A Changeling Has Been Put In The Cradle of American Culture

It is tempting to go on with that last passage but I will jump ahead.  After a long and fascinating passage about Americans in the period around the Civil War and the role Karl Marx certainly played in the thinking of American figures as iconic as Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe Marilynne Robinson continues: 

I am haunted by the sense that a changeling has been put in the cradle of American culture.  Adam Smith, the supposed capitalist, whose influence among us is notorious, developed an economic system in which prison, the poorhouse, and starvation have no role and in which the flourishing of the people ( a term he prefers to "the poor") is the desired end.  Compare the Fabians, those most sedulous of strainers of mercy, Why are Smith's proposals for public projects to enhance the economy, taxes that weigh less heavily on the poor than the rich, and education to alleviate the effects of industrial work, called capitalist, while subsidies of the cost of labor and visits of inspection to the homes of the poor to assure that their destitution was perfect before they were relieved - that women had sold their wedding rings, for example - are called socialist?  Why do the Land Grant Act, the Homestead Act, and the G.I. Bill, three distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain, have no status among political events, when the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as an advance of socialism?

We must find a political and moral clarity that will enable us to address the starkest problems of survival, if the world is to have any hope.  For a long time now, socialists have claimed an exceptional interest in the well-being of the generality of people, a special inclination to humanize collective life.  But the history of socialism is disheartening.  It is too strongly associated with repression, and these ties are too casually dismissed, for socialism to be conceded the special virtues it claims for itself.  Plutonium manufacture and radioactive waste dumping are enterprises for the British government, and as good a proof as one could wish that government ownership in itself means nothing.  The pattern identified by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the accumulation of capital through the destruction of wealth is fully present in Sellafield.  British socialism has always been no more than the left hand washing the right, and yet for years it has compelled the admiration of American socialists, who can find nothing in their own tradition to compare to it for moral grandeur. 

The mainstream political tradition in America is represented insistently now as unrelievedly "capitalist" whatever Marx might have said about it, and as compromised  grubbing and mean-spirited because of the supposed relative prevalence of "private property" - whatever Marx might have said about that.  On both the right and the left, capitalism, not democracy is represented as the basis of our institutions.  If Sellafield is sometime sold to private owners, as the government has long intended that it should be, then overnight it will become a classic capitalist enterprise by Marx's definition. 

There is a third option, however, described by both Smith and Marx, and , as luck would have it, indigenous to America, of a society based upon individual autonomy, to be achieved through policies of government that by act or omission enhance the specific, tangible material well-being of individual people, by creating or protecting conditions of life that enhance vigor and morale.  These include education, fair wages, wholesome food and water, and reasonable hope for one's children.  These things correspond in a general way with what Americans consider to be "Western values," yet they have have never described, and do not now describe, the condition of life of ordinary British people.  To the inevitable reaction, that people do not miss what they have never had, that the austerity of their lives has spared them the corruptions of materialism, that legal protections are needed only where society is a war of each against all that there is the dole to assure them security from cradle to grave, however tedious the passage, or however swift, the reply must be that the history and present condition of ordinary British people make it clear enough how they have been used and in that spirit, by capitalists and by socialists, in tacit or declared collaboration.  The best American political impulses occur outside this sham opposition.  'they need to be rediscovered as valuable impulses.  Certainly we need to rediscover the complexity of our own political history, which deserves vastly better than to be seized upon by capitalists or dismissed by socialists. 

When Abraham Lincoln said of a hypothetical black woman that "in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands ... she is my equal, and the equal of all others,"  he expresses an economic proposition which is by no means the commonplace or inevitable.  Lincoln based the woman's rights on what she earned, not what she needed, a departure from "subsistence theory" and an implicit acknowledgement that labor creates value - that is, a margin between the cost of the worker's subsistence and the amount of wealth she creates - and that she has a right to share in this overplus.  One learns from Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle, E.G. Wakefield, and others that subsistence was assured to slaves as it was not to free workers.  In Britain before the Second World War, employers still felt day laborers' arms before they hired them, so that men who were frail or malnourished could be turned away.  Under ordinary circumstances slaves would have had as much as economic theory, up to the time of Beveridge, promised or allowed fully employed working people in Britain - enough to maintain them in a condition of physical efficiency.  Lincoln made the case, successfully, that in justice more was due anyone.  If he had used Marx's language, he would have declared the right to "self-earned private property."    Against a history in which vulnerability triggered the crudest abuse - the history of the British poor, into which Africans were swept up fairly late - so modest a statement as Lincoln's sounds like beatitude. 

