Elected officials also move in herds, with fellow office-holders instead of making independent judgments: As U.S. House Speaker Sam Rayburn told members of Congress: “To get along, to along” to get anything done. In corrupted democracies like ours, there have often been donors to “go along” with to have any hope of getting elected at all. Surviving and succeeding requires more finessing than Burke required, even against the daunting odds of his own time.
Yet there have always been “Profiles in Courage,”Profiles in Courage – Wikipedia as Senator John F Kennedy’s 1956 book by that title showed in the cases of eight senators who defied their party leaders, colleagues, and constituents to follow their consciences and principles, risking and sometimes suffering political defeat for taking a wiser and longer view of their obligations and options against the odds.
Joe Biden presented such a profile until this past weekend, defying the polls, pundits, big donors, strategists, and masterful colleagues such as Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer. Maybe he’s following only his doctor’s advice now and is quitting the race because of physical and cognitive frailties. But until we learn more, my hunch is that the political pressures overwhelmed his resilience, which might have proved stronger and wiser than we were being told by baying “news” hounds whose own herd-like stampedes (into Vietnam, into Iraq, and much more) reflect a decay in their own capacities and performances more severe than Biden’s. Whose decline is more severe: Joe Biden’s or the news media’s? – The Berkshire Edge
Whatever my doubts about Biden’s integrity and judgments as a senator or vice president (and even as President, when he blundered in backing Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition in Israel), for the most part he’d risen to Edmund Burke’s heights as a leader and remained there ever since the Charlottesville riots of 2017 bared President Donald J. Trump’s Profile in Pathology as a sickness so severe and contagious that the republic may not survive it.
Democrats who’ve surveyed the odds and pressured Biden to quit – and especially Democrats now bidding to take his place — will have to transcend their own weaknesses as well as Biden did his before his colleagues, donors, the media, and too much of the public enveloped and devoured his prospects. I’ll support any Democrat against Trump; I’ll suppress my doubts about how members of the groups I’ve just mentioned handled old Joe; and I’ll hope that the day never comes when they’ll have to eat the words they used during the past few weeks.
The answers are older and deeper than many of us know.
By Jim Sleeper Oct. 2, 2024
Israeli soldiers in June, 1967 at the Western Wall, a remnant of an ancient retaining wall of biblical Israelites’ Jerusalem temple, whose site Israel has controlled since the “Six Day War” for the first time since losing it to the Roman Empire in 70 C.E.
Author’s preface:
Israel invaded and destroyed Gaza 28 centuries ago, but few Americans know that such ancient “undercurrent events” ever really happened, let alone that they still drive current events that divert our attention from older, deeper realities. The following essay, revised and updated from one that I wrote for Salon on March 31, 2024, doesn’t track current events in Israel/Palestine. Instead, it takes a dive, or at least a dip, into long running undercurrents that have shaped the conflict.
The original Salon essay was picked up and re-posted by the international website Reset.doc, which also translated it into Italian. It was excerpted and assessed on The Hannah Arendt Center website at Bard College. When I wrote it early in 2024, charges that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza were plausible but debatable, and it was possible to question protestors’ ideological motives. But by mid-summer, Israel’s strategies had become genocidal in effect and, for some of the strategists, in intent.
Anyone who might think that I’m interpreting the biblical and 17th-Century undercurrents to justify current events would be misreading this essay. More than a few commentators and editors have seemed inclined to dive under their desks or jump out of windows instead of reporting or sharing what I actually say here. Fortunately, others are commenting in ways that can enhance our understanding of what’s developing.
For example, the head of a private school who also teaches in Columbia College’s Contemporary Civilization curriculum sent a message to a mutual friend calling this essay “a fascinating and intellectually rich article, the difficult paradoxes of which may escape most modern readers…. But if we are ever to escape the binary thinking of every political and civic argument that plagues us currently, we need historically nuanced analyses like Sleeper’s. The ancestral thread tying Calvinists and ancient Hebrews together is a lens I hadn’t seen through before, though most of us know the two sides of each (culture? religion?) — its ambitious, questing, covenantal side and its ‘manifest destiny’ brutality.”
A political and intellectual historian in New York wrote me, “Thanks for sending this amazing piece. I devoured it immediately. I know a bit about the Biblical influence on New England’s elimination of America’s very own Canaanites, but most of the works you cite were new to me. I am also glad you appreciate the work of my friend Adam Shatz. Anyway, it seems to me you have the core of a book condensed into a few pages here. I hope you keep developing this line of thought.”
Dive in with me now as I keep on developing this line of thought.
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” T.S. Eliot wrote in the first of his Four Quartets, but America’s increasingly warlike divisions, some of them deepened by the Israel-Palestine conflict, are forcing many of us to bear realities that we haven’t borne so heavily before. These include an animus against Jews that Eliot himself held and that may have become menacing again — as have some Jews’ frantic efforts to suppress antisemitism in ways that may only prompt more of it. Other, far-more-powerful eruptions of hatred in America’s increasingly uncivil society are driven not by antisemitism, and not even mainly by global riptides of capital and technology that are prompting desperate migrations and belligerent nationalisms. They’re being driven by beliefs that figured in Israel’s ancient origins and in 17th Century Puritans’ importation of those origins into America’s conflicted, now-fragmenting political culture. Such undercurrents are converging to prompt not only headline-making “news” but also biblically resonant upheavals that grip people who aren’t religious at all. Even Donald Trump, along with his evangelical Christian and Orthodox Jewish supporters, is riding those currents toward a civic implosion. Belligerent Jewish nationalists who currently govern the State of Israel are accelerating a doom-eager Zionism that biblical Hebrew prophets anticipated and condemned.
Few of us acknowledge the extent to which these conflicting realities began with Jews’ “origin story,” in Genesis 12:1, in which God tells Abraham to “Go from your country [Ur, in Mesopotamia] and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Since then, Jews have often unsettled and uprooted themselves, or they’ve been unsettled and uprooted by others, in ways that have stimulated and exasperated other peoples among whom they’ve sojourned. In effect, they’ve been a “tribe” that negates a lot of what’s usually tribal while developing an enlarged mentality that crosses communal boundaries. The word “Hebrew” —ivry — means “He passed over,” as in crossing borders that are metaphysical and cultural as well as geographical, to pursue universal knowledge and justice across time as well as space.
Many of us consider such pursuits essential to the Enlightenment, not to a religion or a tribe. Yet in the Genesis myth, Abraham’s tent and hospitality are open in all directions, to all comers, and his grandson Jacob demands to know the terms of the tribal mission, wrestling with an angel all night for an answer until the angel releases him at dawn without one, naming him Yisrael, which means, “He contends with God.” That has been “too much reality” for many people and peoples to bear — Jews as well as non-Jews. Yet that reality has driven American civic culture in ways and for reasons that I want to sketch here.
The 17th-century English Calvinists who colonized lands that they called New England and whose legatees participated in founding and extending the American republic, pursued strategies strikingly similar to those of today’s Israeli settlers in the West Bank and military invaders of Gaza who claim a divine mandate or a nationalist “manifest destiny” to impose the Hebrew-derived, ethno-religious identity at the expense of longtime Palestinian inhabitants.
Although the ”settler-colonial” paradigm that progressives apply to Israel certainly did fit Puritans who settled and seized lands to which they had no ancestral claims, those Puritans went even further by appropriating ancient Israelite claims to a divinely promised Zion to justify their own ventures in America. So doing, they seeded America’s civic-republican culture in ways that still drive its messianic inclinations and some Protestants’ and Jews’ preoccupations with Israel’s presence in the Middle East.
In retrospect, American Puritans seem almost to have been ‘copying’ today’s Israeli Zionists 300 years ahead of time, tactic for tactic and pious justification for pious justification.
I experienced that convergence of Hebraic and Calvinist mythologies in the 1950s while growing upin Longmeadow, Massachusetts, an old Puritan town whose public-school teachers passed on to us some echoes and remnants of its origins. My fourth-grade teacher Ethel Smith didn’t merely look at us 9-year-olds; she looked into each of us, as if arraigning our souls before something awesome. At that same time, I was learning biblical Hebrew two afternoons a week in a nearby synagogue and, later, in eight years of Jewish summer camp.
Even when “Puritans” like Miss Smith looked into us sternly, they sometimes did so caringly. In December, 1956, she told me and another boy to stand as she announced, “Jim and Richard are Jewish boys, and they don’t accept our Lord as their savior, and they won’t be celebrating Christmas. But I want you all to know that the Jewish people is a noble and enduring people, and our Lord himself was a Jew. You may sit down now.” Disoriented though I was by that introduction to my classmates at age 9, I sensed from Miss Smith’s gentler-than-usual tone that she meant well in a way that has never quite left me. Later I would realize that for her then, only eleven years after the Holocaust (about which I knew nothing), we Jews weren’t pariahs but sacred librarians, keepers of foundational texts.
By the time I entered Yale, nine years later, in 1965, in the twilight of its Puritan ethos, I understood the significance of the Hebrew phrase that the college’s founders had put on its seal — Urim v’tummim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony” — and I knew that the university’s president during my student years there, Kingman Brewster Jr., himself born in Longmeadow, was a lineal descendant of Elder William Brewster, the minister on The Mayflower that had carried Puritan pilgrims from England to Massachusetts in 1620, in what they considered their Exodus from slavery that fulfilled “the type of Israel materially,” according to Cotton Mather, their most-prominent tribune and chronicler at the end of the 17th Century.
