Midwest vs Coasts: history, culture & politics

Often in reading about politics, my Midwestern worldview can make me feel like I’m working from a slightly different context than mainstream culture. The mainstream media tends to put issues in terms of Northeastern Democrats versus Southern Republicans or else East Coast Establishment versus West Coast Libertarianism/Liberalism. The Midwest is none of these.

I was thinking about this last night when I was reading American Nations by Colin Woodard (which I came across in my recent research that began with an earlier post). Here is one of the passages that made me think about this (Kindle Locations 2962-3053):

“New Englanders headed west across the northern tier of the Northwest Territory, land-hungry settlers from the Midlands were pouring into the central Midwest. The Midlanders—a great many of them German speaking—carried their pluralistic culture into the Heartland, a place long since identified with neighborliness, family-centered progress, practical politics, and a distrust of big government. Spanning the north-central portions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the Greater Midlands spread through central and southern Iowa, northern Missouri, eastern Nebraska and Kansas, and even northernmost Texas—an area many times greater than its original hearth on the shores of the Delaware Bay. Its settlements—a collection of mutually tolerant ethnic enclaves—served as a buffer between the intolerant, communitarian morality of Greater Yankeedom and the individualistic hedonism of Greater Appalachia, just as they had earlier on the eastern seaboard. New Englanders and Appalachian people often settled among them, but neither group’s values took hold. The Midland Midwest would develop as a center of moderation and tolerance, where people of many faiths and ethnicities lived side by side, largely minding their own business. Few Midwestern Midlanders were Quakers, but they unconsciously carried aspects of William Penn’s vision to fruition.”

(Note: Here in Eastern Iowa, there are a fair number of Quakers. Offhand, I know of 3 Quaker churches and a Quaker school in the immediate area. Demographic maps show a relatively higher percentage of Quakers in the Midwest, particularly in Ohio, Indiana and Iowa; where I live, Johnson County, is only a county away from one of the concentrated Quaker communities in the US, Keokuk County. However, maybe this only increased after the early immigrants came to the region. I noticed a 1914 book about Quakers in Iowa which notes, “Although the Quakers have not been numerous in Iowa, the influence of their attitude toward life has been considerable in the history of the Commonwealth.” Maybe living near a concentrated population of Quakers biases my perception of the Midwest slightly.)

“Most Midlanders reached the region on the National Road, which guided their settlement to the Mississippi and beyond. Pennsylvania Germans did their best to replicate the towns they’d left behind. New Philadelphia, Ohio, was founded by a congregation of Moravians and soon attracted German-speaking Mennonites. In Ohio, Pennsylvania Dutch dominated a fifty-mile-wide belt of farms south of the Yankee Western Reserve in settlements called Berlin, Hanover, Dresden, Frankfort, Potsdam, Strasburg, or Winesburg. Amish and Dunkers founded Nazareth, Canaan, and Bethlehem. Pennsylvania Dutch barns and United Brethren churches sprang up amid tidy farmhouses and fields of wheat. From the 1830s this familiar cultural environment attracted huge numbers of immigrants directly from Germany who congregated in Cincinnati.1

“In Indiana the Midlander belt of settlement was narrower due to their discomfort with the Appalachian dominance over the territory’s affairs. Indiana’s Borderlanders called themselves Hoosiers, came from the backcountry of Kentucky and western Virginia, and were ambivalent about slavery. But to Yankees and Midlanders they might as well have come from the Deep South. “Avoid settling in those states where negro slavery prevails,” a Philadelphia newspaper advised would-be emigrants to the west. “Your children will be corrupted by their vices and the slave lords will never treat you like Christians or fellow citizens.” To settle in Yankee-dominated Michigan or Wisconsin, meanwhile, meant putting up with the New Englanders’ irritating desire to make everyone into a Yankee. Many Midlanders did ultimately put down roots there (Milwaukee would declare itself the “German capital of America”), but they had to expend time and energy resisting Yankee attempts to close their beer gardens on the Sabbath, to force English-only public schools on their children, and to stamp out their Germanness. In the Midland zone, foreigners, Catholics, and others found a society untroubled by diversity but skeptical of slave labor, warfare, and the cult of the individual.2″

(Note: My mom’s family who were Germans would be included in the above mentioned ‘Hoosiers’. They originally settled in Southern Indiana from Kentucky, but I don’t know how long they were in Kentucky. If they had only stopped in Kentucky on there way to Indiana, they might not have picked up as much of the Appalachian culture. However, living in Southern Indiana, they inevitably picked up some of that culture. In fact, my mom raised in Northern Indiana still to this day speaks with some of the Appalachian dialect that she apparently got from her family. Anyway, from what I know of my family on that side, it would seem they took on a fair amount of the Appalachian culture, beyond just dialect. My ancestors probably would have maintained more of their own German culture had they initially settled in a more Northern or more Western region of the Midlands. Yankee culture tried to enforce assimilation, but the Scots-Irish of Appalachia weren’t known for being friendly to other cultures either.)

“Midlanders settled a swath of the north-central area of Illinois, anchored by the border cities of Chicago and St. Louis. Northern Missouri became a Midland stronghold as well, with St. Louis supporting two German-language daily newspapers by 1845. Bavarian immigrant George Schneider founded the Bavarian Brewery there in 1852, selling it to Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch a few years later. Continued immigration from Germany enabled Midland civilization to dominate the American Heartland despite competition from aggressive Yankees and Borderlanders. By midcentury, German immigrants were arriving by riverboat in St. Louis and from there fanning out across northern Missouri and the eastern prairies. Railroads followed, carrying immigrants from Europe and the coastal Midlands alike.3

“Germans had many reasons to abandon central Europe, where forty independent German states were squabbling over the great issues raised by the French Revolution: the legitimacy of feudalism, monarchies, and an economic system in which most people lived in dire poverty. Efforts to unify the region into a single state under a representative government failed in 1848, and many Germans looked to escape the military autocracy that followed. Even before the collapse of the so-called ’48 Revolution, liberals had wished for a place where they could build a New Germany, a model for the democratic, egalitarian society they had hoped their own splintered nation could become. “The foundations of a new and free Germany in the great north American republic can be laid by us,” the leader of one German colonization expedition to the American Midwest told his followers in 1833. “We may in at least one of the American territories create a state that is German from its foundations up, in which all those to whom the future here at home may seem . . . intolerable, can find refuge.” This and other expeditions were drawn to northern Missouri by the writings of Prussian-born resident Gottfried Duden, who extolled the region as a ready-made utopia. They were further encouraged by the new German Society of Philadelphia, which sought to found “a New Germany” in the west as “a secure refuge for ourselves, our children, and our descendants.” As the United States headed to the brink of civil war in the late 1850s, two leading German political analysts predicted the union would break into a number of independent states, some “under German rule.” These ideas are probably not what ultimately motivated the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans who actually made the move to the American Midlands, but they did provide the means for many of them to get there, in the form of useful information, organized emigration societies, and political assistance. No state would ever come close to being dominated by the German-born—Wisconsin stalled at 16 percent in 1860—but the 1830–1860 exodus from the Fatherland ensured that the diverse and tolerant Midlander civilization would come to dominate the American Heartland.4

“The flow of Quaker migrants was much smaller, but they were drawn to the Midland Midwest for similar reasons. In the early nineteenth century, Friends still sought to separate themselves from the world, and many found it harder and harder to do so on the densely populated eastern seaboard. During the course of the century, a number of Quaker enclaves outside of the Midlands relocated to Ohio and Central Indiana. Disgusted by slavery, century-old Quaker communities abandoned Tidewater and the Deep South. Indiana eclipsed Philadelphia as the center of North American Quakers in the 1850s. To this day, Richmond, Indiana, is second only to the City of Brotherly Love in total Quaker population. Nestled among communities of Germans, Scots-Irish, English Methodists, Moravians, Amish, and others, the Quakers had found a cultural landscape almost identical to that of southeastern Pennsylvania.5

“Like the Yankee Midwest, the Greater Midlands was settled by groups of families who had been neighbors on the eastern seaboard or in Europe. Unlike Yankees, they generally weren’t interested in assimilating people in neighboring communities, let alone in entire states. As in the Delaware Valley, individual towns were often dominated by a particular ethnic group, but counties tended to be pluralistic. Midwestern towns took their gridiron street plans from Pennsylvania precedents. The Germans set the tone, generally buying land with the intent to build lasting family homesteads rather than as speculative investments. They sought a permanent, organic connection to their land, taking unusual care to ensure its long-term productivity through soil and forest conservation measures first perfected on the tiny farm plots of central Europe. Whether arriving from Europe or Pennsylvania, they built their homes from stone whenever possible, as it was more durable than the wood used by the Yankees or Appalachian people.6

“Scholars have observed that the Germans insisted on entering the American melting pot collectively, on their own terms, and bearing ingredients they felt the country was lacking. Germans arriving from Europe usually had a higher standard of education, craftsmanship, and farming knowledge than most of their American neighbors, whom they found grasping and uncultured. “Americans are in their regard for art half-barbarian,” immigrant Gustave Koerner remarked in 1834, “and their taste is not much better than that of the Indian aborigines, who stick metal rings through their noses.” The Germans avoided assimilating, using their language in schools and newspapers and almost exclusively marrying other Germans as late as the 1880s. In a country rushing madly toward the frontier, the Germans distinguished themselves by their emphasis on stable, permanent, rooted communities, where families would work the same piece of land for generations. This rootedness would be perhaps their most lasting contribution to the culture of the Midlands and, by extension, the American Midwest.7″

(Note: The above is what I had in mind when I was writing yesterday my post Radicals & Reformers of Indiana. In that post, I was discussing the revisionist history that claims assimilation was the norm prior to the multiculturalism of 20th century progressivism. In reality, America was in many ways more culturally diverse and less culturally assimilated in the 19th century than it is today.)

“The people of the Midland Midwest had political values that distinguished the region from both the Yankee upper Midwest and the Appalachian lower Midwest. Midland areas resisted Yankee cultural imperialism and thus voted against the new Yankee-controlled political vehicle that emerged in the 1850s: the Republican Party. Midlanders did not wish to create a homogeneous nation: Quakers championed religious freedom, at least for Christians; new British immigrants were coming for economic opportunity, not to create an ideal Calvinist republic; Germans were accustomed to living among people of different religions. While these and other groups settling in the Midlands zone may have disliked and disagreed with one another, none sought to rule or assimilate the others beyond the town or neighborhood level. All rejected the Yankee efforts to do so.

(Note: Multiculturalism is and always has been the culture of the Midland Midwest.)

“As a result, throughout the 1850s a majority of Midlanders supported the anti-Yankee Democratic Party, which, at the time, was the party of the Deep South, Tidewater, and immigrants, especially Catholics. Democrats in this era rejected the notion that governments had a moral mission to better society, either through assimilating minorities or eliminating slavery. People—whether Deep Southern slave lords or the impoverished Irish Catholic immigrants of Boston—should be left to go about their business as they wished.

“But at the end of the 1850s this allegiance to the Democrats began to change as tensions built over the extension of slavery to Missouri, Kansas, and other new states and territories. Midland opinion began to splinter along doctrinal lines. Religious groups whose beliefs emphasized the need to redeem the world through good works, moral reforms, or utopian experiments found common ground with the Yankees, first on slavery, and later on efforts to curb alcoholism, blasphemous speech, and antisocial behaviors; this led Dutch Calvinists, German Sectarians, Swedish Lutherans, Northern Methodists, Free Will Baptists, and General Synod German Lutherans to embrace the Republican Party. People whose religious beliefs did not emphasize—or actively discouraged—efforts to make the present world holy stuck with the laissez-faire Democrats: Confessional German Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Southern Methodists. Groups occupying the middle ground on these issues (Anglicans, the Disciples of Christ) were split.8

“The end result was characteristically Midland: a large region of swing voters whose support could make or break nearly every future federal coalition around any given issue. On the eve of the Civil War, slavery would push a narrow majority of Midlanders into the Republican camp. Careful forensic analysis of the 1860 presidential vote by late twentieth-century political scientists has shown that this shift in Midlander opinion—particularly among Germans—tipped Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana into Abraham Lincoln’s column, giving him control of the White House. Defeated on the federal stage by the defection of the Midland Midwest, the Deep South would move to secede almost immediately.9″

My Mom’s family is mostly German-Americans who came through the Appalachian country of Kentucky and finally settled in Indiana (interestingly, Abraham Lincoln’s family also went from Kentucky to Indiana where he spent most of his childhood, the reason given for the move was partly because of the slavery issue, Kentucky being a slave state and Indiana a non-slave state; by the way, Lincoln had a personal and political connection to the utopian socialist New Harmony community that was located near the area where Lincoln’s family and my family lived; also, like Paine who inspired him, Lincoln had family ties to Quakerism and, like Paine, sought to self-educate himself as was encouraged in the Quaker tradition). My mom’s family seems to have a bit more of what people think of as the Scots-Irish culture (not known for tendencies toward socialism and self-education), but I was born in the Midlands of German-American Ohio and raised in the Midlands of various states with Iowa as my home state. Both the Midlands Midwest and Appalachia have cultures that mistrust big government, although for different reasons, the former because of a focus on local communities (local governance and civic mindedness) and the latter because of a focus on individualism and a disinterest in any collective organization beyond kinship.

The Midlands has never easily fit into the categories of Southern aristocratic conservatism or Northeastern paternalistic liberalism. Certainly, the Northeast did add a certain flavor to Midwestern culture, especially with some of the New England type of college towns that can be found as far as Iowa. However, the Midwest had to deal with multiculturalism in a way that many other regions of the country didn’t have to deal with. The closest parallel might be parts of the West Coast which makes sense considering many Midwesterners moved to the West Coast during the Dust Bowl years, thus giving to the West Coast its Standard American English. The Midwest shares with the Northeast and the West Coast a love of multiculturalism, although the Midwest gives a very different spin to it.

Midwesterners are liberal in this sense, but this liberalism isn’t always perceived by the rest of the country. Midwesterners are so laidback and not generally outspoken in politics. Texans and other Southerners may speak of live and let live, but Midwesterners genuinely live this motto to a greater extent. Many Americans outside of the Midwest might find it odd how radicaly left-wing the Midwestern states can be at times. We have high union membership, we have some states with same-sex marriage or same-sex union rights, and we have a history of socialism.

Eugene V. Debs, one of the most influential American socialists, was born and raised in Indiana. We also had many socialists communities starting in the 19th century through the 20th century, including New Harmony in Southern Indiana around the time my family moved into that area and including decades of Sewer Socialist mayors in Milwaukee. Big business and big government oppression led many Midwestern socialists to flee to Canada, but even to this day there are successful socialist communities such as Eastwind which is located in the lower Midwest. Despite the decline of overt socialism, social democracy which is closely allied with socialism continues to reign as the dominant political system of the Midwest. My home of Iowa City is a perfect example of social democracy in action.

The following is another section from the same book (Kindle Locations 3799-3819):

“Despite a long history of abolitionist sentiment, the Midlands had been ambivalent about Southern secession prior to the attack on Sumter. The Quaker/Anabaptist commitment to pacifism trumped moral qualms about slavery. Newspapers and politicians from Midland areas of Pennsylvania advocated allowing the Deep South to secede peacefully. Midland-controlled northern Delaware found itself at odds with the Tidewater-dominated south of the state, with some fearing violence might break out between the sections. Midland southern New Jersey had no intention of joining a slave-trading Gotham city-state, even if northern Jersey did.

“In the 1860 presidential election the Midlands voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln, except for northern Maryland and Delaware, where he did not appear on the ballot. (In those places, Midlanders voted for the moderate Bell instead.) Lincoln easily won most of the Midland Midwest from central Ohio to southern Iowa, tipping Illinois and Indiana into his column. While Midlanders voted with their Yankee neighbors, they had no desire to be governed by them. Faced with the possibility of a national dissolution, most Midland political and opinion leaders hoped to join the Appalachian-controlled states to create a Central Confederacy stretching from New Jersey to Arkansas. The proposed nation would serve as a neutral buffer area between Yankeedom and the Deep South, preventing the antagonists from going to war with each other. John Pendleton Kennedy, a Baltimore publisher and former congressman, championed this “Confederacy of Border States,” which opposed both the Deep South’s program of expansion by conquest and the Yankee plans to preserve the Union by force. It was, he argued, the “natural and appropriate medium through which the settlement of all differences is eventually to be obtained.” Maryland’s governor, Thomas Hicks, saw merit in the proposal, which could preserve the peace in a state split between Midland, Appalachian, and Tidewater sections; he corresponded with governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, and Missouri (all of which had substantial Midland sections) plus New York and Virginia to lay the groundwork for such an alliance should the Union break up.13

“But the Deep South lost all Midland support after Sumter. In Philadelphia, Easton, and West Chester—Pennsylvania communities that had previously been centers of secessionist sympathy—mobs destroyed pro-Southern newspaper offices, drove pro-Southern politicians from their homes, assaulted secessionists in the streets, and forced homes and businesses to display Union flags. In Maryland the Central Confederacy proposal became obsolete overnight; Midland and Appalachian sections rallied to the Union, Tidewater ones to the Southern Confederacy. Their flag attacked, Midland sections of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri threw in their lot with the Yankees.14″

Isn’t that interesting?

