One of the more startling changes among Evangelical “thought” leaders from 2000-2020 was the embrace of Anabaptism. A Southern Baptist like Russell Moore has gone from a supporter of George W. Bush and the Global War on Terror to The New York Times editorialist who is afraid that Evangelicals who support Donald Trump are mean and scary. However, it is not real Anabaptism, with little relation to the historic movement that emerged out of the sixteenth century. Today’s neo-Anabaptists lack any sense of strict separatism of moral rigor. There is no denunciation of mainstream society as Satanic, followed by a call to establish a fringe agrarian community. There is no repudiation of games, drinking, secular music or various other frivolous creature comforts in the modern West. The neo-Anabaptist may be a little crunchy in his preference for local farms, but the association with groups like the Amish or Mennonites is an irrational, and unbiblical, critique of power and decontextualized “Jesus politics” against supposedly worldly forces.

Where did this disposition come from? The mainstreaming of Anabaptist thought for the Western world occurred with the prestige career of Notre Dame ethicist and Mennonite, John Howard Yoder. In the light of the Sixties and the tilt towards radicalization within the Mainline, Yoder tried to justify an embrace of pacifism and counter-culture through an appeal to Christ. His Politics of Jesus (1972) was a bombshell and would build bridges between Anabaptist thought with Roman Catholics and Mainline Protestants, an embrace of the budding postliberalism that rejected capitalism, individualism, and all the supposed vices of the coalescing Evangelical right. Yoder’s career ended in flames, nervously avoiding a trial within his own denomination on grounds of sexual misconduct and adultery. Yoder privately quested for an erotic, yet nonsexual, form of engagement between Christian men and women as a third-way between Hippy free love and biblical monogamy, leading to experimental encounters like when he asked a pregnant Mennonite student to massage her breasts, and when she demurred he began to pout. However, the legacy carried on through his friend and student, the tough talkin’ Stanley Hauerwas. While postliberalism remained a phenomenon associated with the pseudo-conservative edge of Mainline denominations and Vatican II Catholics, it would also seep into Evangelicals who had lost their way.

While this phenomenon was not so simple as transmission of Yoder through Hauerwas to disgruntled Evangelicals, it was a significant part. There was disaffection within the ranks of Respectable Christianity. The crash of George W Bush’s administration, repudiated by conservatives for the failure to pacify the Middle East and the economic intervention of the TARP bank bailouts, made the Republican Party of John McCain ugly. Obama’s election triggered Tea Party agitation, but its inchoate pseudo-libertarian protest, sometimes bringing out elements of the old, unRespectable, Right that had elected Reagan and criticized Civil Rights, sent many into the wilderness. It was not that mainstream society hated Christ, it was that they hated Christians and those Christians were right to be hated. If only the true gospel and true Christ were preached, these dazed Evangelical “thought” leaders reasoned, then mainstream society would receive the truth. It was in this optimism that an embrace of weakness and incompetence would lead to something like a revival.

However, the revival was more of a conversion. Given the misused rhetoric of Tertullian, that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church, there was a belief that humility so called would enable a reassessment. The modern Evangelical commitments to American military victory in the Middle East, an abhorrence of the Democratic Party, and a concern for the spread of abortion and homosexuality were under scrutiny. Certainly abortion and homosexuality were evil, but these were pedestrian evils derived from greater, more systemic, evils. Women did not exterminate the unborn because they were callous, cruel, or insane (if not worse), but they acted as victims in a world of poverty, oppression, and greed. Homosexuality was wrong, but what about pornography, domestic abuse, misogyny, and a whole host of other sins that blackened the church, not to mention economic injustice and militancy? These were far worse because they were preached by “Pharisees” in the Evangelical church, overriding their own supposed beams in their eyes. It was this approach that would mark a pivot for Evangelical “thought” leaders to beat the sheep.

This approach was typified in a popular though forgettable work, Brian Zahnd’s A Farewell to Mars. Published at the peak of this bewilderment, in 2014, this book could be considered a genius work of parody if it were not the sustained convictions of the author. The title is biting wit (Zahnd even explains it in a chapter to make sure the reader did not miss the reference to Hemmingway), the book has 15 different positive blurbs describing how essential this book is to the gospel, and it even has a self-deprecating letter from the author to the book about how he did not want to write it but the book bullied him into it. It is a rollercoaster experience in the mind of a Respectable Conservative crumbling into dust.

The genre is a conversion biography. Zahnd was once a rube, a vicious cheerleader of American empire, which hit its crisis with the Gulf War. Ready to chow down on pizza and watch America blow up towelheads in Operation Desert Storm, Zahnd would later remember this episode as his catastrophe. A whisper spoke to him: “That was your worst sin” (Brian Zahnd, A Farewell to Mars: An Evangelical Pastor’s Journey Toward the Biblical Gospel of Peace, 25-26). Slowly, though not all at once, Zahnd realized he had believed a lie, though he was reticent to stop living it. Writing the book was a kind of confession of a serial perjurer who was afraid to tell his congregation that he was no longer sure that Christians should vote for the Republican Party. Even worse, they only worshiped Jesus, they were not willing to follow him.

The problem, for Zahnd, was not that Evangelicals had mixed politics and religion, but they had a bad politics from a false religion. Christians, through the centuries, had mistaken the true politics of Jesus, which led to the evils of Constantine that confounded cross with sword. Zahnd, like many “thought” leaders, have a limited historical sense, so he skips from Constantine, Rome, and Byzantium to Nazi Germany and America as periods of gospel perversion:

In making Christ the chaplain-in-chief of Constantinian Christianity what was unwittingly done was to invent a Manichean Jesus who saves our souls while leaving us free to run the affairs of the world as we see fit (Zahnd, 35).

Constantine abused Christianity and perverted the gospel. What was the proof? Zahnd appealed to Russian literature. Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and the nihilism of Shastov was a “take the red pill” moment (Zahnd, 41-42). Similarly, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita introduced a fictitious dialog of Pilate where, rather than the bewildered and impotent, even tragic, magistrate described in the gospels, he becomes a mouth piece for power politics. This Pilate denounced Jesus as “Criminal! Criminal! Criminal!” because Jesus said give peace a chance (Zahnd, 30-31). This approach to politics, or empire, was bad because it denied the lordship of Jesus. Despite the fact that historic Christian regimes justified kings and republics as vassals of Christ the Lord, these were actually attacks on the politics of Jesus. The real gospel was changing hearts through peaceful protest, which was the very radical and very subversive truth of the Christian faith.

Zahnd, per his own recollection, feared this truth because it was so radical and so subversive. He kept this radicalism and subversion to himself, even as he doubted the expectations of his congregation. As an outlet, he wrote a very radical and very subversive poem, inspired by the spirit, to describe the truth. He showed his wife and she counseled him against showing anyone else. He lied to her and said he would not. But now he revealed this radical and subversive poem in a chapter of this very book. Here is an opening fragment:

The truth I caught out of the corner of my eye?

Every empire of man is built upon a lie;

they come to kill, steal, and destroy.

Every empire of man is built upon a lie;

all virtue is subject to sacrifice upon the altar of imperial expediency (Zahnd, 44)

The poem even includes direct references to other authors, such as Melville, Dostoevsky, and Marx. The seriousness of a man in midlife crisis performing something like slam poetry is pathetic, but it is taken as a conspiracy against the powers of this age. Aesthetics aside, the poem is revealing for how these neo-Anabaptists think. There is a need to appeal to authority, though authority that has no sanction of infallibility or divinity. Insecure and groping, the Great Minds, the radicals and subversives, are identified as prophets. Since I, the radical and subversive author, hold the same ideas as these Great Minds, these radicals and subversives, I must be right. Movies, novels, and pop-culture becomes mechanisms to justify the truthfulness of varied claims about how power works or how God intervenes in the world.

