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In Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, the Devil at one point says:

“When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. Am I not in your books and stories and beliefs, from the first settlements on? […] I am merely an honest American like yourself — and of the best descent — for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours.”

It’s a very interesting story, for it is very patriotic–jingoistic, even–but it doesn’t deny the unpleasant parts of American history, either.

I was reminded of this on hearing the recent controversy over Rick Santorum’s comment that Satan “has his sights on… a good, decent, powerful, influential country – the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age. [sic] There is no one else to go after other than the United States“.

First of all, as I said before, I’m not a religious person. And also, I have no intention of voting for Rick Santorum. I do not plan to vote for any Republican candidate, and even if I did, Santorum would be my third choice out of the current field of four. So, I am not defending him here.

However, it doesn’t quite make sense to me why this is such a big deal. I mean, it is a (in my opinion, regrettable) fact that this country is not going to elect a President who does not publicly profess to be a Christian anytime soon. We have had Presidents who were not very religious in the past, of course, but nobody knew it then, because they kept it to themselves. Personally, I think this is a sub-optimal state of affairs, but there’s no point in denying it.

So, given that, and given that the Bible talks about this “Satan” figure rather a lot, why should anybody be surprised to hear Santorum talking about him? I mean, if you believe in the Bible, as Christians are supposed to do, it seems like you’ll probably end up believing in Satan, too. Now, I know some Christians regard him as an actual guy with horns who is out there somewhere, and some think of him more as a symbolic character representing “Evil”. It seems to me that Santorum’s comments could be read either way, as well. Why is everyone so surprised? Did people actually not realize what Santorum believes before now?

So, with that said, I personally don’t care for what he says in this speech at all, and it has very little to do with the Satan bit, and almost everything to do with deeper, philosophical issues. Again, it’s interesting to contrast the ideas in The Devil and Daniel Webster with Santorum’s remarks. Here’s part of Daniel Webster’s big speech from Benét’s  story:

[Webster] talked of the early days of America and the men who had made those days… He admitted all the wrong that had ever been done. But he showed how, out of the wrong and the right, the suffering and the starvations, something new had come. And everybody had played a part in it, even the traitors.

Santorum:

[Satan] didn’t have much success in the early days. Our foundation was very strong, in fact, is very strong. But over time, that great, acidic quality of time corrodes even the strongest foundations. And Satan has done so by attacking the great institutions of America, using those great vices of pride, vanity, and sensuality as the root to attack all of the strong plants that has [sic] so deeply rooted in the American tradition.

Like I said, both the story and Santorum’s speech are basically advancing nationalistic viewpoints, and yet Benét’s story has a much more optimistic–dare I say it, “progressive”–theme to it, whereas Santorum’s is a dark vision of decadence. I just think that’s kind of interesting. Of course, Benét wrote that in 1937–maybe he would be firmly in the Santorum camp if he were around today. Who knows?

Nationalist conservatives nowadays are very reluctant to entertain the notion of wrongdoing in the early days of the country. It’s curious–I think their narrative requires that everything be wonderful until the damned liberals showed up.

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The new austerity measures the E.U. is imposing on Greece have caused quite a backlash. As this article in the Financial Times notes, a lot of the Greek anger is directed at Germany. Of course, because the Greeks are in Greece, all they can do is riot against their own government, not the German one. As is usually my opinion of rioting, this seems idiotic. I don’t see what good destroying Greek property will do to convince the Germans that these austerity measures are a bad idea.

Roman Gerodimos at CNN sums up the larger political picture in Greece:

The role of the state and of the public sector is usually at the heart of political debates between left and right. Yet, for the first time in recent memory, the political battle lines in Greece are not drawn between left and right, but between the modernizers and the populists existing in most political parties across the spectrum.

I don’t know the details of Greek politics, but that first sentence is wildly inaccurate for most of the world as far as I know. Indeed–and this is usually more true in Europe than in the U.S.–things usually make much more sense if you read “nationalist” for “right-wing”. And nationalists, as we know, are concerned only with the role of the state as it relates to the people and the culture of a nation. Maybe Greece is different, but in my experience, most debates over “the role of the state” are not really over the role of the state. They are proxy debates between cosmopolitanism and nationalism.