Imagine if a Central Confederacy had formed. If the South had resisted turning to violence, the Midland Midwest (and upper Appalachia) wouldn’t have turned to fight with the Northeast in defense of the Union. Also, if the South hadn’t tried to force its slaveholding aristocracy onto the rest of the country (through undemocratically forcing slavery onto new states and by forcing non-slave states to submit to the power and authority of slave states), most Americans in the rest of the country would have been fine with leaving Southerners alone. It was force, oppression and violence that Midlanders and Borderlanders refused to accept from the South. It was the principle of it that bothered these Americans. If the North had first turned to violence in a similar manner, they very well might have gone to the defense of the South.

This is why it is so important for American presidential campaigns to begin in Iowa, in the Heartland. To win the heart of America usually means to win the entire country or at least to win the popular vote. Republicans try to look good in Iowa despite the fact that Iowa in recent history usually goes to Democrats.

I don’t know if that clarifies what I was stated at the beginning of this post. I’m a Midwesterner in my outlook on life. When I come across discussions about politics, especially when it involves those on the far right or far left, I feel like my own understanding is ignored.

I don’t think it is intentional. It’s simply that most Americans are from different regions than I am from. The most densely populated regions are on or near the coasts (West and East, Northeast and Deep South), and it is these regions where most political extremists are found. If I try to join discussions with such people, I feel like I have to translate my own views into their political terms and their social context. I realize that I understand them better than they understand me. As a member of fly-over territory, I constantly am barraged by the mainstream media that comes from the coasts. Those on the coasts, however, are mostly unaware of Midwestern media and hence unaware of the Midwest in general. Sadly, because of coastal dominance, even average Midwesterners have become increasingly uninformed and misinformed about the history, culture and politics of the Midwest.

In some ways, I think the Midwest is more radical than any other region of the US. It is radical because it is something entirely different, something that challenges the very notion of what this country is, what this country has been and could become. The Midwest is largely the creation of cultures from Northern Europe such as Germany. This Northern European culture still remains in the Midwest. Like Northern Europe, the Midwest has low economic inequality and low rates of social problems. Maybe it is time for average Americans to stop defining themselves according to the worldview of coastal elites.

 * * * *

After writing the above, I realized I had forgotten about one issue that motivated my thinking in this direction. I was reading an interview/discussion and a guest post over at SKEPOET’s blog. In both, the issue of regions came up, although only in terms of comparing countries. In the first one linked, one particular section of the discussion stood out:

Keith418:  [ . . . ] I don’t see a criticism of the managed society developing on the right or on the left. Instead, people pick vaguely defined managerial forces they wish to see prevail, but the structure and core operating beliefs of these experts is seldom acknowledged or challenged. Many people on the left just want more humane and caring management – which is quite a different demand from that of the people themselves being allowed to make the most important decisions that effect their lives. There are those on the paleocon right who evidence a kind of cranky antipathy towards the managerial elites, but these folks still don’t seem truly ready to abandon the technological society these same trained experts have provided for them. The neocon right has always cultivated its own managers and think tanks and has always been quite ready to enjoy what a “big government” made of empowered managers can provided.  For both the left and the right, taking power back from those they have ceded it to will take effort and energy. Who is ready to start that process and what sacrifices will they make to get there? The alternative is just to insist on better management – and not to attack and question the power and role of the managers at all.

He does make a fair point here, but such generalizations can be problematic. Instead of just comparing countries or international cultures, I was wondering if more insight might be gained by a more fine-tuned analysis of the regions within the US (and within other countries). If we don’t look in detail at how we got here, how can we speak of where we are going and where we might end up?

The ideal of a society managed by an elite has tended to be more of a coastal phenomenon. In the Midwest, there is the ideal of managing at the local level of communities where there can be a balance between a “more humane and caring management” and “the people themselves being allowed to make the most important decisions that effect their lives”. The most notable example of this balance is that of the Milwaukee Sewer Socialists.

We ignore this cultural tradition and its future potential at our own peril. Instead of looking outside for rupture from the present system, why not look inward for the native traditions that can erupt naturally as part of the culture? If we want to avoid technocrats, then any revolution must arise naturally rather than being externally foced upon the population.

Skepoet: Would you say that right and left are largely irrelevant positions?

Keith418:  Well, even if I did, what would be gained? Why do people still cling to these terms and think and act as if they were, indeed, still profoundly meaningful? Since the ’60s – I’m thinking of Karl Hess and even before him – many have tried to point out differing, and more determining and accurate kinds of dichotomies. Centralized vs. decentralized approaches, authoritarian vs. individualistic choices, top-down vs. bottom up styles. Why, after all this time, do people keep using “left and right”? What is concealed, what unrevealed truth is carried in these terms that continues to prevent their exhaustion?

Maybe we cling to these terms because what needs to be resolved is at the ground level of culture rather than in the heavenly sphere of ideas. The devil is in the details, not in the abstractions. Likewise, to borrow a phrase from Philip K. Dick, God is in the garbage. The real fight is in the dirt and muck of local culture. That is the only place ideological conflict can be fundamentally resolved. As former neocon Francis Fukuyama came to understand, healthy institutions must arise from within a culture as part of the local traditions and knowledge of communities.

Skepoet: What do you think remains unresolved at the core of the idea of left and right then as the fact that categories do not seem to leave us would indicate?   In my mind, when categories won’t go away despite the existence of more precise semantic categories, there is something unresolved at the core of the idea. Perhaps I am wrong about this, but I suspect you approach this similarly, although it may be for different reasons.

Keith418: Well, what are the origin of the terms? They go back to the days of the French Revolution. What remains unresolved from that point? What questions were asked then that still haven’t been answered – and which our political definition still, somehow, entail? [ . . . ]

To me, these terms represent differing sides on the nature of the dream of shared human life, the great motivating metaphysical dream that floats above us and lives through us as we seek to create a world for ourselves.

Maybe so. I’m not unfamiliar with nor uninterested in such metaphysical perspective. However, for my thinking at the moment, I feel drawn to ground these metaphysical dreams in worldly particulars.

Metaphysical dreams don’t just float. They are more like the mist hovering along the ground drenching the world with its wetness, condensing into water that feeds life and then evaporating once again. Such mist follows closely the geography of hills and hollows, obscuring the world beyond the immediate place we stand even as it gives form to the air we breathe.

Drunk History

Martin Luther King, Jr. Sings

The Way of the World (in animation)

Ralph Brauer: Revolutions & Liberal America

I just yesterday discovered the work of Ralph Brauer.  I came across his book The Strange Death of Liberal America in Google books while doing a websearch about the religious right.  I found the passage rather insightful.  His view on American history makes even more sense when put in the context of Strauss and Howe’s The Fourth Turning.

Below are some writings from Brauer.  The first is the beginning of an article.  The second is the aforementioned passage from his book.

A Call For a Third Revolution of Liberal America

By Ralph Brauer

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The history of Liberal America can be seen as encompassing two revolutions. The first centered on rights, as the notion of what Tom Paine termed “the rights of man” extended to include the propertyless, people of color and women. In the United States that revolution was in part derailed by the rollback of Reconstruction when the country essentially bought the South’s idea of segregation. A similar rollback has been under way since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in what I have referred to as the Second Reconstruction.

The Second Revolution focused on economic justice, embodied in this nation and other democracies as governmental programs designed to keep the playing field level for all people. Unfortunately the Second Revolution stalled out for much the same reasons as the first: the country as a whole had little stomach for pushing this to its conclusion. Most people, for example have probably never heard of the Economic Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin Roosevelt shortly before his death.

Part of the genius of Martin Luther King lay in his recognition of the connection between the First and Second revolutions, but his pleas were thwarted in Chicago and Memphis. Like many African American leaders during the Second Reconstruction, King was murdered while those who sought to pick up the banner were marginalized and/or ineffective.

Curiously the last half of the twentieth century played out much like the last half of the nineteenth as the revolution of economic justice went through the same counterrevolution as did the First Reconstruction.

In the case of both revolutions there was a very narrow window during which the cause might have managed to maneuver enough to fully realize its ideals. In both cases America flinched when it might have pressed the advantage. But African American congressmen and state office holders were driven from office in the rollback of the First Revolution and Dr. King, Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer and others were murdered or sent packing in the rollback of the Second.

 

The Strange Death of Liberal America
By Ralph Brauer

pp 32-36

Three of the four partners of the Counterrevolutionary coalition had fallen into place.  The first were the corporate fundamentalists who detested any government regulation of business.  The second were the former Dixiecrats who fought for state’s rights.  The intersection between the Dixiecrats and the corporate fundamentalists sought to pull back the government’s role in leveling the social and economic playing field.   The intersection between the Religious Right and other Counterrevolutionary members involved a crusade that has come to be called the “Social Agenda.”  Although the fundamentalists’ position on such issues such as abortion has received much media and political attention, the linchpin has been education.

If Strom Thurmond personifies the first stage of the Counterrevolution, Ralph Reed, former Christian Coalition Executive Director, personifies the second, for like Thurmond he has that Forrest Gump quality of being at critical crossroads.  Looking like a frat boy whose too-well-groomed apearance and smirking smile suggest he has played more than his share of pranks, Reed’s early career is characterized by questionable actions.  Nina J. Easton, author of Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Crusade notes he was fired from the University of Georgia student paper for plagiarism.  He then worked with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist to take over the national college Republicans.  Later he built Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition into a major force in the Republican Party.  In the 2000 election he served as an advisor to George W. Bush.  He even managed to get himself hired by Enron.  After somehow landing on his feet after that fiasco, Reed became head of the Georgia GOP, running for the lieutenant governorship in 2006.  Reed illustrates the abilities — even necessity — of key Republican operatives to move seamlessly between three worlds of politics, religion, and business.  In fact these operatives probably do not see the three arenas as distinct, but part of one divine mission.

What helped consummate the marriage Land spoke of was one major cornerstone of Liberal America: education.  The Religious Right has been dissatisfied with public schools for some time because by law America’s classrooms have been nondenomenational.  The fundamentalists became especially incensed as courts and legislatures ruled against school prayer and the IRS moved to revoke tax exemptionfor religious schools that served as covers for segregation the way bed sheets covered Klansmen.  As public schools invested in programs such as diversity, fundamentalist Christians bailed out of the system, forming private religious academies or seeking to remove programs that did not agree with their theology.  Finally, Darwin again entered the picture as fundamentalists agitated against the teaching of evolution while advocating what they called “intelligent design.”

In Political Agendas for Education: From the Christian Coalition to the Green Party, author Joel Spring zeroes in on a statement in which Ralph Reed acknowledges, “More than any other single episode, the IRS move against Christian schools sparked the explosion of the movement that would become known as the religious right.”  Paul Weyrich, one of the architects of the new GOP coalition, agrees with Reed’s analysis, noting that the Religious Right was born in response to two decisions by the Carter administration: the IRS ruling and the belief that the FCC planned to regulate Christian radio stations (although imaginary, it was widely believed).

Thus began the second phase of the Counterrevolution, built around a series of Devil’s bargains that made their coalition the equivalent of the New Deal coalition of Franklin Roosevelt.  The Counterrevolution’s road to power was paved by two crucial decisions that played a major role in creatign the Era of Bad Feelings.  The first came from the Supreme Court in Buckley v. Valeo, a 1976 case revolving around reforms initiated after Watergate designed to lessen the impact money on the electoral process.  Those reforms resulted in making the election of 1976 one of the few in which both candidates spent identical amounts.  The Buckley decision upheld the Watergate reforms with one notable exception: the Court ruled that individuals and groups not affiliated with the official campaign had no spending limits.

The GOP pounced on this loophole.  In the 1984 campaign when Ronald Reagan faced Walter Mondale, Republican Political Action Committees (PACs) spent almost four times the amount of their Democratic coutnerparts: $15.8 million to $4.2 million.  In 1988, independent expenditures amounted to $13.7 for the Republicans and $2.8 for the Democrats.  A Brown University study summed up the effect of the changes: “Since the GOP historically had a stronger base among big businesses and wealthy individuals, independent expenditures advantaged Republicans more than Democrats.”

This came as Sunday morning religious programs became serious business, turning preachers into instant conglomerates with tentacles reaching into every part of the media and, along with this, money for political organizing.  Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to give them their due, were doing nothing that had not been done before by the liked of John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould.  Only this time the money lay in churches with an ideology to advance, particularly the remodeling of the American public education system.  Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, no slouch himself when it comes to raising PAC money, detailed the considerable clout of the Religious Right in a 1998 article, toting up the coffers of various religious organizations and then favorably comparing them with such heavyweights as the Chamber of Commerce.  He admirably pointed out, “The Christian Coalition has one million donors, 1.5 million activists, and 2000 local chapters that distributed 66 million voter guides in the 1996 election cycle.  Since 1990 the Christian Coalition has trained 52,300 community activists, 18,000 in 1996 alone.  The 1997 budget was $17 million dollars.”  Much of this considerable war chest came from the efforts of Ralph Reed.

A second decision that became equally important for the Counterrevolution was the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.  First enacted in 1949, the FCC ruling looked into the future and decided that because they operated in the public interest, the mass media should present all sides of controversial questions.  The Supreme Court upheld the Fairness Doctrine in the 1969 Red Lion case, still generally considered as one of the Court’s landmark decisions.

Red Lion  not only involves the Religous Right but also foretells exactly what would happen with repeal of the Fairness Doctrine.  The case began when the Reverend Billy James Hargis, the Jerry Falwell of his day, accused the author of a book on Barry Goldwater of being a communist.  The author sued under the Fairness Doctrine and the Court found in his favor.  In its decision the Court said the Fairness Doctrine serves to “enhance rather than abridge the freedoms of speechand press protected by the First Amendment.”  It also noted that “when a personal attack has been made on a figure involved in a public issue” the doctrine requires that “the individual attacked himself be offered an opportunity to respond.”

In 1987, an FCC packed with commissioners appointed by Ronald Reagan voted to repeal the Fairness Doctrine.  When Congress tried to overrule the decision by passing a law extending the doctrine, Reagan vetoed it.  Just as the Buckley decision opened the door to single-issue PACS, the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine opened the door wide for ideologues like Robertson.

On stage stepped a key actor in the next phase of the Republican Counterrevolution, Newt Gingrich.  Gingrich helped engineer the GOP take over of the House of Representatives in 1994 by making great use of Ralph Reed and his allies.  At the center of the takeover lay the Contract with America, a Gingrich inspiration laying out his party’s agenda.  The preamble makes no bones about what the takeover would bring, stating, this “historic change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with public’s money.  It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.”  The second sentence spells out the next phase of the Counterrevolution: linking distaste for big government with the agenda of Jerry Falwell and the fundamentalists.

Manifestoes have always served as the core of radical movements composed of true believers convinced they have the answer to every problem.  Nothing signifies this better than a sentence from the opening of the Contract with America, which puts a religious cast on everything after: “Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act ‘with fairness in the right, as God gives us to see right.’”  In other words, the zealots of the Counterrevolution evoked the secular saint Abraham Lincoln, linked him to God and themselves.  History is full of people who believe they are acting in God’s name and their record is hardly one that would inspire confidence in the Contract with America.

Psychology of Politics, Development of Society

I’ve been thinking out some complex issues and data.  In particular, my mind has been stuck on the issue of liberal and conservative. 

This relates to personality types and traits, but furthermore it relates to genetics.  Scientists have discovered specific genes that correlate with specific tendencies of political attitudes.  That isn’t exactly surprising as trait research has already determined many psychological differences are passed on from parent to child.  But this is particularly paradigm-shifting on the level of politics.

I plan to write more about this, but I just wanted to outline my thinking for the moment.  There are multiple facets that interrelate in ways I’m trying to determine.

There does seem to be an evolutionary angle that would be very important.  Different genetics enhanced species survival as humans developed ever more complex societies.  One theory I came across proposed that liberal genetics are a more recent evolutionary adaptation.  As humans spread out from Africa, specific traits became more desirable: curiosity, openness to new experience, adaptability, empathy, diplomacy, ability to imagine new possibilities and consider multiple perspectives, etc.  These are all traits that research has proven are correlated with each other, and they together seem to create the framework for the liberal attitude.  Still, the older genetics remained useful because any given society would still need the majority of its population to be fairly conservative in order to create social stability and cohesion.

