Field Snow, who called attention to it in a recent Facebook post. I quote only part of the passage to which she refers.

The precise situation that creates fascism is where society is demoralized, where the conscientious are paralyzed with guilt and leadership believes that it is no longer accountable to anyone, where social disorder is everywhere and that this disorder is everywhere met with more police using more force. It occurs when the law is set aside in the name of order and humans find that the fear, the tension, the chaos, and the guilt become unbearable. It is at that moment when the human spirit is tempted to say suddenly, No! Wrong is right, evil is good, ugliness is beauty, repression is true freedom, and the important thing is to be on the side of the strong. This is nature’s law—the weak, the stupid, the ugly, all those people who are not like me are destined to be destroyed, they are a drag on us, the truly strong. We’ve wasted enough time on them—let’s get it over with—why put up with their nonsense?”

There was a time when I didn’t believe the Republican Party really wanted to destroy the social contract. That was then, before they paraded a collection of proto fascists through a series of elections that ended up requiring all those who survived to pledge ever more stringent scenarios of social harm and that produced a final round of so-called rallies that fostered a lynch-mob ethos. Faced with the recent consequences of that ethos, we shall hardly need the renewed rallies to sustain the country’s angry mood. Our President ran for office in the familiar role of outsider, attacking government as ‘the problem’ in the tradition of Ronald Reagan. But his authoritarian approach to governing promises a police state, and as it develops it isn’t hard to predict a time when his régime will declare itself free of all obligation to ordinary human decency and give itself carte blanche to complete destruction of the social contract. And one further thing is clear. His appeal is deeply rooted in the American culture of winning. Here’s the President speaking to that point.

You’re going to be so proud of your president if I get in—and I don’t care about that—we’re going to start winning again, we’re going to win so much, we’re going to win at every level, we’re going to win economically, we’re going to win with the economy, we’re going to win with military . . . we’re going to win with every single facet, we’re going to win so much you may even get tired of winning, and you’ll say, “Please! Please! It’s too much winning! We can’t take it anymore! Mr. President! It’s too much!” And I’ll say, ˜No it isn’t! We have to keep winning! We have to win more! We’re going to win more! We’re going to win so much!

There’s some cognitive dissonance between the spectacle of Americans winning on such a scale and the destruction of the social contract that the Republican hard core desires, but winning in the presidential rallies was and is imaged as Fr. Snow described it: We need not concern ourselves with “the weak, the stupid, the ugly, all those people who are not like [us].” As the Republican program unfolds, particularly as the Affordable Care Act is repealed and great numbers of citizens lose access to health care while the middle class and the wealthy are given substantial tax breaks, it will become clear that Republican scapegoating doesn’t stop with Muslims and other immigrants but targets the poor as a social class as well. As Representative Roger Marshall (R—Kansas) put it in a recent interview: “Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’ . . . There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves . . . .”

Getting to Albuquerque

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August, 1960: an unbearable day—the temperature well over a hundred degrees on the concrete runway at Dallas Love Field where I am pitching bags off a conveyor belt onto a luggage cart, unloading one of the Vickers Viscount aircraft that Continental Airlines flew in those days. Next to me a mechanic jokes with a coworker as he takes a wad of chewing gum out of his mouth and stuffs it into the guts of a turboprop engine he’d been having trouble with. “That ought to get ‘er to Albuquerque!” he opines.

True story. I have no idea what happened to that airplane, though I certainly hope it got to Albuquerque safely. I should probably have reported that mechanic to somebody, my boss maybe—but I was too frazzled and tired and drenched with sweat (besides being too low in the pecking order) to think that. I’m a bit ashamed that I didn’t report him, though not as ashamed as I ought to be, and I soothe my conscience with the absence from my memory of any stories of plane crashes from around that time.

Thirty years later I published an essay entitled “The Ultimate West.” It has several weaknesses, the chief of which is an excessive literariness, to which I am still prone. I’m not ashamed of it though, and I’m thinking of a particular paragraph I wrote then about childhood trips to Albuquerque from Abilene, Texas: when my mother would put my brother and me in our 1939 De Soto and drive us there in one day. It still seems remarkable to me that she did that. We would usually stop in Clovis for lunch, which consisted of roast beef sandwiches at a restaurant in a small downtown hotel. I remember parking meters and brick streets in Clovis, but another memory, another kind of memory predominates.