There’s more than that at play here though, because the nationalists in Greece are mad at Germany for imposing austerity measures, and the German nationalists are mad at the Greeks for squandering their money. And in the meantime, the cosmopolitan E.U. officials from both countries seem to have come to a truly terrible solution, so the lack of faith in them is understandable. But not only are the nationalist groups in both countries mad at the E.U., they are also mad at the nationalists in the other country. This is often the way with nationalists.

(And, of course, the terrible economic situation is largely the result of mismanagement by materialist business interests.)

As I look at it, in the above sentence from the CNN article, the modernizers are “cosmopolitans” and the populists are “nationalists”. Thus, the true nature of the conflict has not really changed, it has only become more obvious.

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Sometimes I feel that I am not as mature as I should be. For example, when I was reading this article by David Brooks entitled “Where Are the Liberals?”, I couldn’t help thinking of a modification to the song Hugh Laurie sings in this sketch, replacing his words with “Where are the Libs?”

Yes, I know I have issues. Anyway, though, I think I know the answer to Brooks’s question “why aren’t there more liberals in America?” It is because what we call “Conservatism” today is a (sometimes tenuous) alliance between two different philosophies, Nationalism and Materialism, whereas “Liberalism” basically reduces down to one philosophy: Cosmopolitanism.  

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John Nichols at The Nation writes of how Fox News dealt with Obama echoing Theodore Roosevelt in a speech. In brief, some Fox pundits asserted that Roosevelt was a socialist. Nichols writes in rebuttal:

“Roosevelt, in his ‘New Nationalism’ speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, did outline an agenda that supported the establishment of programs like Social Security and Medicare, protections against discrimination, union rights and expanded democracy. In effect, he was arguing for what, under his fifth cousin, Franklin, would come to be known as “the New Deal.”

Some of those proposals were promoted by the Socialist Party in the early years of the twentieth century, which certainly made arguments in its platforms for safety-net programs. But so, too, did moderate Republicans and Democrats. After the ‘Gilded Age’ of robber barons and corporate monopolies, there was mainstream support for tempering the excesses of laissez faire capitalism.”

The people who have been called “socialists” have many different ideas, and the major commonality I can see is a belief that something ought to be done to alleviate poverty. If this is the definition, then Roosevelt was a socialist. If, on the other hand, socialism means wanting the workers to seize the factors of production then Roosevelt was not a socialist. And if socialism is believing that the government should reallocate resources–as many Conservatives seem to think it is these days–then Roosevelt, along with virtually every other person in history who ever ran a country, was definitely a socialist.

Still, it is significant that Roosevelt’s policies were similar to those of socialists at the time. Maybe he was merely a pragmatist, and found that the easiest way to thwart radical socialism was to allow for moderate socialism. Does that make him a socialist? I don’t know; I think it makes him a practical politician.

To my mind, T.R. was something of a market socialist, though I think before anything else he just wanted a powerful United States, and was just willing to do what it took to make that happen. I don’t think he was really invested in socialism. But I will admit that, on the face of it, the “New Nationalism” agenda seems like it have made the country closer to being Socialist than it had been previously.

You may decide for yourself if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. 

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This post is going to be a little different from what I normally do. Usually, when writing about history especially, I try to research things very carefully before I post them. This time, however, I can’t really do that because what I want to talk about is so complex a subject it would take me a whole career’s worth of work to be sure of everything.

Instead, I’m just going to use the facts I already know, and give my opinion on this subject as an amateur student of history. If you find errors, please point them out to me in the comments. I realize I’m risking making an idiot out of myself, but in my (again, amateurish) reading, I’ve come to have one or two ideas. Obviously, if I find any information in the future which contradicts what I say here, I shall correct it ASAP.

Now then, let’s talk about the Soviet Union. Conservatives I know frequently point to it as what happens when “leftism” runs amok. Are they right?

First of all, as some readers may know, I try to ignore the right-left spectrum and examine politics using the framework of Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Materialism.  But where does the Soviet Union fit in to this model?