This development happened when humans were still hunter-gatherers, and so at that time the genetic differences wouldn’t have been as magnified.  With the rise of settled agrarian cultures, an entirely new way of social organization became possible.  This was a traumatic time in the devlopment of the human species.  It’s been a while since I’ve read Paul Shepard, but as I recall he saw this era as being pivotal where something irreversibly switched in the human brain.  This was the beginning of civilization.

I was just tonight reading again some of Derrick Jensen’s The Culture of Make Believe.  I consider him to be one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.  I’d forgotten much of the specific ideas in this book, but one particular thing stood out.  He goes into great detail about how civilization rests on the back of slavery.  Every civilization was built with slave labor (including the early democracies).  Even the modern industrialized nations with their supposed democracies and free markets are dependent on slave labor and sweatshops in the third world countries.  Many of the earliest immigrants to the Americas were indentured servants and slaves.  Civilization as we know it would collapse if there wasn’t some class of people enslaved or in oppressed servitude. 

(I also wonder how this fits in with prostitution as the oldest profession and temple prostitutes who lived in servitude.  In early civilization, prostitution represented the civilizing of primitive desire as the temple prostitutes served the highest ideal of their societies and the temples they worked in were at the center of those cultures.  The example that comes to mind is “The Epic of Gilgamesh” where the wild man is civilized by a prostitute.)

Jensen’s explanation of all of this is just brilliant.  Combined with Shepard’s work, this explains a lot about how we became this way.  The earliest records of humans are about the laws upholding civilization and these laws speak about slavery (e.g., Code of Hammurabi).  The Old Testament in various stories and the 10 commandments promotes slavery.  The Christian Gospels even promote slavery.  The Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans all were dependent on slavery.  Until modern times, few people even thought too much about slavery being a bad thing.

However, some people back then began to question such issues.  During the Axial Age, the origins of modern Enlightenment ideals began to take root.  Those early ideals were in complete conflict with the very structure of civilization and that conflict persists to this very day.  So, where did this conflict come from?

Earlier in social development, humans perceived the world animistically.  According to Julian Jaynes, the very understanding of the individual as clearly separate from the world didn’t even fully exist throughout much of early civilization.  It was a slow shift while individuality formed.  As division of labor in society became more important, so division of labor within the human mind became more important.  The world and the gods stopped being experienced as immediately alive realities.  The world became objectified and so did humans.  Individuality and objectivity go hand in hand, and this is what allows for the objectivication of humans in the form of slavery.

This growing sense of individuality came to a crisis point during the Axial Age.  The brutality of slavery had become very apparent, and people began hoping for something more.  People were less satisfied to simply be in servitude whether to other people or to the gods.  The divine had become distant within hierarchical society, and in response the desire for divine closeness became extremely strong.  Humans started to perceive the divine as being among humans which is reminiscent of the animistic past, but this divine closeness was now built on a relationship of individuals as equals.  The first communes formed which was out of which Christianity took root.  However, Christianity and all of the Axial Age religions were brought back in line with hierarchical slave society, and the brief glimmer of the Axial Age prophets was almost entirely forgotten for the next thousand years.

However, it was never entirely forgotten.  The Axial Age ideals were the liberalism of their day.  I wonder if that liberal urge that kept popping up relates back to the genetics that first formed when humans left Africa?

It seems like there has always been this push and pull within human society that is shown in the the earliest historical records.  Since civilization began, this concept of progress formed.  Civilization is dependent on endless progress and this seems to relate to its dependence on slavery.  In order to maintain a slave population, the early civilizations (as well as later civilizations) were forced to be constantly at war by attempting to conquer other people.  Enslave or become a slave.  Endless progress, endless growth, endless conquering, endless usurpation… which continues to modern civilization as well (even if endless wars now have a larger global context). 

This is where I’m feeling a bit murky.  Civilization is simultaneously built on this ruthless progress, but civilization wouldn’t have been possible without those early liberal traits of diplomacy and whatnot.  This seems to be a part of that internal conflict that is the very fabric of civilization.  As society became more hierarchical and more divisioned, the liberal traits of curiosity and experimentation were focused towards technological innovation.  Even fairly early in Greek society, a well-educated leisure class had already taken hold (with Socrates being the ultimate representative).  The liberal instinct in some ways became even more important as empathy and diplomacy would’ve been absolutely vital during this time of cultural clash.

There was a shift that happened after the Axial Age.  The liberal instinct had a temporary burgeoning in society, but the liberal instinct was looked upon with ever greater suspicion as Empire building became the central impulse.  The Roman Empire as it was inherited by Christianity was quite oppressive, and it didn’t take long for the heresiologists to oppress the liberal impulse within Christianity itself.  This is where many see the proper beginning of Western civilization.

Ever since that time, the conflict between the liberal and conservative impulses has led to much violence.  But, with the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance, the liberal impulse began to have greater influence than it had in a long time.  Also, progress began to happen more quickly.  The liberal impulse is the gas pedal of civilization, but this is balanced with the brake of the conservative impulse.  The fight between the two hasn’t been pretty.

The main issue isn’t specific beliefs or values.  Liberalism and conservatism are relative tendencies.  What was liberal during the Axial Age has become the norm for modern Western civilization.  Generally speaking, even modern monotheists have forsaken their own texts in denying slavery.  The conservative impulse wants to hold on to what has become the norm which is perceived as being traditional.  It’s not important, however, that the perceived traditional values actually correspond to the actual historical tradition.  For example, family values have been centrally important for all of Christian history, but what Christians today consider as family values isn’t what the early Christians considered family values (and Jesus himself didn’t value family at all).  So, liberal and conservative are dependent on the historical context which is always changing with the endless progress that we call civilization.

This has served us moderately well up to this point.  Even so, we find ourselves at a new crisis point and so some people conjecture that we’re experiencing a new Axial Age.  It does seem that the level of cultural mixing in modern society hasn’t been seen in Western civilization since the earlier Axial Age.  The religious sensibility forming now is to Christianity as Christianity was to Judaism, and I think this would explain why fundamentalists have essentially created a new religion that has little to do with early Christianity (which fits into the ideas of Karen Armstrong).

Much of what I’ve talked about can be explained using the model of Spiral Dynamics which would add a lot of much-needed detail.  The history following the Axial Age I somewhat explained in my post Just Some Related Ideas and Writers which basically follows a Jungian view of Western development.  But there is a further aspect that is more central to my thinking at the moment.  Along with Jensen’s The Culture of Make Believe, I’ve also been re-reading Compass of the Soul by John L. Giannini.  The two books make for good companions as they both analyze Western society from different perspectives. 

Giannini’s book is helpful because he is coming from the Jungian tradition, and more importantly he combines his roles as Jungian analyst and MBTI practitioner.  He carefully considers Jung’s view on personality as it fits in with Western sociohistorical development.  He sees a split in our society between tendencies towards the personality types of ESTJ and INFP with the former dominating the Western psyche since sometime shortly after the inception of Christianity.  Essentially, ESTJ and INFP are just a more complex way of saying conservative and liberal.

However, this more complex language is helpful because it’s grounded in decades of psychological research.  Also, it brings me back to where I began this post.

(I want to note one other book: The Trickster and the Paranormal by George P. Hansen.  The author discusses two issues relevant to this post.  He discusses Max Weber’s theory about how rationalization and bureaucratization increases as society becomes more complex and hierarchical.  He also discusses Ernest Harmann’s boundary types.  He mentions research that shows thick boundary types with their conservative attitudes tend to promoted to upper management in hierarchical organizations.  Any major organization is hierarchical and so our society in general is ruled by thick boundary types which is just another way of stating the theory Giannini puts forth.  These highly promoted people tend to have thicker boundaries than even the average person and so the people at top perceive and behave differently than the lower classes.  A seeming implication of this is that even Washington Democrats will be more conservative than the average liberal.) 

The reason I’m so interested in all of this is two-fold. 

The most obvious reason is that the conflict between liberals and conservatives is the most intense that I’ve seen in my lifetime.  And it’s a rather personal issue as I’m liberal and my parents are conservative. 

Secondly, I suffer from obsessive curiosity syndrome.  I feel compelled to try to understand the society I was born into.  There seems to be a narrative to our culture and I suspect that it’s our collective unawareness of this narrative that keeps us stuck in it.  We play these roles we are given and we come to identify with them.  Some of this is genetics and so can’t be changed, but genetics are just predispositions.  I want to believe that the liberal and conservative impulses don’t have to be eternally at odds.  Maybe I’m just a dreamy-eyed liberal with my head in the clouds.

 - – -

Let me give this some more contemporary context.

I’ve been doing some web research on personality types/traits, political attitudes, and career predispositions.  Here are some of the ideas I’m tossing about at present:

The problem with liberal and conservative as labels is that they’re highly relative.

The vast majority of scientists and journalists identify as liberal (or at least they do in the US), but it just means that these groups of people identify as more liberal than how they perceive the general population of their particular society.  In the most general usage, conservative means what is traditional or conventional and liberal means what is not limited to the traditional or conventional.  As such, liberal journalists are only moderately liberal.  They’re liberal because they aren’t perfectly aligned with the average person (or rather they don’t perceive themselves as such), but they’re clearly moderate in their being closer to the mainstream than they are to radicals on the fringe.

However, different societies will vary greatly in their political spectrum.  It’s probably true, though, that scientists and journalists in any society will be comparatively more liberal because those professions seem to demand a liberal mindset (at least liberal in terms of personality traits).

The further issue is how close is the correlation between liberal as political self-identification and liberal as personality trait.  Research on personality traits show that they can’t be categorized as either/or, black/white.  Some people are on the extreme ends, but most people are near the middle.

There is no one way to define these terms.  Liberal and conservative can apply to many issues, and so a person can be simultaneously liberal on some issues and conservative on others.  And any given issue can only be labelled as liberal or conservative relative to the context of the societal norms and the historical era.  Many political positions that seem conservative in a modern industrialized society would be deemed liberal (even radically liberal) in pre-modern and non-industrialized societies.  Liberal and conservative are labels that are inseparable from confounding factors of individual and collective development.

With development, other issues such as intelligent and morality have to be considered as both of those relate to intelligence.  There is a correlation between liberalism and IQ (i.e., traditional methods of testing intelligence), and so that probably explains much of the reason for scientists and journalists identifying as liberals.  As a personality trait, liberalism signifies openness towards new experiences and curiosity towards new information.  Higher education is largely defined by new experiences and new information.

Nonetheless, plenty of people with more conservative personalities go to college as most of the population is fairly conservative personality wise (or rather according to MBTI statistics the conservative SJ temperament represents the largest portion of the population; the question then is how well does the SJ temperament represent the normal definition of political conservatism).  These college educated conservative types tend to be drawn to careers in law, politics, and business.  Most interestingly is the fact that policymakers tend to identify as conservative.  But, even in liberal fields, the top administrators in hierarchical organizations (which includes every major private and public organization) will be more conservative than what is the norm even for the general population.  Scientists may be liberal, but the administration of scientific labs and the corporate funding for science likely is controlled by conservatives.  Journalists may be liberal, but the editors, owners and CEOs of media companies are generally more conservative. 

(The so-called liberal media bias is false.  It may have once been true when newsrooms were independent and reporters were more free to do their own thing.  But in recent decades (because of pressures to increase profits) reporters have been increasingly told what to do by upper management (this is based on a lot of research I’ve done and isn’t an just an ideological claim).  However, this isn’t to say that media is precisely conservative biased in any simple sense.  Let us just say there is conflict of biases where the conservative bias at the moment has gained the upperhand.)

Social liberals are going to be more interested in intellectual inquiry and social conservatives will be more interested in ideological norms.  Because of this, most social scientists and those interested in social science will be moral liberals (research supports this conclusion).  As for moral conservatives, they’re either less interested in or else actively mistrust social science research and theory.  For example, the evidence that certain psychological traits and types (personality, moral inclinations, political ideology, behavior, etc.) are largely inheritable undermines the idea that everyone is completely responsible for themselves as individuals (which is a major aspect of moral conservatism).  The tendency to see human nature as complex is more attractive to the social liberal, and so the liberal attitude is more open to the possibility of nature being equal to or greater than nurture (which could explain why they have a more open view of family values).  The reason why evolution vs creationism seems so central to the culture wars may be because it reflects on the large-scale the same issues of nature vs nurture (I’m a bit unclear on this point).

I’ve come across the theory that conservatives tend to look at media and art in terms of how it serves or undermines their ideology (i.e., the perceived ‘norm’).  This would be supported by the Christian cultural critic who I heard speak a few years ago.  She discussed the need of morally conservative Christians to use film and pop culture to promote their views.  Immediately after this talk, I went over and looked at a William Blake exhibit which presented his vision of the relationship between religion and art.  

There couldn’t have been a better contrast between the conservative and liberal views.  Blake’s art was inspiring because it didn’t represent ideology in any simple way (i.e., no overt political messages, no promotion of group norms).  Instead, Blake’s art pointed towards truths that transcended mere politics.  I sensed that Blake wasn’t limiting himself to his own preferred bias.  

Is the conservative view of art as ideology comparable to the conservative view of news as ideology?  I’ve noticed that many conservatives don’t see a difference of the bias of Fox News from the bias in more liberal news, but to many liberals this is an insult.  I’ve noticed that quite a few liberals seem to idealize intellectual objectivity as a moral value, and they’re not content with the cynical view of extreme conservatives.  The social conservative tends to see humanity as fallen and traditionally this fallen nature included the failure of human reason.  Social conservatives are more mistrusting of reason which explains why they mistrust science (be it Darwinian evolution or climate change).

By the way, this also relates to the tendency of most comedians to be liberal.  Humor is very much related to curiosity and openness to experience.

Anyways, it’s all very interesting.  Journalists, Scientists, and comedians all are dominated by self-identified liberals and Democrats.  I remember offhand that only 6% of scientists (including in the hard sciences) identify as Republican.  That does seem to be saying either something about human nature (psychology, genetics, etc) or something about modern culture… or, as I suspect, a bit of both.

 - – -

I’m, of course, speaking of liberal and conservative in their most extreme manifestations (i.e., exaggerated stereotypes).  It’s important to keep in mind that as personality traits the population distribution is found mostly in the middle rather than on the polar opposite ends.

Also, liberal and conservative don’t always equate with Democrat and Republican.  For example, earlier last century Republicans were the liberal party especially in the South.  So, when I speak of liberal I’m talking about an attitude based on personality traits and not party affiliations which represent shifting labels of shifting demographics.  I was looking at data from the Pew Research Center.  Their definition of liberal corresponds with Democrat only slightly more than it corresponds with independent.  I’m willing to bet, though, that if Democrats dominated for a couple of decades the number of liberals identifying with independent would increase just as how recently many have left the Republican party.

As for psychological attitudes, I do wonder if the way society is structured is causing these genetic traits to become increasingly magnified.  I was thinking that this possibility could be a contributing factor to the present intense political conflict.

Here is a theory I’ve been thinking about the last couple of years.

I’ve looked at mappings of demographic data.  Liberals are concentrated in urban areas in and around cities.  Conservatives are spread out in rural areas.  However, a confounding factor is that ever since the Industrial Age began people have been slowly migrating to cities.  This is how liberals became concentrated in cities in the first place, but the population in general has now become concentrated in cities.  For this reason, cities are more ideologically diverse and so liberals have been forced to adapt to diversity which happens to be one of their talents anyhow. 

The other result is that rural areas have become less diverse and more extremely conservative.  This makes me wonder if conservative politics has become more radicalized partly because of this concentration.  Even the moderate conservatives would tend to move to the cities leaving behind the most extreme conservatives (those who are so resistant to change that they’d rather remain even in poverty-stricken areas).

Ignoring the possible genetic component, our political system by itself would magnify the concentration of extreme conservatives in the rural areas.  American democracy is representative.  In an attempt at fairness, sparsely populated rural areas get more representation per capita.  What this means is that extreme conservatives get more representation per capita.  The result of this is that public debate gets pushed to the right.

This is important as sometimes presidents get elected even though the majority of the population voted against them.  How does a president lead a country when he doesn’t represent a majority of the population?

Also, the media focuses on the extremes.  The rural areas represent the far right-wing.  The Republican politicians tend to be moderate conservatives, but the more radical conservatives of rural areas hold great sway.

 - – -

I don’t know what to make of this, but it’s very interesting.  It seems our entire political system is rather messed up.  I’m hoping by placing US politics in a larger context that I’ll be able to see beyond the polarizing tendency of public debate as it gets shown in the media.

Anyways, it goes without saying that all of this is largely speculation and hence tentative.  I am basing my speculations on actual data, but it is very complex.  Trying to disentangle the threads is difficult if not impossible.  The challenge of making sense of it is only slighly lessened by the fact that some great minds before me have written some insightful books.

US Political History

This is my understanding of American politics.  I don’t know if it’s absolutely true in every detail, but as far as I know it’s true in the broad trends I’m pointing out.