This fixation on authority leads Zahn to embrace all kinds of sources. Not only Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Marx, or the Mad Max films, but also liberalized Judaism. Christians erred in their dispensationalism and “platonism” that did not care for the body or the Earth. Instead, liberal Jews, who taught Tikkun Olam, held the true secret of the gospel. They did not acknowledge Jesus as Christ, and that was important, but that doctrine could be stapled onto their general belief that the faithful should seek social justice (Zahnd, 57-58). Similarly, Zahnd appeals to Anthropology (no particular theorist, no particular school of thought, no awareness of change in the field) for the assertion that agrarian societies caused private property and tribalism that caused war. It is true because the experts said it, and therefore it fits a theory of gospel.

It should be no surprise that the embrace of these other authorities leads to deprecation of traditional Evangelical dogma. In the case of atonement, Zahnd sidelines forgiveness of sin, as well as the wrath of God, for an interpretation of atonement as the means to end the divisions within the world. In other words, Christ’s cross was not about God, but men:

Once the world came to see Christ’s death upon the cross as an act of cosuffering love and an alternative to violent revenge, it introduced a saving grace that helped mitigate man’s inhumanity to man. (Zahnd, 63)

Citing another authority, the renowned theologian David Bentley Hart, Zahnd argued that the truth of the cross was the creation of Human Rights, the unique legacy of Christianity to the West (though it only took nearly two thousand years to discover). Without the gospel of Human Rights, then Gehenna on Earth will reign through violence, selfishness, and a concern for public order. When Jesus spoke of “my brothers” he meant not the faithful, but all those wretched of the earth, the conventional sinners who are ultimately products of worse systemic sins like power and violence. In contrast, as a historical example, Nelson Mandela overcame the racist Apartheid state through Christian witness (Zahnd, 67). There is, of course, no mention of what the African National Congress did for decades prior to Apartheid’s end.

These kinds of radical and subversive politics bucked common sense and electoral majorities, for democracy was a faulty system and the majority is always wrong (Zahnd, 76-78). It may seem strange in retrospect, but the American center-left had several theorists worried about the ills of majoritarian democracy, particularly those low-information voters that believed Obama was born in Indonesia. Zahnd was in touch with the same spirit, for he also concluded that borders were products of violence and evil blood feud (Zahnd, 102). This position was not quite in favor of open borders, but nevertheless critical of the legitimacy of lines on the map.

The Zahnd Jesus was not interested in Republican talking points, but a radical and subversive gospel of peace. Zahnd asks us to imagine Jesus preaching the Sermon on the Mount to Congress. Who would buy it? Especially not those Evangelical Republicans that support war and capitalism. It should not be surprising that Zahnd does not even bother to interpret or apply the Old Testament, except in an offhand remark that, in the case of the woman caught in adultery, the Pharisees were right and Jesus never condoned the “barbaric practice of capital punishment” (Zahnd, 115).

It is not necessary to comb the Old Testament for contrasts. Jesus preached turn-or-burn judgement to a crowd (Luke 13:1-5), called a vulnerable and desperate woman a dog (Mark 7:27), proclaimed he came to bring a sword of division (Matthew 10:34), announced he would bring fire on the Earth (Luke 12:49), and compares himself to the Son of Man in Daniel’s prophecy (Matthew 26:64) which was more graphically described in St John’s Revelation where the Word of God descended from the clouds with a sword, wearing the crowns of slain kings, pouring judgement on the Earth (Revelation 19:11-16). These are inconvenient, so they are left aside. There is no commentary on what portions of God’s Law Jesus drew from to preach the Sermon on the Mount. The Old Testament only has “Joshua the Canaanite killer” and “David the Philistine slayer” as false images of Christ, despite obvious and explicit identification between Jesus and them. The Sacrifice of Isaac has been misused, it is not a sacrifice but an Akeda (Binding) because the whole episode, as rabbinic Judaism teaches, is a repudiation of Human sacrifice, rather than a vision of what the cost of redemption would entail.

It is this perspective that allows Zahnd to reinterpret the scope of American history. Evangelicals in the Antebellum may have worshiped Jesus, but they were actually wicked sinners who deserved to die because of slavery. The origins of the Civil War began not in 1861, but in 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown. It was very radical and subversive to recognize that Christians were slaveowners and they were evil. Their comeuppance came with the war, where the same tabulated 750,000 dead matched the same number of Africans who perished in bondage:

In seeking to preserve an economy dependent upon slave labor, Southern churches had embraced a fatally distorted faith. Probably without even knowing what they were doing, these Christians had quite effectively used Jesus and the Bible to validate their racist assumptions and protect their vested interests. They went to church on Sunday. They got saved. They loved Jesus. They waved their palms and shouted hosanna on Palm Sunday. But like the crowd in Jerusalem eighteen centuries earlier, they didn’t know the things that made for peace. And Jesus wept over an America headed to hell. The churches were full and slavery continued—until the Civil War, that is. Then 750,000 people died for the sins of America. (Zahnd, 146)

There is, of course, no retrospective on the decision of America to ally with the Soviet Union or invade Nazi Germany. However there is one on the failure of the Vietnam war. It is not that Zahnd is a Communist (no mainstream liberal in 2014 was), but the evils of Communism were only overcome through the radical and subversive gospel of peace. The politics of Jesus were on display through the Polish Solidarity movement, though there is no consideration how this worked in practice. Almost gloating, America chose war and violence through its war against Communism in Southeast Asia, and was punished for its supposed hubris:

But how did that work out? Fifty-eight thousand Americans died in Vietnam. The war was lost. Vietnam became communist. Yet somehow the dominos did not fall. The hawks were wrong. Instead, Soviet Bloc communism ran out of steam and collapsed under its own weight a couple of decades later. The fall of communism had more to do with prayer meetings in Poland than bombs dropped on Cambodia. (Zahnd, 187)

Again, it is too much to expect a reference to the rise of the Khmer Rouge or the Soviet-Cuban intervention to support Communists in Angola. There is no mention of the 1970s, when American continued to experience a surge in domestic leftist terrorism and a New Left that rapidly gained a foothold in professional institutions, beginning a rebirth and reformulation of the liberal establishment. Zahnd’s spirit is the spirit of the times, and so the arc of pedestrian, mainstream, American New Left history is simply the facts. Per the old criticism of the Jesus Seminar, that these scholars stared down into the well of the past and saw their own faces, so too has Zahnd peered into the radical and subversive truth and found someone who took modern literature classes at a junior college.