Let me begin by saying that Karl Marx’s theory was anti-nationalistic and, in the sense I mean it, anti-materialistic. While it is true Marx called his philosophy a “materialist conception of history”, what I mean by “anti-materialist” is that he opposed the concentration of material wealth through greedy, capitalistic means. He sought rather to redistribute material wealth to improve people’s lives. As he and Engels wrote in The German Ideology:

“[A]s soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic and must remain so if he does not wish to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” 

And as they wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

“The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got…

National differences, and antagonisms between peoples, are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.”

This mixture of anti-greed and anti-nationalism immediately put his philosophy at a strategic disadvantage, for it was forced to combat both of these forces at once. However, it was fundamentally a cosmopolitan, universalist endeavor, to improve life for people the world over. This was the motivating idea even after Marxism had taken over Russia and formed the Soviet Union. The anthem “The Internationale” signified this, as did the slogan “Workers of the World, unite!”

But then something very interesting happened. In the 1920s, Mussolini was getting lots of attention for his system of “fascism”. As Jonah Goldberg (among others) pointed out in one of those rare correct observations that make him such a frustrating writer, Mussolini had dreamed up fascism when he noticed that appealing to nationalism made it more popular than adhering to the usual internationalist tendencies.

I don’t think this escaped Stalin for one minute. He noticed what Mussolini was doing and began to imitate him. Fascism swept Europe in the ’30s, and the Soviet Union was not spared, though it tried to seem as if it had been.

It was Stalin, then, who fundamentally destroyed any meaning Communism may have had; by changing it into more of a Russian-nationalist movement. By shifting the nature of the State to what was essentially an ultra-collectivist form of what we might today call “fascism”, Stalin rendered it a mere exercise in the pursuit of Power, without real philosophical significance. It was not quite an ultranationalist movement, given Marx’s foundation, but nor was it an international movement. After Stalin took power, it was similar to many of the other governments in Europe at the time, but unlike Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, its leader was not even “honest” about its true nature.

(It was for these Nationalist reasons, also, that Leon Trotsky was exiled from the party. Trotsky remained a committed Internationalist kind of Marxist, and hence had no place in Stalin’s Government.)

This led to all sorts of confusion, especially in the way of liberal intellectuals feeling a need to defend (or deny) certain actions taken by the Soviet Union despite the fact that it really wasn’t on their side.

Nationalists will claim I am only saying this to excuse the cosmopolitans from responsibility, to claim that they do not deserve blame for the atrocities committed by the Soviet Union. They will claim that I am using a tautological reasoning system whereby all people who do bad things are automatically, by the fact itself, nationalists.

Well, I have deliberately tried not to do this. There were genuinely internationalist communists who committed atrocities. And the Communist system seems to lead almost inevitably to authoritarian systems of government, whatever Marx may have intended. And those sorts of systems usually lead to atrocities, no matter who is in charge.

Those who wish to point to the Soviet union as a failure of the “left-wing” may still do so, for it was a cosmopolitan idea that gave it philosophical power. However, in the event, it was a failure largely because of its susceptibility to being taken over by nationalistic forces.

What if there hadn’t been any nationalist shift? What if Trotsky had gotten rid of Stalin? Would it have been a Heaven on Earth, as some people desperately wanted it to be? Very unlikely. It is clear that the allocation of resources under the Communist system was very flawed. This would have been a problem, sooner or later, no matter who was running the show. Might there have been fewer casualties resulting from the Soviet Union’s actions? Possibly so.

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 “[Thanksgiving’s] essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers’ holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production.”–Ayn Rand, quoted. by Debi Ghate in Capitalism Magazine.

“Thanksgiving is as close as we get to a nationalist holiday in America (a country where nationalism as a concept doesn’t really fit). Thanksgiving’s roots are pre-founding, which means its not a political holiday in any conventional sense. We are giving thanks for the soil, the land, for the gifts of providence which were bequeathed to us long before we figured out our political system.”–Jonah Goldberg of National Review, quoted. in Wikisource.

“They [the Plymouth settlers] may have contemplated a system of complete religious and civil democracy, or they may not. They may have found their communist practices agreeable to their notion of a sound and just social order, or they may not. The point is that while apparently they might be free enough to found a church order as democratic as they chose, they were by no means free to found a civil democracy, or anything remotely resembling one, because they were in bondage to the will of an English trading-company.”–Albert Jay Nock. Our Enemy, the State. [Italics mine.]