Seal of Yale University
At my opening freshman assembly at Yale in 1965, a thousand of us mostly white young men in dark suits rose and sang (or read and mumbled) a hymn composed by Yale Divinity School Professor Leonard Bacon in 1833 that rendered Yale founders’ “Exodus” from their English Egypt to their “Hebrew Republic” in New England:
1 O God, beneath Thy guiding hand Our exiled fathers crossed the sea, And when they trod the wintry strand, With prayer and psalm they worshiped Thee.
2 Thou heard’st, well pleased, the song, the prayer; Thy blessing came, and still its pow’r Shall onward through all ages bear The memory of that holy hour.
3 Laws, freedom, truth, and faith in God Came with those exiles o’er the waves, And where their pilgrim feet have trod, The God they trusted guards their graves.
At Yale’s 1964 commencement, three months before my freshman assembly, Brewster, the legatee of the Puritan “Exodus,” had presented the university’s honorary doctorate of laws to Martin Luther King, Jr., who at that time was telling America’s lords of segregation to “Let my people go,” as Moses had told pharaoh, and was leading American Blacks to what King called “the promised land,” echoing Exodus. As Brewster presented Yale’s degree to King, their handshake reached across time and space, summoning Protestants and Jews whose ancestors had made history of the Exodus myth in ages past.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Yale President Kingman Brewster, Jr. at the 1964 Yale Commencement
Like the Hebrew prophet who “lives out a myth that may be dead in us and for us, whose fruitfulness cannot be known except by exposing it (and himself) to possible failure,” as political theorist George Shulman puts it, King and Brewster used speech-acts in the ceremony to revivify an ancient, sacred past and. not incidentally, to make us moderns do a double take on our own limitations. Yale’s civic poetry had enough power then to inflect Authority as decisively as Congress inflected it by enacting the new civil rights laws of 1964 and ’65.
When biblical undercurrents resurfaced again a few years later in a war between Hebrews and Egyptians in what Jews still called their “promised land,” those undercurrents also resurfaced in me: Early in June, 1967, you would have found me standing in line at the Jewish Agency in Manhattan, hoping to register as a noncombatant supporter of Israel in the Six-Day War. Not yet 21, I needed parental permission, which I didn’t get, so I didn’t go. But two years later, I was in Haifa and the Galilee with the small Movement for Arab-Jewish Cooperation, holding intensive conversations with Palestinian citizens of Israel, as I’ve recounted in The New Jews, an anthology of essays by young American-Jewish activists of that time that I co-edited with the late scholar of Hebrew literature Alan Mintz. It may be worth noting my expression in that book of my doubts about Jewish nationalism and Zionism, even as an idealistic young supporter of Israel.
My own experiences matter here only because they exposed me to origins of today’s controversy that are overlooked or mishandled by many Christians and Jews, including secular liberals and ardent progressives. The mythic origins matter because, as King and Kingman demonstrated, they go a long way toward explaining why Jews have figured disproportionately in Americans’ civic reckonings and international interventions. Their handshake at Yale in 1964 demonstrated that Hebrews’ uprooting from Ur and their disruptions of conventions in other times and places still figured in Americans’ understanding of themselves as a nation of clean breaks and fresh but covenanted starts. It figures now, even as the country is becoming less Hebraic and covenantal and more gnostic, agnostic or libertarian. Americans’ preoccupations with the Gaza war continue to divert our attention from larger, more lethal wars.
So let me make a few more observations about the original Jewish break from other traditions, and then about how the New England Puritans transported that break into what has become this country’s fraught, disintegrating civic-republican culture. A different but no-less powerful intervention in American political culture was made by Spanish Catholics who colonized Florida and the American Southwest, as well as Latin America, but in this essay I trace the Calvinist/Hebraic origins of what became the classically liberal “Protestant Establishment” that governed the United States well into the 20th Century. Today there are so many other variants of evangelizing and proselytizing in America that some readers may be tempted to misread this essay itself as one more variant of the same. It’s not. I’m not propagating or preaching what I’m about to describe but am recognizing its continuing, problematic power in America’s political culture and public life.
Jewish sublimity and its discontents
In the Genesis myth as interpreted in Midrash Genesis, one of the rabbinic commentaries on that book, Abraham smashes Ur’s idols as he’s leaving, and he even prepares to sacrifice his own son Isaac at the command of his hidden but omnipotent Interlocutor. Yet that command to sacrifice Isaac is rescinded even as Abraham binds his trusting son and raises his hand to strike the fatal blow. His grief and loneliness are broken by the angel Gabriel, who brings a ram to substitute for Isaac in the offering. Yet Abraham has other disputes with God — for example, against God’s decision to obliterate the corrupt cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, killing many innocents. And Yisrael contends with God ever after.
Such biblical accounts of humans’ separation from what seemed naturally ordained demonstrate not only human independence in thought and action but also its futility: A central prayer in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, originated the claim that “man’s origin is dust, and his destiny is dust,” depicting every individual life “as a fragile potsherd, as the grass that withers, as the flower that fades, as the fleeting shadow, as the passing cloud, as the wind that blows, as the floating dust, and even as a dream that vanishes.” Such a scourging awareness of human fragility projects the faithful into a vast unknown between them and a ubiquitous but hidden God. It prompts yearnings like Jacob’s to discover God’s will and to justify humans’ often-flailing efforts to transform a world that isn’t wholly impervious to their efforts to displace tribal insularity with missions across time and space. “The Jewish nation is the nation of time, in a sense which cannot be said of any other nation,” the German Protestant theologian Paul Tillich explained in 1938:
“It represents the permanent struggle between time and space. … It has a tragic fate when considered as a nation of space like every other nation, but as the nation of time, because it is beyond the circle of life and death, it is beyond tragedy. The people of time … cannot avoid being persecuted, because by their very existence they break the claim of the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction. The gods of space, who are strong in every human soul, in every race and nation, are afraid of the Lord of Time, history, and justice, are afraid of his prophets and followers.”
Afraid, indeed: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” wrote Blaise Pascal, a French contemporary of the Puritans. Jews have negated much of what’s tribal yet haven’t disappeared as a “tribe” themselves, at least in many other people’s minds: “How odd of God to choose the Jews,” quipped journalist William Norman Ewer a century ago, capturing the mix of antipathy and admiration that they’ve provoked ever since Judaism prompted its “axial” break in Western consciousness. You don’t need to “believe in” that break in any religious sense to notice that Jews have stimulated and exasperated other peoples among whom they’ve sojourned.
‘How odd of God to choose the Jews,’ quipped William Norman Ewer a century ago, capturing the mix of antipathy and admiration they have provoked ever since Judaism prompted its ‘axial’ break in Western consciousness.
Judaism’s derivative religions, Christianity and Islam, adopt Hebraism’s separation of spirit from nature: “We are all, in all places, strangers and pilgrims, travelers and sojourners,” intoned Robert Cushman, a contemporary of the Elder William Brewster and an organizer of the Pilgrims’ ‘Exodus’ to Massachusetts, in a sermon he gave in 1622. Three-hundred-fifty years later, the American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that the “paradoxical relation between the possible and the impossible in history proves that the frame of history is wider than the nature-time in which it is grounded. The injunction of Christ: ‘Fear not them which kill the body but are not able to kill the soul’ (Matthew 10:28) neatly indicates the dimension of human existence which transcends the basis which human life and history have in nature.” Somewhat analogously, Islam commemorates Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac in its holiday, the Feast of the Sacrifice, which honors Abraham’s obedience but celebrates Isaac’s release.
In Judaism’s judgment, Christianity and Islam go too far to relieve humankind of having to bear “too much reality” in this fallen world. In Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews, the late Israeli philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel notes that Christians have depicted God “as a suffering, agonizing man, but thereby… transformed a human need into a theological principle that ends with an illusion” and “a false consolation.” For two millennia, Christians have intoned, “My kingdom is not of this world” and “Baptized in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek,” yet they’ve reigned from golden thrones over armed states whose national identities are rooted even more deeply in ties of sacred “blood and soil” than Jewish “tribal” identity has been.
Yet the Hebrew Bible also depicts Hebrews as no less terrified of existential uprootedness than Blaise Pascal or any Christian king. Even as the Book of Exodus recounts God revealing the terms of His covenant to Moses on the summit of Mount Sinai, His chosen people are busy fabricating and worshiping a Golden Calf at the foot of the mountain. Later they turn to kingly and materialistic protections against wandering. Zionism appears in several historical periods as an attempt to return to and possess the promised land, the latest attempt provoked in the 20th Century by Jews’ urgent need to escape rising persecution and even extinction.
But returning doesn’t guarantee succeeding. For three millennia, Jews celebrating the Passover holiday have invoked poetically and ritually their “return” to Jerusalem and deliverance from exilic, often ghostly, wandering. At times, they’ve actually returned to the biblical land and to what Tillich called “the gods of space, who express themselves in will to power, imperialism, injustice, demonic enthusiasm, and tragic self-destruction.” In the Book of Samuel, Israelites importune its eponymous judge to “Give us a king to rule over us, like all the other nations.” Although that demand displeases Samuel, he and the Israelites commit genocidal assaults against neighboring Canaanites, Amalekites and Philistines:
“Remember what the Amalekites did to you… [when] they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven.” [Deuteronomy 25]
“Then Samuel said, ‘Bring me Agag king of the Amalekites.’ Agag came to him cheerfully, for he thought, “Surely the bitterness of death is past.” But Samuel declared: ‘As your sword has made women childless, so your mother will be childless among women.’ And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal.” [1 Samuel 15]
Eight centuries before Christ, and 28 centuries before the Netanyahu government waged war against Hamas in Gaza, the prophet Amos said, “For the three transgressions of Gaza, Yea, for four, I will not reverse [its punishment]: Because they carried away captive a whole captivity [of Israelites] to deliver them up to Edom. So I will send a fire on the wall of Gaza, and it shall devour the palaces thereof; … and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, Saith the Lord.”
