It may not always be apparent but in many cases my linking to articles is prompted not because I agreed with them but because they moved me to reflect. That was very much the case with Ronald Dworkin’s post at American Affairs, “Capitalism’s Character Types”. In the article he opens with some interesting questions. How did Democrats come to embrace open borders, harmful as they are to important members of their coalition? Why do so many economic conservatives, in his words, “obfuscate” the reasons they support open borders? Here’s his observation:
For progressive Democrats, who supposedly distrust capitalism, the truth risks exposing them as shills for unrestricted capital and markets; for economic conservatives, who love capitalism, the truth risks their finding fault with what they love.
He goes on to consider some stereotypes that prevailed at certain moments in history: the Yankee Protestant, the “Organization Man”, and David Brooks’s “Bourgeois Bohemian”, explaining them:
First, each type captured the spirit of the American upper middle class at a particular moment. This is important because only the upper middle class has sufficient numbers, influence, and wealth to control culture. Second, each type rationalized the capitalism of its day.
Now I disagree with his interpretation of events but I do think he’s on to something important. Consider tossing a pebble into the air. When you throw a pebble into the air there is a moment when it appears to stop. But that’s an illusion, a consequence of two opposing forces, in this case the force of gravity and the force of your arm throwing the pebble. For just a moment the two forces balance each other out and the pebble appears to stop.
His notions about the upper middle class are absurd. They do have the podium because neither the ultra-wealthy nor the poor write books musing about the special moment in history that is the eternal today. But they don’t control the culture any more than historians control history. Historians just produce the historiography. History is under no one’s control. It’s the same reason that Denver is portrayed as having palm trees in television programs. Or that Omaha is portrayed as having mountains on the horizon. Whatever you see on TV, neither Denver nor Omaha is Los Angeles.
In reality “capitalism” is just one force among many, although it’s an important one. There are many other forces including the desire for approval and other aspects of human nature. The United States didn’t enter World War II because the Nazis were awful or because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. It was because the Nazis’ attack of the Soviet Union ended American socialists’ opposition to going to war and the attack on Pearl Harbor ended American isolationists’ opposition. The forces pushing us towards war that had been building for years no longer had countervailing forces.
What has given the #metoo movement critical mass if it indeed has critical mass? What is propelling modern feminism? Viewing them as the consequences of the interplay among competing forces will convey a different understanding than simpler explanations.
Mr. Dworkin’s Yankee Protestant, Organization Man, and Bobo were doomed by their own internal contradictions as well as the changing needs of international capitalism. The Organization Man couldn’t stand up against human nature and the great thrust of American culture.
I agree with this; I couldn’t finish the piece because it appears to be in the vein of selective history as vehicle for moral sermon. For me, history is interesting only in the context of learning about people or figures within the situation as it existed in their time as they understood it. For U.S. history, there is a lot of it. There are a lot of people writing, including poor people, and the problems tend to be towards synthesis. People like Max Weber are the Tom Friedman of their time and should be taken with a large grain of salt in reflecting complex situations.
The Yankee Protestant type here is Abraham Lincoln, to which I would point out that the value in free labor and wage labor that he voiced was widespread (it can be found in publications like the Atlantic or the Nation) and based upon direct observation. Men like Lincoln are moving off of the farms, finding work and then finding an occupation that gave them independence, an escape from dependence on the employer. For these people, the pebble is rising skyward, the path taken is clear and for Whigs, the key to continuing that direction is in lawyers, railroads and reliable currency. For free soil democrats, aspects of free labor ideology are attractive updates to Jeffersonian agrarianism, but insufficient to replace the need for a homestead act.
What all of these people think they are doing is making people free and independent. What happens next and why was disputed by them as well. A good starting point is probably labor-saving technology.
It also falls within the genre of trying to evaluate something by tallying costs without reckoning benefits.
“I couldn’t finish the piece because it appears to be in the vein of selective history as vehicle for moral sermon.”
That was the case with me as well. I do like the balance of forces theory though.
Interesting that you mention the Homestead Act. Can you imagine something like that passing today? A government program where roughly half of the participants would fail, some of them fatally?
The insistent characterization of the United States as a “nation of immigrants” (all countries are; everybody except, possibly, a few people in Africa, is from somewhere else) fails to take into account how many of those immigrants came to farm and couldn’t make a go of it.
@Andy, it was similar to what happened in the Reconstruction South in that most of the small farms carved out of confiscated plantations would fail. I think there was a common myopia about the difference in soils and climate that would necessitate different farming approach (or possibly none past the 100th meridian). Also, the railroads for a variety of reasons caused a lot of unintended problems, particularly by increasing property taxes which would lead to debt peonage to company stores following failed harvests.
I’m sure from a Marxist p.o.v., the results are all too convenient for capital, but farmers losing their land is pretty much the opposite of the intended result. Probably the programs needed to be more modest.