The first thing to note about all these quotes is that they are from people who would all be classified today as “conservative”.

Because our two major political factions cannot be relied upon to agree even about the weather, it is perhaps unsurprising that they cannot reach a consensus about what went on nearly 400 years ago. This temporal distance does not stop them from assuming it vindicated their platform, however.

There is a running argument about the nature of the economy which existed at the time of the first Thanksgiving. The Conservatives hail it as a triumph of the free market, whereas Liberals tend to view it as a product of  “communal” sharing. From my cursory reading, it seems to have been a result of socializing the private gains, which is a form of “welfare capitalism”, or “market socialism”–whichever you prefer to call it.

One thing I don’t understand about this debate is that no one addresses the issue of currency. In fact, I don’t know if they had currency, it was probably a barter system, which introduces the question of whether people were sharing or just bartering at Thanksgiving. If anyone reading this knows, please enlighten me.

In any event, the argument about the economics of Thanksgiving is small potatoes compared with the social and philosophical debates. The Nationalists use Thanksgiving to celebrate the soil itself, as Goldberg says, and sing the praises of the European founders of the Nation. For instance, two years ago, A.W.R Hawkins wrote in Human Events:

“When Thanksgiving became an official, national holiday in 1941 it retained its focus on God, the freedoms we enjoy as Americans, and the rich fruits of Western Civilization…

[A]ny attempt to reduce [Thanksgiving] to a secular celebration is a bogus attempt to deny the God-centered focus of this particular holiday. It is also a ploy to downplay the bounty of freedoms and rights that flow to us by birth and are protected by the traditions and cultural norms of Western Civilization.” 

The Cosmopolitan intellectuals, on the other hand, will reflect and mourn upon the fate which was to befall the Natives at the hands of the settlers. The late Howard Zinn wrote a good deal about this, much to the fury of Republicans.

For my part, I’ve never been big on dictating what the “meaning” of the holiday ought to be. There are some holidays that do have a specific meaning, but to me, Thanksgiving is a day that doesn’t really have or need any political meaning. But if people choose to invest it with same, I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it.

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Recently, I’ve been listening to a lot of Cowboy/Western music. I never used to have any interest in the genre, but having heard some of it in the game Fallout: New Vegas, I became intrigued enough to sample some more of it. In general, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I like it. I particularly like the song “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky“.

One interesting idea came to me while reading about the genre. According to the Wiki article on Western music, “by the 1960s, Western music was in decline“. Now, I don’t like to politicize everything, and this really is reaching to make a connection, but I wonder if this is related to the changing role of nationalism as a force in this country at that time.

Most Western music is based on a relationship to the landscape and the romanticizing of times past. It is hardly a coincidence, either, that it has become associated with “country” music, which is probably the type of music most favored by the politically conservative today. Also, there is a strong “law and order” element in many of them; for example, Marty Robbins had at least three songs about an outlaw being gunned down by lawmen.

Since the 1960s, the nationalistic elements of society have been simultaneously more vocal and less powerful. And it is perhaps not surprising that the Cowboy song’s fortunes have waned along with them, for the cowboy is probably the primary symbol for American nationalists. (That’s probably also why their favorite President strove to create a “cowboy” image.)

But still, it would be too easy to read too much into all this, and find ourselves making absurd generalizations. Even though country and Western songs may have underlying nationalistic elements, it does nothing to prevent liberals like me from enjoying them.

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Leonard Pitts mentions a revealing fact in a column on the “Occupy Wall Street” movement:

“By one measure at least, the movement that began with Occupy Wall Street is already bigger than the tea party ever was.

According to a report in the Washington Post, Occupy rallies were held in over 900 cities around the country and across the globe last weekend. The tea party is big, but it is not known to have had an impact in Barcelona, London, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Brussels, Munich, Rome, Sydney, Manila, Lisbon, Paris and Zurich.”

I consider this important because it is symptomatic of the difference in the movements. We all knew, almost instinctively, that OWS was a liberal movement, just as we all knew instinctively the “Tea Party” was a conservative one.