Zahnd himself is forgettable, but he is representative of the drift many disaffected Evangelical pastors and professionals found themselves in during the 2010s. These “thought” leaders sought a better “politics of Jesus” during the Obama years, and instead found the modern Democratic Party. The parochialism of many Evangelicals makes them find the pages of the New Yorker to be a fountain of civility and wit. Mental incontinence is a movement of the Spirit and the pages of the Bible lose their content for general vibes about being a decent and normal person. In a way that was almost prophetic of how this movement would dominate the parachurch circuit, Scot McKnight, a minor New Testament scholar and Exvangelical, would praise Zahnd as the man of the future:

Leaders like Brian Zahnd are quietly becoming more numerous, not because they’ve turned Euro on us but because they’ve turned once again to the Gospels and to the New Testament to find an alternative political vision for our world. They’ve eschewed pragmatics and compromise for a full-throated commitment to the kingdom vision of Jesus, which is necessarily political, but an alternative politic. This alternative political world, which Stanley Hauerwas calls a “peaceable kingdom,” refuses to flash the sword of Caesar or Constantine, Germany or the USA, and instead flashes the cross as the way to live. The cross is the symbol of the politics of Jesus, and it is beginning to burn its way into the heart of so many in the church in the USA. We need it. (Zahnd, 20)

In other words, Zahnd, like many other pastors, have discovered how unRespectable and cornpone the American Evangelical ghetto is and they have turned once again to the Democratic Party and The New York Times for the vision of an alternative politic. The self-seriousness is ridiculous if the subject matter was not so crucial. The inflatuation of the Zeitgeist is treated as a window into the throne of grace. It does not dawn on any of these comfortable professionals that they are the majority, that they follow the major culture trends, and they rely on conventional wisdom from social democrats who believe the age of Christian exclusivity can finally be put away. Like teenagers rebelling against parental norms, they fall into predictable patterns of outrage and resistance. They were entirely at home in the world of Barack Hussein Obama, David Cameron, and Angela Merkel. They were advocates of the general trend to feminize office spaces, where wellness checks took precedence over measurable ability and constructive criticism. They are the world.

Nevertheless, Zahnd and his kind were right to be disgruntled with the trends of Evangelicalism. They too had embraced Respectable Conservatism and they too retreated from the vocation of Christian civilization towards dispensational and confessional secular quietism. That does not mean Tikkun Olam and voting against Trump endorsed candidates, however. The course of the gospel is the discipline of nations, and confusion over the exercise of the pastoral office is rampant. Teachers who bring out treasures new and old have been replaced with gimmicks, thin evangelism, and therapy. It is only when the same Jesus who forgives sinners is the same who massacred the Canaanites that new windows of thought will open up for those willing to pursue the truth. Indeed, the Jesus of the gospels is the only salve to the current spiritual malaise that has led many Evangelicals to bury their heads in the sand.

However, what have these radicals and subversives done? They have exclaimed a gospel of even more stultifying conformity to the spirit of the times. Their audience withers away and they compromise more and more for the sake of pleasing a contemporary majority who is only concerned to make sure they do not turn kook or bigot. They have bent their neck to every passing fad and have earned a comfortable life with plenty of time for hobbies. If there is a biblical image of them, they are the twin whores of Ezekiel, apostate and animated by delirious fancy, selling themselves for the allure of lust. They have no future, they are already dead, and they have yet to only face judgement:

And the righteous men, they shall judge them after the manner of adulteresses, and after the manner of women that shed blood; because they are adulteresses, and blood is in their hands.

For thus saith the Lord GOD; I will bring up a company upon them, and will give them to be removed and spoiled.

And the company shall stone them with stones, and dispatch them with their swords; they shall slay their sons and their daughters, and burn up their houses with fire.

Thus will I cause lewdness to cease out of the land, that all women may be taught not to do after your lewdness.

And they shall recompense your lewdness upon you, and ye shall bear the sins of your idols: and ye shall know that I am the Lord GOD. (Ezekiel 23:46-49)

What is the foundation of America? There is an endless argument of boilerplate assertions between liberals and conservatives over the Founders and Framers as architects of a religious or secular nation. The truth, however, was both, sometimes one more than another. The contested origins of the Federal Union (which should break open mythic, and colorless, confabulations like “the Founders” or “the Framers”) raise questions about the establishment of any constitutional order, that any kind of secularity depends upon an account of the sacred. While not his intention, the legal historian David Sehat, completing a trilogy of sorts of American secularity with This Earthly Frame, offers a counsel of despair about where his beloved project could end.

In the beginning, there was Thomas Jefferson. The tradition of secularity began prior to the Revolution and was associated with Deism and anti-clerical, even anti-Christian, wings of the Enlightenment, but Jefferson and his friends in the House of Burgesses utilized the war to strip the Church of Virginia of its established status. After the Revolution, Hamilton’s quip that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 did not include a reference to God because they forgot left many Patriots uneasy about the drift of the Federal Union. However, even if most Americans were hostile to this kind of Deism, they shared a commitment to a pan-Evangelical, multi-denominational, culture. America was, for them, a Christian nation. Some Antifederalists took umbrage at this lack of acknowledge from the new Constitution. One Yankee lamented, in the pages of the New York Daily Advertiser, that the lack of an explicit Christian faith would lead to a downward slope:

1st. Quakers, who will make the blacks saucy, and at the same time deprive us of the means of defence—2ndly. Mahometans [Muslims], who ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity—3rdly. Deists, abominable wretches—4thly. Negroes, the seed of Cain—5thly. Beggars, who when set on horseback will ride to the devil—6thly. Jews etc. etc. (quoted in David Sehat, This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism, 22)

Despite this opposition, enough Americans found the Constitution sufficient. The First Amendment forbade a national establishment, with each state free to promote churches as they saw fit. However, this interpretation was one of a few, with the First Amendment ambiguous in construction:

Take the first clause, the establishment clause. The committee used the gerundial construction “respecting an establishment of religion,” presumably to maintain parallelism with the second clause, “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The phrasing raised questions. How would Congress respect an establishment? Did it mean that Congress should make no law holding an establishment in esteem? Did it signify that Congress should not make a law touching upon any facet of an establishment (in the same way that we might use the phrase “in respect to”)? Did it primarily indicate that Congress should not interfere with state-level establishments that might exist then or in the future? It was unclear.

Or take the second clause, the free-exercise clause. Whose rights were being protected? Madison had wanted to protect the individual rights of conscience. Did this amendment protect individual rights? Or did it guard the right of religious groups, as the Senate seemed to desire? Or did it uphold the right of states? Again, it was unclear.

The amendment meant too much; it had a plenitude of meanings. The committee of people who designed it had wanted incompatible things. Madison’s original proposal was changed and reduced, but still they were unable to agree. So, the legislators resorted to what the historian Sidney Mead has described as the amendment’s “laconic brevity and consequent vagueness.” Far from solving the debate, the passage of the First Amendment revealed how little clarity had been achieved. (Sehat, This Earthly Frame, 23)

If originalism be followed then confusion and compromise was the original intention of this amendment. Both political Christians and secularists could argue their interpretation to a standstill. However, contrary to chastened Deism of Madison, the nineteenth century saw the rapid ascent of that informal para-church, cross-denominational, Evangelical Union, sharing a culture of individual conversion, charity on doctrine (even if at times incoherent), and moral reform. The Second Great Awakening would impact both political parties and, with the conclusion of the Civil War, the Third Great Awakening marked a distinctly Christian politics (again associated with all sections and both parties, but especially the Republicans) that sought to restrict Catholicism, Mormonism, prostitution (“white slavery”), gambling, pornography and the sale/consumption of alcohol. States had blasphemy laws and blue laws, as well as funding organizations like Bible societies.

