Those threads are proceeding predictably, and I am hoping that people will not import the simplistic dualisms of theism/atheism to this quite different discussion.

I am no expert on American history, although as a student of literature I have picked up the odd useful bit of information along the way.

For example: Nathaniel Hawthorne's Angst over his own violent and repressive Puritan heritage led me back to the social history of Salem, Massachusetts, in the late C17, and a brilliant study of why and how that colony was so terribly but, interestingly, so briefly, convulsed by the witch hunts.

As all social historians of that period know, the eventual losers of those convulsions were the accusers, not the accused (unless, of course, the accused had been unfortunate enough to die during the years of the assault). Within a generation, the several major families of the accusers were economically erased from Salem, a fate that, it seems, the first "possessed" children had intuited from their increasingly insecure and tense parents.

And within a generation, there was a "great awakening" of a religio-socio-cultural sort in the New England states, a movement favouring both simplification and generosity, as, I understand, there have been several times since in USian history. Perhaps others can fill us in on later particular "great awakenings" in USian history.

To the point. Something major is obviously happening among that enormous population to our south, and I think that serious students of social history should be ashamed to dismiss it, snobbishly, as purely irrational and reactionary.

Reactionary it clearly is: people react to threats, and it would appear that close to half the population of the USA feel threatened -- not, I think, not deeply, by foreign bogeymen, but by what is happening to them in their own lives. We only become vulnerable to bogeyman-threats when we feel deeply threatened by our own reality. And there is nothing irrational about that. Self-defence is always a basic defence.

That people choose the wrong way to defend themselves is one issue. But that they feel threatened, the reality of the threat, the source of the threat -- those are separate issues.

Some babblers may have read, and wondered at, the NYTimes Magazine article this last weekend on the inroads that evangelical Christians have made into USian businesses.

I skipped a lot of the details -- a lot of the details are unbearable to read, for me, anyway. But the article took, in a way. For so many of the people profiled there who walked into the banks or the insurance companies (barf) in that article, I felt a lot -- for their sadness, for their failures, for their vulnerability, right on the surface, I felt a lot.

To me, this is social history. There is an enormous movement underway in the U.S., however clumsy, however misdirected, however amorphous. It is huge, and it is genuine. It would not be happening if enormous numbers of people were not feeling dispossessed.

The forms that it is taking right now are so easy for us to mock and satirize. And yet the numbers involved are huge. Even if the people involved do not understand themselves well, their numbers are huge. As those people move, so will our history. They are responding to pressures that neither they nor we are articulating well enough yet. But they have two advantages: they are responding from the gut, and they are responding in numbers.

And if we are true democrats, we always remember and honour Rousseau for teaching us that THE PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS RIGHT.

[ 03 November 2004: Message edited by: skdadl ]

nonesuch, I don't know. (Seriously: I don't.) But the few bits and scraps of detailed European social history I know suggest to me that something similar has indeed happened there.

Elites, economic or intellectual, have driven certain changes -- and yet the major changes have depended on slowly gathering, then suddenly moving mass movements. Again and again, huge numbers of people have suddenly decided that things must change. Ordinary people do this by just ... living. Finding ways to live. Astonishing. Eh?

I'm not in literal sympathy with American born-againers ("new-borns," as my irreverent baby sister calls them), but I am assuming that they appear for good reason, that they are not stupid, that they are responding to real pressures in their real lives.

Urban America has its own problems. Blacks are under siege from the prison-industrial complex. The poor are buying it from policies designed for high unemployment as a workforce-discipline measure, combined with a trashed social safety net. Yadda yadda yadda. The rich folks are puttin' on the squeeze and pocketing every dollar they can squish out of the system.