To begin, early Republicans were libertarians who believed in separation of government and capitalism.  The Founding Fathers believed in an educated elite that controlled government and weren’t motivated by economic concerns.  They thought selfishness was a danger to democracy.  The early country was almost entirely agrarian.  The Federal government was weak as much for reasons of disagreement as for any libertarian idealism, but there were already those favoring a strong Federal government supported by a thriving economy.  Industrialism was already emerging and so along with an increasing tax base there was an ever-growing Federal government.  It wasn’t long before there was a standing army and it was all downhill from there.

The US had slavery longer than other major nations.  The US was slow on abolishing slavery.  The early economy of the US was largely dependent on slavery and even politicians who were ideologically against slavery were only against it very weakly.  The hope was that it would peacefully die out on its own, but this hope would prove to be unfounded.  A similar argument is made today in the belief that racism will end on its own if we just don’t talk about it.

Lincoln was more concerned with maintaining Federal power than he was in ending slavery.  He said he would have accepted slavery if the Southern states stopped trying to secede.  With Lincoln and the Civil War, the Republican party had become the party for the federal power and the Democratic party had become libertarian in defending state’s rights.  The Civil War was mostly about conservative Democrats from the Southern agrarian states (i.e. Dixiecrats) who opposed the liberally progressive Conservatives from the Northern industrial states.  Of course, Industrialism and Federalism won and along with it progressive liberalism.

In the early 20th century, politics in general along with both parties was slanted towards progressive liberalism. Socialist programs were popular and fascism (the combination of state and capitalism) was the national enemy.  At this time, Ayn Rand for the first time made popular a form of libertarianism that was pro-capitalism (i.e. big business to replace big government which if taken to an extreme would manifest as fascism).  I don’t know which ideas were originated by Rand, but certainly she popularized a new ideal of enlightened selfishness which in time became the ideal adopted by many politicians.

In the mid 20th century, the Democratic and Republican parties switched places.  Democrats turned towards civil rights and turned away from their support of state rights Dixiecrats.  Republicans attempted a balancing act of maintaining their growing support of Federal power all the while wooing the Southern states.  So, Democrats became the party of multiculturalism and minorities, and Republicans became the party of “white culture” and the religious right.  At this time, Communists replaced the Fascists as the new national enemy and Federal power grew in leaps and bounds.  Distracted by Communism, the ties between state and capitalism grew closer (i.e. military-industrial complex).

Several decades of the Cold War changed even further the definitions of the political parties.  The fear-mongering of patriotic rallying led both parties to be proponents of a strong central government.  The Republicans had a nifty trick that helped them to dominate politics for much of the last few decades.  They managed to hold on to the Southern states by opposing the civil rights movement, and they held on to the Northern states by their support of Federal Power (and their support of “white culture” as the nation was still majority white).

This would seem to have left Libertarians outside of influence, but Republicans and Libertarians made a deal.  The Rand devotees took over the Libertarian party and made it the party of big business and the Reaganite Neocons took over the Republican party and made it the party of the military-industrial complex.  Thus the Rand Institute became a major player as a think tank for the Neocons.  The odd thing is that the Neocons were disillusioned Democrats who stripped progressivism of any consideration of the idealism about human rights.  Under Reagan, the Cold War military-industrial complex had led to an economic boom.  The rich grew richer and the poor got trickle-down economics, but this also began the movement towards a massive cultural divide that would take a while to become disruptive to Republican power.

The Democratic party lost it’s inspiring vision with the death of Martin Luther King jr and the Kennedy brothers.  It became a time of materialism and selfishness.  There was simultaneously a cynicism about human nature and an idealism of the American spirit.  Social Darwinism was the model of politics and of society in general.  Even protesters against the war had turned violent as the police also turned violent.  The soldiers were returning home and the travesty of the Vietnam war could no longer be ignored.  These veterans weren’t welcomed home by anybody.  Some of them joined the protesters (adding to the violence of the protests) and others entirely dropped out of civic participation.  A generation of traumatized veterans became a major component of the growing homeless population.

This was also a time of an oppressive and invasive government.  Besides the many assassinations, the government was heavy in to COINTELPRO programs which had the specific purpose of destroying the civil rights movement.  Politics became dirty and Nixon became the symbol of how far the country had fallen in its depravity.  The Cold War in general was a time of constant conflict inside and outside of the country.  Besides Vietnam, the government was involved in covert wars, overthrowing of democratic governments, and illegal assassinations.  As such, we helped support and build the power for people such as Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Politics and morality had almost been completely severed.  This was a time of Republican power but it was a Republican party that had become entirely opposite of the ideals of the earliest Republicans.  The Democratic party wasn’t much better as idealism in general was no longer strongly valued or rather the idealism had become nationalistic.  Even the Democrats had become fairly Neocon.  Neither party supported states rights.  Neither party protected the poor from the rich.

However, a new young generation of realistic-minded GenXers were beginning to have a subtle influence in the background.  It seems this new generation was not only more socially liberal but also more fiscally conservative which is closer to early American political values.  GenXers believed in doing things for themselves because the large Boomer generation wouldn’t allow them into the reigns of power.  GenX made the web into what we know it now and GenX embedded their liberal/libertarian values into how the internet functioned.  The internet was first developed by the military and intellectual elites, but GenX made it in to a platform for democratic empowerment for the common person.

Meanwhile,  Neoconservatism manifested in it’s most extreme form with Bush jr which finally made the American public realize the faults of this ideology that had dominated for a half century.  Also, recent policies had led to a decade or so of increased immigration.  A generation of kids were growing up in a multicultural America like no generation had seen before which in turn led to increasing socially liberal values.  This was GenY which was larger than the Boomers and turned out in great numbers for the election when the Republican party finally lost its grip on political power.  Obama was the first GenX president and he came to power by using the internet that GenX had developed.

After a dissatisfying 8 yrs of extreme Neoconservatism (along with a loss of American pride and an economic downturn), the ideal of the government taking the moral highground and of politics serving the people has became popular again.  Obama has brought a focus on social programs and in reaction conservatives have retreated to a populist stance which they hadn’t used since the last time true liberal progressivism had been in power earlier in the previous century.  However, this far right populism is grounded in both religious fundamentalism and “white culture”.  The problem is that the US demographics have changed.  The rural and Southern white Christian fundamentalists are now becoming less influential and will soon be the minority.  This “populism” of “white culture” no longer correlates to popular opinion in the real world.  Sadly, this the reason the white supremacists will become very vocal in the immediate future.  There is going to be a cultural war and “white culture” as it’s been defined in the past is going to lose, but white supremacists won’t give up their power easily and there will be violence.

In conclusion, my main point is that only a loose connection exists between Republican and conservatism and between Democrat and liberalism.  And Libertarianism has been particularly effective in redefining itself in order to create a niche.  No unchanging definition of these parties exists.

So, what will the parties become in the next few decades?

The Democratic party is remembering it’s liberal idealism but without entirely giving up on the Neocon vision, and the Republican party is being forced to reassess its role in society and at least temporarily paying populist lip service to Libertarianism.  The Libertarians were aligned with the Republicans in recent history, but now even many conservatives are critical of the Republicans.  Now that Democrats are ascending in power and liberalism in general is increasing, where will that leave Libertarians in the long-term?  The white supremacists are grasping for an alliance with the Libertarians, but if the Libertarians aren’t careful they will be pulled down.  Libertarians have no loyalty to the white-dominated religious right.  It’s more likely that Libertarians will eventually either seek commonality with Neoconservative Democrats and Blue Dogs or else lessen their advocacy of uncontrolled capitalism.  What would the two parties look like if Libertarians switched loyalties to the new ruling party?  I wouldn’t mind seeing a Libertarianism with a social conscience no matter which party it aligned itself with.

Blacks and hispanics will soon be the new majority.  Will these previous minorities turn their backs on the Republican party that turned it’s back on them?  Or will the new majority ethnicities take control of the Republican party?  Will the political fight of the future be over whether America will be defined by either ”black culture” or “hispanic culture”?  Will white supremacists align themselves with hispanic caucasians in defense against the rising tide of blacks seeking compensation for centuries of oppression?  Or are these culture wars of ethnicity a thing of the past as interracial marriage becomes ever more common?

RE: Top Ten Problems With the Jesus Myth Theory

I every so often check out the blog by the apologist Stephen J. Bedard.  I noticed some new comments and one particular comment was quite nice.  I’ll quote this comment in full because it’s such a perfect summary of the Jesus Myth position.  I’d been meaning to fully respond to this post of Bedard’s for a while, but just had only answered Bedard’s first criticism and so it has remained unposted until now.  I’ll first give my limited response, then share the other commenters response, and after that I’ll respond to Bedard’s response to the commenter.  Clear?

Top Ten Problems With the Jesus Myth Theory

1) The rejection of the Gospels as historical sources.  They are seen as faith documents and not modern biographies.  That is true but we do not have any unbiased ancient texts that meet the criteria of modern biography.  If we reject the Gospels, we would also have to reject most of what we know about ancient history.

Some mythicists may reject the Gospels as historical sources, but this has nothing directly to do with the mythicist theory.  The parallels are relevant whether or not there is any relevant historical references in the Gospels.  Besides, I doubt any mythicist claims that the Gospels entirely lack history.  In fact, all the mythicists I know of agree that the writers (and interpolators) were purposely adding history to make the Christ myth more convincingly real.  The difference from literalists is that mythicists either see the historical additions as coming later in the development of Christianity or they see a historical figure that was evemerized and whose biographical details now are (mostly or entirely) lost.

It’s a rather complex issue since the limited info allows for endless speculation.  There might’ve been a historical Jesus who was lost beneath mythology and then the later historicizing of the gospel writers may have attempted to reconstruct the hypothetical evemerized Jesus.  Or there might’ve been many historical figures that became amalgamated by which they were given a unified and coherent story through mythological motifs.  We conveniently don’t even have the unmodified writings (or even the first commentaries) of the earliest Christians/Gnostics to determine how they perceived their own process of storytelling.

All of this shows a difference in thinking styles.  To the degree that someone is a literalist, they think in black and white terms.  A literalist historical Jesus can’t be mythical (even if one allows for superficial mythical accretions).  The mythicist position, on the other hand, can allow for a historical Jesus.  As such, mythicists (unlike apologists) are in a better position to adapt to the evidence as it arises for they have no singular fixed position, no belief system held above doubt and question.  A difference here is that a historical Jesus is unimportant to a mythicist because history doesn’t prove theology nor does it disprove the mythicist theory.  Even if the litealist can prove a historical Jesus, it is utterly meaningless because what they’re really trying to prove is that he is the Son of God who died for our sins… which is outside of the proof of history.

Oddly enough, a number of Christians have supported mythicism even while they affirmed historicism, but these aren’t your typical literalists.  One of the greatest New Testament scholars was Rudolf Bultmann.  He believed in mythological parallels, but the apologist prefers to ignore Christians like him.  Another example is C.S. Lewis who is a favorite of apologists, and yet he accepted that Pagan parallels existed before Christianity.  Actually, the earliest apologists didn’t try to deny any of this, but some just said the Devil foresaw the coming of Christ and taught the Pagans false doctrines ahead of time in order to deceive.  Lewis followed a different tradition of interpretation (Justin Martyr speaks of “seeds of truth among all men” within 1 Apology 44. See: preparatio evangelica).  He argued that the pre-Christian parallels strengthened Christianity.  If the pre-Christian parallels were false, then Christianity would be false as well.  However, maybe Christianity took the truth of Paganism and added further truth to it.  What had been just mythological was now historically real… or so the argument goes.  But this ignores the fact that many Pagans believed their myths were also historical.  Anyways, it is insightful how apologists overlook this part of Lewis’ writings.

To be fair, I should point out that Bedard isn’t a simpleminded apologist (see: Reading the Bible Literally).  Bedard seems to be more in the latter camp as he was influenced by C.S. Lewis (see: Mere Christianity).  He accepts that Christian holidays are Pagan in origin (see: The Bible and Pagan Holidays), that the earliest Christian iconography copied Pagan images (see: Christ as Orpheus), and that the Judeo-Christian tradition was contributed to by Pagan ideas (see: Hellenistic Influence and the Resurrection).  To me, this seems to be as literalist as a Christian can be while maintaining some basic rational dignity, and Bedard claims his beliefs are based on rationality.

But if one were to take all of those Pagan elements away, what would be left?  A historical figure?  Well, Pagans had historical claims about their godmen.  A savior who is the Son of God?  Well, this motif can also be found outside of Christianity.  Bedard, obviously, feels there is something unique here… but exactly what?

Bedard at times does show his literalist tendencies in a black and white thinking.  No mythicist is using modern standards of biography to judge the Gospels.  It is absurd to argue we’d have to reject most of ancient history if we reject the Gospels.  That almost doesn’t even deserve a rational response.  For one, secular historians aren’t trying to prove anything theologically and so they always start from a position of questioning and doubt.  There is no reason to accept any text as true until other sources of info validate it.  In the case of the Gospels, they lack confirming sources.  No ancient historian spoke about Jesus while he was alive even though there were numerous historians (including Jewish historians) in the area Jesus supposedly lived.  Also, Romans were meticulous record keepers and the records of the time survived for us to inspect, and yet we discover no Jesus in them.  This lack of evidence may not be remarkable for an average person of the time, but Christians claimed Jesus had great impact on the Roman World.

Let me add one last point on this issue.  I was listening to Richard Carrier on the proper defense and improper defense of the Jesus Myth(scroll down).  Carrier makes an interesting point.  People aren’t idiots for believing in Jesus’ historicity.  They’re just looking at different data.  Just a few pieces of data not assimilated or countered by historical arguments won’t disprove it, but a few hundred pieces of data that promotes doubt causes one to consider alternative theories.  However, most people never get to that point.  This is particularly true for many (most?) New Testament scholars who are Christians (which is a large percentage) and hence who don’t have much motivation to seek out and seriously consider all of the contradictory data.  According to Carrier, it’s a bad argument to try to support mythicism by claiming silence on Jesus’ historicity.  The evidence that has survived could be interpreted as proof of a historical Jesus, but it could also be interpreted in other ways when placed in context of other evidence.  If one doesn’t take into account the plethora of Pagan parallels (either out of ignorance or dismissal), it isn’t irrational per se if one were to claim Jesus’ historicity.  However, as an apologetic argument, it’s just an empty claim that one can say little about… not that apologetics is meant to have substance beyond the belief motivating it.

Michael’s response to Bedard:

“As I sit here watching the documentary on Tom Harpur’s Pagan Christ, I find myself reminded of all the problems that I see in the Jesus myth theory. I will share my top ten problems with this theory. This is not a detailed analysis but rather my opportunity to vent on the glaring problems with this theory.

1) The rejection of the Gospels as historical sources. They are seen as faith documents and not modern biographies. That is true but we do not have any unbiased ancient texts that meet the criteria of modern biography. If we reject the Gospels, we would also have to reject most of what we know about ancient history.”

For the most part, proponents of the Jesus Myth (JM) regard the gospels as allegorical first and faith documents second. Also, proponents of the JM do highlight the fact that the early catholic church used purely theological arguments for the existence of Jesus and did not defer to historical sources. Barnabbas and Clement are very curious because when they refer to the passion of Christ they simply quote Isaiah 53… which is an odd thing to do if the exploits of Christ had been a matter of recent history and were purported to be world reknown.

And there does exist a good selection of actual historical documents from the 1st century, such as Pliny’s Natural History and Josephus’ Testimonium… the four gospels do not mirror the style and format of any known works of historical record from the time period they are alleged to have been composed in.

“2) The claim that Paul never mentions the historical Jesus. This is simply not true. Paul quotes Jesus, mentions aspects of his life and in 1 Corinthians 15 he challenges his readers to check out the surviving witnesses.”

That Paul “quotes” Jesus is not problematic for proponents of the JM. There’s nothing that prohibits the idea that the cosmic divine messiah taught his apostles. That Paul is aware of a sacred meal is not problematic either. Sacred meals are virtually universal. And in 1st Corinthians 15 Paul never differentiates between the nature of his experience with Jesus (revelatory vision) and the experience of the other apostles. Doesn’t Paul say at some point in the epistles, “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord?” Paul wrote that there was no difference between his experience with Jesus and the other apostles experience. And in verse 45 Paul actually says that Jesus was not a human and draws a stark contrast between Adam and Jesus to illustrate the point.

You seem to be basing your 10 points off of a very faulty understanding of the JM, which is regrettable but predictable.

“3) The rejection of Josephus as a testimony of Jesus. Some authors reject Josephus as evidence for Jesus because it is clear that there is Christian tampering. Most scholars see an original core testimony that has been augmented by Christians not created. Plus we have what Josephus says about John the Baptist and James, the brother of Jesus.”

I am always very doubtful of anyone who says anything along the lines of “most scholars”. This kind of appeal to authority and reliance upon an alleged consensus is the heighth of intellectual laziness.