The militarized nationalism of today’s Zionists can be understood as another such reversion or “return” to the promised land, reinforced in 2018 by the Knesset’s “Basic Law” declaring that Israel is “the Nation-State of the Jewish People,” and greatly diminishing it as a liberal democracy.
Such contradictory, conflicted uprootings and re-rootings have sometimes given Jews their mobility, marginality and occasional magnificence and malfeasance, breeding tough, defiant spirits not only in Moses and Jesus but also in Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, inventor of the atomic bomb and self-avowed “destroyer of worlds.” The Jew as interloper, living marginally in homogeneous societies but flourishing and sometimes predominating in pluralistic and open ones — agile, entrepreneurial, walking on eggshells and thinking fast – has sometimes seemed most “at home” in media of exchange, whether of information, social commentary, money, merchandise, music, math, medicine or scientific discovery. Confirmation of their prominence in those realms is presented sociologically and lyrically in Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century.
That Jews, unlike “settler-colonial” Puritans, actually do have ancestors in their “promised land” was confirmed in 1947 by the discovery of what became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls (transcribed in Hebrew that I can read with little more than my “Hebrew school” and summer-camp training) that had been buried in caves near the Dead Sea seven centuries before Jews’ millennia of exile from the area and before Islam existed and Arabic was spoken in the region. The scrolls had been in those caves for almost a thousand years when the Roman Emperor Hadrian coined the name “Palestine” for the land in the second century C.E., to elevate its Philistines at the expense of its rebellious Israelites, whom his legions had recently defeated and forced into exile. Although Jews were mostly absent from Palestine for the ensuing two millennia, the “settler-colonial” paradigm that applies so clearly to English Puritans applies only ambiguously to Jews, as John Judis explained invaluably — and grimly — two months after the October 7 attacks.
The “settler colonial” paradigm, or accusation, is especially ambiguous in regard to the half of today’s Israeli Jewish population whose ancestors never left the Middle East after Rome’s conquest of the Jewish kingdoms but settled in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt and in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Ethiopia for millennia before the 1940s. Most of these “Mizrahi” Jews have never set foot in Europe, nor have they had “mother countries” to which they could return safely, as European colonizers could have done. Yet the biblical passages transcribed on those ancient scrolls include the prophetic warnings that Israelites’ territorial claims were contingent on their keeping the covenant sealed at Sinai — or, as we might put it now, on their transcending narrow tribalism to meet a higher, more universal standard. If Israelites failed to do that, God would punish them at the hands of their enemies: Here is the prophet Amos again, sounding almost like a protester against Israel today:
“Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and to those who feel secure on the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the first of the nations, to whom the house of Israel comes! …. Go down to Gath of the Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms? Or is their territory greater than your territory, O you who put far away the day of disaster and bring near the seat of violence? Woe to those who lie on beds of ivory and stretch themselves out on their couches, … who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” [Amos 6]
Isaiah, another reluctant but overwhelmed biblical prophet, warned that God would punish Israelite elites’ arrogance by destroying their Zion “until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken.”
How America’s Puritans became the ‘New Israel’
The first landing of the Pilgrims, 1620. (Getty Images/Bettmann)
It’s remarkable how closely Puritans’ and their legatees’ strategies in their American colonies prefigured those of today’s Zionist settlers on the West Bank and of the IDF in Gaza. In 1637, Puritan soldiers surrounded a major settlement of Connecticut’s Pequot people as Puritan leader John Mason “snatched a torch from a wigwam and set fire to the village, which, owing to the strong wind blowing, was soon ablaze,” according to James Truslow Adams’ 1921 Pulitzer-winning “The Founding of New England”:
“In the early dawn of that May morning, as the New England men stood guard over the flames, five hundred men, women, and children were slowly burned alive.” Ministers of Christ saluted one another “in the Lord Jesus,” some of them profiting directly from selling surviving Pequot boys and girls into slavery.
In 1676, future Harvard president Increase Mather urged and then celebrated a genocide of the Narragansett people, declaring, in his chronicle of “The Warr with the Indians in New England”:
“The Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose Land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightfull Possession, have at sundry times been plotting mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the Sun…. And we have reason to conclude that salvation is begun [because] there are two or 3000 Indians who have been either killed, or taken, or submitted themselves to the English…. [T]he Narragansetts are in a manner ruined… who last year were the greatest body of Indians in New England, and the most formidable Enemy which hath appeared against us. But God hath consumed them by the word, & by Famine and by sickness …”
Gregory Michna, a historian of that war, writes that “Just as [the biblical] Canaan was wrested from the hands of heathens through sacral violence… the Rev. Joshua Moodey advocated infanticide as a wartime strategy, writing that ‘The Bratts of Babylon may more easily be dasht against the Stones, if we take the Season for it, but if we let them grow up they will become more formidable, and hardly Conquerable.’”
It’s remarkable how closely the early American Puritan strategies, including mass murder, anticipated those of today’s Zionist settlers on the West Bank and the IDF in Gaza.
Indigenous people made retaliatory attacks against the English, including in an infamous raid in 1704 on Deerfield, Massachusetts that destroyed that settlement — by the measures of its time, nearly as horrifying as Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel. The devastation of Deerfield has figured deeply in my own moral imagination ever since a February morning in 1957, when my fourth-grade class in Longmeadow — including some of my classmates who were descendants of the town’s Puritan settlers — sat on the floor, with the lamps turned off for effect, as Miss Smith stood before us in the pale, wintry light, telling us that on another cold February morning approximately 250 years earlier, howling, hatchet-wielding “Indians” had slaughtered nearly 20 English settlers of Deerfield, 40 miles upriver from us, and then force-marched nearly a hundred more through the frigid wilderness to captivity in Canada.
The captives included Deerfield minister John Williams and his family. Two of his children were killed in the attack, and his wife, Eunice, became weak on the trek north and fell down a ravine, tumbling into a river that swept her away. Williams’ account of that personal and communal calamity, all the more harrowing for its self-sacrificing affirmations of faith amid crucifixion, was published as “The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion” soon after he and his son Stephen were returned to Massachusetts in a hostage exchange. For a while, his account rivaled John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a parable and primer for the Puritans’ holy but dangerous errand into the “howling wilderness,” as the historian John Demos recounts in The Unredeemed Captive; A Family Story of Early America, highlighting Williams’ daughter’s refusal to leave her Native captors to rejoin the English world.
Williams’ son Stephen later became the minister of Longmeadow’s Congregational church, which stands 100 yards from the classroom where Ethel Smith told us about his captivity. The great Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards visited him there in 1740, and a year later Stephen Williams rode the five miles south from Longmeadow to Enfield, Connecticut, to hear Edwards preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,”and write an eyewitness account of its listeners’ writhing reactions.
My belief that this matters may be overdetermined by the fact that, 215 years later, I bicycled along Williams Street every weekday, passing the church where Edwards had visited Williams, on my way to and from Miss Smith’s classroom. (Fifty-eight years after that, in 2014, I wrote a quasi-puritanical jeremiadfor Salon about the American republic’s dimming prospects. I wasn’t thinking of Edwards at the time, but The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg tweeted in response,“ Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture — and that’s a compliment.”)
Miss Smith didn’t tell us that the English had included some rogues, swindlers and mountebanks who drove the expulsions and massacres of Pequots, Pocumptucs, Mohawks, Narragansetts, Wampanoags and Abenakis. Despite the settlers’ proclaimed good intentions, their land hunger generated duplicitous trade and land deals, alongside pious missions to convert indigenous people into “praying Indians.” James Truslow Adams explains that
“as the whites increased in numbers and comparative power, and as their first fears of the savages, and the desire to convert them, gave place to dislike, contempt, spiritual indifference, and self-confidence… it was no longer considered necessary to treat with the Indian as an equal…. [T]he lands of the [Indians] gradually came to be looked upon as reservations upon which their native owners were allowed to live until a convenient opportunity, or the growing needs of the settlers, might bring about a farther advance.”
Today’s Israeli settlers on the West Bank might take note and take caution. So might “old stock” Americans, proud descendants of the intrepid Puritans who prefer not to remember these and other awful precedents for our present civic-republican crisis. Even Stephen Williams, the redeemed Deerfield captive who had followed his father into the ministry, wound up owning Black slaves as his house servants in Longmeadow, as recent Harvard graduate Michael Baick recounts in a fascinating senior essay. It would be wrong for today’s faltering, “mainline” Congregationalists, Presbyterians and other Protestants to displace onto today’s Israel their own discomforts with the fraught aspects of their Puritan history and with the soulless neoliberalism – and, in some white-nationalist evangelists, the reactionary tribalism — that it has spawned. If we could reweave older, stronger covenantal threads into our civic-republican fabric, we might remember that its strength has depended on premises and practices that armies and wealth alone can’t nurture or defend. Puritans placed the Hebrew approximation of “Illumination and Testimony” on Yale’s seal because they decided to ground their salvation-hungry faith in covenanted, earthbound communities of law and work whose model they called “the Hebrew republic.” And some Jews would learn from them, as I did in Longmeadow and at the “old” Yale, to cherish its then-still-“Protestant” personal and moral introspection.