Getting to Albuquerque was for me the most powerful of symbols. Texas was plain, New Mexico exotic and cosmopolitan. In Albuquerque I went to school with Mexicans and an occasional Indian, whereas my Texas schools protected my Scotch Irish ethnicity against cultural pollution and forced me to memorize Bible verses, which I still think of as Baptist, at school.

I did a lot of growing up in Abilene. It had been my mother’s family home since 1926, the place where she and my father met, fell in love, and married. We lived in Abilene with my grandparents during the early years of World War II when my father was in the Philippines. We moved there more or less permanently in 1948 after his death had been confirmed. But both my brother and I had been born in Albuquerque, I in 1937 and he in 1940. We both started school there; though I had a longer exposure to school in Albuquerque than he did, from first through fourth grade. The road trips I recalled in my 1990 essay took place between 1943 when we moved back to Albuquerque from Abilene and occupied the house my parents had built on Tulane Place near the university, and January, 1948 when we resettled in Abilene.

My parents’ Albuquerque house as it looked when it was it was new (circa 1939). All photos are “live.” Click images to enlarge.

And of course there were as many road trips to Abilene as to Albuquerque in my childhood—but although I have many cherished memories of visiting and living in Abilene as a small child and continue to love my adopted home town, it is the road trips to Albuquerque that my memory assigns to a special place among my magic things. “I could feel my heart rise in me as we passed the state line at Farwell and it mysteriously got an hour earlier.” Not even the seemingly endless succession of wolf and coyote skins strung on the barbed wire fences along the roadways dampened my enthusiasm. But in spite of the fact that Albuquerque gave me a childhood sense of something like cultural diversity, what I didn’t understand as a child was that both in Northern New Mexico and in West Texas I was living in places where perhaps a hundred fifty years of history had been erased. It is my connections with that history that I continue to ponder and with which I still strive to come to terms.

Historic marker at Millerville (TX) Cemetery.

Last fall, on my way to my annual high school class reunion, I made another road trip, in a rented car, to the Texas ghost towns of Duffau and Millerville, not far from the present day town of Hico, on the edge of the Texas hill country. I made the trip to search for my great grandmother’s grave. She is buried in Millerville Cemetery, according to her death certificate. I didn’t find her grave, but I suspect it may be one of a good many graves in the old cemetery that are marked with field stones bearing no inscriptions, or that it may never have been marked at all. Her name had been Melinda Ava Akers. She was born in 1843 in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and had moved with her extended family to Bloomington, Illinois, some time before 1870. She was just shy of seventy years old at the time of her death in 1913. Her journey from Pennsylvania to Texas had been long and meandering.

My great grandfather, John H. Long, outlived Melinda by twenty-five years, married again, and died in Los Angeles, California in 1937. I should like to know more about him and my great grandmother and his second wife, one Mary Floyd Marcoux, though I now know a good deal more than I ever did growing up, when I don’t think I ever heard their names. Apparently, my great grandmother’s death certificate mentions only one child, her daughter Marian. But Marian was the youngest of four siblings, two of whom, Florence and Raymond, are buried in New Florence, Missouri, and one of whom, James Olin, was my grandfather. Here is a photo of John Long, for which I am grateful to my cousin, Carol Flanagan. I have no idea where it was taken or when, though the subject looks to be middle aged. I’ve not been able to find a photograph of my great grandmother. John Long was six years younger than Melinda Akers when they were married in 1876. I have no idea how they met or where, though I have traced John Long to his birth in Peoria County, Illinois, not far from Bloomington. He and Melinda show up together with their then two children, Florence and James Olin, in the United States Census of 1880 in Minneapolis. Their southwards migration through towns in Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri (where they lost their two children, Florence and Raymond), would bring them to Beckham County, Oklahoma, some time prior to 1905 when my grandfather, James Olin, and Adda Belle Peterson were married at Guthrie.

Adda Belle Peterson and James Olin Long on their wedding Day.