“4) The claim that gnosticism was an equally original valid of Christianity along side what became orthodox Christianity. The fact is that there is a clear continuity with our first century Christian documents as found in the New Testament and what became orthodox Christianity. Gnosticism with its rejection of the Jewish God, Jewish Scriptures, material world, and its focus on gnosis rather than sin were a later (mid to late second century) break away from Christianity.

5) The misuse of pagan myths. Many claims are made about the pagan myths by these authors but when you look at the myths themselves, these claims are often not accurate. You are expected to rely on their secondary sources and not to look at the primary sources.

6) Pagan myths are described in Christian language to strengthen their connection to Jesus. Mithras is said to be born of a virgin even though he was born of a rock. Horus is said to be born of virgin even though he was conceived in the post-death intercourse of his married parents.”

It is not a fact that there is clear continuity between canonical texts and what became orthodox Christianity. There is a record of development from the 1st century to the 2nd of an evolving human Jesus doctrine. This can be seen in primitive “gospel” references throughout Barnabbas, Polycarp, Clement, Paul, Ignatius, etc. and it leads all the way to the end of the 2nd century with the crystallization of the four gospels as referred to by Irenaeus in Against Heresies.

Please note that, unlike your baseless assertion this is an argument that is logical and supported by the documentary evidence.

Also, you over-state the case for pagan influences. You’re building one heck of a strawman. Certainly there was pagan influence, but any proponent of the JM worth his/her salt will tell you that the biographical data that came to be expressed in the gospels was drawn almost entirely from the Old Testament.

Again, your understanding the JM seems to be incredibly flawed.

“7) No respect for the dates of texts. Authors use pagan texts to establish connections to Jesus but sometimes (as in the case of Mithras) the texts post-date the New Testament. How do we know that the pagans did not borrow from the Christians?

8 ) Use of post-biblical traditions. Authors demonstrate pagan influence on the three wide men, the ox and ass, December 25 and a number of other traditions. The problem is that those are not biblical traditions. These things were added to the tradition later and any pagan influence says nothing about the origins of the Jesus story.

9) Misunderstanding of pagan influence on art. There are valid examples of pagan influence on Christian art such as Isis holding baby Horus being used as a model for Mary holding baby Jesus. It make sense that the new movement of Christianity would look beyond itself as it was developing its artistic side. This says nothing about pagan origins for the story.

10) The patchwork use of pagan myths. It is difficult to find large chunks of pagan myth that look like the Gospels. Jesus myth theorists take a word here and a phrase here, from dozens of myths from many cultures and say “Here is the Gospel!” If you start with enough stories, you can reconstruct almost any historical figure, ancient or minor.”

Strawman strawman strawman.

“These are just a few of the problems that I have with the Jesus myth theory. Unfortunately, it is not likely to go away any time soon.”

No, it won’t go away any time soon, in fact it is gaining traction.

– - -

I generally agree with this assessment of the Jesus Myth theory.  Bedard responded to this comment, but the commenter didn’t return.  So, let me have a crack at Bedard’s comment.

Regarding the Gospels, even the great allegorist Origen did not take them as strictly allegorical. While not exactly the same as Josephus, the Gospels do have much in common with ancient histories. They are closer to ancient biographies with Luke-Acts having stronger historical leanings. And as for the early church, they did not just rely on allegory or OT interpretation. They also stated these events as being historical events.

Yes, there was a great variety in early Christianity.  It was common practice for Christians to take some of the Bible allegorically, but there was disagreement about which parts were allegorical and exactly how they should be interpreted.  Some Christians even believed that Jesus was entirely allegorical or at least entirely spiritual (non-physical/non-historical)… allegorical and spiritual being related in the ancient mind.

I personally wouldn’t argue that the Gospels entirely lack commonality in certain aspects of style with some ancient histories.  It wasn’t uncommon in the ancient world for history to be mixed with allegory (whether allegory as spiritual truth or as moral storytelling), and it’s not easy to tell how literally ancients took any given text as the common understanding would likely never have been written down.  The claims of emperors as godmen, for example, can be found in supposedly historical accounts.  Did the Romans actually believe their emperor was a godman?  I’m sure some did… just consider how gullible some modern people are even though modern education is far superior.

The Gospels show commonalities with many types of writing and storytelling and that is part of the point of the Jesus Myth theory.  There are a few comparisons that can be made.  Alan Dundes wrote the book Holy Writ as Oral Lit in which he shows the similarities of the Bible with folklore texts.  Other scholars have pointed out the similarity of the Gospels to the genre of Spiritual Romances which were a type of fiction popular at the time.  As an example of a novel of that time period, read The Life of Aesop which supposedly tells the biographical story of Aesop’s life and the style of it is reminiscent of the Gospels.  I’m not implying that there is any causal connection between the Gospels and The Life of Aesop, but I’m merely pointing out that this genre of storytelling was extremely popular in the early centuries of the Roman Empire.

Regarding Paul and the historical Jesus, in the first verses of 1 Cor 15 where Paul speaks of the resurrection historically and tags his experience to the witness of others. As for verse 45, Paul is contrasting Jesus with Adam but he is not denying that he is human. Read the passage from Genesis that he is quoting and you will see that the whole verse is about Adam. Paul is saying Jesus is a complete Adam.

I have no particular opinion about this.  Jesus and Adam are equally mythological and both were taken as historical figures by some believers.  On the other hand, there were also believers who interpreted the Bible as spiritual allegory which isn’t exactly fiction but which is far from historical fact.  The purpose of spiritual allegory is to point to a more profound truth.  The question is which belief was closest to the original Christians.  Well, I don’t know if there was any singular group of Christians that was orginal.  What I do know is that the Gnostics were the earliest Christians to organize the Gospels into a single book, were the earliest Christians to comment on the Gospels, and were among the earliest prominent Christian leaders both within and outside of the Catholic Church.

I hear what you are saying about “most scholars” but I have trouble when there is a strong consensus among a wide variety of scholars (not just Christian) and just a few scholars, usually those with a theory like the Jesus myth to promote, who deny the passage.

My opinion is that the concensus in Biblical studies isn’t the same thing as a concensus in science.  Most Biblical scholars have been and still are Christians or at least were raised in Christianity.  Most of the Biblical scholarship in the past was done as overt apologetics, and many scholars still act as apologists and see no contradiction in their ability to think objectively and critically.  Bedard himself is an apologist who has beliefs such as the virgin birth that contradict the concensus of scientists.  Shouldn’t the concensus of scientists supercede the concensus of apologists when it comes to a subject such as the biological possibility of virgin births in homo sapiens?

As examples of the importance of distinguishing apologetics from scholarship, read the following blogs and articles.  I also threw in some other responses to specific apologetic arguments just for good measure.

Robert W. Funk:

A letter of Concern for Prof. Dr. Gerd Luedemann

April DeConick:

Choosing your method

What do I mean by ‘confessional’?

The never-ending confusion about perspective

Robert M. Price:

Protestant Hermeneutical Axiomatics: A Deconstruction

Is There a Place for Historical Criticism?

MUST WE TAKE A LEAP OF FAITH? (HAVE WE ALREADY?)

Paradigm Shifting and the Apologetics Debate

Introducing the Journal of Higher Criticism

N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God

By This Time He Stinketh

Earl Doherty:

Challenging the Verdict

Responses to Critiques of the Mythicist Case

D.M. Murdock:

Is the Bible True?

Richard C. Carrier:

Bayes’ Theorem for Beginners

Epistemological End Game

Experimental History

History Before 1950

Related to apologetics is the issue of scientific understanding in the ancient world… and sadly the issue of scientific understanding in the modern world.

Richard C. Carrier:

Stark on Ancient Science

Books on Ancient Science

Science and Medieval Christianity

Statistics & Biogenesis

Yockey on Biogenesis

Defining the Supernatural

To continue with my response to Bedard:

I disagree with your statement about the continuity. Orthodox Christians agreed that Jesus’ Father was the God of the OT and that Jesus was human and divine. All of this found in the NT but denied by gnostics.

The Gnostics were the first to collect scriptures into a single book we now call the Gospels.  The Gnostics intentionally left out Jewish scriptures because the purpose of their creating the Gospels was because they specifically believed the OT God and the NT God were separate Gods (enemies even).  The Gospels were created for the purpose of demonstrating the distinct uniqueness of the Christian God.  Yes, there were some Jewish or Jewish-influenced Christians early on, but there is no proof that they were the first Christians.  Obviously, Judaism was a part of the milieu of early Christianity and so were a number of other religions.  As the earliest commenters on the Gospels were Gnostics who were also the creators of the Gospels as a singular canon, I think it’s fair to give them precedence on it’s interpretation… or at least it’s fair not to dismiss them out of hand.

Regarding the pagan influence. I agree that there is a stronger case that the Gospels are based on the OT than on pagan sources but the Jesus myth people I have encountered (Tom Harpur, Peter Gandy, Timothy Freke) have focused mostly on the pagan sources.

As I see it, it isn’t either/or.  Yes, many biographical details were lifted at some point from the OT.  But, some argue, that this was simply a matter of Hellenistic Jews and other related groups reading the OT through the lense of Greco-Roman philosophy, theology and mythology.  In the ancient world, a new religion was deemed unworthy if it didn’t have precedent in an already existing religious tradition.  So, a new religion had to prove itself by interpreting older texts in a new light.  But this was just a matter of convenience and they weren’t trying to stay true to the original intent and purpose of those texts.  The Jesus story that they created was in contradiction to the traditional Jewish expectation of a Messiah, but all that mattered is that Jesus was portrayed as Jewish which gave him the appearance of respectability.  They had to detail his Jewish lineage in order to substantiate their claims.  However, from a strictly traditional Jewish perspective, such superficial reinterpretations were meaningless and outright blasphemous.

Let me make one last point about Bedard’s scholarship.  It’s obvious he lacks any full understanding of mythicism.  The three Jesus myth people he mentions (Harpur, Gandy, and Freke) are just popular writers.  He admits to having never read any serious scholarship about mythicism.  I appreciate popularizers for they communicate ideas to the general public, but there are several scholars I can think of offhand who are way more respectable than those three.  I linked some of these scholars above, but there are a few more besides.  I should mention Karen Armstrong.  She is a respectable scholar who, although doesn’t identify as a mythicist, seems to support the connections between pagan mythology, classical thought, allegorical thinking and early Christianity.  If you want to know more about the Christ myth theory and the scholars who have supported this position, then check out the Wikipedia article which gives a good overview.

As an apologist, it doesn’t matter that Bedard’s knowledge of mythicism is limited.  However, as a scholar, it’s very important.  Bedard is not only a published scholar but has specifically written a book about mythicism.  He presents himself as an expert and he is an expert in other areas of Biblical studies but not in mythicism.  I first commented on Bedard’s blog around the beginning of this year (2009) and the year is almost ended.  One of the comments I made to Bedard at that time was specifically that he claimed to have only read the popularizers of mythicism and that if he was serious about his scholarship then he should read some serious scholarship on the subject.  I was just perusing his blog and saw no evidence that he has since read any high quality scholarship on mythicism.

As far as I can tell by my brief interactions, I respect Bedard as a person.  He is one of the most easygoing apologists I’ve ever met.  Also, I read one of his articles published in a journal and I was impressed.  But none of that changes the fact that he isn’t an expert nor has read any experts in the field of mythicism.  His opinions about mythicism are no more worthy than the mythicist popularizers he has criticized.  As such, his writings on mythicism mostly serve the purpose of apologetics rather than scholarship.

That is fine if that is all he wants to do, but he seems to have a mind that is capable of so much more.  I’d love to see him (or some other apologist) do an in-depth analysis of the full range of mythicist scholarship.  I’m waiting…

What is a Mythicist? part 2

I wrote a post a while back that was a response to a blog post by Acharya S (D.M. Murdock).  Here is the link to that post and the link to the post I was responding to.

http://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/what-is-a-mythicist/

http://tbknews.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-is-mythicist.html

After my initial comment, another commenter just wanted to argue with me.  It was frustrating because the person didn’t even understand that there was actually very little disagreement.  I’m a major fan of Acharya, but some of her fans are a bit too defensive.  I can admire someone and still feel no requirement to subserviently agree with their every thought and opinion.  However, some of Acharya’s fans for some reason are very argumentative and defensive which I personally can find quite annoying.  In discussions, people who would be open to Acharya’s ideas become polarized in opposition partly because of some of her over-zealous fans.  I’ve tried to ignore it, but this discussion on her post was getting to me.

I happened to visit that blog again and noticed she had responded to me.  Even she didn’t understand my perspective which is rather ironic since my review of one of her recent books has the highest rating on Amazon.  So, why am I able write a review that explains Acharya’s ideas so well and yet Acharya can’t understand my view?

If Acharya understood my point, then she probably wouldn’t be disagreeing.  I personally don’t disagree with her general view.  I frankly don’t find my view difficult to understand and so I frankly don’t understand the misunderstanding.  She wrote nothing in her reply to me that actually disagreed with anything I was trying to communicate.  There is an obvious miscommunication.

I’m arguing that there are two issues that are related but not identical.  The scholarship about history informs the scholarhip about mythology and vice versa, but they still can be studied separately.  Neither field is dependent on the other.  If someone doesn’t understand that,  I don’t know how else to explain it.   Maybe the confusion is based in our respective studies.   Acharya wrote that she read widely in mythology and so have I, but we may have focused on different kinds of authors and ideas.  To understand where I’m coming from, someone would probably need to have a detailed comprehension of certain thinkers: Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Karen Armstrong, Patrick Harpur, Ken Wilber, etc.  I’m more interested in the ideas than the history, more interested in the mythology than textual criticism.  My curiosity has drawn me towards the subjects of storytelling, creativity, imagination, and the imaginal.  My interest in history and religious documents is from this perspective.

As I see it, mythology works in parallel with history and yet according to its own mechanisms.  At the same time, history and mythology interact in various ways.  Sometimes history inspires mythology and sometimes mythology interprets history, and it’s impossible to entirely separate the two which is especially true the further one goes back in history.

My main point is that history is secondary to understanding mythology.  I don’t need to disprove a historical argument to prove a mythological argument.  The problem I see in most discussions of biblical scholarship is a lack of subtle insight and a lack of larger context.  Too many people are trying to prove or disprove issues where the data is skimpy on both sides of the argument.  What annoys me is that this ends up just being bickering over details.  People miss the forest for the trees.

The reason it’s dangerous to have one’s arguments rely too heavily on history is that history is never black and white.  We’re forced to assess according to probability.  We have to weigh and measure various documents and weigh and measure the sources (and translations and alterations) of those documents and weigh all of the conflicting evidence.  There is no formula to ascertain a specific probability.  It demands much guesswork and subjective interpretation.  It’s very imprecise.

So, there is no evidence that convinces me of the probability of Jesus existing.  But then again there is no evidence that absolutely disproves Jesus existed.  It just doesn’t matter to me.  And I must admit I feel frustrated that others believe this is the most important issue.  What does matter to me is that if a man named Jesus lived it has little to do with later Christianity.  There may have been a single person who was called or came to be called Jesus and who inspired early Christians, but if such a man existed all relevant details of him have been lost.  Nonetheless, it’s perfectly rational to accept that it’s possible that Jesus actually lived.  I won’t say it’s probable, but neither will I say it’s improbable.  There just is no way to make an objective judgment.

The arguments about the historical proof of Jesus are simply moot.  So, why don’t we just ignore it and focus on more interesting issues which aren’t dependent on it (such as mythology).

I brought up the biblical scholar April DeConick to demonstrate the problem of conflating the debates about history and mythology.  DeConick seems to be a rational, intelligent and educated person.  She is the type of person who should be easy to convince of mythicism, but apparently is wary of it.  My suspicion is that she is wary of it because of how it’s often presented.  She is very far from being a bible-thumping Christian and yet her professional assessment is that Jesus may have existed.  Because of the entangling of mythicism with historical arguments, someone like DeConick ends up judging mythicism based on the historical arguments.  This is very bad news because it could be avoided.  The worth of mythicist arguments doesn’t rely upon any conclusion about history.  DeConick represents the openminded mainstream biblical scholar who is unconvinced about mythicism, but unconvinced because she probably hasn’t studied it in depth.  Part of shifting public opinion is by making one’s actual view clear.  Obviously, mythicists haven’t been entirely successful in explaining their actual position.

There is good reason that mainstream biblical scholars who are open to mythicism such as Robert M. Price also at the same time keep some distance from it.  Price would rather not be identified with a single perspective which I think is a very intelligent attitude.  Like Price, I support Acharya and other mythicists even as I’d rather not be labelled as a mythicist.  I prefer to go where ever the facts take me (along with where my intuition and curiosity take me).  I have no desire to defend a singular position and there is always a weakness to any scholar (whether of the professional or armchair variety) who becomes identified so strongly with a particular argument that they feel the need to defend it against all criticisms even criticisms from potential allies.  The major weakness of mythicists is that they spend as much time bickering with eachother as they do with literalist Christians.