Even when Puritans held New England in their thrall, slaughtered native Americans, and hanged 40 witches, they sometimes knew better than to forgive themselves as casually as many Americans do now when they excuse or even valorize their country’s collective hysterias and brutalities. In 1697, a conscience-stricken Judge Samuel Sewall, who’d presided over the Salem witch trials five years earlier, stood penitently in Boston’s Old South Meeting House one Sunday as the pastor, Samuel Willard, read aloud a note from Sewell confessing his “guilt contracted… at Salem” and his desire “to take the blame and shame of it, asking… that God… would powerfully defend him against all temptations for Sin, for the future: and vouchsafe him for the efficacious saving conduct of word and spirit.”
Who among America’s current and recent leaders desires to take such blame and shame for enabling the killing or unjust incarceration of thousands of innocent young black men? Who begs forgiveness for opening floodgates of slaughter in Vietnam and the Middle East or enabling the official brutality on our streets and the subtler but no-less decisive dispossession of hard-working but under-informed Americans from their homes and jobs? Who takes blame for designing and operating the powerful engines and marketing sensors that grope and titillate lower viscera which Puritans like Edwards probed and restrained?
Against the present conventional presumption that globalization is flattening the world for the better, Puritans would warn that our “flat” world has abysses that open suddenly at our feet and in our hearts and that a good society needs to plumb those depths in ways spiritually potent enough to face down the demons in them and in ourselves. Abyss-plumbing requires caring as well as discipline — a tall order, and a humbling one, as Judge Sewall made clear by “humiliating” himself, in the old usage of that word, and as Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. did by drawing on Puritan remonstrances and metaphorical remnants.
I got a clue to what abyss-diving requires in 2015, when I attended my Longmeadow High School class’ 50th year reunion, three weeks before the publishing industry commenced a huge promotion of Stacy Schiff’s energetically researched, dazzlingly narrated, ideationally empty The Witches: Salem 1692 with a 500-person Manhattan armory gala, dinners up and down Park Avenue, a book tour rivalling Odysseus’ travels or David Niven’s in “Around the World in Eighty Days,” and four feature pieces in The New York Times. I’ve had my say elsewhere about what was wrong with the coronation of Schiff’s (and our) self-servingly damning assessment of Puritans. But not until that reunion in 2015 did I begin to understand how growing up amid remnants and echoes of Puritan ways may have sharpened my reckonings with our civic-cultural crisis.
Probably the only public “sin” we Longmeadow High School students committed came in painting “LHS ’65” in huge white letters on a tobacco barn just across the town line in Enfield. But soon enough we committed sins of the heart and lower viscera that Edwards would have probed. So I was surprised at our reunion to discover that I owed something better to classmates whose Puritan descent had seldom crossed my mind. There I learned for the first time that the family of my classmate Will Thayer, one of our football stars, had come to Massachusetts in the 1630s and that he had become a minister in the Congregational Church, the original Puritan church, and that he’d spent years working with poor residents of Brooklyn’s beleaguered East New York — a neighborhood that, in an unlikely coincidence, I, too, had come to know well.
How had seeds like that been sown in Will Thayer and me in arboreal, funereal Longmeadow? Talking with Will and other classmates — Susan Shepard’s family, I learned, donated part of the land that is Harvard Yard; Clark Shattuck, a deeply reflective, artistic composer, had an ancestor, John Shattuck, who drowned in the Charles River in 1675 while returning from a battle in King Phillip’s War and another ancestor who’d fought in Lexington in 1775; and Barbara Hubbard showed me that her mother’s lineage goes back to William Bradford, first governor of the Pilgrims’ Plymouth Colony — I found myself awash in memories of growing up as a stranger among these kids half a century earlier. And, with due allowance for the fact that the Longmeadow I’d grown up in wasn’t the Longmeadow of its Puritan founders, I understood how wrong we are to psycho-dramatize, satirize, and commercialize the Puritans.
Long before they’d lost their ecclesiastical and judicial grip on New England early in the 18th Century and had settled into becoming the Yankees I’d known in the 20th, descendants of Puritans had had a legacy worth living up to. If we now nervously satirize, demonize, and commercialize them, we may only be displacing blame for our own darker side. Would it disorient us unbearably to imagine that some of them knew more about the human heart than we assume that they did? Have we enough courage to assess them without seeing them, as the historianJane Kamensky rightly rapped Schiff for doing, “in a mirror that reflects most brightly our own self-satisfied faces.”? We have apps and algorithms that Puritans never dreamed of, but do we have their wisdom and will?
How American republic’s founders invoked biblical Hebrews
In 1771, the young James Madison, then a future framer of the republic and president, stayed on for a year at the College of New Jersey (later known as Princeton), to study Hebrew and Puritan theology.
In 1776, Benjamin Franklin proposedthat the great seal of the United States depict “Moses in the Dress of a High Priest standing on the Shore, and Extending his Hand Over the Sea, Thereby Causing the Same to Overwhelm Pharaoh.” (The Continental Congress chose instead the Masonic-inspired seal that’s now on every dollar bill.)
In 1790, Jews’ own hope for a fully “enlightened” citizenship in America that they hadn’t yet achieved in Europe was ratified in George Washington’s letter to the Jews of Newport, Rhode Island, which affirmed the new republic’s full tolerance of “the stock of Abraham”.
In 1809, John Adams, a descendant of New England Puritans and by then a former president, wrote, “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize Men than any other Nation. If I were an Atheist and believed in blind eternal Fate, I should still believe that Fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential Instrument for civilizing the Nations.” Adams employed that “instrument” to advance something like the Hebrew covenant, writing, in what is still part of the preamble to the Massachusetts constitution, that “The body politic is … a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.”
Note what that entails: Covenants require extralegal agreements, or traditions of trust, even among their competing participants, as much as they require laws that can too-easily be undercut by the laws’ own enforcers unless they also rely on a strong, nourished consensus favoring the rule of law itself. That relies, in turn, on an overriding sense of trust, even amid substantive disagreements. A civic-republican society can’t rely on imagined ties of sacred “blood and soil,” the shorthand for ethno-racial, quasi-familial bonds that sustain a sense of intimacy among people who share what historian Benedict Anderson called “Imagined Communities.” Rather, a civic-republican society is based on a covenant, a semi-spiritual agreement among autonomous individuals to hold one another to certain public virtues and norms that neither the liberal state nor free market alone can nourish or defend. Something additional, or foundational, is required: a civil society that reinforces the kind of “social compact” sought by Adams. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
A civic-republican society is secured not only by institutional and legal authority but also by understandings that cannot be legislated. Such a social compact cannot be rooted ultimately in ties of blood and soil.
In 1869, the British criticMatthew Arnold observedthat Protestant Americans had internalized Hebraism’s scourging demands for “conduct and obedience” and “strictness of conscience”:
“To walk staunchly by the best light one has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number… who say and do not, to be in earnest – …. this discipline has been nowhere so effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism…. [T]he intense and convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith — the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen — this energy of faith in its ideal has belonged to Hebraism alone.”
“From Maine to Florida and back again, all America Hebraizes,” Arnold wrote, and Hebraic intrepidity and prickly fidelity indeed characterized the training of many American leaders and followers at college-preparatory schools like the Groton School, whose founding rector Endicott Peabody was a descendant of Puritans – ironically, of a Puritan rogue, John Endecott, whose brutality toward indigenous peoples thankfully wasn’t sustained by Peabody or by a later relative — Endicott “Chubb” Peabody — who was governor of Massachusetts in my own lifetime. One of the Groton School rector Peabody’s students, Franklin D. Roosevelt, continued to correspond with him from the White House. In 1912, FDR’s older cousin Theodore Roosevelt, another of Groton’s founders, had challenged the presidency Woodrow Wilson, himself a latter-day Puritan,by thundering, at the Republican National Convention, “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord!” (By comparison, the loudest “thundering” at the 2024 Republican National Convention came from the theatrical wrestler Hulk Hogan.)
In 1987, the historian Shalom Goldman discovered that George W. Bush’s great-uncle five generations removed, the Rev. George Bush, was the first teacher of Hebrew at New York University in 1835 and the author of a book on Islam, “A Life of Mohammed,” which pronounced the prophet an imposter. In 1844, the Rev. Bush wrote “The Valley of the Vision, or The Dry Bones Revived,” interpreting the biblical Book of Ezekiel to prophesy the return of the Jews to Palestine.
I don’t know if George W. Bush has read his ancestor’s exegesis, but Barack Obama cited Ezekiel in his 2008 speech on race, recalling that at his Trinity Church in Chicago (a branch of the Puritans’ Congregational Church), “Ezekiel’s field of dry bones” was one of the “stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope” — that “became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears.” Obama seemed to want to weave back into America’s civic-republican fabric some tough, old threads of the Abrahamic, covenantal faith that had sustained Kingman Brewster Jr. and Martin Luther King Jr. Now that we’re looking through gaping holes in that fabric, the republic is faltering, as is its founders’ hope that it could rely on “strictness of conscience” and citizens’ inner beliefs as strongly as on their outward performances.