And liberals–cosmopolitans, as I like to say–are all over the world and, I think, feel a vague sense of unity with one another. Conservative nationalists are also all over the world, but they do not always feel the same unity, because, after all, what is good for one nation may not be good for another.

There are nationalist movements in every nation, and sometimes one is allied with another, but just as often they are in direct opposition. A cosmopolitan movement is by definition international. This, I suspect, is partly  how each movement was so easily sorted as “liberal” or “conservative”.

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It’s always, ah, interesting to read the ultra-conservative blogs. For instance, I see Robert Stacy McCain (no relation to John) linked to this piece on “Women on the Left” at a site called “Alternative Right“.

The author, Alex Kurtagic, makes two basic arguments–the first, particularly, is a very basic argument, in much the same way that an abacus is a very basic supercomputer. This argument is this: liberal women are less attractive than conservative women. This argument is (a) not true and (b) irrelevant to the merits of the ideologies. It’s this sort of thing that gives internet political discourse a bad name.

But I’m not here to tell you that our conservative friends oftentimes say ridiculous things. You already know that. What I want to get to is Kurtagic’s other point, which is that the change from women being housewives to getting jobs is bad. He says:

“[W]hat the Left has done for women is trade one form of slavery for another… 

Some women certainly enjoy sacrificing everything for a remunerative career, and some even achieve those careers, but they comprise a minority. Most women, like most people, work only to pay the bills, and only tell themselves they enjoy their work because that is the only way they can stand it: most women, like most people, are bored by it and spend their weeks longing for the next weekend and dreading the following Monday.” 

Well, amazingly, I think this is probably true. It sounds plausible, anyway, which is more than you can say for the other claim. But I doubt it was because “the Left” is secretly a misogynist conspiracy and more of a case of poor estimation on the changes in wage rates over half a century. And of course, the fact that women asked for this freedom suggests they thought it was preferable to the current “find a man” model of the time.

The really interesting thing, though, is the quite devastating critique embedded in this article of capitalism and its effects on workers. It’s a pretty tough, but fair, in my view, assessment of the way business treats its employees. And yet, for all that, if somebody as mainstream conservative as R.S. McCain is linking to it, it likely means it is approved of by the free-market, supply-side crowd, even though I gather that “Alternative Right” is a site dedicated to pushing “social conservatism”.   Or, to use my preferred term, it is a site for nationalists.  (Kurtagic hints that laissez-faire capitalism is a flavor of liberalism, implying that it is bad.)

I bring this up only as one more data point demonstrating the incredible contradictions between the two wings of the Republican party.

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I came across a very interesting blog called “Noahpinion”. One post that particularly caught my eye was one that relates to the issue of the Southerners and the Tea Party, which has been under discussion here lately. The author, Noah Smith, makes a lot of great points in it, but he also makes what I think is a somewhat significant error. He writes:

“It seems to me – and this part is a guess and a supposition – that white Southern conservatives just don’t have a lot of nationalism – at least, not for the nation they currently inhabit. They seem to feel, instinctively, that the United States of America is only “their country” when one of their own is in power… 

When Southern white conservatives talk about the “real America,” or cry “I want my America back!”, my instinct says that they are talking about an America that the United States has never been – a white racial nation.” 

This description of their behavior is largely true, although I am by no means certain that just because they are nationalistic means they long for a white-only nation. But the behavior described here is, in fact, textbook nationalism. Nationalists are frequently in direct opposition to their own government, if they feel that government is run by cosmopolitan intellectuals. I consider this one of the defining characteristics of nationalism.

As longtime readers may know, I like to quote from, of all things, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism on this subject:

“Patriots revere ideas, institutions, and traditions of a particular country and its government. The watchwords for nationalists are ‘blood’, ‘soil’, ‘race’, ‘Volk’, and so forth.”

And this quote requires I briefly quote myself from another post on the subject: “This definition, I think, makes it too easy to categorize Nationalists as simple racists.” I do think nationalism, although often associated with racism, is not the same thing, and the two need not always go together.

So what Smith is really describing here, I think, is the difference between patriotism and nationalism. Ultimately, of course, what’s really important is that he describes their behavior quite well, even if he uses unconventional terminology.

(Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan.)