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Thought Criminal:

I think American academic habits which Winters demonstrates in the article share something of the late 19th century Vatican in the conventional thinking about America, in that they accept too readily that European definition of "liberalism" when the distinction between that amoral and ultimately anti-egalitarian and so anti-democratic ideology - the ideology of most of the media "liberals" - is destructive of the egalitarian-democratic basis of traditional American liberalism. That a number of neo-fascists in American have styled themselves as "classical liberals" is an important thing to understand.

I attended a presentation/lunch/something? (for the life of me I can’t remember why I was there) where an ordained minister discussed something (?) to do with something we other ordained ministers wanted to know, and it had to do partly with his work in Europe.

Yeah, I realize now I don’t remember anything about that event except his rather fervent desire we not let on to his European colleagues that he was an ordained minister (as if we could), because they would think far less of him. I’m not sure it’s really different in America, at least among the professional classes, where “religion” equals either racial intolerance (Jews v Palestinians), or Bible-thumping know-nothingism. But what made me think of his concern (I’ll be damned if I can remember his comments and thesis, both of which were quite good. Sic transit gloria.), was the distinction mentioned above between the basis of European and American liberalism.

Reading TC’s post, I immediately thought of the Ronantics, who were quite liberal in their beginnings (despite the fact most of them had family money to live, and write, on. Wordsworth became famously politically and socially conservative in middle age.). I’d venture to say that’s the basis of European liberalism, the same basis (identification with the “working class,” albeit from a far more comfortable “leisure class” position. Or at least an educated class one.) as Marxist analysis. There’s a reason Marxism was always more acceptable in European thinking than American, and it has largely to do with religion.

Walt Whitman was the great avatar of “working class” American Romanticism, and his is almost mystical, especially by comparison to Wordsworth’s pantheism grounded in nature. It’s not an accident Thoreau and Emerson ground their Romanticism in vague notions of Eastern religions. Thoreau the naturalist certainly doesn’t ground it in Wordsworth’s adoration of sunrises and clouds.☁️ The simple fact is, Romanticism in America took root in far more fertile religious soil than it did in Europe, where religion was much more a matter of the State, and Romanticism was, especially initially, radically revolutionary.

So it was in America (Whitman, after all, openly celebrated sex, no matter the gender if the partners). But it was revolution grounded in religion, and the revolutionary spirit of the importance of the individual fired both the emphasis on personal salvation, and the Social Gospel emphasis on care for the poor, and so for each other.

Social Gospel, religious social reform movement prominent in the United States from about 1870 to 1920. Advocates of the movement interpreted the kingdom of God as requiring social as well as individual salvation and sought the betterment of industrialized society through application of the biblical principles of charity and justice. The Social Gospel was especially promulgated among liberal Protestant ministers, including Washington Gladden and Lyman Abbott, and was shaped by the persuasive works of Charles Monroe Sheldon (In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? [1896]) and Walter Rauschenbusch (Christianity and the Social Crisis [1907]). Labour reforms—including the abolition of child labour, a shorter workweek, a living wage, and factory regulation—constituted the Social Gospel’s most prominent concerns. During the 1930s many of these ideals were realized through the rise of organized labour and the legislation of the New Deal by U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I don’t know which came first: labor unions and labor laws in America, or in Europe. I do know we taught the Nazis how to write race laws and laws against “undesirables” (“Three generations of imbeciles are enough!” US law made the words “moron,” “imbecile,” and “idiot,” legal terms of art.). But a lot of these ideas traded freely back and forth. The interesting consequence, though, is that modern American liberalism, at least, is based in religion through the teachings of the Social Gospel; and yet American liberalism has ceded that ground to conservatives, and aped European liberalism as their standard. Which may go a long way to explaining why they are failing in America.

It also supports Reinhold Niebuhr’s criticism of the Social Gospel emphasis, because its ideal became establishing the basiliea tou theou through government. American conservatism in the’70’s and ‘80’s championed Niebuhr’s critique (misguidedly), until they figured out they could use religion (or just the trappings and vocabulary) to wield government power themselves. And so we have Trump in his second term vowing to make Christianity paramount in the country (although he’s already forgotten he said that).

But if we recover the egalitarian religious basis of American liberalism, and plant it firmly in American soil, rather than trying to grow a European hybrid… 🤔