Some of the founders’ hopes, visions, and ancient origin stories still animated the civic culture during my childhood in Longmeadow, but that culture has gone missing in the 70 years since Miss Smith implanted some Puritan and Hebraic discipline in an impressionable nine-year-old. Even John Adams’ covenantal, civic-republican culture seems to have given way to narrowly personalistic strains in evangelical Christianity and in the republic’s Lockean premises, now commercialized and technologized beyond recognition
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Wherefore? Where to?
Jewish youth rescued from the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp show their camp tattooes on their forearms on board the refugee immigration ship Mataroa July 15, 1945 at Haifa port. (Zoltan Kluger/GPO via Getty Images)
Many Jews of my American generation grew up withphotos like this, not as historical curiosities but as reminders of what we ourselves might not have escaped had we been born a decade or so earlier in the Europe of our grandparents, instead of in postwar America. (That was true of me, born in Worcester, MA, in 1947 to parents whose Lithuanian-Jewish parents had emigrated to the U.S. shortly before World War I. Had I been born in 1937 in my paternal grandfather’s village of Dusiat, I wouldn’t have survived what happened there in the summer of 1941.)
Jews who’ve facilitated but sometimes challenged modernity’s dislocations have been targets of others’ resentments, owing to what George Steiner called their role as “a moral irritant and insomniac” — and what Assaf Sagiv, in a formidable essay, “George Steiner’s Jewish Problem,” — characterized as Jews’ function as an interlocutor “of the darkest impulses of man.” Steiner considered that status “an honor beyond honors,” but some Jews who’ve been persecuted, or haunted by memories of persecution, have resorted to sinuous subservience to established powers, especially in times of populist frustration and backlash. The Jew as fixer or apologist for the powerful — suspicious and opportunistic, legally and commercially underhanded, contemptuous of detractors – has been a stereotype too often earned by Jews such as Trump’s former henchmen Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, and Allen Weisselberg, who’ve acted as if such behavior would serve them in societies presumed hostile to progressive, humanitarian hopes and even to Jews.
And not only Jews. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, a Roman Catholic who became a Trump acolyte and chair of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Republican Conference, also became a self-appointed alarmist against American antisemitism when she spearheaded a Dec. 5, 2023 House committee hearing on what she claimed was “the rot of antisemitism” in student protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza. She demanded that university presidents seated before her at the hearing answer “Yes or No” to her accusation of anti-Gaza war campus protesters: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” So saying, Stefanik struck a politically decisive blow not only against the presidents of Penn and Harvard, whom she admonished to resign because of their equivocal responses, but also against America’s civic-republican culture.
Some protesters who shout “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” or “Globalize the intifada!” and who hold Israel “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ violence are historically uninformed and politically immature. But they haven’t been “calling for the genocide of the Jews,” as Stefanik insisted. They’ve been accusing Jews of committing genocide. Stefanik likely understood that they had a plausible, if debatable, case, but she flipped their script to make their own intentions seem genocidal against Jewish victims and to make university presidents seem their enablers. (Not incidentally, Stefanik also bolstered conservatives’ long-running campaign to blame liberal university leaders for ruining liberal education.)
Ironically, only two years before urging Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign, Stefanik herself had been asked to resign from the advisory board of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics because she’d supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election with her “public assertions about voter fraud… that have no basis in evidence, and… public statements about court actions related to the election that are incorrect,” in the words of the school’s dean. When Stefanik refused to resign and was removed by the board, she departed gracelessly, claiming that it was a “badge of honor to join the long line of leaders who have been boycotted, protested, and canceled by colleges and universities across America…. The decision by Harvard’s administration to cower and cave to the woke Left will continue to erode diversity of thought, public discourse, and ultimately the student experience.”
Protesters who shout ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Globalize the intifada’ may be historically uninformed or politically immature. But they’re not ‘calling for the genocide of the Jews.’ They’re accusing Jews of committing genocide.
Anti-antisemites are right to insist that Hamas’ intentions toward Jews are genocidal and nihilistic and that Hamas is a despotic, destructive force for Palestinians under its rule. But that doesn’t cancel the historical reality that English settlers who founded Harvard and the American republic were as genocidal as the biblical Hebrews upon whom they modeled themselves. Condemning student protesters for excusing or defending Hamas yet ignoring the murderous extremism of Israeli settlers on the West Bank and of the IDF in Gaza only intensifies the pathologies of both Holocaust-traumatized Jews and Nakba-traumatized Palestinians. What the writer Adam Shatz has called “vengeful pathologies” inflame not only those who are tied ancestrally or materially to one side in this war; they also inflame people who have no such ties but who seem more enraged by this war than by other regional conflicts that are as devastating and a hideous as the IDF’s killing of more than 30,000 Gazans, including many women and children, and destroying their homes, schools and hospitals. Unless we’re truly unable to “bear too much reality,” as T. S. Eliot surmised, we’d also have to note the sadism of Hamas leaders who’ve maimed countless Palestinian dissenters and of Hamas fighters’ whose body-camera footage depicted their murders of Israelis who were forced to watch their own children or parents being butchered just before being slaughtered themselves.
Some young Americans protesting the Gaza war are indulging in an ersatz politics driven by zeal to “prove themselves” in moralistic posturing and ideological position-taking. “This concern for the Palestinians is not a matter of anti-Semitism so much as it is a reflection of self-absorption,” Shatz wrote in The Nation in 2014. “Palestinians are for the radical Western left what Algerians were for Third Worldists…: natural-born resisters, fighting not only Israel but its imperial patrons…. Palestine is still ‘the question’ because it holds up a mirror to us. ‘Too many people want to save Palestine’ one activist said to me. But it could just as well be said that too many people want to be saved by Palestine.”
The “all-consuming preoccupation with America and Israel,” Shatz continued, has left some progressives “strangely incurious about the crimes for which the West can’t be blamed and the developments, such as the politicization of sectarian identity, that are shaking the region far more profoundly than the Israeli-Palestinian arena.” Since progressives champion freedoms of speech, of conscience, of sexual identity, and of reproductive choice, why don’t they champion hundreds of millions of people who are denied those freedoms by chanting, “From Tehran to Tripoli, Muslims will be free!”?
My criticism of the left on such grounds doesn’t excuse the Zionist movement and Israel’s degrading and now, yes, genocidal assaults on Palestinians. Since at least the 1930s, some Zionist leaders such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky have been unapologetically racist. Yet I cannot condemn Israel uniquely, when it is blamed or valorized by Americans whose ancestors destroyed Indigenous peoples and enslaved millions of Africans. “Forgetfulness, and… historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation,” noted Ernst Renan, the 19th-century scholar of Semitic languages and civilizations. Equally “essential,” it would seem, are demagogic leaders who safeguard their own nations’ false memories by ginning up moralistic condemnations of other peoples’ vengeful pathologies. A wiser, more effective strategy might begin by acknowledging with Renan that no nation’s emergence has been morally innocent, and by seeking honest explanations and answers, even when they’re painful. Several courageous American Jewish writers have tried to do this.
Former liberal Zionist Peter Beinart has held instructive public conversations with young Palestinian activists and thinkers such as Ahmed Moor. New York Times columnist Ezra Kleinhas held reflective, informative conversations with Palestinian and Israeli thinkers such as Amjad Iraqi and Yossi Klein Halevi. Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has explained why changes in the nature and dimensions of war have ended its plausibility as a solution to conflicts such as the Israeli-Palestinian impasse.
Whenever religion presumes to rule with state power, as the Puritans did and as today’s Christian nationalists intend to do, it becomes odious no matter what its Grand Inquisitors say in its defense. Yet without a faith deeper than legalism, our society will wither and die.
These and other Jewish writers exemplify another irony: Jews’ ancient, proto-cosmopolitan breakthrough still drives even secular, liberal Jews who are passionate about America, not just because some of their own forebears escaped the European nightmare but also because America’s Puritan-Hebrew emphasis on communal covenant has figured so strongly in its civic-republican ethos. Free now of Calvinist preoccupations with personal salvation, and also largely free of rabbinical constraints, the secular Jews whom I’ve mentioned are more “Jewish” than ever in striving to strengthen a covenant that entwines personal renewal with public progress.
“The past is never dead; it’s not even past,” noted the novelist William Faulkner. From the biblical Abraham breaking Ur’s idols to Abraham Lincoln forcing a bloody “new birth of freedom,” and from Kingman Brewster’s and Martin Luther King’s handshake in1964 to Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign for a “New Covenant” to Barack Obama’s “Change we can believe in,” America’s political culture has often invoked a past whose threads would now need to be re-woven somehow if the republic is to be kept from dissolving into a neoliberal free-for-all or tumbling into a Trumpian abyss.
Such a re-weaving would require acknowledging that the vagaries of finance capital and intrusive consumer marketing have hollowed out the civic-republican culture that was planted problematically by the Puritans but that sustained what G.K. Chesterton would later call “a nation with the soul of a church,” which indeed it still was when I sat on the floor in Ethel Smith’s classroom — a “church” that expected its citizens to be faithful but that didn’t impose a particular ecclesiastical doctrine. If a religion presumes to rule with state power, as Puritans certainly did and as today’s Christian nationalists and Catholic integralists intend to do, religion may become odious, no matter what its Grand Inquisitors say in its defense. Yet without a faith deeper than legalism, a society will wither and die.