However, whatever revival among the masses from the mobile pulpits of Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday, the Evangelical Union hit the shoals. There had been a century of increasing scrutiny over Christian cosmology. Eighteenth century Deists had already assaulted the integrity of Scripture, but now Germany became a hub of Higher Criticism that further attacked the inerrancy and historicity of Holy Writ. Naturalism had become increasingly normative, a stable, if not eternal, universe of mechanical laws. Geology had demonstrated that, by standards of normal growth, the Earth was much older than the Bible seemed to suggest. Darwin coalesced a lot of this thought into his own theory of Evolution through descent by modification. The universe was struggle, life incoherent, all things depended upon chance and force. Darwin, like many of his fellow liberals, believed in the need to work with Nature to ameliorate the worst excesses, but it was a theory that rejected the Christian world-order. This theory was not new, it remained the essence of Heraclitus and Democritus, of ceaseless change and bouncing atomic materialism. Nevertheless, for outsiders and heretics, this theory was electric with new possibilities. Even some churches tried to make room for these doctrines, causing the Fundamentalist-Modernist rift over orthodoxy.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Darwinian and “Modern” had captured many of America’s elite. Old appeals to Natural Law and Common Sense Realism faded for the unknown of future of force and fate. Subsequently, the interpretation of the Constitution as a bulwark for the Evangelical Union came under fire. The new age of Progress was manifest in the friendship between Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis. The former was a blue-blooded Boston Brahmin and the other the son of revolutionary 48er German Jews; both rejected all claims to orthodoxy, all claims to sure or certain knowledge, for a free floating “Pragmatism” to interpret the law afresh for new needs. All that mattered was whether a statute “worked” and it was therefore legal. What does that mean? The irrationality was irrelevant for what Holmes called “Jobism,” which had no time for unsubstantiated claims from the past, certainly hobgoblins of intolerance and bigotry on the basis of creed. Both men would make their way onto the Supreme Court and both would advocate for secularity to protect the individual’s conscience against outmoded conformity.

Holmes stood for many educated, White Anglo Saxon Protestants, who feared the crisis of technology and immigration. Since the days of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose Transcendentalism and Abolitionist allured the disaffected with the self-satisfied merchant elite of Boston’s Unitarian establishment, the sons of men who would coalesce as this new national establishment entertained heterodoxy and heresy. While the Great Awakenings created a wide, though thin, culture, there was little satisfaction for the curious, the rigorous, the sensitive, and the rational. Secularity guarded the brave from the crowd and superstitious.

In a similar vein, Brandeis represented the growth of a new demographic in American secularity. Agnostic secular European Jews, fleeing either failed revolution or the shtetl, were the tip of the spear. Double disconnected, aliens in a foreign country while apostates from the rabbis and ghettos, these Jews would advance secularity to defend their own awkward, not quite assimilated, position in American society. They would form groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union to protect this vision of American society. Similarly, black secularists, like W.E.B. Dubois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples, wanted to disestablish the wider Evangelical culture of the South that went together with Jim Crow. Some Feminists, attacking coverture law in marriage and restrictions on the franchise, also appealed to the individual. Together, through a variety of legal strategies, these organizations attacked all racial, religious, and gender discrimination as inconsistent with the Constitution and its supposed principled pluralism. The Jeffersonian-Madisonian tradition roared back to life.

Tolerance was the backbone to secularity, but what was the limit to tolerance? If secularity rejected any religious preference for an objective neutrality, what was a valid religion? During American Independence, Thomas Paine, another Deist and secularist, accused Quakers of Loyalism for their pacifism and their refusal to contribute funds to the Patriot cause. That same problem remained for the courts. When did an individual’s conscience require protection and when did it jeopardize the basis for American society? What was that basis? Holmes struggled to solve these problems. During World War One, Holmes wrote opinions to demarcate speech that was merely critical of the government from speech that subverted the state, justifying jail sentences for some who wrote against American involvement in Europe. Brandeis became even more conflicted, as his praise for the individual struggled against his conversion to Zionism and the need for a Jewish state for a Jewish community.

These questions, however, did not stop the march towards constitutional secularity. Gitlow v. New York (1925) upheld the conviction of a violent Socialist, 7-2 (Brandeis and Holmes dissented), for a pamphlet that called for the overthrow of the United States government. The significance for the case was how it argued an appeal to the First Amendment through the Fourteenth Amendment. While the case jailed a Red scribbler agitating for terrorism, it set a precedent that the “due process” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could apply and review the First Amendment at the state level. In other words, the Supreme Court could now, in theory, strike down a state law that violated the Constitution.

This interpretation received further support from United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938), where the Majority decision, penned by Harlan Stone (a liberal Republican and Episcopalian), sided in favor with the government and a federal law that regulated trade. However, Stone had included a footnote that promised a “more searching judicial inquiry” when a state law seemed to contradict the Constitution, particularly the Fourteenth Amendment’s legal equality applied to religious, racial, and national minorities. Combined together, the Supreme Court had a legal basis to review, and throwout, state laws that violated a secular interpretation of the Constitution. It was a watershed moment for anti-discrimination through judicial review:

With this opinion the court entered fully into a new constitutional world. It broadcast a broad deference to the legislature in matters of political economy but a simultaneous commitment to minority rights that refused to defer to prevailing sentiment. The latter was an accession to civil liberties thinking that had been d veloped by the ACLU and other dissenters and that was articulated through Brandeis’s right to privacy thought and the free-speech cases of the 1920s and early 1930s. The court had embraced a new set of substantive ideals and liberal keywords—diversity, equality, rights—that would control its thinking in the coming years. Its public affirmation of new ideas invited people to use the court’s institutional power to achieve a renewed constitutional and political order. As a result, the court soon became the central venue for the elaboration of secularism in public life, more so than any other institution. (Sehat, This Earthly Frame, 82)

The door was open to attack what remained of a Christian, both Evangelical and, at some local or state levels, Catholic, legal order. Jehovah’s Witnesses joined with the ACLU to strike down laws that prohibited their abrasive and anti-social efforts at evangelism. Even though they believed that all churches and governments belonged to Satan, that did not stop them working with secularists to defend their right to destroy public Christianity. Leo Pfeffer was a lawyer who took any chance to defend a secular interpretation of the Constitution. When the Supreme Court, in Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), decided against religious instruction in schools, Pfeffer was thrilled. Secularism was now the hegemonic interpretation of the Constitution.

Yet, at the same moment that secularism had voided out the Christian interpretation of the Constitution it faced a crisis. For men of a previous generation, like Holmes and Brandeis, depended upon the basic social norms of liberalized Protestantism that preserved common ideas about reasonable worship against unreasonable agitation. Jefferson and Madison presumed a rationalist, Unitarian, definition of morality that it could use to judge good and bad behavior. They could wish to strike out all religious particularity because they presumed a kind of neutrality that did not exist. Unitarianism had space to make room for Jews, Catholics, and even Atheists within American society, as long as they did not veer too far from the unspoken norm. In turn, Jews, Catholics, and especially Atheists derived their understanding of law and political culture from these agreed upon liberal norms. Felix Frankfurter, an agnostic Jew and heir to the tradition of Holmes and Brandeis, was an aggressive liberal in defense of a civic nationalism that bound together a common American norm. Other New Deal liberals on the Supreme Court, who became a comfortable majority through the middle of the twentieth century, agreed with this stance.

But what happened when abrasive, alien, groups challenged that standard. Communists floated between an acceptable and banned group, but what about black Muslim nationalists? What about the proliferation of Oriental sects that sought to challenge The Man and his imposed morality? As one example: should psychotropic drugs be legalized if an individual has a conscientious, even religious, justification to take them? Does burning the American flag constitute an attack on civil unity? What about waving an enemy flag, like the Viet Cong? Could one burn draft cards out of a conviction that war was immoral? What about abortion? Could anyone dictate to a woman that she should keep the child if, in her conscience and individual autonomy, she did not believe the fetus alive or possessing rights? In theory, anything could be declared sacrosanct if it violated the conscience.