I knew none of this growing up, perhaps because we lost contact with my father’s family after World War II. For a long time Grandma Long would come to visit every few months, but finally the visits stopped when she moved to Hawaii for a while—she too was a wanderer. The extended family of Longs and Petersons lived in Oklahoma until 1911 but seem to have split up after that, with John and Melinda and their daughter Marian, who had married a man named Orlando Curtis, going to Texas, and my grandparents and Melissa Peterson settling finally in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Here’s a photo of the Las Cruces clan, I think from 1913; Peter Peterson, my maternal great grandfather who had died in Oklahoma in 1910, is absent. My grandmother is holding my Uncle Bill, the baby of the family. My father is the boy in the middle between my grandfather and great grandmother Melissa Peterson who is holding my Aunt Frances’s hand. Next comes my uncle Randolph and finally, a neighbor boy whose hat covers his face. I never knew my grandfather, James Olin, who died in the flu epidemic of 1919, but I spent a number of happy childhood times at the Las Cruces farm—we didn’t call it a homestead, and of course I’m remembering it as it may have been thirty years after this photo was taken. I chiefly remember sleeping on a screened-in porch on cool summer nights and waking every so often as a train hooted by on the tracks close by. My memory is that the porch faced the railroad, though that could be wrong. I also remember the farm as a garden. Grandma Long kept bees and dairy cattle in addition to chickens. She raised vegetables and I don’t know what else. There was a lot of alfalfa grown in that part of the world in those days. I associate the smell of alfalfa with Grandma Long’s farm and find that smell exhilarating still.

And I think that farm was a sustainable enterprise as long as Las Cruces remained rural and as long as climate cycles allowed. Of course, all the farms in that place were irrigated. The irrigation ditch that brought water to them from the Rio Grande was the chief feature of downtown Las Cruces in those days. My mother once told me that my father and a friend wrote a book about what she called ditchwater Spanish, which my father spoke fluently she said. That expression, ditchwater Spanish, suggests to me that my father and other boys, not all of them Anglo, must have played in and around that irrigation ditch much as I and my friends sneaked away and played in the dry creeks of Abilene. I have the address of the Las Cruces farm but think it exists no more. A 1998 photo shows only the railroad right of way. I’ll go to Las Cruces and look for it one of these days. My favorite of the handful of photos I have of the place is one I’ve used before, because it shows my grandmother and her four grown children. I should say too that I am grateful for all my photos of the Long Homestead to my cousin, Lorian Choate, and her husband, Brett Martin. Another I love just for the way it shows the house, is this winter picture.

But central to the lives of all of us who gathered from time to time at that farmhouse was the fact that we were inheritors of what we now sometimes call Indian removal. We were the first couple of generations of Americans who profited directly from that experiment in ethnic cleansing. But we didn’t think of our lives that way, and part of the reason we didn’t was that history had been cleansed for us as well, in Texas by the banishment of everything native American including the people, and in New Mexico by commodification. Our story, the story of our times and our places in them, was a story of migration into a place that had been empty of human culture before our arrival, or so we thought. Our stories of heroic journeying, cowboying, and the like, neglected to mention the people who had been there before us as human agents engaged in civilized life.

To be continued . . .

interim report

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The great, glaring ways in which my society’s norms have been morally wrong have pretty much always been obvious to me; though my understanding of the subleties and nuances of these wrongs has grown and changed over the years. It has been my privilege to work to change some of those norms and to see them replaced by others that I and many of my fellow citizens hope to be more humane. But there are other, less obvious norms that are the ground of my experience as well. Last week I participated as a spectator in a forum for candidates for mayor of my city. I attended a play at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, known affectionately as the Rep. I attended a St. Louis Symphony concert and a church service. I spent a day judging debates at a St. Louis Urban Debate League tournament.

In these activities I participated in the civic life of my locality. I affirmed my city by living and acting in it through corporate and conventional modes of behavior. I also ate meals at restaurants and with friends, shopped for goods at local stores, drove my automobile on local streets, visited with friends in their homes and enjoyed my own. By these and countless other actions, mailing letters, using electrical appliances, keeping up with the news, watching the Super Bowl, I pursued my social and civic life as I have for almost eight decades in various places in the United States of America. From my early youth until now I have known myself as a social creature, thinking that it was both my right and my duty to participate in my society’s formal civic life but also taking for granted a host of activities and pursuits that form the accidental and complex infrastructure that gives me a physical as well as a social connection to the turning earth, the seasons, the businesses of business and of learning, modes of intentionality that are as much a part of civic life as voting.