Such a challenge often takes pundits and politicians by surprise, but democratic renewal can’t be conjured up in newspaper columns. blog posts, cable commentaries, and tweets. It has to be cultivated patiently in early social education, civic organizing, and political outreach worthy of the ethos envisioned by John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and others. The American civil-rights movement that made possible that handshake between Brewster and King at Yale was decades in the making, struggling to find moments of opportunity to discomfit comfortable whites with what the late Rep. John Lewis, himself a former seminarian, called “good trouble” that prompted sympathy for Rosa Parks.
Plutocratic investors and managers can’t nourish such faith and action. Who might? One wintry morning in 1968, my junior year at the old, all-male, nearly all-white Yale, I was plodding along on my way to a class when I noticed about fifty undergraduates gathered silently around three seniors and the university’s chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, Jr. One of the seniors was speaking against a gusting wind and, it seemed to me, against fear. “The government claims we’re criminals,” I heard him say as I leaned in to listen, “but we say it’s the government that’s criminal in waging this war.” He and the others were handing Coffin their draft cards, identical to the one in my wallet, and they were refusing conscription upon graduation six months hence.
Coffin was there to bless a courage that few of us who were watching fully understood. “Believe me, “he said, smiling, a strand of his graying hair flying in the wind, “I know what it’s like to wake up feeling like a sensitive grain of wheat lookin’ at a millstone.” Although his Calvinist theology was conservative in many ways, it was revolutionary in carrying forward the Hebraic axial break with ancient Ur’s idols and its conviction that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Something in us grasped at that convinced energy, because we were scared: As far as we knew, these guys were about to be arrested and sent to prison, and we felt arrested morally by their example. Something in their bearing of that reality made them as deeply prophetic as Rosa Parks was when she refused to move to the back of the bus. As the quiet dignity of her performance credited her white oppressors with some integrity, even while exposing their shortcomings, it had reconstituted civic life instead of trashing it. Now, too, as the seniors before us took grave risks to resist the United States government in the name of a civic nation transcending “blood and soil” and even capitalism and Cold War ideology, American civil society seemed to have risen from slumber and to be walking again, re-moralizing the state and the law. As I watched, the silent, wild confusion I was feeling gave way to something like awe.
One might consider these students’ gestures foolish, even elitist. But the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas called their acts of witness “constitutional patriotism,” and he marveled that Americans were resisting the state on behalf of a civic-republican experiment testing whether republics that rely on a higher, deeper faith can endure. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon reminds us that Rome slid almost imperceptibly from republican self-governance to imperial rule when Augustus sensed that “people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.”
As we deplete the stored-up moral capital of the country’s original, Hebraic-Calvinist covenant, we’re losing the faith that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Let’s give the biblical authors credit for taking the sublimity of our loss straight up instead of chasing false consolations. Our best hope of transcending realities that seem too much to bear may come from seeing them for what they are, not for imagining them as we wish them to be.
Read more from Jim Sleeper on free speech and history:
Many discouraging observations have been made about Americans, some of them clearer than truth: French observers have called us les grands enfants. The late American historian Louis Hartz rued our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind.” Those are two of the nicer assessments. Some of the more-accurate ones are scarier.Although millions of us behave encouragingly every day, often in distinctively “American” ways that I assess on this website, this is no time to congratulate ourselves. But it’s also no time to consign ourselves to history’s dustbin by writing pre-mortems for the 2024 election and for the republic itself.
The following essay is a highly personal account of my reckonings with these challenges. Before you read further here, please read “About This Site” in the left-hand column on this home-page and glance at its survey of challenges now facing an American, civic-republican culture that a mentor of mine, the late literary historian Daniel Aaron, once characterized, felicitously, as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.”
I’d like to see that civic culture transcend and outlive “woke” corporate neoliberalism, authoritarian state capitalism, right-wing, racist nationalism, Marxoid economic determinism, and post-modernist escapism, all of which are responses to global riptides that are transforming humanity’s economic, technological, communicative, climatic, migratory, and other arrangements. These swift, often dark currents are driven not only by capitalism but also by human inclinations, including to greed and power-lust, that antedate capitalism by millennia and seem certain to outlast it. Neither the left nor the right seems able to block them or re-channel them, let alone to redeem us from them.
More than a few Americans actually find these currents energizing as well as disorienting. That’s partly thanks to accidents of this country’s history that have enabled its commingling of faith, innovation, fakery, and force. Americans “have all been uprooted from their several soils and ancestries and plunged together into one vortex, whirling irresistible in a space otherwise quite empty,” the philosopher George Santayana noted. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education and a career.”
Well, maybe. The 19th-century Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck is reputed to have said that “God protects, fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” The ascent of Donald Trump and of Trumpism has reinforced that impression and made many of us doubt and even despair of “American” virtues that we’d taken for granted or dedicated ourselves to upholding. I doubted our capabilities along those lines in the 1970s and more deeply in 2014, before I or anyone imagined that Trump would run for the presidency, let alone that tens of millions of Americans would be credulous and cankered enough to elect him.
“Jim Sleeper is the Jonathan Edwards of American civic culture – and that’s a compliment,” tweeted The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg, referring to the formidable Puritan “thought leader” of the 18th Century and to my Salon essay “We, the People, are Violent and Filled with Rage,” which you can read later on this site. With Jeremiadic woe, I’d surveyed the civic-cultural damage of the 2008 financial crisis and the run of public massacres, including in Oklahoma City in 1995, Columbine in 1998, and Sandy Hook in 2012. Soon after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, I doubted America’s prospects more deeply still in “It’s Not Only a Constitutional Crisis, It’s a Civic Implosion,”a short essay for Bill Moyers’ website that you can read later on this website’s section, “A Sleeper Sampler.”
Hertzberg’s reference to my cast of mind was fortuitous, not only because the damage I mentioned has been accelerating but also because I’d grown up in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a small town settled by Puritans in 1644 six miles north of the spot where, in 1741, Edwards would preach his (in)famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Some of my Longmeadow public school classmates were direct descendants of the town’s Puritan founders. A few of my teachers seemed to have been writhing in Edwards’ congregation when he preached. Whenever some of them looked at me in school, I felt them looking into me, as if arraigning my soul before something awesome.
Their residually Calvinist, “Yankee” discipline converged with two other cultural currents in my upbringing, inclining me to look into civic-republican society’s ups and downs. The Calvinist current drew on an Hebraic biblical current of law and prophecy that was my inheritance as a grandson of four Lithuanian Jewish immigrant grandparents and that was deepened in my youthful exposure to it. Neither the Christian nor the Jewish current had disappeared in me by 1965, when, at 18, I entered Yale College, founded by Puritans who’d put the Hebrew words Urim V’Tumim, meaning, approximately, “Light and Truth” or “Illumination and Testimony,” on the seal of the college, which they envisioned as a “school of prophets.” Kingman Brewster, Jr., Yale’s president during my undergraduate years, was a lineal descendant of the minister on the Puritan Pilgrims’ ship The Mayflower, and he had been born in Longmeadow.
Fooling around at 19, my freshman yearStill fooling around in Wellesley, MA, age 23, 1971
Beyond Calvinism and Hebraism, two other cultural currents, leftish and civic-republican, followed me and surfaced at around the time I turned 30, in 1977. Like many New Englanders before me, I carried some of the region’s civic and moral presumptions (conceits? innocent hopes?) to New York City, although not to literary Manhattan but to “inner city” Brooklyn, where I ran an activist weekly newspaper before bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge every day to work as a speechwriter for City Council President Carol Bellamy. By 1982 I was writing for The Village Voice, Dissent, Commonweal and other political magazines. From 1988 to 1995, I was an editor and columnist for the daily newspapers New York Newsday and The New York Daily News.
In 1987, my essay “Boodling, Bigotry, and Cosmopolitanism” sketched New York’s changing political culture for a special issue of Dissent magazine that I edited and that was re-published as In Search of New York. The “Boodling” essay was re-published yet again inEmpire City, a Columbia University Press anthology of 400 years of writing about the city, edited by the historian Kenneth Jackson and the master-teacher David Dunbar.
In 1990, W.W. Norton published my The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York. The book, a somewhat tormented love letter to the city, sparked public debate in and beyond New York. After 1999, while continuing to live in the city and writing many of the pieces referenced and linked on this site, I taught Yale undergraduates for two decades in political science seminars with course titles such as “New Conceptions of American National Identity” and “Journalism, Liberalism, and Democracy.”
In the late 1970s I has embraced, and I still affirm, a democratic-socialist politics that, unlike Stalinism and orthodox Marxism, has a distinctively American, civic-republican orientation that rejects Communists’ opportunistic (ab)uses of civil liberties, civil rights, and democracy. Democratic socialism in the 1970s steered fairly clear of the racially essentialist “identity politics” that many of its adepts now wrongly embrace by fantasizing about “Black liberation” as the cat’s paw of an advancing Revolution. Sample my offerings in the section “Why a Skin Color isn’t a Culture or a Politics,” and you’ll encounter my conviction that although ethno-racial identities are inevitable and sometimes enriching, they’ll never be wellsprings of social hope in America unless they’re transcended by all of us as citizens in the thicker civic culture of a larger republic, if not of the world. Precisely because The United States is more complex racially, ethnically, and religiously than most “multicultural” categorizing comprehends, Americans need work overtime to identify and, yes, instill, certain shared civic and moral premises and practices that I discuss in many of the pieces on this website.
