Liberals: Many Good Causes (Some Bad Attitude)

Among some "Facebook Friends" and some real-world former colleagues at Miami University (Ohio), there was a robust bit of debate about a New York Times opinion piece on by Gerard Alexander, identified as "a professor of political science at the University of Virginia," with the piece given the provocative title, "Liberals, You’re Not as Smart as You Think" (12 May 2018).

It's about Liberal hegemony in the entertainment and education fields, and Liberal condescension. And, of course, about zealotry in suppressing "microaggressions" and the occasional Right-wing to fascistic speaker on college campuses, and bad-mouthing opponents, e.g. supporters of Donald Trump. And it's worth reading and definitely important for Liberals (and Democrats) to think about moving into the major off-year elections of 2018.

I spent forty years as an academic, and I've been retired for a dozen; so I have a kind of liminal view from the edge, an important section of my "jagged orbit." From there, it looks like the most interesting analysis of Liberal snark might stem from a suggestion in Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011): many American academic Liberals are the spiritual descendants of traditional improving, reforming, good-government American Yankees and can be usefully thought of as Puritans without God.

This is an honorable tradition, at its most noble in its centrality to the American Abolition (of slavery) movement, and engaged in the crucial human purpose of tikkun olam, the healing, repair, and/or perfecting of the world. With or without God, such active citizens are necessary and useful, but often annoying. (And when armed, as in the 17th century, downright dangerous; but that lately hasn't been much of an issue.)

My more idiosyncratic complaint is with people on the academic Left who don't apply the sort of rigor they'd use in their fields — or even just rules of courteous debate — when it comes to politics.

Consider this example from recent (continuing, contentious) debate, as we American return to our intertwined hobbies of refighting our Civil War and judging one another and our/their ancestors. 

The US Civil War centered on slavery: that's clear from the documented record on secession. The motivation of individual soldiers, however — that can get complicated. Still, one can argue that whatever the motivation, the upshot of fighting for the Confederacy was waging war against the United States (hence, treason) and objective support of slavery, which had helped engender and preserve racism and in turn was supported by racism. So Confederate fighters of whatever motivation objectively supported Evil, while Union fighters supported the Good.

Now let's apply that sort of analysis to more recent American warfare. 

At least in its middle and end portions, US warfare in Vietnam and other places in Southeast Asia was primarily to prevent loss of face by the US and particularly Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who didn't want to be the first US president to lose a war. That the US lost and is still here and doing okay, and arguably would be doing better if we'd never fought (even if the Philippines and Indonesia were now Communist) — this shows that by definition no literally vital interests of the US were involved. And a war fought just for "The Great Game" is evil. Hence, those who fought the war on the US side, however pure their motivations, objectively supported Evil. Those who opposed the war did well, and those who avoided or evaded service at least didn't provide significant objective support to Evil. So we are to prefer Donald J. Trump and Dick Cheney in this for avoiding (or with DJT's bone spurs even evading) service, over, say, John Kerry's initial service fighting the US war in Vietnam. 

Objectively, applying the same sort of analysis that allows blanket condemnation of Confederates in the US Civil War.

That conclusion on Vietnam "would gag a maggot," even as would a comparably glib argument from the Right branding all anti-War activists as traitors, having given aid and comfort to the Communist Vietnamese enemy. For the Civil War debate, though, we on the Left can listen patiently to fellow citizens (e.g. James Webb) if they argue their Confederate ancestors hadn't much seen slaves let alone owning one and hated the slave-owning planter class. But they disliked and feared the Federal government more and really disliked Union troops on their territory. So rebels, yes, traitors technically, but not necessarily more racist than their Union military counterparts.

And so forth — including refraining already from bigoted badmouthing of "White Trash" and, on the positive side, taking care to differentiate between and among "racism" (an ideology), "bigotry" (more of a gut feeling), "prejudice" (prejudging on the basis of bias, not facts or experience), and "systemic injustices" (which are difficult to perceive if we're profiting from them). And we can at least pause before we accuse someone of what may be the oxymoron of "unconscious racism."

So: Keep up the good work, Liberal elite, godless Puritan Reformers! But on the way, lose the superior tone; it's not winning converts to the Cause. 

The U.S.A.: A Secular Federal Republic (Not a Nation)

The classics scholar William Arrowsmith said that the major ancient Greek tragedies dealt with the meaning of key terms politically-involved Athenians "contested," argued over.