The appeal to Pragmatism was an appeal to stability and norms, and once those gave way, the vacuity of a faith-in-faith Unitarianism gave way to challenge. The New Left, with its emphasis on identitarian intersectionality, pushed the liberal establishment to be more consistent in attacking Christian society at its roots. Many Americans felt uneasy with this radicalism and Richard Nixon, with his Silent Majority, blasted the New Left candidacy of George McGovern in 1972 with its program of conscientious acid, abortion, and amnesty. Yet even with this electoral landslide, the Supreme Court ruled to legalize abortion nationally in Roe v. Wade (1973). Forced bussing and desegregation also shocked Evangelicals and Catholics into action.

The irony, if it can be called irony, was that rightwing Christians found a solution within the very order that removed them. For the New Left, with what remained of the liberal establishment in some agreement, individualism required an activist state to prevent abuse of the conscientious minority. The courts had to guard this order and strike down any legislation that contradicted it. For the burgeoning New Right, the rights of conscience meant that Christians did not need to participate in society if it was at fundamental odds with their professed belief. If Christians felt that public school teaching on sex and Evolution conflicted with their faith, they had a right to withdraw their children from these institutions and establish their own. If violence and crime made parents fearful for their children, they had a right to remove them from vicious school environments. Christians, per the right of conscience and protection of religious belief, argued for the right of exemption.

Of course, leftists and liberals rejected these claims. Evolution was simply the Science and there was no alternative, sex education could not be replaced with teachings on abstinence. Additionally, some of these private schools (which indirectly took tax dollars through their legal, tax exempt, status as schools) were havens of bigotry and intolerance among a radical right. Yet, despite these protests and some nasty court battles, home schooling became legal throughout the nation and private schools began to compete as an alternative among the white middle class. Similarly, abortion should be recriminalized because it was a threat to the individual life of the child in the womb. In a strange twist, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were defenders of school choice and voluntary association on the basis of shared Christian faith, they were now heroes of the American Right.

The New Right received further support from the success of the Reagan Revolution at the national level, bringing twelve years of right-adjacent politics. Nevertheless, the standstill did not reflect a return to the old Evangelical Union, but a pause on the drift of cultural and social conformity. Evangelicals and conservative Catholics maintained their right to stay outside the norm, with many taking advantage of this lull to advance seemingly irrelevant culture war issues like prayer in school, a reverse of Roe v. Wade, and allowing public school teachers to say “Merry Christmas” instead of a more neutral greeting. The general culture, however, continued to shift to normalize casual sex, pornography, profane speech, blasphemy, drug-use, and other vices. Both political parties have adjusted, and while each has now a clear stance on the general drift of the culture war, common ground has increasingly dissipated. The liberal Protestant establishment is gone and secularity has no grounds for deciding among the various competing, and expanding, group claims. The victory has been hollow.

Sehat has some ideas for a solution. There may be no return back to the old norms, but lawyers and judges can defend the product of this pseudo-neutrality. If the courts need to determine legitimate issues of individual conscience against destructive and bigoted anti-social behavior, leftists must surrender identitarianism. A general civil nationalism on the basis of abstract, even if arbitrary, norms must hold together a multicultural, multiethnic, republic of sorts. If American liberals will not organize themselves against this political drift, then the state should impose a French-style Laïcité. The courts should enforce a ban on all discussions of eccentric religiosity against standards that pertain to the needs of bodies. What that means in a world of transgender medical requests and claims of systemic racism in scientific fields is not clear. However, an aggressive areligiosity according to a muscular Pragmatism is the only sufficient buttress to preserve Jefferson’s Wall of Separation, given that its old foundations have crumbled into dust.

What Sehat has discovered is the nonexistence of neutrality. The pragmatism of “this earthly frame” is axiomatic as ground to establish the good, if not perfect, society. Even if secularity was originally grounded on a lie, it was a useful lie. There is little interest in why one would bother fighting to preserve fictions and fabrications for creature comforts and some undisclosed, possibly meaningless, future. New Left identitarians have no reason to give up their fight because they believe in some sort of metaphysical, if not theological, justification for a Universe that bends towards (their) justice. As much as empiricism devours itself as it attempts to justify its knowledge claims, so too does secularity have no basis in any greater order besides the lack of resistance. But what happens when groups begin to be left out? In other words, Brandeis may fight tooth and nail for the rights of conscience, but Zionism meant that he could return to a legally constituted community that produced norms. Or in a different register, utility always a limited spectrum, where no argument in favor of slavery is justifiable despite whatever net-positive experiences. The axiom is non-negotiable and is the beginning of any argument about the application, exception, or unconstitutionality of laws.

This history reveals the basis of constitutional order, and why secularity is a parasite. As Sehat himself says: the study is “to take account of the political tradition, to learn its language and its uses, is a first step in trying to shape the tradition or in attempting to overcome it” (Sehat, This Earthly Frame, 266). It has, in part, justified the New Right’s strategy, and the lessons of COVID bureaucratic grind against appeals to conscience and faith remain relevant. However, there is no going back to the Evangelical Union, even if it were desirable. Instead, like Secularists and Democratic Socialists, the Evangelical minority must learn to guard its interpretation of the Constitution to advance order. The stakes for this struggle are manifest in the rise of Christianity in both the Roman and Persian empires, each providing an image of how new futures remain undisclosed.

In Rome, contrary to conventional fairy-tales about pacifist Christian witness, the earliest church struggled, in public confrontations, against the prevailing norms of a rapidly decayed Roman Empire. Christians were not the unwashed masses, hungry for bread and hoping for pie-in-the-sky after death. Per Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity, the early church was an urban movement of among the “middle class” that had appeal to both the laboring poor but also the well-born. Biblical references to Erastus the Chamberlain (Romans 16:23) and the two converts from the Areopagus, Dionysius and Damaris (Acts 17:34) demonstrate early elite pedigree. By the third century, Origin reported, against neo-Platonic sneers that the faith was for incredulous peasants, of Christians among the noble:

At the present day, indeed, when, owing to the multitude of Christian believers, not only rich men, but persons of rank, and delicate and high-born ladies, receive the teachers of Christianity, some perhaps will dare to say that it is for the sake of a little glory that certain individuals assume the office of Christian instructors. It is impossible, however, rationally to entertain such a suspicion with respect to Christianity in its beginnings, when the danger incurred, especially by its teachers, was great; while at the present day the discredit attaching to it among the rest of mankind is greater than any supposed honor enjoyed among those who hold the same belief, especially when such honor is not shared by all. (Origen, Contra Celsum, III.9)

These beginnings were dangerous, however, because of how Christians forced their teaching forward. They were not hiding under the floorboards from the Roman gestapo. Christian teachers, instead, took a confident, even brash, stand for the gospel. Polycarp was a second century bishop and disciple of the biblical John the Elder. Known for refusing worship to the gods and teaching others the same, Polycarp came at a request from the Roman proconsular authority in Asia Minor to report his actions. According to a biography/hagiography of his final ordeal, Polycarp reveled in confrontation:

And the Irenarch Herod, accompanied by his father Nicetes (both riding in a chariot ), met [Polycarp], and taking him up into the chariot, they seated themselves beside him, and endeavoured to persuade him, saying, What harm is there in saying, Lord Cæsar, and in sacrificing, with the other ceremonies observed on such occasions, and so make sure of safety? But he at first gave them no answer; and when they continued to urge him, he said, I shall not do as you advise me. So they, having no hope of persuading him, began to speak bitter words unto him, and cast him with violence out of the chariot, insomuch that, in getting down from the carriage, he dislocated his leg [by the fall]. But without being disturbed, and as if suffering nothing, he went eagerly forward with all haste, and was conducted to the stadium, where the tumult was so great, that there was no possibility of being heard. (The Martyrdom of Polycarp, 8)

The case was not a simple attack on Christianity, but a refusal to participate in the civic cult. Polycarp’s silence and refusal only intensified his intransigence to a Roman magistrate that opened the door for his escape. There was no desire to persecute him, but the bishop made the contrary impossible:

And when the proconsul yet again pressed him, and said, Swear by the fortune of Cæsar, he answered, Since you are vainly urgent that, as you say, I should swear by the fortune of Cæsar, and pretend not to know who and what I am, hear me declare with boldness, I am a Christian. And if you wish to learn what the doctrines of Christianity are, appoint me a day, and you shall hear them. The proconsul replied, Persuade the people. But Polycarp said, To you I have thought it right to offer an account [of my faith]; for we are taught to give all due honour which entails no injury upon ourselves) to the powers and authorities which are ordained of God. But as for these, I do not deem them worthy of receiving any account from me.