The most difficult struggle of our civilization has been to find the means to create autonomy for ordinary lives, so that they might not be plundered or disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people.  Ideas like civil rights and personal liberty come directly from this struggle, which is not terribly well advanced at best, and which is untried, failed or abandoned in most of the world. 

There has not been a president in fifty years who was more fitted by history to restore that characteristically American ideal than Barack Obama,  it is doubtful that he will do it.  Summers, Geithener and, now Lew, are not going to do it.  I suspect that Obama's education, as the one I got, indoctrinated him out of either a knowledge of it or a serious consideration of it.  I think, though, that in it lies a way out of the stalemate he finds himself in, in which he aspires to nothing more than a more efficient expression of neo-classical economics.   Robinson's remarks about Adam Smith indicate how much of a distortion of his ideas "capitalism" in the modern style are.  Thatcherism-Reaganism,  millennial austerity... are bound to enslave us, the pseudo-socialism that has been seen as an alternative is, in fact, just the left hand washing the right, as it is so wonderfully put above.   Life for middle class Americans is, ever more, resembling the dispirited, desperate condition that Marilynne Robinson prophetically held up for us to see almost a quarter of a century ago.

Note:  March 2014  Don't Minimize The Role of TV In the Decline of the American Left

It is a really good question that is asked, why is it that the history of American democracy is not what the left didn't choose to continue building on instead of the overtly non-democratic Marxist theories or a romanticized version of the British left that had failed to produce even such benefits as Marilynne Robinson lists in this passage.  

I would include land grant universities, which were an important way in which the children of the underclass were able to continue their educations to join the professions and to staff the most remote public schools with professional teachers.  

But the children and the grand children of the people who were the first to benefit from those characteristically American forms of wealth redistribution were successfully taught to disdain those and what progress had been made in the United States.   A great deal of that profligate abandonment of what could have turned into one of the strongest assets in appealing to the larger American population, on the basis of their own cultural tradition rested securely on the basis of fashion and a popular presentation of the far, far less appealing British and, to a lesser extent European socialist tradition.   

Britian had achieved national health care, which isn't an inconsiderable fact in making that kind of appeal but, as Marilynne Robinson said, the remnants of the poor law, aided and abetted by the very "socialists" who had constructed the Welfare State,  were also a part of that.   And that made the British model of "socialism" less than a model for emulation than it was often presented as being.  

Politically, the fashionable disdain of American traditions has not enhanced the electability of more liberal candidates successfully saddled with it.   Americans who had saved Britian from the economic and political intrigues of its ruling elite, twice in the preceding half century might well resent the snooty dismissal of American achievements in political advancement, even as it was engaged in the struggle that would push off more of its baggage,  racial and other forms of inequality.   

The very period in which Britain was romantically looked to by the new educated elite, often through imported form from the BBC on the newly formed PBS, was the same period that the left in the United States achieved the end of its most productive period and soon found itself unpopular and failing in elections.  If Republicans and right wing Democrats could appeal to lower income Americans through appeals to patriotism,  the left helped them through failing to make their own appeals on the basis of American experience and traditions that were, in fact, worth building on.   That a lot of the best in that tradition has been successfully transformed by the far right into something that seems alien to many Americans would not have been possible if the left had presented it as an achievement  of American equality,  a result of the best thing in our political tradition and the culture of The People.  

The role of the media in destroying the achievements of the American tradition, things that, as said above are "distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain" cannot be minimized or dismissed by intoning those magic words,  "free press".    The use that the owners of that "free press",  the use of the rich people who own the massive and unprecedentedly politically effective electronic mass media to destroy that American tradition has been countered by a total capitulation by the libertarian-left.   In order to do that they have had to suppress the basis of and the reason that print media was, originally, given that freedom, the need of free people for unbiased information in order for them to be able to cast an informed vote.   I don't think that the steady diet of British TV and, later, radio fed into the United States has really helped much.   Its role in the culture of what remains of the American left has been a bad one.   British TV produced the Thatcher era in Britian, after all.   If that kind of "press" were going to have a role here, that is the result that could be expected.   

We have to rebuild a real American left, built on the remaining parts of the achievements of the American populist and liberal traditions of the past.    It might be that the habits of thought and the appeals of equality, inherent rights and the moral obligation to respect those -  which will not done except on the basis of effectively strong religious conviction - is still possible.   It is certainly more worth trying than building on the failed lefts of other countries which have failed to protect what acheivements they have had.  As Robinson points out, the American achievements of more equal distribution of wealth were more successful in the past, even as their left was fretting over how to make the lot of the destitute sufficiently miserable to be salubrious.   That is a British tradition that the American right has successfully copied,  aping the worst of the British system, even importing Rupert Murdoch  in order to destroy the truly American heritage in line with more typically American ideals.