And OK, the American people are reacting to this. From the gut, as you say--I'm not sure I think this is an advantage. To my mind, the problem isn't that they're going religious. The problem is that the kind of religion which is being offered to them as a refuge comes predesigned for making the problem worse, not just in terms of its specific ugly belief set, but also in that its structures are stratified and top-down to an even greater extent than the political ones. This is not liberation theology we're looking at. Life is shitty for them, and a group of snake-oil salespeople are on TV and everywhere else telling them it's all good if they'll only believe that the source of the problem is gays and uppity women and "liberals" and science. But the message is controlled by a small group of people who are aligned with exactly the folks who made their lives shitty in the first place. These churches are very patriarchal, they believe very much in cults of personality. Quakers they're not, whether doctrinally or organizationally. There is little room for ordinary people to do much with the direction of these faiths; decision-making and communication are largely one way. The top decides and tells, the bottom listens. Very Catholic, except that a lot of Catholics have a sense of humour about the whole thing. Or used to--American Catholics seem to be joining the American Protestant culture.

The whole thing reminds me, and I'm sorry to use an invidious comparison, but it reminds me of a certain other demagogue who got a people who had it shitty and felt under threat to line up behind a cult of personality by blaming some group of scapegoats. And you know, Germany's a pretty good place these days, but it's because the Nazis were defeated, not because Nazism transformed into something good.

Still, i see one thread running throughout that seems (relatively) easy to follow: the national mythology; that is, the cycle of stories a nation tells itself about itself.
It's a very young country; doesn't have a whole lot of history, and even that is half invention. It's a kick-ass winner history, sanitized of the unhappy bits.
They have icons and legends, but the stories are simple, two-dimensional, without internal tension, without character development or texture. The mythology is feeble. I mean, what other nation would want to remember the Alamo?

Now, a people's mythology defines its identity. The American national identity is something like a Paul Bunyon video-game with graphics by Norman Rockwell.

That brings in the loss of agriculture. Yes, that is a very big deal. Rural virtues - hard work, perseverence, frugality, simplicity, charity, honesty, community spirit - are a cornerstone of the American myth. It flourished (when it did) on the land and in the small agricultural towns. Turn the countryside into a faceless industrial complex, and you tear down a main pillar of the American soul.
What happens when people feel that their soul is in peril? They start listening to prophets, who are only too eager to tell them: "Any setback you suffer, from a mortgage foreclosure, to the coldness of your children, to some enemy blowing up a building, to destructive weather, is the result of God's wrath. And God is mad at you because you have abandoned the primary virtues."
People want a quick fix. A scapegoat is offered. They kill it. They wait. If things don't improve, another scapegoat is offered... and so on, until the people begin to suspect that the prophet was wrong.

The same is true for all the other movements, from rights to the environment. The logger with six kids who just lost his job has very little concern for the spotted owl.

The dispossessed and the threatened (real or otherwise) are turning to religion to rescue them.

In the States, people like Bush can garner support from those 30 some or so red States which receive more in federal transfer dollars than they actually contribute in taxes. The giver States were largely those that supported Gore
in 2000. Yes, Skdadl, 50 some odd million people will be voiceless in Washington over the next four years, but a growing sense of injustice and division along class lines can only grow over the next four years, especially if the Republicans contunue with their disasterous course for the economy.

I agree with you Skdadl. According to commentators like James Galbraith in his essay from September past, Bush may well win this election by the narrowest of margins in dividing a nation, once again. But this kind of right wing revivalism on a religious scale has occurred in the past. And American's eventually turned their backs on political conservatism which always created vast inequality and growing levels of poverty. From William McKinley to Herbert Hoover and now to the Bush's; all of them were eventually given a heave-ho by the American electorate for practising elitism while laissez faire gods were sacrificed just a few too many poor American's for the economic sake of la creme de la creme.

There is an ultra-pessimism in the US. The gaps are filled with religion, drugs, lotteries, etc. Even people hoping for political/social reform don't seem to believe it possible.

I think there's an onus on Canuckistanis and other prgressive folks to try to reason and support progressives in the US -- I found myself cheering when Kerry spoke about the right to be an atheist during the last presidential debate.

So religion is a solace. Which is fine, except for a few things, which I'll tackle but not straightforwardly.

To begin with, I read (sorry, no source) that when lots of people tend to feel unable to control their economic futures, they will invariably react by trying to control anything else that they can. And so we have this odd spectacle in the USA of the most reactionary, seemingly narrow-minded set of laws coming out of the Congress, state legislatures and ballot initiatives.