The proconsul then said to him, I have wild beasts at hand; to these will I cast you, unless you repent. But he answered, Call them then, for we are not accustomed to repent of what is good in order to adopt that which is evil; and it is well for me to be changed from what is evil to what is righteous. But again the proconsul said to him, I will cause you to be consumed by fire, seeing you despise the wild beasts, if you will not repent. But Polycarp said, You threaten me with fire which burns for an hour, and after a little is extinguished, but are ignorant of the fire of the coming judgment and of eternal punishment, reserved for the ungodly. But why do you tarry? Bring forth what you will. (The Martyrdom of Polycarp, 10-11)

It was contemptible for a teacher to beg and scrape before the mob and the threat of death, even death by beasts or fire, was nothing. Now it may be said that the case was clear idolatry, even though many Roman magistrates understood the cult of Caesar as a civic ritual. It was not that elite Romans believed in the deity of emperors on the basis of fiat. The satirical Pumpkinfication of the Divine Claudius, likely by Seneca the Stoic tutor of Nero, reflected no belief in incorruptible blood. Vespasian was reputed to have joked that he was becoming a god as he felt his body die. Even so, Christians would not participate. There was no division between the sacred and secular within the Roman political order, the bonds of the empire, the city, and the family were suffused with divine worship. If it was not Christ, then it would be someone or something else. This same problem reached into the armies. Tertullian recounted a third century incident of a Christian soldier refusing a military crown, a wreath consecrated to the gods of the Legions:

The tribune at once puts the question to him, Why are you so different in your attire? He declared that he had no liberty to wear the crown with the rest. Being urgently asked for his reasons, he answered, I am a Christian. O soldier! Boasting yourself in God. Then the case was considered and voted on; the matter was remitted to a higher tribunal; the offender was conducted to the prefects. At once he put away the heavy cloak, his disburdening commenced; he loosed from his foot the military shoe, beginning to stand upon holy ground; he gave up the sword, which was not necessary either for the protection of our Lord. (Tertullian, De Corona, 1)

The ordeal did not end with the loss of his office. He then made the trial into a spectacle of faith, of Christ vs. the idols of the Roman Army. It was not enough to remain a private Christian if one’s sword was unsheathed to claim glory for false gods. Tertullian praised this soldier for standing up under pressure from not only his pagan peers, but other Christians:

Thereafter adverse judgments began to be passed upon his conduct — whether on the part of Christians I do not know, for those of the heathen are not different — as if he were headstrong and rash, and too eager to die, because, in being taken to task about a mere matter of dress, he brought trouble on the bearers of the Name, — he, forsooth, alone brave among so many soldier-brethren, he alone a Christian. It is plain that as they have rejected the prophecies of the Holy Spirit, they are also purposing the refusal of martyrdom. So they murmur that a peace so good and long is endangered for them. Tertullian, De Corona, 1)

Reading between the lines, there was always a struggle between those Christians who wanted to be left alone and Christians who were faithful to the vision of Matthew 28 to disciple the nations. There was no neutrality, even when Rome practiced the closest thing to modern tolerance. The construction of the Pantheon during the term of Augustus was to truly celebrate Rome as the mother of the gods, a house for all divinities of all tongues and nations. It was because Christians removed themselves from this world, refusing to participate in public ritual and even courting a dramatic conflict with magistrates, that they were hated. No private value-system will long survive, except as a caste of slaves, beneath a state dedicated to a rival vision. Candida Moss, a liberal Catholic scholar of the early church, puts the case well:

Once they were arrested, early Christians could hardly be accused of trying to secure their release. They were by and large uncooperative and stubborn. In the martyrdom accounts themselves Christians fail to answer the questions that are put to them. Even simple’ questions such as “What is your name?” or “Where are you from?” are met with vague, evasive, and nonsensical answers. According to the second-century Martyrs of Lyons, a martyr named Sanctus refused to give the judge any information about his name, citizenship, nationality, or background and instead answered all questions by saying, “I am a Christian.” In early Christian stories about martyrs, this kind of impudence is found in abundance. Although we might be able to empathize with Christian refusals to worship the emperor, this sort of behavior was, for some, the kind of unnecessary stubbornness that invited trouble. To an ancient Roman observer this practice seemed perverse. Is it really necessary to refuse to give one’s name in a trial? Even in modern American trials in which defendants regularly “take the fifth” in order to avoid answering questions, they’re not usually evasive about their own names. (Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution, 178)

Yet, despite said stubbornness, Christians became key figures throughout the Roman administration. Non-Christian emperors in the third century, per the first post-biblical historian of the church Eusebius of Caesaria, “entrusted the government of provinces, exonerating them from all anxiety as it regarded sacrificing on account of that singular good will that they entertained toward the doctrine” (Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, VIII.1). Of course, in the same chapter, this success brought greater division and greater potential for temporizing. Men of both low and high status faced the same temptation. However, over centuries of conflict, growth, confrontation, and fidelity (even if imperfect), God blessed the Romans with Constantine, a man who first legalized tolerance for Christians and then reformed Rome in light of the gospel. There is no neutrality, reforms in law were reforms in civic religion, culture and cult intertwined. Thus Eusebius, a courtier and ally of Constantine, interrupted his history to explain his methodological difference. He did not write a story of political intrigue, but the victory of the saints:

Others, indeed, who compose historical narratives, would record nothing but victories in battle, the trophies of enemies, the warlike achievements of generals, the bravery of soldiers, sullied with blood and innumerable murders, for the sake of children and country and property. But our narrative embraces the conversation and conduct which is acceptable to God, the wars and conflicts of a most pacific character, whose ultimate tendency is to establish the people of the soul as well as those who have manfully contended for truth rather than for their country and who have struggled for piety rather than their dearest friends. Such as these our narrative would engrave on imperishable monuments. (Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, V Preliminary)

Whatever flaws and faults, the gospel reinvigorated the Roman Empire, now resituated in Constantinople, and expanded among Germanic tribes to the North and West. Europe would embrace the faith over the centuries and produce civilization, law, and order.

In contrast, Persia too, revived in the new Sassanid dynasty, had a civil religion and an imperial cult that were the basis of social harmony and stability. The Shahanshah was the king of kings and representative of Ahura Mazda, the unconquerable light, and his prophet Zoroaster. Ahura Mazda defended Persia as the divine world empire as it battled the forces of Ahriman, the coequal god of darkness. The Shah preserved the worship of fire and the hierarchy of gods and angels that served the light. This dualist, and quasi-monotheistic, faith depended on a warrior-aristocracy to preserve Iran from Roman and barbarian incursions. Like Rome, Persia had a growing Christian population that expanded eastwards from Syriac-speaking Antioch. The gospel followed trade routes and many converts were middling sorts. Like their Roman peers, these Christians stayed away from the civic religion of Ahura Mazda as antithetical to the truth. Yet, like Rome, Persia was a multicultural and multiethnic empire, including Jews and Gnostics, that practiced general tolerance if obeisance were made to the Magi, the sacred teachers of the cult, as they worshiped the fire and the sun.