I know myself to be a historical actor too, as we all are, living within the stream of our times. It’s tempting sometimes to think that historical milieux can change suddenly and drastically, especially in revolutionary times—but that’s usually an illusion. What looks like sudden change upon inspection turns out to be the product of a gradual evolution. Such a consequence (e.g. the turn towards fascism in the world’s contemporary democracies) appears to have happened suddenly, or relatively suddenly, only because attention was focused elsewhere, engaged with images of an order of things that had long been imperiled. I mean to speak practically, not to propound a theory of history which I am not qualified to do. I also mean to speak from my own lived experience and from no one else’s. Events that might disconfirm my argument abound, the crashing of airplanes into New York’s world trade towers being perhaps the most recent large-scale Viking raid I have witnessed personally (albeit virtually). But the tensions in the middle east in the aftermath of the founding of Israel in 1948 were nothing new in 2001, and our country’s unfortunate involvement in fomenting and increasing those tensions off and on over the years was also old news. We Americans simply thought we were invincible, that our geopolitical situation preserved us from attack.

The political changes in my country have caused me to wonder if my thinking needs to change. I have understood myself as a liberal as long as I have been an adult. But I spent my professional life working in universities except for a period in the 1970s when I worked in the community arts movement, community arts having been an establishment effort not fundamentally different from the founding of land grant universities and community colleges. I am now realizing the extent to which these experiences gave me a situation and an identity in the center of American life, not on the fringes. What I am just fully realizing is that even though I participated in protests and voter drives during the 1960s and have had an albeit sometimes rocky love affair with today’s academic left, I thought of these things as expressions of civic virtue and not as revolutionary acts. Speaking for myself, it is a mistake to identify with claims of opposition to the center. We are capitalists in the United States, as Nancy Pelosi has recently pointed out. But being capitalist is not synonymous with being American. Capitalism is and ought to be subordinate to our evolved social vision. The New Deal got part of that relationship right, but only part. For many Americans, whole social groups indeed, were left out of the New Deal and denied the goods of American life by virtue of ethnicity, gender, or social class. Our public efforts, some of them misguided, to remedy the defects of the New Deal produced systemic stresses that eventually led to the top-heavy, overly bureaucratic infrastructure that the rightist insurgency has now seized and means to exploit for its own nefarious ends. But it is the evolved democratic social vision of the twentieth century that to my understanding remains the central project of American life and that of the evolved social democracies of the rest of the world, though many of them are presently being impacted by rightist insurgencies as well.

It is also a mistake to believe that the rightist insurgency in the U. S. is a demand for small government. It may have been that in the early days (though it is hard to think of HUAC and the McCarthyist witch hunts as small government projects), but by 1964 movement conservatism was clearly an ethnic nationalist coalition opposed to emerging social change and resentful of the declining world power of the United States as the Cold War continued. Nor is today’s rightist insurgency the sole projector of neoliberal economics. One of the rifts that could destabilize our emerging rightist government could pit neoliberals, both Democratic and Republican, in the congress against the economic nationalism of the executive régime. But I think it more likely that rightist forces will unify around rolling back regulations that protect citizens from corporations coupled with various repressive social policies: scapegoating immigrants and minorities, feminists, LGBTs, public schools and universities, unions, science and scientists, professionals of all sorts—a longer list could be made. Much of this will be done in the name of religion. While it is tempting to me to identify myself entirely in opposition to the rightist insurgency, I am beginning to understand that I care most as a citizen about preserving the evolved democracy I am coming to see as the main project of my lifetime and the lives of my family and parents and grandparents.

The rightist emergence in the developed democracies of the west seems sudden (if it does) because of its determination to undo history and because of its violence. We democrats (note the small d) are accused of violence when we protest, just as we are accused of having changed the world illegitimately, albeit we represent the slow evolution of western society towards democratic institutions (e.g. universal suffrage, equal access to education, health care, and other public goods for all persons regardless of race, religion, gender, social class, place of origin, etc.) And what may have begun in this country, seems to have begun if I consult my memory and my family’s, as what was billed in my youth as an effort to ‘restore free enterprise’ has now become a movement to destroy every vestige of democratic socialism among us by any means necessary—and the harm, the pain, the social dislocation and disruption this will cause are not accidental but intended as the means of reestablishing governance by what the rightist insurgency believes to be our legitimate ruling class: white, affluent persons who subscribe not only to a radical neoliberal economic ideology but also to a reactionary and paranoid set of social beliefs that for some are reinforced by a retrograde piety that calls itself Christian. Our current Vice President is representative here more nearly than his boss, but the President adds a beefed-up nationalism and overt kleptocracy to the already toxic mix of recommended rightist practice.

