The Collapse of American Pluralism
by Fred Siegel
A new book gets the problem right but the solution wrong.
by George Marsden
George Marsden, the distinguished historian of religion in America, has written a short, curious, and at times insightful book, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment. Awarded the Bancroft Prize in 1993 for his biography of Jonathan Edwards, Marsden rightly argues in his new book that American political culture has been shaped by an alliance between Protestant Christianity and Enlightenment rationality. “My argument,” he explains, “is that the mainstream thinkers of the 1950s can be better understood if we see them in far more continuity with the cultural assumptions of the founders than would be true of most mainstream thinkers today.” He aims to explain the collapse of the pluralistic liberalism of the 1950s, in which religion and reason—like the era’s Protestants, Catholics, and Jews—were seen to be in relative harmony. But his closing chapters propose a new sort of pluralism based on the writing of Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper.
The book opens with an extended recapitulation of 1950s academic and popular discussions about the impact of mass society on individual freedom. Marsden covers familiar territory, recounting the arguments of Eric Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, and Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers, among other titles. With some caveats, he sides with those who argued that consumerism and television were “destroying freedom” and individuality in America.
Marsden assumes that this view of middle-class American life was new and reflected real conditions. But neither was the case. The middle-class critique that he endorses first took shape around the First World War, in the so-called “revolt against the village,” which saw life on Main Street as stupefying and soul-crushing. The writers Marsden relies on either recycled those arguments or, because they were writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, saw America as susceptible to the same horrors that had overtaken Nazi Germany. Marsden seems unaware of the role that a cultural Marxism-cum-left-wing-Toryism played in foisting such arguments on ordinary Americans. The relatively placid life of the 1950s was the bounty of people who had lived through economic depression and war and yearned for conventional comforts. Whatever its shortcomings, this vision was hardly a danger to the American republic. But ideologues made it seem so, and Marsden accurately renders the consequences when their thesis became widely accepted.
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By Fred Siegel:
This short book rewrites the history of modern American liberalism. It shows that what we think of liberalism today – the top and bottom coalition we associate with President Obama - began not with Progressivism or the New Deal but rather in the wake of the post-WWI disillusionment with American society. In the twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right. The aim of liberalism’s foundational writers and thinkers such as Herbert Croly, Randolph Bourne, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis and H.L Mencken was to create an American aristocracy of sorts, to provide a sense of hierarchy and order associated with European statism.
Like communism, Fabianism, and fascism, modern liberalism, critical of both capitalism and democracy, was born of a new class of politically self-conscious intellectuals. They despised both the individual businessman's pursuit of profit and the conventional individual's pursuit of pleasure, both of which were made possible by the lineaments of the limited nineteenth-century state.
Temporarily waylaid by the heroism of the WWII generation, in the 1950s liberalism expressed itself as a critique of popular culture. It was precisely the success of elevating middle class culture that frightened foppish characters like Dwight Macdonald and Aldous Huxley, crucial influences on what was mistakenly called the New Left. There was no New Left in the 1960s, but there was a New Class which in the midst of Vietnam and race riots took up the priestly task of de-democratizing America in the name of administering newly developed rights
The neo-Mathusianism which emerged from the 60s was, unlike its eugenicist precursors, aimed not at the breeding habits of the lower classes but rather the buying habits of the middle class.
Today’s Barack Obama liberalism has displaced the old Main Street private sector middle class with a new middle class composed of public sector workers allied with crony capitalists and the country’s arbiters of style and taste.
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