We in the U.S. also have profound disagreements over basic terms. Case in point: America as a "Christian nation" (or a "White Christian nation") vs. the U.S. as a "secular Federal Republic" and not in a meaningful sense a nation at all.

We have no established church (synagog, mosque, or whatever), and Amendment One in our Bill of Rights forbids "an establishment of religion"; and, in a significant omission, "God" isn't mentioned in our Constitution. As a matter of official state policy, we're a secular establishment (which has been quite good for the various religions in American society: they're stronger than in most places with established religion).

And we're not a nation: one "ethnos" — people — with one origin and culture, and a history beginning "back in the mists of time" or even in an origin myth, all united by "blood and soil."

We're a hodgepodge; if you want a fancy image, a mosaic, the one I prefer, that thoroughly American dish, chop suey: one thing, sort of, but in complex ways. Collin Woodard counts "Eleven Regional Cultures of North America," and there are good historical reasons for that kind of regional analysis. For one thing, we're not only still kind of fighting the U.S. Civil War, but also the English struggles of the 17th century that separated out Puritans from less radical Christians.

Plus other ways that we're sliced and diced and divide ourselves up, which on balance is a good thing — *IF*

Our diversity is a good thing if, but only if, most Americans can see ourselves as «One Republic (if we can keep it)», with citizens unified by some agreement on basic terms, plus consciousness of what it's important for us to argue about and dedication to rules of civil contention and competition

Nation v. Republic

For he might have been a Roosian,  A French, or Turk, or Proosian,  Or perhaps Itali-an!

All.

Or perhaps Itali-an!

Boatswain.

But in spite of all temptations  To belong to other nations,  He remains an Englishman!  He remains an Englishman!

 — Gilbert and Sullivan, H.M.S. Pinafore

         My headnote from W. S. Gilbert's 1878 Pinafore lyrics includes a joke that some 20^th-century Americans missed, and some 21^st-century Americans might still miss.

         About 1599, in his Henry V, Shakespeare shows a British army in France with captains who are Welsh, Irish, Scottish, and English and who talk of those designations as their nations. Things hadn't changed much that way by the Victorian era in the 19^th century, nor with the mother of a friend of mine who corrected people who thought she was English by telling them she was Welsh. Nor during the run-up to Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee, when I saw a Union Jack only at a touristy place in the somewhat-United Kingdom and otherwise saw only the flags of the nations, especially, where I was, the English cross of St. George and the Scots cross of St. Andrew.

         The United Kingdom has one monarch, one flag of union, and four nations. And that's just one country we Americans refer to loosely as "England."

         "Nation" in the old sense was your tribe writ large: your ethnos, your people, and it wasn't something you chose, and it wasn't something you could change. You were born a Russian, Turk, French, or Prussian — and a Prussian damn well wasn't a Bavarian — and that was who you were.

         In that sense, Japan is a nation, and France is, sort of: France was pieced together from different independent medieval fiefs, and some Basques of France are getting restless, which gets one to the issue of Spain and the Basques and Catalans. And digging down a bit one would get to Québécois in Canada and, a bit further, such sensitive issues as Armenians in Turkey in the early 20^th century and the ethnic issues behind "ethnic cleansing" in the late 20^th century.

         In this sense of nation as "tribe writ large," the phrase "a nation of immigrants" makes sense only if you do a very fine-grain analysis of the old tribes and note that many of the big ones in historical times really weren't all that "blood and soil" pure-bred but more like confederations and semi-open communities.

         The First Peoples in the Western Hemisphere are also called "the Indian nations," and that's a plural. When the White folk arrived, they came from different cultures in Europe, and, indeed, even just what we call "the English" — "Albion's Seed" — came in different groups even more local than the current four UK nations and contributed to what Colin Woodard identifies as the "Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America" (American Nations, 2011).

         How we count those (North) American "nations" or see our histories — plural — and rivalries isn't crucial; the crucial point is that the USA has not been, is not now, and for a long time won't be, if ever, "one Nation, under God" (or atheist or pagan).

         And unless we exclude a whole lot of people, we're not "a White, Christian" — as in "I used to be Catholic, but now I'm Christian" — nation. (That Christian vs. Catholic line is a quotation from a student of mine: a nice guy I had a talk with on, let's say, religious nomenclature.)