One can fault Edmund Burke for many things. He could not have been a feminist. His record with respect to slavery and colonial abuse, the two great issues of his time upon which he spent the most of his energies, is mixed and problematic. He was not a democrat in any sense of the term. His most famous writing is a tract attacking the French revolution; yet he more or less supported the American. To say these things, however, is to say only that he was a man of his time. Perhaps it is more important that he was a practicing politician, spending his career in the British House of Commons, that his writings have more of the character of obiter dicta than of philosophy. The last thing I want is to endorse the uses to which Burke’s ideas have been put by American movement conservatives. Indeed what seems useful to me at the moment is more nearly what Burke has come to represent in the history of ideas than what Burke actually said about politics or history. Burke’s understanding of the French revolution was deeply flawed, his reaction to it naïve and sentimental. But his position as a politician observing and reacting to what he took to be the destruction of the evolved society just across the channel accords very well with my position with respect to my country’s present history. I have claimed now several times that we are an evolved democracy in the United States. Like Edmund Burke, our founders did not approve of democracy; but we have evolved towards democratic institutions, particularly in the last century, just as we have made some efforts to remedy the consequences of slavery, the native American genocide, and our terrible record as a colonial power. Some have said, and used Burke as their justification, that this evolution has made us weak; I believe, on the contrary, it has made us strong. Now, our evolved democracy faces, if not extinction, at least a severe and cruel curtailment. I don’t need to rehearse the horrors of the past few weeks, only to allude to them and to the fact that they are being praised enthusiastically by representatives of the rightist electorate even whilst their leaders’ behavior horrifies most Americans and indeed most of the rest of the world.

I think protests have to continue, and I will participate as I am able. Beyond protest, I think we all have to organize better than we have ever done before in order to start winning again at the polls, to fight attempts to suppress our votes in the courts and where we fail, to mount massive voter drives to obtain credentials for the disfranchised. We need to participate in local politics. We need to support our local cultural and eleemosynary institutions as well as regional and national advocacy organizations that are doing the work of democratic resistance. We in the American democratic majority have presently lost the ability to command. Some of Burke’s thoughts about France might give us pause as to why that happened; but now, we stand to lose much more. For me, at least, the realization of what I have to lose, may have lost already, is what I have to defend. It is what I think Burke saw, beyond the specifics and with all his flaws and limitations, in the idea of a developed society. Our local institutions will hold for the time being, but we have lost the ethical center of our civilization. This makes conservatives of all of us who are lifelong liberals, and it means partly that liberalism and conservatism were never a binary opposition.

But it is the specifics that count the most. It isn’t enough just to be opposed to the rightist régime because it is duplicitous, authoritarian, bigoted, and violent. That’s one of the mistakes we made in last year’s election. We have to know what things we value in our civic life, and we now more than ever need to tell their stories—the stories of all those things we had come to take for granted as permanent in our lives and in the world. Why is it that I think the rightist insurgency threatens these things? My symphony orchestra is at least half female and includes a goodly proportion of players whose ethnicity is non-white. My church officially supports the ambitions of LGBT persons. Most of the candidates for the office of mayor in my city are African American. The St. Louis Urban Debate League serves St. Louis City Public Schools, most of whose students are African American. A recent play at the Rep involved a conflict between a gay man and the mother of his dead lover. My front window now features a poster welcoming refugees. The International Center just around the corner from my house is a haven for immigrants, as is my church, which also counts a number of same sex couples among its members. I am a supporter of Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and public media as well as my local art museum, botanical garden and zoo. I am a member of the League of Women Voters. From my perspective these facts are signs of the times and of my participation in the normal social life of my locality. From the perspective of the rightist insurgency, however, I am living in the middle of a politically correct community that needs to be brought into conformity with traditional values.