As another example, Joseph Campbell did know how to explain well these type of issues.  He knew how to invite people to consider a new perspectives.  In biblical discussions, there is way too much antagonism from all sides (not just from Christians).  Campbell knew how to avoid conflict because he understood conflict closes minds rather than opens them.  Instead of conflict and righteous debate, Campbell appealed to the imagination.  If mythicists want to actually change public opinion, they need to learn new tactics.  Separate the issues into smaller fights that can be won and look past the superficial disagreements to the fundamental issues that really matter.  Let the literalists waste their time mired in pointless historical arguments and meanwhile undermine their entire position from a direction that they never see coming.

Interestingly, Acharya did quote Campbell briefly in one of her recent books, but she doesn’t seem to reference his ideas much.  I’m not sure how much she has studied him and other similar writers.  In my humble opinion (which so happens to be in line with Campbell), the problems of literalism aren’t merely a religious issue.  Literalism is a problem of any position that becomes taken too concretely.  Literalism is just what happens when people stop learning and questioning.  Materialistic scientism, for instance, is a variety of literalistic thinking.  A literalist takes a model for reality and forgets that a model is always an approximation, forgets that a theory is always open to being improved or even discarded.  Literalism is the bane of modernism because, as Karen Armstrong points, fundamentalists took their cue from science itself.  The literalist argument of either/or is a false argument as there are always more than two sides to every argument.  The difficulty is that objectivity is forever grounded in subjectivity and it’s easy to take the latter for the former.

The debate about the historical proof of Jesus is a game that will continue endlessly.  That is fine if everyone were having fun, but they’re not.  However, pointing out the uselessness of such a game falls on deaf ears because apparently it’s the game many people want to play.  I was suggesting to Acharya that she simply refuse to play this game, but it almost seems like she thinks its the only game in town… as if everything were riding on that one issue.

In the end, I find myself arguing with (or being attacked by) both literalist Christians and mythicists.  The reason for this is that both of these kinds of people are defending a specfic position and I’m not.  I’m only defending curiosity and wonder, the freedom to question and doubt, the desire to explore new possibilities and consider new perspectives.  The problem is that someone defending a position is constantly on the defense because they can never absolutley prove their position.  There are always further doubts and questions.  On the other hand, my perspective in a sense can’t ‘lose’ because my perspective allows for the possibility of my being wrong.  The inevitable doubts and questions are what inspire me.

My heroes are people like Charles Fort, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick.  These are people who valued questions over answers, people who considered every possibility and continually discarded each possibility for the next one.  The true believer (whether a believer in Jesus or Darwin, theism or mythicism, or whatever) can’t help but be perplexed by the person of a Fortean bent.  Neither Acharya nor some of her fans, apparently, can understand someone like me.  I’ve read her work and understand it, and yet have my own opinion.  The fan of hers who was commenting in that post couldn’t comprehend how I could disagree if I understood Acharya.  The idea that Acharya’s argument could be improved was blasphemous.  It’s not even a matter if I was right or wrong.  The issue was that I dared question Acharya’s authority.  It sometimes feels like Acharya believes that all disagreement is based on ignorance and that if she could enlighten the world everyone would agree with her (trust me, I understand the temptation of thinking this way).  She doesn’t seem to get the real issue.  I’m not even in disagreement with any of the facts she brings up or even her general interpretaion, but her view is just one view.  Nothing more and nothing less.

To me, it seems she is more certain of her position than is necessary.  I think she relies a bit too heavy on astrotheology.  I personally love the insight astrotheology offers, but there are many other perspectives that offer insight.  As for even deeper insights, I prefer the ideas of integral theory and of depth psychology; I prefer ideas such as the archetypal, the imaginal, and the daimonic.  I think studies of the trickster archetype, for instance, may offer more insight than most theories from mainstream religious textual criticism.  For me, I separate religion from spirituality.  The problem with biblical scholarship debates is that the line generally gets drawn between theists and atheists.  To many (most?) theists and atheists, you have to be either one or the other.  However, in the traditional sense, I’m neither theist nor atheist.  Furthermore, I grew up in an extremely non-literalist Christianity and so I have a hard time trying to make myself care about historical debates that never go anywhere.  History didn’t seem to matter much to early Christians and so why should it be made the primary issue of almost every single discussion about Christianity?  What does someone like Acharya think she is gaining by seemingly trying to make this the pivotal issue on which all of Christianity either stands or falls?

 - – -

Note: I just wanted to clarify what I mean by being a fan of Acharya S.

I guess it was in the late 1990s when I first read her work.  It was about 1999 and so I’ve been studying her work for at least a decade.  She has written quite a bit (thousands of pages) and it’s difficult reading, but I’ve read most of it even her various online articles.  I’ve spent massive amounts of time studying mythicism and buying books by mythicists.  I’ve spent time on many different forums discussing mythicism in general and Acharya in particular.  I’ve been on all of the major forums and have studied all sides of the debates.  At one time I spent a fair amount of time on the forum that Acharya runs and I got to personally know her most loyal fans (many of whom were quite friendly and one of whom actually was familiar with Joseph Campbell).  I’ve read all of Acharya’s opinions of other biblical scholars and I’ve read the opinion of other biblical scholars about Acharya.  I’ve written about mythicism and Acharya’s scholarship numerous times in this blog and in Amazon reviews, and I’ve often gone out of my way to defend her scholarship.

I enjoy and highly respect her scholarship and consider her to be a very trustworthy source.   On top of this, I’ve personally interacted with her numerous times on her forum and blog and she emailed me a couple of times (one of those was in response to my Amazon review which she quoted on her publshing site).

My studies of mythology and religion go beyond Acharya and mythicism and include years of study prior to my discovering Acharya.  I’m not an expert in this field, but this subject is one of my personal obsessions and I take my obsessions very seriously.  I think it’s fair to say I’ve studied more widely and in more depth about this subject than most people will do in their entire lives.

So, my criticisms aren’t offered lightly.  Even with these criticisms, I still respect Acharya’s scholarship.  But I also respect the scholarship of many writers and not all of them agree with eachother.  My criticisms aren’t insults.  They’re just differences of perspective.

My point in bringing all this up is that there is a major problem if Acharya can’t accept constructive criticism offered by one of her more vocal admirers (i.e., me).  Does she just think everyone is out to get her and every criticism is either someone attacking or someone who is ignorant?  If so, that is a very odd way to view other people.

Cold War Era: Paranoia and Oppression

This post started out with my thinking about the paranoia and oppressiveness of the 1950s.  However, I realized that the 1950s was merely a clear example of the entire Cold War era.  Some would say the Cold War is still going on, but just with a new name.  For certain, the Cold War spans almost the entire living memory of our culture.  The people who clearly remember the US before WWII are getting very old and becoming smaller in number.  And only now is a new generation growing up with no memory at all of the threat of communism.  Maybe terrorism will obsess our collective psyche for the next half century or so as communism had done before it. 

With the new or seemingly new threat of terrorism, it’s easy for many (the Boomers in particular) to fondly remember the peace and prosperity of the post-war period of history.  But let us not get too soft and fuzzy in our memories.  There is a dark past that I hope isn’t forgotten for fear of repeating it.  Much of our present international troubles are directly rooted in the meddling activities our country did in the last century.  We shouldn’t be surprised that the chickens have come home to roost.  The problems of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran are nothing new and our country is far from innocent.

Mid-1940s to early 1990s — “The Cold War began in the mid-1940s and lasted into the early 1990s.”  This general period involves some of the greatest and worst events of American history.  The late 1950s to early 1960s represented the high point of American idealistic optimism, but I’ll instead focus on the negative here because the media, for all of its seeming negativity, too often overlooks the dark underbelly of politics.  This, of course, might have something to do with the government becoming ever more adept at controlling the media through propaganda. 

Most of the Cold War was patriotic rallying and international posturing rather than overt fighting and hence the name, but still there was plenty of international conflicts including covert operations (para-military training, assassination attempts, overthrowing of governments, financial support of dictatorships, etc.).  The stakes were as real as the World Wars but just with more subtle methods.  As this was the beginning of ideological warfare it was also the beginning of the endless war and the military-industrial complex that certain people early on had predicted and warned about.  An interesting aspect was the ending of colonization as the preferred method of relating to “Third World” countries, but obviously that didn’t mean the “First World” countries were no longer interested in continuing their control and manipulation by other means.  From the Wikipedia article on the Cold War:

Nationalist movements in some countries and regions, notably Guatemala, Iran, the Philippines, and Indochina were often allied with communist groups—or at least were perceived in the West to be allied with communists.^[79] In this context, the US and the Soviet Union increasingly competed for influence by proxy in the Third World as decolonization gained momentum in the 1950s and early 1960s;^[134] additionally, the Soviets saw continuing losses by imperial powers as presaging the eventual victory of their ideology.^[135] The US government utilized the CIA in order to remove a string of unfriendly Third World governments and to support allied ones.^[79] The US used the CIA to overthrow governments suspected by Washington of turning pro-Soviet, including Iran’s first democratically elected government under Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in 1953 (see 1953 Iranian coup d’état) and Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954 (see 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état).^[104]Between 1954 and 1961, the US sent economic aid and military advisors to stem the collapse of South Vietnam’s pro-Western regime.^[20]

Because of new advances in technology, this was an era that brought to a new level the power and ability of the information gathering agencies and secret (and semi-secret) enforcement agencies.  It was around this time that many of the alphabet agencies in the US were created and gained immense power.  These agencies, however, had predecessors before them.  In the past century, there has been a complex ever-changing puzzle of committees and organizations under a variety of names.

Also during this time, the US and the Soviet Union began wide experimentation: atom bombs, neutrino bombs, hydrogen bombs, radiation, radar, sonar, microwaves, bio-chemicals, genetics, psychological manipulation, social control methods, brainwashing, psychedelics, ESP, telekinesis, influence of various kinds of energy waves on humans and technology, etc.  In order to try to gain an edge, the world powers were willing to try anything at least once both on citizens of other countries and sometimes their own unsuspecting citizens.  Still unknown to most people, the government parapsychology research went on for decades in both countries and possibly is still going on.  For example, the Stargate Project was a 20 million dollar US intelligence program which at its peak had 14 labs that researched remote viewing(including clairvoyance and out-of-body experiences).  This project involved the Army and the CIA and was in operation from the 1970s to 1995 when it either closed down or changed names as is commonly the habit for programs that get too much public attention.  The Stargate Project was related to the projects Sun Streak, Grill Flame, Center Lane by DIA(Defense Intelligence Agency that, according to the Wikipediaarticle, “coordinates the activities of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force intelligence components”) and INSCOM, and SCANATE by CIA. 

There was intense secrecy surrounding such government activities.  We only know about them now because President Clinton was interested in UFOs and the John F. Kennedy assassination which even he couldn’t get information about and so in 1995 he signed the Executive Order 12958 which declassified many documents and promised to declassify further documents later (but in 2003 President Bush essentially replaced this order by amending it and so the government has returned to it’s stance of secrecy).  This order forced the government to admit to much that it had denied in the past.  This included the various research programs, but maybe more intriguing was the government’s lengthy interest in UFOs which publicly served the purpose of debunking and disinformation. 

The world’s governments all became majorly interested in the foo fighters first observed in 1944 by military pilots during WWII and the ghost rockets first observed in 1946, but it was only after the war that the national governments realized that these weren’t experimental craft of the enemy and so that it is how they became labeled as Unidentified Flying Objects.  The Air Force reports on the Roswel UFO incident didn’t come out until the mid-1990s which was about a half century after the event.  There were several investigations into UFOs that lasted almost 3 decades, but of course any recent concerted efforts of government investigation would still be classified.  The known investigations include: US Air Force’s 1947-48 Project Sign including the 1948 Estimate of the Situation document, US Air Force’s 1949-51 Project Grudge including the 1949 Grudge report, CIA commissioned 1952 Robertson Panel, US Air Force’s 1952 Project Blue Book including the US Air Force commissioned 1954 Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, and the US Air Force’s 1968 Condon Committee (formally known as Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects).  Besides the Air Force reports from the 1990s, there have been other official responses to UFO sightings such as Federal Aviation Adminstration reaction to the 2006 O’Hare International Airport UFO sighting and the official reaction of the Coast Guard and various space agencies to the 2007 Kodiak Island UFO sighting.  Some people speculate that the NASA commissioned 1961 Brookings Report implies a motive for the government’s secrecy about UFOs, but the government is secretive by nature and probably doesn’t need specific reasons.  Classifying information as secret was common practice during the Cold War even for uninteresting and harmless documents.

Directly in line with this culture of secrecy, there was an intense paranoia that too often emerged as projection of fear and hatred onto fellow citizens.  The enemy had many guises: fascists, commies, liberals, aliens, or even your neighbor; and these enemies often blended together for the “enemy” was an amorphous force of constant threat.  The movies were filled with the good guys endlessly fighting off various enemies and monsters, but it was also the beginning of film noir which was highly critical of American idealism.  This was a time of the rising power of conservatism after Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism and it was a time of the US ascending as a greater world power than it ever had before.  More importantly, this was a time of complete social upheaval.  Veterans coming back after WWII were scarred and rootless looking to settle down to the comforting fantasies of the nuclear family portrayed on tv.  America as it once was had disintegrated and the women had gotten a taste of liberation during the war.  The Baby Boomers born into this new world were a polarizing ideological force of great numbers that would grow up to start more wars than any generation before.  

Strangely or not, all of this ideology and idealism coincided with materialism.  There was the romanticism of the Enlightenment project of modern progress embodied in industrialism combined with the promise of the new technological age.  Despite conservativism coming to power and despite the collective dreams of traditional values, this was a new world.  Capitalism had become a power to compete with democracy itself and some would say capitalism won.  This certainly wasn’t the libertarian-leaning conservativism of the early history of the US.  In it’s place, neoconservatism was starting to take root.  World War II was over and the bad times seemed in the past.  Even as the middle class grew to increased power, the elites of the military-industrial complex grew to even greater power than probably the whole middle class combined.  But people weren’t worried, bread and circus as they say.  People had jobs, had homes, and the entertainment industry was booming.  Life had become practically one big advertisement for the greatness of being an American… unless you were a minority or a sexual deviant such as a homosexual, but those people don’t count.  In the 1950s and 1960s, progress almost looked like it would be endless and few people noticed the negative consequences.  My dad remembers that a smokestack belching out noxious gases was a symbol of productivity and he has fond memories of seeing them as a child.  Things were happening.  Every time you turned around, there was something new.  Technology was advancing in bounds.  The scientist was the savior of mankind.  There were rocket ships and skyscrapers, and on a more personal level there were microwaves and tvs.  The early versions of the internet was being developed.  No doubt, science was kicking ass and taking names. 

This was also a time when imagery gained power over the written word which had ruled for the last couple of millennia.  Two images in particular captured our collective sense of identity:  the mushroom cloud and the planet earth as seen from space.  Another catchy symbol was the Doomsday Clock.

There is an interesting Wikipedia article about the Culture during the Cold War.  And here is a lovely summary of a nuclear war scenario in the article Massive retaliation:

A massive retaliation doctrine, as with any nuclear strategy based on the principle of mutually assured destruction and as an extension the second-strike capability needed to form a retaliatory attack, encourages the opponent to perform a massive counterforce first strike. This, if successful, would cripple the defending state’s retaliatory capacity and render a massive retaliation strategy useless.

Also, if both sides of a conflict adopt the same stance of massive response, it may result in unlimited escalation (a “nuclear spasm”), each believing that the other will back down after the first round of retaliation. Both problems are not unique to massive retaliation, but to nuclear deterrence as a whole.

Some other lovely Wikipedia articles:

Truman Doctrine

Eisenhower Doctrine

Kennedy Doctrine

Johnson Doctrine

Nixon Doctrine

Reagan Doctrine

Rollback

Containment

Domino Theory

Democratic peace theory

Peace through strength

Nuclear Peace

Mutual assured destruction (MAD)

Fail-deadly

Dead Hand (nuclear war)

Balance of terror

Deterrence theory

Madman theory

World War III

   —

That was just introductory comments about the larger context.  The rest that follows is about the specifics of this era, loosely in chronological order.  I’m mostly focusing on documented information, but all of this leads to questions of motives.  I’m not interested in discussing conspiracy theories for this blog.  Where I do discuss conspiracies, I’ll limit myself to those that have been well documented and/or admitted to by the government.  This is all actual historical events although some of it didn’t show up in the news media of the time and when it did show up the public only got partial information.  Now that the Cold War is over, much more info is available for inquiring minds.

