Thoughts on American Culture II

Interrogating those barely-vestigial values

Photo by Frederick Shaw on Unsplash. Militia overwatch in Appalachia. Man wears buffalo plaid and jeans with multicam crye JPC 2.0, and a helmet with night vision. Appalachian Mountains. Published on September 27, 2022

Jason is now halfway through Albion’s Seed. I hear him at bedtime, flipping pages and laughing at the many anecdotes sprinkles through the book. The Puritan preacher whose wife bore twins on the Sabbath Day (a forbidden day for birthdays, as it was assumed a baby was born on the same day of the week it was begotten). The tidewater bride who refused to repeat the “obey” portion of the vows during the wedding, protesting repeatedly, No obey! No obey! until the groom and the priest relented, fine, man and wife, kiss the bride, sheesh.

I’ve recommended the book to a half dozen other people but I suspect that Oxford University Press cost and availability is a barrier to acquisition for many. I’ve been mulling more over the themes with respect to the 2024 election season and have a few further thoughts to share.

If you are familiar with family constellation therapy, I imagine the archetypal members of the early American family - for ease of reference, let’s call them Puritan, Quaker, Tidewater, and Borderer - seated somewhere, a conference room or a bardo, to hash things out.

Puritan: Governance is a noble calling supported by community consensus.

Quaker: People should govern themselves well, thereby taking the expectation off a government, which can quickly become corrupt.

Tidewater: Governance is inherited, not earned. It is obvious who should be in charge. And they should be respected, no matter what.

Borderer: DISRUPT! Break things! No one is keeping us down! We didn’t consent to any of this!

Puritan: Calm down, Borderer. No one is keeping you down. We’re talking about functional roads, safe water, and an organized harvest.

Borderer: Lies! lies! You wanna move single men into community-approved family homes!

Quaker: This is getting hot really fast.

Tidewater: Unseemly, really. Can someone calm down the gentleman from the border?

Borderer: I AM NO GENTLEMAN. And I am certainly not going to sit here and listen to your g*****n h*******t b*****t, you sons of w*****s. Power is there to be taken, you hear? There’s no agreement. I don’t need an agreement when I’m the strongest.

(Quaker and Tidewater move away.) Quaker: Can we work with him?

Tidewater: I will respect a chosen leader, ahem.

Quaker: I don’t think I can work with the Borderer. I will retire to my household to rigorously examine my conscience. I cannot dirty my hands with this.

Tidewater: I respect a chosen leader.

Borderer: You will respect ME when I am your leader because I will TAKE power if need be! Might makes right!

Puritan: Good grief, please calm yourself.

Borderer: You calm yourself down, you Puritan. Who put you in charge?

Puritan: The good of the community.

Borderer: BOSH.

I could go on. You get the idea.

A compelling candidate combines elements from these four “seed” cultures - for example, take a Borderer and give him an Ivy League education (Clinton, Hawley, Cruz, Vance), then send him back to disrupt. Take an Irishman from Boston and give him Puritan values. Yet now descendants of Puritan value stock no longer win national elections; this type of “ask not what your country can do for you” self-abnegation does not play well on the broader stage. We see Tidewater types in McConnell and Graham, nattering on into senescence like George III, moving their pieces around endlessly on the chessboard.

The fears and aspirations of Borderer culture have perhaps contributed to the overall militaristic culture of the US. Get them before they get you. Might makes right. Can’t trust no one. Like the figure in the photo I sourced above - I wonder, Who is he? Why is he kitted out like this? In Appalachia? Who is he watching out for? What dangers would he like to rebuff? Because in Borderer culture, there is only attentiveness. There is no rest - the threat is constant. Yet Borderers and Puritans might have a kneejerk anxiety in common. Break things, say the first. Take care of things, say the second. I have a hard time seeing anxious Quakers (the light within becomes the perfect antidote to anxiety) or Tidewaters (secure in their notion of how the world works).

In an election, the factions might fall into place like this: whoever’s left of the Puritans, the Dukakis and John Kerry types, will be unable to mount a viable election. Quakers and Pietists might continue to say they’re not going to get their hands dirty, all politicians are dirty, why chose between two devils, etc. The Tidewater culture might be able to get behind a Puritan or a Borderer - but at the end of the day, the Borderer is closer to Tidewater culture. Who can stomach evolved Puritans with their contracts, signatures, fairness, and self-abnegation? All that pease porridge and meditating on death, long winters and noreasters. When America’s ship came in, those Puritan sacrifices were promptly rolled onto the emptied boat for prompt export. Who in America really thinks like this anymore? (I’m asking in earnest.)

The discussion of tanistry in particular - the idea that elders, or the elder thanes, who possess the strength and cunning to protect their families should be treated with respect - and its converse, that the elderly who are weak and unable to protect their families should be shunned - may contain the seed to understand the insistent American culture of youth. Lift up the strong, and scorn the weak.

The section of the book on Andrew Jackson keeps rolling around in the back of my mind. So like Trump. The bully everyone prayed for who would be on their side and make sure they never lost a fight again.

James Parton, a contemporary of Andrew Jackson, remarked that Jackson’s “anger was a Scotch-Irish anger. It was fierce, but it never had any ill effect upon his purposes; on the contrary, he made it serve him, sometimes, by seeming to be much more angry than he was; a way with others of his race.” (p. 769)

Sure, things might have been less than just with Jackson (or his political heirs) in charge, but ran on strong rails, until they didn’t, and no one with a taste for survival ever doubted who was in charge, until he wasn’t.

… Backcountry violence also had another side. Andrew Jackson’s strategy of controlled anger worked because most rage was genuine in this culture. Violence often consisted of blind, unthinking acts of savagery by men and women who were unable to control their own feelings. Much backcountry violence occurred within the family. Visitors recorded with horror the violence of parents against children, husbands against wives, and friends against neighbors. (p. 770)

This last point reminds me of something that happened in Oklahoma not long before we moved to Italy. A neighbor across the street lived in one of the units in the tumbledown rabbit warren on the corner lot. One morning, before school, he chased his young son - maybe seven or eight years old - around the car parked in the street, and when he grabbed him, beat the living daylights out of him. The kid was terrified and crying. I felt ill as I watched the scene from the window of my home office. But I also knew that if I tried to intervene, the man would probably beat me up, or shoot me, and if I called the police, the man would find me across the street not long after and beat me up, or shoot me. The violence was everywhere and normalized. It felt like there was no recourse to violence, which seemed to be everywhere you looked.

Indeed, this scene, looking back, sounds a lot like what must happen in southern Italy with the Camorra and the ‘Ndragheta. The code of honor. Might makes right. Don’t call it in. Omertà exists all over the world in pockets.

Back to my armchair analysis. I don’t know where this leaves us. Disrupters gonna disrupt. As long as there is a deep and rich vein of anger to tap, they’ll prevail. Political abstainers remove energy from this equation. I wish there were a way to bring them in because that level of calm sobriety is needed. Tidewater heirs are going to dig and to maintain the status quo, no matter the cost. Academic Puritans have the right idea but struggle to connect these ideas to the electorate in meaningful ways. So who will connect, in the end, with Americans? Whose story and plan compel those who vote? Why does “the vote” as a concept matter so much in America? (Perhaps a topic for my next piece.)

Thanks for reading to the finish here. This didn’t turn out as elegantly as I had hoped, but here it is, and I’m still thinking about all of it. The thread is now open!