No longer fooling around. Brooklyn, age 31, 1978
Beginning in the 1990s and ever since, I’ve taken strong public stands against ethno-racialist evasions of the civic-republican mission. In 1991 I wrote a rather harsh assessment of leftist identity politics for Tikkun magazine that was re-published in Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments, edited by Paul Berman. I refined and, dare I say, elevated the argument in civic-republican terms in a 1996 Harper’s magazine essay, “Toward an End of Blackness,” that identified the emptiness of American blackness and whiteness as vessels of social hope. I summarized and updated the argument again in 2021, in a Commonweal essay,“Scrapping the Color Code.” (You can find all of the essays on race that I’ve just mentioned in this website’s section on race, “Why Skin Color Isn’t Culture or Politics.”) I’ve published a lot more along these lines and debated in many public forums, some of them linked in the Commonweal essay and elsewhere on this site. (My two books on the subject are The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997).
Some of this work sparked resentment among activists and academics on the left and among journalists and other writers across the political spectrum. I accused some of them of betraying a civic-republican ethos and creed that’s under assault by capitalist, neoliberal, and even radical-racialist forces, the most dangerous of them white-supremacy, but others of them are unconstructively “woke” or subtly, seductively commercial. Some of my criticisms of writers who’ve ridden these currents have been gratuitously cruel, even when they’ve been accurate.
Civic-republican strengths and susceptibilities
Although many Americans behaved admirably, even heroically, on 9/11 and in the civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, what matters to a republic’s survival are the little things people do daily, when no one’s looking and no digital tracking device, cellphone camera, or journalist is recording them. Essential though a republic’s wealth and military power are to its strength, they can become parasitical on it pretty quickly if people are feeling stressed, dispossessed, and susceptible to simplistic explanations. Neither a booming economy nor massive firepower can ensure a republic’s vitality, especially if prosperity and power are dissolving civic-republican norms and practices.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against this in his Farewell Address in 1960, condemning what he called a “military-industrial” complex. (An early draft of his address, well-known to historians, called it, rightly, a “military-industrial-academic” complex.) Ike, who was hardly a radical leftist inveighing against capitalism or a rightist railing against “the deep state,” was a deeply decent, heartland American who’d gotten to know the military-industrial-academic complex from within, as its supreme warmaker and then as Columbia University’s president. He didn’t like everything he saw there.
Even more than Eisenhower’s warning or Jonathan Edwards’ and the Hebrew prophets’ jeremiads, several developments since 9/11 have convinced me that Americans who are accustomed to think well of themselves would be better off convicting themselves of complicity in democracy’s decline. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the 18th century British historian Edward Gibbon noted that “a slow and secret poison” had worked its way into the vitals of ancient Rome’s republic, distorting and draining its virtues and beliefs. In our own time, faster, glaringly public poisons have been working their way into our republic. Yet most Americans, “liberal” or “conservative,” have been ingesting and pushing them without naming them honestly.
You may insist that whatever is driving Americans’ increasing resort to force, fraud and mistrust comes from human nature itself. The republic’s founders understood that argument in Calvinist terms and also from reading Gibbon’s semi-pagan assessment of human history as “little more than a record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” They tried to devise a republican system of self-government that “doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections and gives an order to our individual strivings,” as one of their legatees, John McCain, put it two and a half centuries later in one of his last addresses to Senate colleagues.
Assessed by these lights, Trump (who cruelly disparaged McCain) is only the most prominent carrier and pusher of poisons that the founders knew were already in us, even in those of us who deny that we’re carriers and pushers. In 2008 Barack Obama reinforced our “vast and almost charming innocence of mind” by staging a year-long equivalent of a religious revival rally for the civic-republican faith, across partisan, ideological, and ethno-racial lines. But he wasn’t only a performance artist. He embodied and radiated distinctively American strengths that fascinate people the world over — not our wealth and power or our technological affinities, which are often brutally or seductively unfair, but our classless egalitarianism, which inclines an American to say “Hi” to a stranger instead of “Heil!” to a dictator; to give that stranger a fair chance; to be optimistic and forward-looking; and, from those collective and personal strengths, to take a shot at the moon.
I don’t think that the American republic is sliding irreversibly into Nazi-style fascism, as some on the left fear and some on the alt-right hope, or that it will succumb to leftist totalitarian socialism. More likely is an accelerating dissolution of the civic-republican way of life that Daniel Aaron characterized as “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free.” That subtle balance of divergent qualities and of the trust and comity they engender is being routed now by global undercurrents -– economic, technological/communicative, climatic/migratory, and demographic/cultural –- that are sluicing force, fraud, and mistrust into our public and private lives. A bare majority of us are holding on to common ground.
Looking across the tracks.Illustration by Philip Toolin, a film art director/production designer who’s been doing this since he was 15.
In his foreboding 1941 prophecy, What Mein Kampf Means for America, Francis Hackett, a literary editor of The New Republic, warned that people who feel disrespected and dispossessed are easy prey for demagogic orchestrations of “the casual fact, the creative imagination, the will to believe, and, out of these three elements, a counterfeit reality to which there was a violent, instinctive response. For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fiction as they do to realities, and that in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond. The fiction is taken for truth because the fiction is badly needed.”
Edward Gibbon and Jonathan Edwards would have recognized that condition in us now. Yet its causes and subtleties often escape the notice of journalists who are busy chasing “current events” without enough historical and moral grounding to contextualize them within “undercurrent events” that are driving upheavals and horrors around us and within us. I have a thing or two to say about that myopic side of American journalism (and I have some experiences to share) in this website’s sections on “News Media, Chattering Classes, and a Phantom Public” and on “Scoops and Revelations.”
The undercurrent events that many journalists mishandle aren’t malevolent, militarized conspiracies. They’re civically mindless commercial intrusions into our public and private lives that derange our employment options, public conversations, and daily aspirations and habits. They bypass our hearts and minds relentlessly, 24/7, on their way to our lower viscera and our wallets, to attract eyeballs to their ads, to maximize the profits of swirling whorls of shareholders. These commercial riptides incentivize (and brainwash?) many Americans to behave as narrowly self-interested investors and as impulse-buying consumers, not as citizens of a republic who restrain their immediate self-interest at times to enhance the public interests of a “commonwealth.” That word is still on our legal documents and pediments, but we’re losing its meaning, along with its “ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free” ethos.
Decay and Renewal
Imagine a former auto worker, a white man in his mid-50s whose $30-an-hour job and its benefits were replaced a decade ago by a job stocking shelves at Wal-Mart for less than half the pay and who has lost his home because he accepted a predatory mortgage scam of the kind that prompted the 2008 financial and political near-meltdown. Imagine that he winds up here:
“When the people give way,” warned John Adams (a graduate of the then-still residually Calvinist Harvard College and a self-avowed admirer of Hebrews) in 1774, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour…. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society.”
In 1787, Alexander Hamilton, urging ratification of the Constitution, wrote that history seemed to have destined Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
In 1975, two centuries after James Madison, Adams, Hamilton, and others designed the republic with dry-eyed wisdom about its vulnerabilities, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt worried that “Madison Avenue tactics under the name of public relations have been permitted to invade our political life.” She characterized the then-recently exposed Pentagon Papers, which confirmed the Vietnam War’s duplicity and folly, as an example of the invasion of political life by public relations, of Madison by Madison Avenue – that is, of efforts to separate its public promises of a democratic victory in Vietnam from realities on the ground, until, finally, the official words lost their meaning and, without them, the deeds became more starkly brutal.
March on Pentagon, 1967 (National Archives and Record Administration)
What many Americans should have learned from that debacle, and what I’ve been learning ever since, reinforces Oliver Goldsmith’s warning, in 1777: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a’prey, when wealth accumulates and men decay.” A wealthy society may decay and implode not only because its prosperity isn’t distributed fairly but also because it’s only material and therefore weak against profit-maximizing engines such as Rupert Murdoch’s media, which prey upon the susceptibilities and resentments of stressed, dispossessed people such as the former auto worker and the Uber driver. If the manipulative engines aren’t stopped, they’ll grope, goose, titillate, intimidate, track, indebt, stupefy and regiment people, many of whom will crave easy escapes in bread-and-circus entertainments like those of Rome in its decline. They’ll join mobs that demand to be lied to with simplistic story lines that tell them who to blame for their pains and who to follow to fix them.
Perhaps with Gibbon’s slow and secret poison in mind, Alexis de Tocqueville described “the slow and quiet action of society upon itself” in the little daily interactions that matter as much as the high moments of national decision. Writing Democracy in America in 1835, he marveled, perhaps wishfully, at an American individualism that was inclined to cooperate with others to achieve goods in common that individualism couldn’t achieve on its own:
“The citizen of the United States is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety….This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established…. The same spirit pervades every act of social life. If a stoppage occurs in a thoroughfare, and the circulation of the public is hindered, the neighbors immediately constitute a deliberative body; and this extemporaneous assembly gives rise to an executive power which remedies the inconvenience before anybody has thought of recurring to an authority superior to that of the persons immediately concerned.”
This civic-republican disposition — to give the other person a fair chance and to back her up as she tries, to deliberate rationally with her about shared purposes, and to reach and to keep binding commitments — relies on the elusive balance of civic values, virtues and body language that’s ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free. You see it in a team sport whenever a player closes in on the action not to show off but to back up a teammate and help him score. You see it in how people in a contentious meeting extend trust cannily to potential adversaries in ways that elicit trust in return.
You used to see it even on Capitol Hill, as I did in 1968 while interning for my western Massachusetts Republican Congressman, Silvio O. Conte:
(That’s me in the dark jacket. standing next to then-astronaut John Glenn, who was visiting Rep. Conte (standing to his right) while planning to run for the U.S. Senate from Ohio.)