1942 to 1946– Japanese American Internment and the propaganda for it: Around 110,000 Japanese were imprisoned in camps, 62 percent were US citizens including those that were native born.  The architects of the Internment camps used deception and withheld critical information.  There was no evidence of espionage or sabotage from any of the detainees, and a government assessment concluded that the vast majority of the Japanese American citizens were loyal to the US.  To promote the use of internment camps propaganda was necessary.  Americans were open to such influence partly for the obvious reason of the fearful response to the Pearl Harbor attack, but also because at the time racism was very strong and there were farming conflicts involving Japanese Americans.  Also, the media of this era was very agreeable to being used for propaganda purposes.  From the Wikipedia article on the Propaganda for Japanese American internment:

As a common form of entertainment for many Americans, motion pictures portrayed a positive image of relocation to non-Japanese movie-goers. Produced by the United States War Relocation Authority, such movies as A Challenge to Democracy (1944)^[4] and Japanese Relocation (1943)^[5], depicted the internment camps in a positive light and showed the Japanese people as happy and content, benefiting from their new life in the internment camps. To accomplish this, these government-issued propaganda films touched on common positive themes, such as:

• ensuring the safety of internee property
• providing Japanese-Americans with greater opportunities, such as education, employment, internal government, and religion
• cooperation of the internees with the local authorities and federal government
• language comparing the relocated people to early American frontiersmen

Such motion pictures were made with film from actual Japanese American internment camps with a narrator informing the audience of what they were witnessing. As the UCLA Film and Television Archive writes:

[This] film reminds us how easily unpleasant truths can be rationalized into banality and individual liberties can be swept away. (UCLA, 2007)

As a prominent news source for many Americans in the 1940’s, the newspaper media also played an integral role in influencing national attitudes toward Japanese citizens. Many times, editorials published in these newspapers would approach relocation as a necessary inevitability characteristic in times of war. The San Francisco Chronicle on February 21, 1942 displayed just such an attitude of pro-Japanese-American internment, stating, “We have to be tough, even if civil rights do take a beating for a time” ^[6]. The Bakersfield Californian was among the newspapers of the time to criminalize the Japanese American population, stating, “We have had enough experiences with Japs in times of peace to emphasize the opinion that they are not to be trusted.” ^[2] Violent sentiment would also be characteristic of some of these editorials, as when a writer to the Corvallis Gazette Times expressed, “The loyal Jap American citizens have the law on their side, but that may not protect them. Besides, what is the law and what is the Constitution to a dead Jap. If they are smart, they will not return” ^[2]. Many newspapers would also publish propaganda cartoons concerning the Japanese military, which fueled a general racist attitude towards Japanese-American residents. ^[7]

From the Wikipedia article on Japanese American Internment:

In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation stated that government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”.^[10] About $1.6 billion in reparations were later disbursed by the U.S. government to surviving internees and their heirs.^[11]

A disagreeing opinion by Victor Hwang from the Asian Week (“Internment: More Than Just a Government Mistake”, February 28, 2003):

But contrary to the narrative which validates our nation’s commitment to constitutional principles over time, a more careful analysis suggests that the internment of Japanese Americans was not simply an error in judgment, but rather an accepted practice which has been frequently considered for use by our government during times of perceived crisis. In this view, the government has shown itself to be continuously willing to suspend the constitutional rights of the minority in the interests of national security, and it has learned nothing from the sacrifices and injuries done to the Japanese American community.

1945 – Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The largest bombing in history; It’s main purpose, besides bomb testing, was to force Japan into submission by destroying heavily populated cities which killed around 220,000 civilians.  Whether or not it was necessary and effective for the intended goal, it is without a doubt the most devastating terrorist attack ever implemented (the government admitted that a major reason was psychological warfare).  If you prefer euphemisms, you could call it a countervalue.  It was the ultimate symbol of the ends justifying the means, a pragmatic ethics of brute force that undermines any claim of a moral highground… which isn’t to say any other country has the moral highground either.  My dad is fond of saying that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other types of government.  He might be correct, that is assuming the US government is still a democracy (or ever was… considering all of the royal lineages, family relations, business connections, and old money of the majority of politicians, one could be forgiven for thinking that our government is actually a plutocracy or at least a semi-plutocracy).

1945 to 1980 – Nuclear Weapons Testing Accidents, Downwinders, and Human Subject Research:  There was a lot of nuclear and radiation testing going on and much of it was secret at the time.  Because of the secrecy, most people are unaware of how many supposed accidents there were that exposed populated areas.  Whether these were genuinely accidents or not, the government was very interested in the health results that ensued.  Fortunately, some of these people (the ones that lived and knew what happened to them) were later compensated.  Unfortunately, too many people have been negatively effected and compensation can’t solve the problem.  Considering all of this, it doesn’t seem all that strange that cancer and other related illnesses and symptoms (such as decreased sperm count and deformities) have massively increased (in humans and other animals as well) since nuclear testing began.  Throw in all the other pollutants and you’d think we as a species are collectively trying to commit suicide.  From the Wikipedia article on Downwinders:

Between 1945 and 1980, the United States, U.S.S.R, United Kingdom, France and China exploded 504 nuclear devices in atmospheric tests at thirteen primary sites yielding the explosive equivalent of 440 megatons of TNT. Of these atmospheric tests, 330 were conducted by the United States. Accounting for all types of nuclear tests, official counts show that the United States has conducted 1,054 nuclear weapons tests to date, involving at least 1,151 nuclear devices, most of which occurred at Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands, with ten other tests taking place at various locations in the United States, including Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico. There have been an estimated 2,000 nuclear tests conducted worldwide; the number of nuclear tests conducted by the United States alone is currently more than the sum of nuclear testing done by all other known nuclear states (USSR, Great Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea) combined. ^{[3] [4]}These nuclear tests infused vast quantities of radioactive material into the world’s atmosphere, which was widely dispersed and then deposited as global fallout. ^[5]

Even assuming these radiation dispersals were simply accidents involving naive scientists and over-eager politicians and military leaders, there is still plenty of evidence that intentional human experimentation occurred.  From DUCK AND COVER(UP): U.S. RADIATION TESTING ON HUMANSby Tod Ensign and Glenn Alcalay:

If you have any lingering thoughts that the government’s failure to disclose radiation experimentation on humans was driven by misguided national security concerns, throw them in the nearest nuclear waste dump. At least some officials knew what they were doing was unconscionable and were ducking the consequences and covering their tails. A recently leaked Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) document lays out in the most bare-knuckled manner the policy of coverup. It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such work field should be classified `secret,’ wrote Colonel O.G. Haywood of the AEC. *1 This letter confirms a policy of complete secrecy where human radiation experiments were concerned.

The Haywood letter may help explain a recently discovered 1953 Pentagon document, declassified in 1975. The two-page order from the secretary of defense ostensibly brought U.S. guidelines for human experimentation. in line with the Nuremberg Code, making adherence to a universal standard official U.S. policy. Ironically, however, the Pentagon document was classified and thus was probably not seen by many military researchers until its declassification in 1975.2

As these and a steady stream of similar reports confirm, for decades, the U.S. government had not only used human guinea pigs in radiation experiments, but had also followed a policy of deliberate deception and cover up of its misuse of both civilians and military personnel in nuclear weapons development and radiation research. While the Department of Energy (DoE) has made some belated moves toward greater openness, there are clear indications that other federal agencies and the White House have not yet deviated from the time-honored tradition of deceit and self-serving secrecy.

From the Wikipedia article on Human Experimentation:

Numerous experiments were done on prisoners throughout the US. Many prisoners eventually filed lawsuits and these actions brought about many more investigations and suits against doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. [1]Experiments included high-risk cancer treatments, the application of strong skin creams, new cosmetics, dioxin and high doses of LSD. Many incidents were documented in government reports, ACLU findings and various books including Acres of Skin by Allen M. Hornblum. The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study is one of many examples. The Plutonium Files, for which Eileen Welsome won a Pulitzer Prize, documents the early human tests of the toxicity of plutonium and uranium on people.^[21]

The CIA ran an extensive toxicology and chemical/biological warfare program in cooperation with the US military. The Edgewood Arsenal and US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Maryland were the main headquarters for such studies. At such centres, the agency developed many toxins, incapacitants, mind-altering substances and carcinogens. Mind-control substances were studied to facilitate interrogation and toxins were used as weapons in assassination. One of the toxins that the CIA studied extensively was derived from red algae called dinoflagellate which produces the red tide.^{[citation needed]}

The MK-ULTRA project was a CIA run human experiment program where prisoners and unwitting subjects were administered hallucinogenic drugs in attempt to develop incapacitating substances and chemical mind control agents, in an operation run by Sidney Gottlieb. Biological-weapons specialist Frank Olson‘s drink was spiked with LSD by Sidney Gottliebin November 1953. He became psychotic and chronically depressed and committed suicide by jumping from the roof of his hotel ten days later.^[22]

1924 to 1972 and beyond – J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and COINTELPRO:  Hoover was effective at his job and there were real threats in the world that he dealt with, but history has remembered him less kindly since information about his life became open to the public.  He was a major player who helped create the groundwork for the oppressive atmosphere of the Cold War era which interestingly spanned most of his long career.  Without him, the communist and homosexual witchhunters wouldn’t have had the same power to threaten the public.  It’s also important to keep in mind that Hoover’s 50 yr reign as director of the Bureau represents a direct link between Prohibition (along with it’s corrolary War on Crime against gangsters) and the War on Drugs (along with it’s later corollary War on Terrorism).  From the Wikipedia article on Hoover:

Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation — predecessor to the FBI — in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. Hoover was highly regarded by much of the U.S. public, but posthumously he became an increasingly controversial figure. His many critics asserted that he exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI.^[1] He used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders,^[2] and to use illegal methods to collect evidence.^[3] It is because of Hoover’s long and controversial reign that FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.^[4]

[...]

In 1956, Hoover was becoming increasingly frustrated by Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute people for their political opinions, most notably, Communists. At this time he formalized a covert “dirty tricks” program under the name COINTELPRO.^[13]This program remained in place until it was revealed to the public in 1971, and was the cause of some of the harshest criticism of Hoover and the FBI. COINTELPRO was first used to disrupt the Communist Party, and later organizations such as the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Jr.‘s SCLC, the Ku Klux Klan, the neofascist American Nazi Party and others. Its methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents and spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations.^[14]Some authors have charged that COINTELPRO methods also included inciting violence and arranging murders.^[15]In 1975, the activities of COINTELPRO were investigated by the “United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities” called the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) and these activities were declared illegal and contrary to the Constitution.^[16]

Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on many powerful people, especially politicians. According to Laurence Silberman, appointed Deputy Attorney General in early 1974, FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley thought such files either did not exist or had been destroyed. After The Washington Postbroke a story in January 1975, Kelley searched and found them in his outer office. The House Judiciary Committee then demanded that Silberman testify about them. An extensive investigation of Hoover’s files by David Garrow showed that Hoover and next-in-command William Sullivan, as well as the FBI itself as an agency, were responsible.

In 1956, several years before he targeted King, Hoover had a public showdown with T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader from Mound Bayou, Mississippi. During a national speaking tour, Howard had criticized the FBI’s failure to thoroughly investigate the racially motivated murders of George W. Lee, Lamar Smith, and Emmett Till. Hoover not only wrote an open letter to the press singling out these statements as “irresponsible” but secretly enlisted the help of NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall in a campaign to discredit Howard.

In the 1950s, evidence of Hoover’s unwillingness to focus FBI resources on the Mafia became grist for the media and his many detractors, after famed reporter Jack Anderson exposed the immense scope of the Mafia’s organized crime network, a threat Hoover had long downplayed. Hoover’s retaliation and continual harassment of Anderson lasted into the 1970s. His moves against people who maintained contacts with subversive elements, some of whom were members of the civil rights movement, also led to accusations of trying to undermine their reputations. His alleged treatment of actress Jean Seberg and Martin Luther King, Jr. are two such examples.

Hoover personally directed the FBI investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations issued a report in 1979 critical of the performance by the FBI, the Warren Commissionas well as other agencies. The report also criticized what it characterized as the FBI’s reluctance to thoroughly investigate the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the president.^[17]

[...]

Hoover hunted down and threatened anyone who made insinuations about his sexuality.^[35] He also spread destructive, unsubstantiated rumors that Adlai Stevenson was gay to damage the liberal governor’s 1952 Presidential Campaign.^[35] His extensive secret files contained surveillance material on Eleanor Roosevelt‘s alleged lesbian lovers, speculated to be acquired for the purpose of blackmail.^[35]

[...and if you're into conspiracies...]

Hoover was a “devoted” Freemason and was coronated an 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Freemason in the Southern Masonic Jurisdiction. “He was raised a Master Mason on November 9, 1920, in Federal LodgeNo. 1, Washington, DC, just two months before his 26thbirthday. During his 52 years with the Craft, he received innumerable medals, awards and decorations.” Eventually In 1955, he was coroneted a Thirty-third Degree Inspector General Honorary and awarded the Scottish Rite’s highest recognition, the Grand Cross of Honour in 1965 by the Southern Masonic Jurisdiction. ^[42]

From the Wikipedia article on the FBI:

During the 1950s and 1960s, FBI officials became increasingly concerned about the influence of civil rights leaders. In 1956, for example, Hoover took the rare step of sending an open letter denouncing Dr. T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other blacks in the South. ^[14]

The FBI carried out controversial domestic surveillance in an operation called COINTELPRO.^[15] It aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States, including both militant and non-violent organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a leading civil rights organization.^[16]

In response to organized crime, on August 25, 1953, the Top Hoodlum Program was created. It asked all field offices to gather information on mobsters in their territories and to report it regularly to Washington for a centralized collection of intelligence on racketeers. [1]

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a frequent target of investigation. The FBI found no evidence of any crime, but attempted to use tapes of King involved in sexual activity for blackmail. In his 1991 memoirs, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowanasserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide.^[17]

[...]

In March 1971, a Media, Pennsylvania FBI branch office was robbed; the thieves took secret files and distributed them to a range of newspapers including the Harvard Crimson.^[38]The files detailed the FBI’s investigations into lives of ordinary citizens—including a black student group at a Pennsylvania military college and the daughter of Congressman Henry Reuss of Wisconsin.^[38] The country was “jolted” by the revelations, and the actions were denounced by members of Congress including House Majority Leader Hale Boggs.^[38]The phones of some members of Congress, including Boggs, had allegedly been tapped.^[38]

[...]

Protecting an informant, the FBI allowed four innocent men to be convicted of murder in March 1965. Three of the men were sentenced to death (which was later reduced to life in prison). The fourth defendant was sentenced to life in prison, where he spent three decades.^[50]

In July, 2007, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertnerin Boston found the bureau helped convict the four men of the March 1965 gangland murder of Edward “Teddy” Deegan. The U.S. Government was ordered to pay $100 million in damages to the four defendants.^[51]

From the Wikipedia article on COINTELPRO:

COINTELPRO (an acronym for Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States. The FBI used covert operations from its inception, however formal COINTELPRO operations took place between 1956 and 1971.^[2] The FBI motivation at the time was “protecting national security, preventing violence, and maintaining the existing social and political order.”

According to FBI records, 85% of COINTELPRO resources were expended on infiltrating, disrupting, marginalizing, and/or subverting groups suspected of being subversive,^[3] such as communist and socialist organizations; the women’s rights movement; people suspected of building a “coalition of militant black nationalist groups” ranging from the Black Panther Party and Republic of New Afrika to “those in the non-violent civil rights movement” such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and others associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress of Racial Equality, and other civil rights groups; a broad range of organizations labelled “New Left“, including Students for a Democratic Society, the National Lawyers Guild, the Weathermen, almost all groups protesting the Vietnam War, and even individual student demonstrators with no group affiliation; and nationalist groups such as those “seeking independence for Puerto Rico.” The other 15% of COINTELPRO resources were expended to marginalize and subvert “white hate groups,” including the Ku Klux Klan and National States’ Rights Party. ^[4]

The directives governing COINTELPRO were issued by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered FBI agents to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” the activities of these movements and their leaders.^[5][6]

[...just in case for some silly reason you thought this was all in the past...]

While COINTELPRO was officially terminated in April 1971, suspicions persist that the program’s tactics continued informally.^[35][36]Critics have suggested that subsequent FBI actions indicate that post-COINTELPRO reforms in the agency did not succeed in ending the program’s tactics.^[37] The Associated Pressreported in November 2008 that documents released under the FOIA reportedly show that the FBI tracked the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam for more than two decades.^[38] A review by The Washington Post shows that Maryland activists were wrongly labeled as terrorists in state and federal databases by state police’s Homeland Security and Intelligence Division from 2005 to at least early 2007. ^[39]

“Counterterrorism” guidelines implemented during the Reagan administration have been described as undercutting these reforms, allowing a return to earlier tactics.^[40] Some radical groups accuse factional opponents of being FBI informants or assume the FBI is infiltrating the movement.^[41]

Several authors have accused the FBI of continuing to deploy COINTELPRO-like tactics against radical groups after the official COINTELPRO operations were ended. Several authors have suggested the American Indian Movement (AIM) has been a target of such operations.