         What we are, I think and hope, is what's identified in the old story of Benjamin Franklin's exiting the final session of the Constitutional Convention to be confronted by a woman who asked, in my paraphrase, «Well, Dr. Franklin, what kind of government have you given us […]?", answered with, «A republic, madam, if you can keep it.»

         We are, I think and hope, a republic, with a "mixt constitution" combining a rather monarchical President with an aristocratic Senate and a relatively democratic House of Representatives — as the Founders mostly intended, combined with a robust judiciary to check the other branches, and a professional bureaucracy to get the whole ungainly apparatus to work for what has become a large country.

         And we have citizens: people loyal to the Constitution (as much as they understand it) and to ideals in what has been called a civic religion, celebrated most especially on the Fourth of July, the anniversary of the signing of our Declaration of Independence, one basis of American ideals.

         The Republic, of course, is kind of abstract and intellectual, but, then, you can't touch or smell or literarily feel a nation. Corporations are "fictive persons," but they exist, and money is just paper — or electrons in motion nowadays — backed up by convention and imagination and faith. The Nation also is a matter of symbols, rituals, origin myths, and stories, and in a better world than this one would be a safe and easy way to get emotional commitment to the State.

         In the world we actually have, the Nation gets emotional attachment much too easily, leading far too often to almost idolatrous attachment to symbols and a warm and fuzzy feeling of absorption into the tribe.

         Screw that. Or screw the extremes of "that": the xenophobic chauvinism summed up in Mel Brooks's joke about the first national anthem: "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Seventy-six!" Screw unthinking infatuation with our little tribes, with us.

         What we need instead is a mature love for the homeland we were born into or have adopted, a firm patriotism for the American Republic as an ideal and a hope for human dignity. The Republic as a great experiment in self-rule, what Abraham Lincoln called "the last best hope of earth" if we can maintain our Union and expand freedom. We can strive for a nation embodied in a Republic worthy of our love and even that "last full measure of devotion" for the ideal celebrated by Lincoln: the poet of the Republic as "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" — which God forbid should ever be replaced by the low appeal of just another arrogant, self-absorbed band of nationalists deluded by the myths of blood, soil, and ethnic purity.

Defining "American"

            In a letter to the editor of The Ventura County Star for February 15, 2017, Ray Sobrino Jr. of Newbury Park, CA, ended with the admonishment to "remember we are all Americans in the end." I won't argue with the letter or even the sentiment of this clause, but I will reword it to, "we are all Americans if you pull back and take a long-distance view of ourselves" — because close up we see important differences.

            One set of differences is political, and nowadays that's pretty obvious with continuing support for Donald Trump from most of the 46.1% of voters who votedfor him and continuing opposition from many of the 48.2% who voted for Hillary Clinton — and at least some of the nearly 6% of the electorate who voted for someone else and the large number of people who just didn't vote. 

            More important, there are deep and long-stand differences you can analyze in many ways, but my current favorite is Colin Woodard's American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2014) and the idea that there is no single American nation but either none or up to eleven, depending on how you define "nation."

            Most of us on the territory of the United States are citizens of the American Republic, and we mostly agree on loyalty to the Republic. What holds us together is our agreeing to argue over what the Republic should be, who should be members, and what sort of society we should try to build.

            "We are all Americans" — and then we fight over what that should mean.

Immigrants: Excluded or Melted Down

The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.

Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

— Leviticus 19.34 (New International Version)

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me […]" —
"And we'll send 'em right back, we'll send 'em right back,

we'll send 'em right back to you!"

— Quoting from memory, Mad Magazine, 1960s or so,

 and "The Critical Mom" website

            My father's father came to the US a couple steps ahead of the Czar's secret police. He, my grandfather had killed a Cossack. The family story is that my grandfather killed the Cossack while the Cossack was raping my grandfather's sister during a pogrom. That's our story, and I'm sticking with it, but if my grandfather had waited a couple days to kill the rapist, or had killed the Cossack as a servant of the Czar in an unfortunately premature burst of revolutionary zeal — that would be okay with me.

            The Cossacks are among the groups who suffered under Stalin, and that suffering should be respected, but at the beginning of the 20^th century many Cossacks served the Russian Empire, and for all of my dedication to nonviolence I won't speak badly of killing a Czarist rapist.

            From a US immigration point of view, however, my grandfather was a wanted criminal, and I assume he'd have been stopped at Ellis Island and returned to Russia if he'd given his right name and explained the reasons for his emigration.

            We can be sure my grandfather did not give his full story at Immigration and that far, which is pretty darn far, was an "illegal."