It's because if they can't assert control meaningfully over large corporations that effectively dictate the economic destiny of the United States, they will assert control over social factors and society's response to crime. And politicians pick up on this and, of course, since they are to do the "will of the people" they gladly seize on this impulse to pass a law against anything anyone doesn't like, and get these idiotic and counterproductive things passed.

So we have three-strikes legislation. Punitive time-limited welfare. Mandatory proof of citizenship-to-get-state-aid ballot initiatives. Harsher sentencing provisions taking away judicial flexibility in assigning a punishment that doesn't simply warp a person for good. And so on.

I think it is not an accident that Canadians are far less likely to press for these things than Americans, because for all that our social safety net isn't what it used to be, we still have a cultural and ideological stake in at least pretending it still is, and for this reason we have moderately more control over our economic lives (although not much). So the impulse to control the social sphere lessens.

How this intersects with religion is that while we can point to left-wing themes in the Bible and indeed, outright socialist and communist concepts, the Bible as a whole is written to support a fundamentally insular, reactionary worldview. Look at the Mosaic Law, for example. Strict restrictions on diet. Seeming meaningless prohibitions on what clothing shall be worn. Et cetera and so on.

The most contentious part, the part about a man lying with another man, indirectly lowers the status of women relative to men (a theme that seems to run through the entire Bible, anyway), since it implies that male-with-male sex, since it doesn't contribute to population growth, is bad. Even Onanism (whether coitus interruptus or masturbation) is considered bad because it doesn't fulfil a very narrow perspective on sex - that of the reproductive part only.

So this insular, stiff, unchanging worldview certainly has its comforts, especially in a country already predisposed to a very insular view of itself wherein many of its people do not travel beyond its borders or if they do it's to experience stereotypical aspects of Canada or Mexico. Teenagers often talk of going to Tijuana for a ten-dollar Bee-Jay and a fifth of tequila, or something. This is a damaging stereotype of Mexico as a perpetually backward country whose people are in such straits that they will collectively prostitute themselves for the United States greenback.

Canadians are treated more fairly, in that we have an economic status comparable to that of the USA, but many USians automatically and wrongly assume that we are "like them", and so no special effort need be taken to understand us for who we really are. This stereotype is also damaging, because it distorts popular US perspectives on Canada and leads its politicians into assuming things about Canada that are not so. The US officials' shock that Canada was actually not committing forces to go to Iraq is just one example of this misunderstanding.

Right. Back to religion.

The uncompromising moral stance of the Bible lends itself well as a guidepost to people who want to believe there is something that is constant and fixed in this world. They want to believe that for all the buffeting economic winds, that the cultural myths that sustain the United States are still valid, workable and right.

The cultural myths of the United States have strong religious overtones to begin with ("Manifest Destiny", the belief that Indians were inferiors that needed to be converted to Christ, and so on), so it is easy to see how they mesh with a fundamentalist view of how religion should be conducted and "felt".

The irony, of course, is that this socially reactionary worldview, buttressed by religion, is utterly inadequate and useless in developing the tools needed to understand how to re-take economic control in the United States. They have cultural myths that militate against serious government intervention in the economy, fuelled by a relatively nonreligious business élite, but which finds religion useful for its own purposes (in this vein I have been excellently aided by a book written in 1994 called Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60, referenced here).

Those cultural myths, incidentally, have been relatively recently implanted, as that book implies. In the 1930s and 1940s, collectivist impulses drove the US population as they came to distrust the corporate sector as the source of the solution to the problem of economic sovereignty on the personal level and looked to the government, unions and other non-business associations as the likely source of economic security and sovereignty. The business counterassault starting in 1947 led to the modern belief that the stability and economic performance of the 1950s and 1960s were hallmarks and heydays of individual initiative, instead of the result of more extensive government interventionism than is extant today.

Yes, I recognize that in an ideal world we should not be critical of this mass shift in USian attitudes, since it at least ostensibly comes from the sum total of individual decisions, freely taken and apparently uncoerced.