Or maybe you don’t see civic grace like that so often these days. Maybe backbiting, road rage, and the degradation of public space and cyberspace are prompting quiet heartache and withdrawal as trust in other people slips out of our public lives. Without the balance that I’m sketching here and elsewhere on this website, the United States won’t survive as a republic amid the undercurrent events that I’ve mentioned.
Civic-republican grace in writing and public life
Finding a better description of civic republicanism than I’ve offered here would require harder analysis and reportage but also more poetry, faith and, even some fakery. You can develop an ear and an eye for it, and maybe a voice for it. I’ve been following American civic republican culture’s ebbs and flows since around 1970, when I was 23, but really since World War II, because I was born on June 6, 1947, two years after the war’s end and three years, to the day, after D-Day, so and I grew up in a civic culture that seemed, at least to a child, more triumphant and coherent than it actually was or ever had been.
Some of the writing collected here records my and others’ growing disillusionment. A lot of it began for me in journalism, “the first rough draft of history” if a journalist has some grounding in history and isn’t just chasing “breaking news.” Whenever the chattering classes make cicada-like rackets over the latest Big Thing, I’ve tried to assess that noise in its historical and other contexts, remembering Emerson’s admonition “that a popgun is [only] a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom.”
Contextualizing current events this way sometimes yields scoops and insights that others have missed. (See the “Scoops and Other Revelations” Section for a sampler of what I’ve found.) Some of those pieces spotlight fissures and fragilities in the republican experiment, and some assail public leaders and journalists who I believed had lost their civic-republican lenses and standards, along with virtues and beliefs necessary to wise reporting. (See also “Leaders and Misleaders”)
I’m collecting some of my essays for a book that I’ll call Somebodyhaddasayit. Some my work has prompted people to tell me they were glad that I’d written what they, too, had been thinking but were reluctant to say. Somebody really did need to say it, even when doing so made enemies not only among the “villains” but also, as George Orwell lamented, among editors and other writers who cancel honest speech that might embarrass them. “Saying it’ requires not only sound judgment and tact, but also, sometimes, courage. I’ve sometimes “said it” with too little fact or courage.
Editorial writer and editor at New York Newsday, 1992
But usually I’ve defended people who bear the American republican spirit bravely, against daunting odds. One of my pieces began in Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in 2006, when I was looking for family background on Ned Lamont, then a little-known computer executive (now Governor of Connecticut) who was making a Democratic primary bid for the Connecticut U.S. Senate seat of Joe Lieberman, in protest against Lieberman’s unbending support for the Iraq War. I ended up writing not about Ned himself but about a long-forgotten uncle of his, Thomas W. Lamont II, whose young life and supreme sacrifice in World War II seemed to me a fata morgana, a fading mirage, of the American republic and of the citizenship that we’re losing, not at its enemies’ hands but at our own. (See the essay “Duty Bound” on this website’s section, “A Civic Republican Primer.”)
Being an American like Tommy Lamont is an art and a discipline. You can’t just run civic grace like his up a flagpole and salute it, but neither should you snark it down as just a bourgeois mystification of oppressive social relations. When the Vietnam War’s brutality and folly were at their worst and when official words had lost their credibility and official deeds had become murderous, the perennial socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas told protestors “not to burn the American flag but to wash it.” I took his point. I work with it. Americans who consider themselves too sophisticated for that are naïve.
Although one can’t credibly call my writing “nationalist” or “conservative,” more than a little of it has been motivated by my and others’ civic-republican patriotism. I’ve written often for left-of-center sites and journals, challenging much of what’s called “conservative” in American life. But a civic-republican compass points rightward at times, and I’ve written once or twice in right-of-center venues to condemn racialist “identity politics” and ethno-racial banner-waving that passes for progressive politics even when it only compounds a racial essentialism that fuels white superracist politics more than black-power politics.
Although American national identity was developed self-critically and sometimes hypocritically in secular Enlightenment terms, ultimately it relies on something akin to religious faith, even though it doesn’t impose a particular religious doctrine. Living with that paradox requires skill and empathy, as some leftist activists learned while swaying and singing with black-church folk against armed white men in the American South. Precisely because this country is so diverse religiously, racially, and culturally, it needs to generate shared civic standards and lenses, with help from newly potent (and therefore “mythic”) civic narratives. We don’t refuse to ride horses because they’re strong enough to kill us; we learn to break them in. Some liberals need to learn something similar about religion and patriotism instead of refusing them entirely.
How (and How Not) to Think About Left and Right
Both left and right in American life offer distinctive truths that are indispensable to governing ourselves by reflection and choice instead of by accident, force, and fraud. The left understands that without public supports in a village that raises the child, the family and spiritual values that conservatives cherish cannot flourish. But the right understands that unless a society also generates and defends irreducibly individual autonomy and conscience, well-intentioned social engineering may reduce persons to clients, cogs, or cannon fodder. Each side often clings to its own truths so tightly that they become half-truths that curdle into lies, leaving each side right only about how the other is wrong.
The consequent damage to the public sphere can’t be undone by clinging to the left-vs.-right floor plan that I mentioned at the outset and that still limits many people I know. Analysis and organizing against socioeconomic inequities are indispensable, but they’re insufficient. That’s equally true of conservative affirmations of communal and religious values that bow quickly to accumulated wealth that, as Oliver Goldsmith noted, preys upon and dissolves values and bonds that conservatives claim to cherish. (See this website’s sections, “Folly on the Left” and “Conservative Contradictions.”)
Ever since Madison helped to craft a Constitution to channel and deflect such factions, the republic has needed an open, circulating elite – not a caste or an aristocracy — of “disinterested” leaders whose private or special needs don’t stop them from looking out for the public and its potential to govern itself by reflection and choice. When John McCain voted in 2017 against repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, he admonished Senate colleaguesto “learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us…Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible…and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement…. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than ‘winning.’”
Maybe McCain had a good speechwriter, but he believed what he was saying, even though he hadn’t always lived up to it. (See the section, “Leaders and Misleaders”.) Another flawed but sincere legatee of the founders’ Constitutional project was New York Mayor Ed Koch, whom I assailed for years until I got to know him a little better.
Many Americans still do uphold the civic-republican promise –as moderators of candidates’ debates; umpires in youth sporting leagues; participants in street demonstrations; board members who aren’t afraid to say, “Now wait a minute, let me make sure that we all understand what this proposal is based on and what it entails;” and as jurors who quiet the ethno-racial voices in their own and fellow-jurors’ heads to join in finding the truth. Truth is a process as much as it’s a conclusion. It emerges not from radical pronouncements of the general will or from ecclesiastical doctrines but provisionally, from the trust-building processes of deliberative democracy. “[A]nyone who is himself willing to listen deserves to be listened to,” Brewster wrote. “If he is unwilling to open his mind to persuasion, then he forfeits his claim on the audience of others.” In politics, unlike science, the vitality of truth-seeking matters as much as the findings.
At any historical moment, one side’s claims can seem liberating against the other side’s dominant conventions and cant: In the 1930s, Orwell sought liberation in democratic-socialist movements against ascendant fascist powers, and his sympathy remained with workers, but sometimes that required him to oppose workers’ self-proclaimed champions, especially Stalinists, as well as their capitalist exploiters. Orwell “never forgot that both left and right tend to get stuck in their imagined upswings against concentrated power and to disappoint in the end: The left’s almost willful mis-readings of human nature make it falter in swift, deep currents of nationalism and religion, denying their importance yet surrendering to them abjectly and hypocritically as Soviets did by touting ‘Socialism in One Country’ (i.e., while touting Russian nationalism) and preaching Marxism as a secular eschatology” (i.e., as a religion).
The balance that we should hold out for against ideologues is like that of a person striding on both a left foot and a right one without noticing that, at any instant, all of the body’s weight is on only one foot as the other swings forward and upward in the desired direction. What matters is that the balance enables the stride. Again, it requires both a “left foot” of social equality and provision – without which the individuality and the communal bonds that conservatives claim to cherish couldn’t flourish – and a “right foot” of irreducibly personal responsibility and autonomy, without which any leftist social provision or engineering would reduce persons to passive clients, cogs, cannon fodder, or worse.
A balanced stride can be upset by differences among individuals and by the divisions within every human heart between sociable and selfish inclinations. A strong republic anticipates such imbalances. It sustains an evolving consensus without ceding ground to hatred and violence. It remains vigilant against concentrations of power because it knows how to extend trust in ways that elicit trust and reward it in return. Being ethical and pragmatic, disciplined and free, it acts on virtues and beliefs that armies alone can’t defend and that wealth can’t buy. Ultimately, and ironically, a republic’s or democracy’s strength lies in it very vulnerability, which comes with extending trust. “The presumption of innocence is not just a legal concept,” Kingman Brewster Jr. wrote, in a passage that is now the epitaph on his grave in New Haven. “In common place terms it rests on that generosity of spirit which assumes the best, not the worst, of the stranger.”
Think of Rosa Parks, refusing to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, presenting herself not only as a black woman craving vindication against racism but also as a decent, American working Everywoman, damning no one but defending her rights. Presenting herself that way, she lifted the civil society up instead of trashing it as irredeemably racist.
Civic grace like that is heroic, and rare. But after forty years of tracking American civic culture’s ups and downs, I believe that, ultimately, it’s all that we have.
The first landing of the Pilgrims, 1620. (Getty Images/Bettmann)
