The Long View

The State and Populism

As we will see in a moment, the recent news that the temple begat the city actually speaks to our current condition:

Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist [Klaus Schmidt] waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn't just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago -- a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture -- the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember -- the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

The dating for this find will get a second look, and a third. If true, it's almost as surprising as the discovery of Atlantis would be. (For a more sober account, look here.) As for the hypothesis that urbanization began around ceremonial centers, the surprising aspect of this report is that anyone would consider the suggestion surprising. To the extent that the origin of the city can be equated with the origin of the state, even the wicked Baron Evola had thoughts along these lines. (And speaking of wickedness, we may also note that Genesis 4:17 is the first mention in the Bible of the founding of a city, and Cain was the founder.)

Be that as it may, wherever the state has existed throughout history it has always had a special ontological status. It's not quite like other institutions, quite aside from the question of the monopoly of legitimate violence (which, in fact, it does not always claim). Certainly the American founding as evidenced in the Declaration of Independence posits a transcendental justification for the state that might have been written at almost any earlier point in the history of the West. Still, a certain ambiguity about the role of the state runs through American history. We see an expression of it in the attempt by Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru to answer the vexed question: just what does Movement Conservatism seek to conserve?

What do we, as American conservatives, want to conserve? The answer is simple: the pillars of American exceptionalism. Our country has always been exceptional. It is freer, more individualistic, more democratic, and more open and dynamic than any other nation on earth. These qualities are the bequest of our Founding and of our cultural heritage. They have always marked America as special, with a unique role and mission in the world: as a model of ordered liberty and self-government and as an exemplar of freedom and a vindicator of it, through persuasion when possible and force of arms when absolutely necessary.

The survival of American exceptionalism as we have known it is at the heart of the debate over Obama's program. It is why that debate is so charged. In his first year, Obama tried to avoid the cultural hot buttons that tripped up Bill Clinton and created the "gays, guns, and God" backlash of 1994. But he has stoked a different type of cultural reaction. The level of spending, the bailouts, and the extent of the intervention in the economy contemplated in health-care and cap-and-trade legislation have created the fear that something elemental is changing in the country. At stake isn't just a grab bag of fiscal issues, but the meaning of America and the character of its people: the ultimate cultural issue.

The problem is that the pillars of American exceptionalism may not be located quite where this analysis assumes. Walter Russell Mead, no stranger to visitors of this site, has this thumbnail historical survey of populist attitudes toward state action:

Yes, the Tea Partiers represent something very old in American life and in some ways they want a return to traditional American values, but the traditional American value that inspires them the most is the value of revolutionary change. The Tea Party movement is the latest upsurge of an American populism that has sometimes sided with the left and sometimes with the right, but which over and over again has upended American elites, restructured our society and forced through the deep political, cultural and institutional changes that from time to time the country needs and which the ruling elites cannot or will not deliver...My guess would be that the Tea Party movement is part of a very big wave. The link between a business driven agenda of modernization and reform and a populist agenda for empowerment, deregulation and attacks on privileged professions which are also costly economic bottlenecks is what, historically, has driven many of the populist movements that change the face of the country. That was true in the Jacksonian era and again during the progressive era and the New Deal when the desires of a left of center populism meshed with corporate needs for a stronger national framework of policy and regulation. It was true when the Republican Party pushed through the wave of changes and restructurings in the 1860s that ushered in the rise of the national industrial economy. It is equally true of the right of center populism that now seems to be taking shape...

In this connection, we may note what Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West says about the resolution of the "Crisis of the 17th Century." Spengler's formulation of that era is that, everywhere in Europe, the State fought Society. In continental Europe, the State usually won. Things were different across the English Channel, however:

In England the victory of the gentry and the Declaration of Rights (1689) in reality put an end to the State. Parliament put William III on his throne, just as it later prevented George I and George II from vacating theirs, in the interest of its class. The word "State," which had been current as early as the Tudors, fell into disuse -- it has become impossible to translate Louis XIV's "L’état c’est moi" or Frederick the Great's "Ich bin der erste Diener meiner Staates." On the other hand, the word "society" established itself as the expression of the fact that the nation was "in form" under the class- and not under the state-régime; the same word that with a significant misunderstanding Rousseau and the Continental rationalists generally took over to express the hatred of the Third Estate for authority. But in England authority as "the Government" was clear-cut and well understood...

We may note that it is entirely possible to translate Frederick's remark as "I am the first servant of my State," but Americans and some other Anglosphere types have to translate the translation to understand that the speaker was not claiming to be a senior civil servant in Albany or Sacramento.

In any case, an American conservatism might reasonably be expected to conserve the Glorious Revolution attitude toward the state, which does in fact persist in America. The Constitution and the nation are sacrosanct; government gets no such deference. As Meade's summary suggests, however, this attitude toward the state has not implied any particular suspicion of government action in itself. Questions like the role of command economic or public utilities are irrelevant to the point: they arose after American political culture gelled. For that matter, there is no logical connection between a high status for the state and command economics: some of the most uppity states in the history of the West have in fact promoted laissez faire. It's not an accident that phrase is French.

Again: populist suspicions of authority based on status is an insistence of American culture; libertarian economics is not.