However, this mass shift is taking place in the context of an incredibly circumscribed political milieu dominated by a right-wing media and right-wing politicians who have very clear interests in furthering this mass shift for their own ends.

So no, in the USA nobody goes to jail for not attending the Christian churches, but the economic "push" for individual certainty amid the uncertainty of one's pocketbook, and the social "pull" of interpersonal connections and the genuine friendliness that often permeates a churchly atmosphere, combine to a structural impetus where people might legitimately fear social disapproval and a lack of beneficial social interactions if they don't go to church - in the process unconsciously internalizing the viewpoint of that church.

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I think the voters in the States are in a similar situation to us with our first past the post system. The Liberals here and there are getting a share of votes that would typically go to several other parties further to the left in countries with more advanced electoral systems

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The two party system makes the lines more complicated, rather than simpler. It means that various interest groups, ethnic minorities and regions can't have their own representation. No party for labour, women, Blacks, Hispanics, farmers, white collar liberals. Nobody to address their various concerns and conflicts with another; the best they can hope for is uneasy, temporary alliances. All they can choose between is two people (male, white) from The Planet of the Rich. They usually end up choosing the one that looks a little more like the guy in the mirror: the inarticulate one with the goofy grin. (Preferably an inarticulate, goofy war hero. Hence the dirty tricks to discredit Kerry's Vietnam record.)
Oh, and fifty years of intense corporate-driven dumbing-down and intellectual-bashing hasn't helped.

Dr.C weighed in - very well, i think - while i was typing.
Yes, of course, Puritanism is at the root of the culture and colours every aspect of it. So it's easier to refer back to those values than to expand on the more recent democratic ones.

Also, the national myth would have the American Revolution motivated by a desire for freedom and equality... overlooking minor details like taxation and slavery. Indeed, while slavery (and genocide and racism) played a formative role in the nation's character, it's been almost completely edited from the mythology.

[ 04 November 2004: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

I don't know much about "great awakenings" or what affect they have on US political and economic interests.
But If you want to interpret the direction the US is taking as a reaction to a "threat", then I think it would be the threat of losing power, the security that comes with it, and the wealth they have gained. When economic, political and cultural dominance is all you strive for losing that dominance is the end of the world.

If you want to talk about solutions keep in mind people don't want to be "poor Communists", or "Moslem losers", the last argument many people pull out when they've been convinced of everything else you have to say. If you have an alternative you believe in, be prepared to show how its better than what they have already.

[ 04 November 2004: Message edited by: salaam ]

One possible tie-in is with Elliot Leyton's study of serial killers, Hunting Humans. [I've read the original, not the more recent edition] He suggests that in the late 1800s-early 1900s serial murderers were often middle class people who felt insecure in their status, and they tended to murder down [prostitute, nursemaids, etc]. Modern serial killers tend to be a little lower class, to feel they have been cheated and have not received their due in life, and to murder up [college students, etc.] I wonder if there is a connection with the Salem accusers; the feeling of being threatened in your status so you attack people you connect somehow with the threat.

The religious right vote ties in with the need for security. A fundamentalist church claims there is one way to interpret the Bible, and that the answers are there. Instead of asking what is good or evil, you concentrate on what is right or wrong; morals are easier than ethics. Fundamentalism is inflexible, but it is also secure. Doubting is scary. Bush also makes people feel secure; they don't see him as a hollow man. But the thing is, maybe they were voting for security which they connect with morality.

Feelings of security also tie in with the economy; that's what Clinton won on, isn't it? Apparently more Americans did not blame Bush if they had economic problems. This time the slogan was "It's the security, stupid."

I remember when the first Gulf War started and I talked to someone who was terrified that Iraq would fire bombs at us. It didn't seem likely to me, even without knowing anything about Iraq's capabilities, but this person was frightened.

I think it's a more complex division, though. Not so much on the line of how they envision the future, as on how they view the past.