A few authors go further and allege that the federal government intended to acquire uranium deposits on the Lakota tribe’s reservation land, and that this motivated a larger government conspiracy against AIM activists on the Pine Ridge reservation.^{[2][14][42][43][44]}Others believe COINTELPRO continues and similar actions are being taken against activist groups.^[44][45][46]

Caroline Woidatargued that with respect to Native Americans, COINTELPRO should be understood within a historical context in which “Native Americans have been viewed and have viewed the world themselves through the lens of conspiracy theory.”^[47]

Other authors note that while there are conspiracy theories related to COINTELPRO, the issue of ongoing government surveillance and repression is nonetheless real.^{[48] [49]}

The War on Terror has brought to new heights the fear-mongering and civil rights infringement.  I don’t doubt that COINTELPRO is still happening right now, but there is at least proof of similar activities happening into the 1990s.  The Earth First! activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were falsely accused of carrying a bomb after a planted bomb blew up in their vehicle even though all evidence pointed away from them.  It should be noted that they were specifically travelling for the purpose of organizing a campaign of non-violent protests.  After their spending years in jail, a judge finally changed the verdict instead charging the FBI and Oakland police of deception and misinformation and Bari and Cherney were awarded 4.4 million for the infringement of their civil rights.  If I remember correctly, it was the first case ever won against the FBI and surely J. Edgar Hoover was rolling in his grave.

1938 to 1975 – House Committee on Un-American Activities (officially called House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC for short): It was an oppressive political organization lasting decades.  Although there was a real communist threat, the fear-mongering distorted the actual reality of it and created a state of paranoia which the media played into.  Besides media censorship, it led to Hollywood blacklists which destroyed careers and led some to suicide.  Another main target of attack was the American Civil Liberties Union.  1975 to present — The House did abolish the committee, but only to transfer its powers to the House Judiciary Committee.

Late 1940s to late 1950s – McCarthyism: 1953 — Joseph McCarthy helped to create the greatest political oppression in modern US history by scaring government and military officials into submitting to his demands.  The FBI became extrmemely intrusive and threatening.  With various investigations and committees, many people had their lives destroyed and some were sent to prisons.  1953 — State Department bowed to McCarthy’s request by removing and in some cases burning books from its overseas libraries.  This fear-mongering created a snitch culture where family and friends spied on eachother.  From the Wikipedia article:

It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthyism. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.^[42]In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.^[43] Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees did in fact have a past or present connection of some kind with the Communist Party. But for the vast majority, both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliation were tenuous.^[44] Suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. The hunt for “sexual perverts”, who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in thousands being harassed and denied employment.^[45]

In the film industry, over 300 actors, authors and directors were denied work in the U.S. through the unofficial Hollywood blacklist. Blacklists were at work throughout the entertainment industry, in universities and schools at all levels, in the legal profession, and in many other fields. A port security program initiated by the Coast Guard shortly after the start of the Korean War required a review of every maritime worker who loaded or worked aboard any American ship, regardless of cargo or destination. As with other loyalty-security reviews of McCarthyism, the identities of any accusers and even the nature of any accusations were typically kept secret from the accused. Nearly 3,000 seamen and longshoremen lost their jobs due to this program alone.^[46]

1948 – There was a mass of comic book burnings by priests, teachers and parents.  1954 to present – Dr. Fredric Wertham and The Comics Code Authority: This organization was created out of fear that children would be negatively influenced and psychologically perverted by reading comic books.  Many subjects became taboo: disrespectful portrayals of authority figures and evil winning against good; any inclusion of drugs as used by characters or in terms of plot; sexual innuendo, and depictions of “sex perversion”, “sexual abnormalities”, and “illicit sex relations” which specifically included seduction, rape, sadism, masochism, homosexuality, masturbation, and nudity; portrayals of violence, gore, cannibalism, kidnapping, and concealed weapons; the words “crime”, “horror” and “terror” in comic book titles; and the characters of vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and zombies.  The odd thing was these were all taboo even if someone wanted to publish a comic book with a morally good message such as portraying drug use negatively.  Even though this organization held no legal power to enforce its requirements, through public fear it was able to get the comic book industry to enact its own self-censorship.  A comic book had to meet these requirements to get the sticker of approval which determined sales.  1980s — comic books finally became free of censorship, but the Code in revised form continues to exist and continues to be self-imposed by some publishers.

1954 to 1956 – Wilhelm Reich and the FDA: Reich was prosecuted and imprisoned because certain government officials apparently didn’t like his researching sexuality.  1956 — Reich’s books, papers and journals were burned and his equipment destroyed by the FDA.  His fellow scientists remained silent during this government oppression of free scientific inquiry.  The term “orgone energy” was at the time censored from future publications of his work.  This is particularly sad in light of the scientific idealism and social optimism of the 1950s.  Dreams of a bright future blinded people to the darkness in their own present time.  From the Wikipedia article:

In November, Reich wrote in Conspiracy. An Emotional Chain Reaction: “I would like to plead for my right to investigate natural phenomena without having guns pointed at me. I also ask for the right to be wrong without being hanged for it … I am angry because smearing can do anything and truth can do so little to prevail, as it seems at the moment.”^[57]

To speculate, it’s possible that the real reason for his prosecution wasn’t about his sexuality research.  His main interest was developing technology that could focus energy fields for various purposes.  This was an area of great interest of the government at the time.  His equipment and paperwork may not have been destroyed but simply taken to a government laboratory.  There certainly were many scientists working in various covert military programs.  The government (specifically the alphabet agencies) weren’t above destroying someone’s life or career if they weren’t cooperative, and I imagine that Reich wouldn’t have wanted his research into healing methods being used for military purposes.  Maybe the most depressing aspect of his story is that I believe his reason for coming to America was at least partly so that he could do scientific research unhindered by government control and interference.

1972 — Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal: Nixon was also one of the politicians who fear-mongered about Communism calling it “the threat” and he was a major player in the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).  Also, he was the first to use the phrase “war on drugs” in 1969.  The Watergate scandal was the low point in American history and the nail in the coffin of the increasingly depressing events of the period.  The Cold War which had been going on for decades was in full gear with all of its fear-mongering and oppressive atmosphere.  The Vietnam War demonstrations were getting ugly and Nixon wasn’t open to these opposing viewpoints.  The earlier assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. were still fresh in the public memory which just made Nixon’s criminal behavior all that more revolting.  I don’t know if he was intentionally trying to destroy democracy, but he created a secret police which is something dictatorships are well known for having.  Actually, I think Nixon was attempting to break a record by breaking every law in the book, and then after it all President Ford pardons him.  WTF!  Spies, and even common criminals for that matter, have been given the death penalty for lesser crimes.  You need to look no further for proof that there is no justice (or at least very little) in American politics.  If he hadn’t been caught and forced into resignation, who knows what he might have accomplished.  Later presidents and politicians learned from his bad example, but I suspect all that has been learned is how to be more sneaky and deceptive. 

Beginning in 1975 — Operation Condor:  US agencies had a long history of manipulating and interfering in the politics of Chile even to the extent of undermining democracy and supporting groups responsible for horrible atrocities (see here), but most notable was Operation Condor which included the support of the Pinochet regime.  From the Wikipedia article:

Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor), was a campaign of political repressions involving assassination and intelligence operations officially implemented in 1975 by the governments of the Southern Cone of South America. The program aimed to eradicate socialist influence and ideas and to control active or potential opposition movements against the governments.^{[citation needed]} Due to its clandestine nature, the precise number of deaths directly attributable to Operation Condor will likely never be known, but it is reported to have caused over sixty thousand victims^[1], possibly even more.^[2][3][4]

[...]

Operation Condor, which took place in the context of the Cold War, had the tacit approval of the United States. In 1968, U.S. General Robert W. Porter stated that “In order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are…endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises.” Condor was one of the fruits of this effort. The targets were officially armed groups (such as the MIR, the Montoneros or the ERP, the Tupamaros, etc.) but in fact included all kinds of political opponents, including their families and others, as reported by the Valech Commission.^{[citation needed]} The Argentine “Dirty War“, for example, which resulted in approximatively30,000 victims according to most estimates, targeted many trade-unionists, relatives of activists, etc.^{[citation needed]}

[...]

Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, was closely involved diplomatically with the Southern Cone governments at the time and well aware of the Condor plan. According to the French newspaper L’Humanité, the first cooperation agreements were signed between the CIA and anti-Castro groups, fascist movements such as the Triple A set up in Argentina by Juan Perón and Isabel Martínez de Perón‘s “personal secretary” José López Rega, and Rodolfo Almirón (arrested in Spain in 2006).^[39]

 

1979 to 1985 — Second Cold War, from the Wikipedia article:

 

The Cold War (1979-1985) discusses the period within the Cold War between the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev as Soviet leader in 1985.

The period is sometimes referred to as the “Second Cold War”^[1] due to the rising US-Soviet tensions and a change in Western policy from détente to more confrontation against the Soviets. Many military conflicts occurred, including Soviet war in Afghanistan, the 1981 Gulf of Sidra incident and the US invasion of Grenada.

[...]

Popular anger among sectors of the Iranian population opposed to the Shah’s rule, seething and repressed for a generation, combined with the Shah’s secular reforms, eventually culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which in turn led to a hostage crisis. Much of the anger in Iran was directed at the U.S., which helped bring the Shah to power in a 1953 CIA-backed coup. In recent years, U.S. officials have expressed regret for past U.S. actions that contributed to the Iran Revolution. Madeleine Albright in 2000 expressed regret for the ’53 CIA role, stating “…it is easy to see now why so many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”¹

The fall of the Shah, a key Middle Eastern ally, was an embarrassment for the United States; and Carter’s inability to get U.S. hostages freed perhaps cost him the 1980 election. While the United States was mired in recession and the Vietnam quagmire, pro-Soviet governments were making great strides abroad, especially in the Third World. Communist Vietnam had defeated the United States, becoming a united state under a communist government. New pro-Soviet governments had also been established in Laos, Angola, Ethiopia and elsewhere. Other communist insurgencies were spreading rapidly across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

Margaret Thatcher became the British Prime Minister in 1979, and Ronald Reagan was inaugurated US President in 1981. Both Reagan and Thatcher denounced the Soviet Union in ideological terms that rivaled those of the worst days of the Cold War in the late 1940s,^[2] with the former famously vowing to leave the “evil empire” on the “ash heap of history“. Pope John Paul II helped provide a moral focus for anti-communism; a visit to his native Poland in 1979 stimulated a religious and nationalist upsurge that galvanized opposition and may have led to his attempted assassination two years later.^[3]

The “new conservatives” or “neoconservatives” rebelled against both the Nixon-era détente and the Democratic Party’s position on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern in 1972, saying liberal Democrats were the cause for U.S. international setbacks. Many clustered around hawkish Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat, and pressured President Carter into a more confrontational stance. Eventually they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the conservative wing of the Republicans, who promised to confront Soviet expansionism.

The Soviet Union seemed committed to the Brezhnev Doctrine, sending troops to Afghanistan at the request of its communist government. The Afghan invasion in 1979 marked the first time that the Soviet Union sent troops outside the Warsaw Pact since the inception of the Eastern counterpart of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). This prompted a swift reaction from the west: the boycotting of the 1980 Summer Olympicsin Moscow and the heavy funding for the Afghani resistance fighters. A tedious guerrilla war continued. America supplied the mujahadeenof Afghanistan with weapons, including Stinger missiles used to shoot down many Soviet aircraft.

America also supplied arms to the Nicaraguan Contras, funded by the sale of arms to Iran, which caused the Iran-Contra Affair political scandal.

[...]

Led by heightened public awareness and fears, the period 1979-1985 witnessed the production in Western countries of several films and television dramas depicting the probable effects of a nuclear war and its aftermath. These included the ground-breaking American film The Day After (1983) and the British television docudrama Threads of the same year. Combining a contemporary Western youth culture of computer games and young love with fears of an accidental nuclear holocaust was the 1983 film WarGames. The Hollywood film Red Dawn (1984) played on American fears by portraying an invasion by Soviet and Cuban forces.

Several films of the James Bond series were set against a Cold War backdrop (The Spy Who Loved Me, Moonraker, Octopussy, and most particularly The Living Daylights set in war-torn Afghanistan with Bond vs. the KGB directly), while films such as White Nights and Rocky IV exploited contemporaneous tense Soviet-American relations.

For the next couple of decades, people mostly gave up on the naive American dream and consoled themselves with self advancement and material gain.  After the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s and the world weary politics of the 1980s, it was hard to remain truly optimistic about the world.  However, politics became even more ideological than ever.  I suppose the conservatives had their time in the sun and the public attitude was slowly shifting back to liberalism again (which fits the predictions of Strauss and Howe’s generations theory). 

Despite their having been the largest generation, the Baby Boomers never had many of their own elected as president (which certainly isn’t to imply they didn’t have many in positions of power).  George Bush, Jr. was a clear example of a Baby Boomer and now Obama is a clear example of a new generation.  So, with Bush Junior out of office and with many other Boomers finally retiring late in life, the last remnants of the political power from the Cold War era are disappearing.  From birth on, the Boomers have dominated American culture for almost the entire Cold War.  The Boomer generation didn’t start the Cold War, but they became the representatives and promoters of it.  Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Gen Xers were born.  And, the latchkey kids that they were, they represented the collective malaise of a decadent society.  Gen Xers aren’t ideological as the Boomers were and so maybe we can hope for a waning of the political extremism that has created so much conflict in the world for the last century or so.  I’d like to believe that America won’t return to some of the civil rights atrocities of last century, but events of the new century seem to demonstrate a federal government seeking to increase its extra-constitutional powers.

    —

There are plenty more fun facts about US history since WWII.  There is the United State’s role as world leader and the US ”relations” to other countries including a variety of covert (and sometimes not so covert) CIA operations and military conflicts.  Also, there are the even more interesting details about covert operations and intelligence gathering within the US.  Especially intriguing are the US government activities related to the media, propaganda, and information control.  All of this, of course, involves conspiracy theories and the mixing of public and private interests.  For a small sampling of such issues, see these Wikipedia articles (in no particular order):

American exceptionalism

American Century

Pax Americana

Neoconservativism

Messianic democracy

American Empire

Imperial Presidency

Overseas expansion of the United States

Overseas interventions of the United States

United States military aid

United States Foreign Military Financing

United States and state terrorism

War crimes committed by the United States

Extrajudicial prisoners of the United States

Extraordinary rendition by the United States

Torture and the United States

Human Rights Record of the United States

Human rights in the United States

CIA transnational human rights actions

CIA sponsored regime change

CIA activities by region: Near East, North Africa, South and Southwest Asia

CIA activities in Iran

CIA activities in Iraq

CIA activities in Afghanistan

CIA activities in the Americas

CIA activities in Brazil

Dirty War and Operation Condor

CIA activities in Asia and the Pacific

Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (School of the Americas)

School of the Americas Watch

Foreign relations of the United States

Latin America – United States relations

Nicaragua vs. United States

CIA drug trafficking

CIA and Contras cocaine trafficking in the US

Kerry Committee report

Iran-Contra affair

Special Activities Division

Black budget

Black site

Black project

Black Operation

Covert operation

Open secret

CIA activities in the United States

Project MKULTRA

Human radiation experiments

Plausible deniability

Blowback (intelligence)

Ward Churchill 9/11 essay controversy

Psychological Operations (United States)

Information warfare

Black propaganda

White propaganda

Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare

CIA and the media

CIA influence on public opinion

Operation Mockingbird

Propaganda in the United States

Censorship in the United States

Bush administration payment of columnists

Media bias in the United States

Committee on Public Information

Public diplomacy

Office of Public Diplomacy

Smith-Mundt Act

Perception Management

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Propaganda Model

United States President’s Commission on CIA activities within the United States (Rockefeller Commission)

Church Committee

Operation CHAOS

Mass surveillance

NSA warrantless surveillance controversy

Congressional response to the NSA warrantless surveillance program

NSA call database

Room 641A

Postal censorship

Warrantless searches in the United States

Project MINARET

Family Jewels (Central Intelligence Agency)

Operation Northwoods

Bay of Pigs Invasion

Cuban Project (Operation Mongoose)

Operation WASHTUB

Operation Gladio and Propaganda Due

U.S. intelligence involvement with German and Japanese war criminals after World War II

Arthur C. Lundahl and CIA interest in UFOs

Criticism of the Federal Reserve

World Finance Corporation

October surprise

October surprise conspiracy theory

Inslaw

Michael Riconosciuto

Danny Casolaro

Gary Webb

Mark Lombardi

Seymour Hersh

Deep Throat and William Mark Felt, Sr.