There is no surprise that the same conflict and agitation emerged within Persia. One of the first major conflicts was between the Christians of the capital, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and Shapur II. The Shah needed to raise money and the Christians were an untapped resource. Tax farming was always difficult in a large polity and local community leaders were the most effective source to generate revenue. Christians could prove their loyalty if they paid these taxes and bishops were deputized for this role. Many of them refused. The leading bishop, Simeon, explained why he would not serve the emperor in this way:

I bow to the king of kings, and I honor his commands with all my power, however, concerning that which is required of me in the edict, I believe even you know that it is not my business to demand taxes from the people of Christ, my Lord. Indeed, our authority over them is not in the things which are seen but in those things which are unseen. (History of Simeon)

Simeon refused to subjugate Christian authority to the service of an empire that fought for a false god. The bishop did not want the church to become an organ of a Zoroastrian state. Like the cases of Roman Christians, these conflicts could be framed as unnecessary stubbornness, especially because Persia’s enemy, Rome, had become Christian. Yet Persian Christians would fail to convert the empire and by the seventh century, bishops like Ishoyahb III became wealthy as tax-farmers, levying land and poll taxes on their flocks.

Other conflicts targeted the centers of worship. Abda, the archbishop of Ormazd-Ardashir, was brought before an imperial court because a group of his priests and laity had besieged a local fire temple, destroying it and committing sacrilege by putting out the divine fire. Abda did not necessarily reject the complaint, his people were behaving unruly. However, in a biography-hagiography of his ordeal, one priest remained unapologetic: “I demolished the foundation and extinguished the fire because it is not a house of God, nor is the fire the daughter of God” (The Martyrdom of Abda). Again, the archbishop was not happy with this course of events, but he also refused to condemn his subordinate, let alone follow the court’s order that the Christians pay to rebuild the fire temple. For this refusal Abda was executed. Narsai, a fifth century poet and monk, also destroyed a fire temple that had once been a church, built by an Iranian noble convert who, after his reversion, remodeled it into a Zoroastrian chapel. Narsai too refused to pay to rebuild and received execution.

The Magi understood that the preservation of holy sites were necessary to defend the Zoroastrian world-order they claimed to represent. So too was the preservation of noble blood. Persia had a “law of apostasy” that allowed patrilineal relatives to bring lawsuits against converts to Christianity. In one case, the popular and charismatic sixth century Gregory the Commander, member of the House of Mihran, was unabashed about his faith. He led his troops against Rome, but he also repudiated fire worship. Before his troops in 518 AD, Gregory confessed his faith in Christ and disavowed worship of Ahura Mazda. While Gregory’s military victories made him a hard target to get, with Chusrow I overlooking this indiscretion, Gregory’s family wanted retribution. The charge was made, Gregory was convicted, and he was stripped of his office, jailed, and, after continued pressure on the Shah, executed for apostasy. Like historians of early Roman Christianity, Persian Christians came across as equally stubborn:

These zealous Christians were killed not for failing to contribute to the organization of the empire but for intentionally—and unapologetically—dismantling its infrastructure. In addition to being sites of ritual functions, foundational of imperial authority, fire temples were an indispensable basis for the economic and social power of the aristocratic houses. It was through isolated acts of temple destruction that certain Christians openly challenged Iran’s social and political structures, with or without knowledge of how they were embedded in fire temples and their rituals. [Richard E. Payne, A State of Mixture: Christian, Zoroastrian, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity, 48].

Christians would persist in Persia, surviving as a small and besieged group well after the Islamic conquest. They would even send missionaries southwards to India and eastbound to China. However they remained vulnerable and would eventually succumb to minoritarian irrelevance. That did not stop efforts to convert Mongolian nobles, centuries later, as they smashed through Central Asia. The struggle remained the same, yet without its manifest successes. In Providence both empires followed very different roads with very different legacies. In both, these saints remained loyal to the actions of St Paul, who preached before magistrates and participated in courtroom drama, even sailing across the Mediterranean to preach before Caesar himself.

The history of secularity is the history of an alternative faith, one based on a liberal Protestantism that no longer believed in anything but the idea of belief. Christians faced these problems throughout the arc of American history, the same conflict that marked Roman and Persian Christians in a very different time in very different polities. But in all of these cases there is, and never has been, neutrality. The worship of Mother Rome, Ahura Mazda, and liberal democratic norms always included limited toleration, especially as empires involve complex demographic questions. Nevertheless, the call to disciple the nations, or the loss of this mandate through sloth and forgetfulness, remains the same. These histories are images of what was, is, and will be for the sacred that establishes the secular. Only one law reigns, let it be the truth.

For having renounced the popular and earthly, and obeying the commands of God, and following the law of the Father of immortality, we reject everything which rests upon human opinion. (Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 32)

Anglicanism is a concept that has hit the breakpoint of incoherence. A woman is enthroned in Canterbury and doctrinal confusion is rife. In Anglican diocese, let alone individual parishes, one will find Anglo-Catholics who remain outside of Rome for some idiosyncratic quibble, Pentecostals who speak in tongues, Orientalists who hang icons and abjure the Filioque, chummy Methodists, and the occasional lunatic Calvinist. Some parishes do not even use the historic rubric for worship, the Book of Common Prayer, out of a desire to be more Catholic or Charismatic. This list does not even include the liberal Mainline with its sacraments of abortion and sodomy. Episcopalian in the United States is code for a gay-friendly Catholicism.

This essay, however, is about an earlier phenomenon, one that hollowed out the core of the Reformation and pursued an alternate vision of being Protestant. For many Anglicans, Laudianism is Anglicanism and the Archbishop William Laud was a martyr for the true faith of the Church of England. But what was Laudianism?

This question, perhaps surprisingly, is one of the most perplexing for scholars of the seventeenth century. Patrick Collinson had argued the “Calvinist Consensus” dominated the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church of England, a clear conviction of the international sorority of Reformed churches. Laudianism was thus an innovation, even a foreign imposition from Continental Arminians. Revisionists, such as Kevin Sharpe and Mark Kishlansky, rejected dogmatic conflict for institutional solidity. Royal supremacy was a core point of continuity from Elizabeth through Charles and Laudianism, though with some unique quirks, was business as usual. In the climate of court intrigue, the accusation of a Laudian faction corrupting the Church was a fabricated, indirect, attack on the king’s policies. Peter White is at the fringe denying that the movement even existed, the Church of England having a fluid spectrum of beliefs.

Peter Lake’s recent work, one of the great historians of the Elizabethan-Caroline eras (and perhaps one of the last), has written maybe the final word on the movement for some time. In his On Laudianism, Lake argues that Laudianism was endemic to the Church of England, but it was a novel development to face new challenges in the seventeenth century. Laudianism was a coherent “worldview” that rejected Calvinism yet was not a dogmatic alternative, such as the Remonstrants in the Netherlands. It was a vision of what the Church of England should become as the best of Protestant churches throughout Europe. This program was not only doctrinal, but manifest in the material culture of ecclesiastical renovations and aesthetics. Utilizing J.H. Hexter’s distinction between “lumpers” and “splitters” among historians, Lake hopes to do a little bit of both, demonstrating the coherence of a single Laudian vision while noting its unique personalities that did not accept every part of the program. The Personal Rule of Charles, a period without Parliament and without aristocratic/gentlemanly puritan agitation, allowed Laudians to try to ram through their revolution. Many of them — young and old, prestigious and up-and-coming, mainly middling clergy — were men in a hurry.