They're frightened, not of one particular threat, but of a whole interrelated network of possible threats. It's necessary to understand the basis of the fear. A significant portion of it comes from guilt. Even uneducated USians didn't altogether buy "They hate us because we are good." They fear the people they have wronged (Africans, Native Americans, Mexicans). They fear the people they intend to wrong (the poor, Asians, Arabs). Deep down, they know how they themselves would feel in the victims' place. Something has to be done about that guilt, and the easiest thing to do is deny it, find excuses, demonize the victim... make it go away!

They long to go back to a time when they felt virtuous, confident, invincible. Of course, there was no such time, really: that golden age only exists in the Disney version of history. Americans have never come to terms with themselves or one another.

That might be the key to an awakening. As BushCo continues to gut the economy and shred the constitution, all those illusions about the national identity will be challenged. People who have never confronted one another will have to co-operate for sheer survival. They will begin to look for, and perhaps even listen to, more truthful explanations of what went wrong.*

I don't see it very soon, unfortunately. First, there will be upheaval, riots, repression and reprisals. (Unless, of course, God intervenes with some really spectacular pyrotechnics.)

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Originally posted by nonesuch:

I think it's a more complex division, though.

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Originally posted by salaam:
Americans are invincible, their churches tell them they are "virtuos", and I don't think you will find another country with so much confidence in themselves today. As the US govenment consolidates its empire and until some powerful rival to this power appears I can only see this "national identity" reaffirmed.

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I think you're right, Salaam. I think that collective efforts of corporate sponsored news media and the deeper of the war chest funding is responsible for the American virtuoso attitudes. American's view "might is right" in similar ways that British citizens did during the height of empire. Those same attitudes are, I think, evident in European soccer hooliganism. I know that it's not just British fans with these attitudes and draping themselves in Union Jack colours, but I do think that some Brits still exude some of that forlorn superiority complex, even after the sun set decades ago on their colonialist empire.

American's were once revered around the world as citizens of a nation that represented freedom and opportunity. Presidents Truman, Johnson and Kennedy saw trade union movements as being responsible for improving American standards of living over what they had been through before the war and the dirty 30's. As Doc Conway mentioned, American's were open to socialist ideas. The New Dealer's reduced unemployment with drastic interventionism in the economy. Drastic times required drastic measures, something political conservatives in both our countries at the time were impotent to realize themselves because their laissez faire convictions during that time prohibited it. The invisible hand of the market would iron out the rough spots in due time. In the economic long run, things would improve, but intervening with make work programs and poverty relief would only anger the invisible hand gods of laissez faire if people and governments would simply kneel and pray long and hard enough. The poor and unemployed would have to tighten their belts because fasting is what makes the economic gods happy in the economic long run. At least Islam and Christian fundamentalists have the afterlife to promise the faithful. Laissez faire capitalism began to lose its appeal world wide as people like JM Keynes showed us that we don't have to sacrifice our young to the morlocks of laissez faire worship. JK Galbraith and the New Dealer's on this side of the ocean demonstrated that we can reason and think our way out of economic chaos and stagnation without causing the sky to fall or the sun to stop shining.

The super-wealthy and political conservatives have resented Keynesianism and socialism ever since the 1930's. Their agenda has been to return to the days when they were comparatively much, much better off than the working class slobs. They were only biding their time during the cold war when unemployment rates were at all time lows
and one spouse working 40 hours a week could bring home the bacon while the kids were in familiar care. Our own "royal families" were beginning to get annoyed with having to brush elbows with Chuck the steel worker or Mary the waitress on Miami Beach or the ski slopes at Tremblanc.

In the end, old world colonialist attitudes were able to ward off a global worker's revolution with militarism. And they had that angle covered too because the worker's could be saddled with the debts incurred from fighting that cold war against the spread of communism. The military industrial complex in North America and around the world has become enormous by way of Keynesian-militarism.

Like old world imperialism, the strength of the dollar is bolstered by the military might and a perception that it equates to geopolitical stability. The military complex was desperate for bogeymen and legitimate threats to its military superiority until it re-created Osama bin Laden, a proven anti-communist whose family has business ties to the Bush's. The last time the Bush family did business with an anti-communist was with Adolf Hitler. And then they profited again when we had to clean up the mess. Fascists will eat their young and sell their mothers for a buck. They're a cancer on humanity. They are an open sore that needs cleaning out before it becomes infected.