            Alternatively, in terms of interpretation, not facts, he was a refugee from an openly autocratic regime — "Autocrat" was part of the Czar's title — an openly if not always effectively autocratic regime that use pogroms and rape to keep down restive populations, e.g., the Jews.

* * *

            In its edition for 4 February 2017, The Ventura County Star ran an excellent column by Jerry Schwartz, titled and arguing that the "US has [a] long history of barring immigrants," and the 247 words above in black constitute my initial reaction. I ended up e-mailing a different response, since I kind of wanted the headnotes for this one, and because what I wanted to say took more than 250 words.

            There's more to US problems on this issue than Right-wing (usually) exclusion of us undesirables; there are also less deadly but still significant Lefty attitudes toward us "wretched refuse." Now refuse as a noun, the Oxford Learner's Dictionary tells advanced students means "waste material that has been thrown away," and is that sense is almost neutral: many were indeed cast off, "thrown away." However, the Oxford folk inform those advanced students of English that "refuse (noun)" has as synonyms in N. American English "garbage" and "trash" and among the Brits "rubbish."

            So the more progressive sorts sincerely and usually compassionately wanted to de-trashify our late-19^th and early 20^th-century ancestors — and later, too — by getting us to lose them there hyphens ("Irish-American," "Italian-American," "Jewish-American") and assimilate. Note the word: not "integrate" but assimilate, with the image of assimilation the great melting pot, which you should picture.

            It's a nicer image than trash collection — nowadays maybe recycling — but we foreign metals were to be thrown into a pot, subjected to heat sufficient that the metals liquefy, with individuals if not in the physics/chemistry sense definitely in the sociological sense atomized, and these radically individual individuals combined into a complex alloy: American. Except the alloy would be basically Anglo-Saxon WASP, at least in Yankee theory.

            And to a great extent this happened: if not in the first or maybe even second generation, most of the "Unmeltable Ethnics" melted at least a bit, assimilating into one or another of what Colin Woodard counts as "[…] The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. To some extent, the immigrant cultures and individuals changed the surrounding culture, but for the most part we were assimilated to them.

            And this assimilation isn't so bad a thing insofar as a good deal is necessary for a nonBalkanized country, and a fair number of immigrant cultures have aspects we can just as well do without — sexism, for example, some tribalism, disrespect for education — but, then, so do some of our regional cultures (sexism, racism, clannishness, xenophobia, macho violence, privilege, puritanical snobbery, elitism, anti-intellectualism (that stuff).

            Still, the ideal probably should be integration, not assimilation, and the image a well-made quilt, or, to get less artsy-craftsy, chop suey: that great American-Chinese hodge-podge of leftovers to simmer and sell to people who don't know high-class Chinese cuisine.

            Also, assimilation "to a great extent" has not meant total assimilation, and things can get complicated in an area such as "El Norte" in Woodard's dividing up the map: an area covering large parts of south-western US and the north of Mexico. And things can get complicated where different regional cultures, meet and overlap, places where there have been some important recent waves of migration: places where I have lived pretty much my entire life.

            I was born in Terre Haute, Indiana; grew up in the Lake View District of Chicago — where politics were largely ethnic politics — attended college in central Illinois, where the Midwest meets "Greater Appalachia"; spent a year at Cornell University in radically rural Ithaca, NY, living with guys from "The City" of New York; taught for 35 years in S.W. Ohio, in the non-Kentucky area J. D. Vance talks about in Hillbilly Elegy, but at very much up-scale, largely Roman Catholic Miami University at Oxford, OH (with occasional trips to and gigs at our campuses in Hamilton and Middletown). And I now live in southernmost Ventura County, where Woodard's El Norte meets "The Left Coast," but in a town where more than half the people are not Hispanic but ¡Por Dios Mexicanos y Americanos!, and often here a long time before the gringos showed up.

So: The United States has a very mixed record meeting immigrants and in treating like immigrants or worse people here first — including Native Americans, whom I haven't discussed here, not to mention Africans who didn't immigrate but were kidnapped and enslaved. And this record didn't improve all that much in the 20^th century when our behavior — usually that's "our" in quotation marks, for our predecessors — when "our" behavior was frequently, well, despicable: when we let fear and bigotry over-rule our feelings of compassion and knowledge of basic ethics.

            We can do better. This time around, let us be of good courage, show some decency, and do better.