[ 05 November 2004: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Regular people that feel strong don't support state terror.

My contacts with USians over the last ten years have mainly pointed their terible insecurities -- either national, political or personal.

I had an e-discussion with a bunch of folks fro teh US who couldn't believe that they could EVER have public socialized health care. And that was from people wanting it. One correspondent wrote about injuring themselves after an accident so that they'd be ill enough to get emergency medical care.

Many Americans, including many of those who voted for Bush, certainly know about the outsourcing of jobs to those countries. But given that the power-brokers in their own country, including the Bush admin, are complicit in the brutal way in which that is happening, what are ordinary people making of it?

I think that Fidel is right to make a distinction between many/most of the people who voted for Bush and the man himself. I still think that he is only acting the role of a born-againer.

But all those voters -- most of them are not. From the little I know, I am guessing that that puts them on the wrong side of history, although, like nonesuch, I fear that the convulsions they have made possible will not be ending soon or easily.

About Salem: it is definitely the case -- the rise of mercantile capitalism was a major provocation, and it was the families of the accused witches who came out the winners historically.

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I wonder how much most Americans -- most people, actually -- know or grasp about the rise of China, and probably India.
Many Americans, including many of those who voted for Bush, certainly know about the outsourcing of jobs to those countries. But given that the power-brokers in their own country, including the Bush admin, are complicit in the brutal way in which that is happening, what are ordinary people making of it?

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Probably not much.
As a nation (nod to all the exceptional persons), they're very poorly informed and educated and really terrible at following a train of thought from A through B to C, let alone F. Shoes are made in China. Chinese work cheap. I don't get paid much, either. I buy shoes made in China. No connections.

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Originally posted by skdadl:

I think that Fidel is right to make a distinction between many/most of the people who voted for Bush and the man himself. I still think that he is only acting the role of a born-againer.

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I think Bush believes as much as most Evangelicals do-- which is to say not very much at all.

I'm not about to call the Evangelical Christian 'movement' a fad, but it is rather a synthetic, alternate lifestyle born of an odd sort of desire.

It is all about seperation from the less-than-righteous, and is replete with its own subculture, wherein music, recreation, sexual mores, manners, social conduct, use of language, adjudication of success and failure, etc. are all defined by one's church. It is a way of life that is not so much rigidly insular as purposefully isolating.

But back to that strange desire. This whole Evangelical apparatus is designed to elevate. The so-called American Dream once bespoke economic success and its attendant comforts; that Dream is spectacularly unfulfilled. And so, the Evangelical substitutes the frustrated desire for social climbing so long-inculcated in American mainstream culture with the desire to demonstrate Moral Superiority, albeit mostly to himself.

The scapegoats are brought forth by the approved spiritual leaders, slaughtered... and for a moment, the Evangelical of the species feels buoyed, rather than lessened.

It doesn't work very well at satisfying the 'lack' such people feel, but it is better than nothing. And besides, they've made a community for themselves by now.

Blogger Mark Schmitt poses some intereting questions regarding the latest "awakening":

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The right question, I think, is not whether religion has an undue influence, but why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice ? Why is its public phase so exclusively focused on issues of private and personal behavior? Is this caused by trends in the nature of religious worship itself? Is it a displacement of economic or social pressures? Will that change? What are the factors that might cause it to change.

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Ronan Bennett's excellent new novel, Havoc in Its Third Year, about a Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable.(11) An obsession with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush’s America.

So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the United States this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush’s government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it’s up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.

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This is not belittling or being disrespectful to patients who have actually been diagnosed: this is merely enlarging the already-loose clinical definition to include people who are not currently recieving treatment - are, indeed, far too numerous ever to receive treatment.
Different eras tend to produce different forms of mental illness.
Consider the origins of acquired mental illness (non- physical and chemical causes). Mixed and contradictory messages from early childhood on. Psychic or pschological trauma. Mental stress. Too much stress will push any mind over the edge. Stress on this scale has never been encountered before. Anything can happen.

[ 10 November 2004: Message edited by: nonesuch ]