Before Laudianism proper, it is important to note an analytic road block that has prevented many historians, especially English historians of England, from understanding both the Church of England and its movements. There is pride in “moderation” and “conformity” against the tides of revolution, and this pride has marked many English academics from the Restoration period, through the turbulence of the French Revolution, to avoidance of both Fascism and Communism in the Twentieth century. These same English scholars have often been taken in by the Laudian rhetoric of “moderation” against hotheaded puritans and papists. These two forces were unenglish and foreign. However “moderation” and “conformity” have almost always been effective polemical strategies to isolate and eliminate enemies. Laudians were anything but moderate, they were not a force representing an organic mass of timeless practices but an aggressive minoritarian movement that hoped to quickly stamp its image on the Church of England (in a way that the original Reformers did). However, as “moderates” and loyal to the Church of England established by law, Laudians could displace critics as crypto-puritans, and thus crypto-republicans, enemies to both church and crown.

So what was Laudianism? Lake agrees, through minor modification, with Collinson’s thesis of a “Calvinist Consensus,” though one that was not so normative to remain unchallenged (Lake prefers “Calvinist hegemony”). This English Calvinism combined magisterial loyalty with predestinarian Reformed theology, a tolerance for required ceremonies as adiaphora (indifferent). The Elizabethan Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, was a solid Calvinist but lacked the fire for external reform that some “precisionists” or “puritans” advocated in reforming the Church of England towards continental Presbyterianism. Per a dour view of human progress and sin, Whitgift did not want any alteration that did not flow from the royal will outside of clear doctrinal commitments. Justification by faith alone was non-negotiable, but episcopal government and ecclesiastical gowns were a magistrate’s prerogative. Obedience was sufficient (Lake, 21).

That consensus received a tweaking through a core apologist for the Church of England, Richard Hooker. It was not that Hooker was not a Calvinist; he swam happily within the broad stream of Reformed orthodoxy. Rather, Hooker’s innovation was to defend the Church of England as it was established. The ceremonies were not only indifferent products of magisterial order, but positive goods. In this sense, Hooker may be the first “Anglican,” to further distinguish the Church of England from its continental sister churches. However, that was not enough to forge a rival worldview to the Calvinist hegemony. The origins of Laudianism emerge from the homilies of Lancelot Andrewes, a Jacobean bishop and court-preacher who had a soft anti-Calvinist and strong conformist bent. Laud would edit and reprint Andrewes court sermons in a volume that would map onto the liturgical calendar (an increasingly important ritual to Laudians). As Lake summarized:

The starting point for any discussion of the theological roots of what emerged as Laudianism is Lancelot Andrewes and any starting point for any discussion of the divinity of Lancelot Andrewes is Christ. (Lake, 47)

To clarify the point: Lake, like many scholars, often use “Christocentric” to oppose the “Theocentric” of predestinarian Calvinism. The former emphasizes the earthy and human aspects of the suffering Christ against latter’s iron will of an electing Omnipotence. Andrewes was more “Christocentric” in this sense, offering an emphasis on the communal life of the church and the celebration of the sacraments. Formed around the high holy days of Evangelical churches (Christmas, Easter, Whitsun [Pentecost]), the Christian became more like Christ through slow moral conformity. Bishops were not mere administrators jure humano, be they created by the Apostles or kings, but a sacramental presence of Christ’s authority (Lake, 57–58). Like the bishop, the king was a divine presence in civil life. To attack bishops was to attack Christ as priest, as well as to attack kings, which was an attack on Christ as king, all of which was an attack on God (Lake, 59–65). Popery and puritanism, for Andrewes, both destabilized this divine order, advocating both tyrannicide and republicanism in both church and state (Lake, 66–68).

Andrewes despised a certain kind of divinity that emphasized predestination and election because it, as the Calvinist hegemony, was an alternate worldview. Calvinism, particularly its fire breathing form in so-called puritanism, was logocentric. Piety to God was found in words, doctrine, and teaching, with ceremony as mere indifferent aesthetics at best. Andrewes resented this concept of Protestantism as it took away from obedience and formation. Puritans instead created hypocrites obsessed with debates over dogma. Andrewes’ anti-Calvinism attacked puritanism as simultaneously creating arrogant saints so-called who were too sure of their salvation, as well as shattering the consciences of the weak who lapsed into despair and libertinage (Lake, 68–69).

Predestination thus came under fire. Andrewes was not an Arminian, he had no rival metaphysical conceit. He was simply anti-Calvinist, and thus predestination, despite being the glory of the gospel, must be buried. It was too confusing, too divisive, too prone to attract the unstable. Utilizing “moderation” as the advocate of truth, Andrewes rejected Calvinist fatalism as well as the self-perfection of Anabaptist sects. While abjuring Pelagianism, the Christian could take consolation in the works of repentance, lived out through the liturgical calendar and sacraments (Lake, 85–100). Andrewes was not opposed to sermons, but Puritan sermons on dogma. Preaching should encourage good works. Preaching was also not the “ordinary means of salvation” (as puritans would put it), it was not the center of worship, not the call to arms of a godly minority against national sins. Sacraments and prayer led the lumbering body of the realm towards the New Jerusalem (Lake, 101–108).

This basic outline of Andrewes would mark the avant-garde of Laudianism. If churches would change from houses of preaching (sometimes ignored to the point of dilapidation) to houses of prayer, renovation would become a core plank. Laudianism was not mere conformity, it was a reform movement. Altars were raised and would no longer be common tables, rails were installed, and images had a scriptural and patristic sanction (Lake, 148-151). Hanging pews that obstructed the view of the altar were torn down and altars were lifted higher than the pulpit (Lake, 173-188). Ministers took on a sacerdotal character, alone able to offer sacraments that received a heavier accent as a kind of sacrifice. Priests were mediators, alone able to stand on the other side of the rails (Lake, 190). Laudians argued for bishops as jure divino, the three-fold order as established by Christ himself and part of good Christology (Lake, 208–211). Sabbatarianism was rejected for its scripturalism. The church had a right to demarcate days for celebration, worship on Sunday was not direct obedience to the Fourth Commandment (Lake, 223–234). Home worship and conventicles were divisions in the church, creating opposition to the sanctioned public worship of the Church of England (Lake, 242-243). Puritan “sermon gadding,” men and women going from village to village to listen to good preaching, was equally sanctioned (Lake, 271–81).

Laudians attached themselves to kingship of Charles I, who was an early friend of these reforms. Puritan emphasis on the godly and their obedience to divine commands (even if that meant defying royal commands) smacked of “popularity” and defiance of royal decree. Puritans could threaten to become tribunes of the plebs, a faction that could create division across the realm (Lake, 308-316). The king and Laudians became allies not because one was the product of the other, but both flowed from the Jacobean churchmanship that criticized the Calvinist hegemony in both church and state. As the Laudian Robert Skinner asked rhetorically: “What is Defensor Dei but Rex Evangelicus?” Charles’ impeccable morals provided further weight to the project (Lake, 342–43). The Laudians styled puritans as the “evil twin” that threatened the whole Church of England by their criticisms and attacks on these projects of renovation (Lake, 254–255).

So far, in the above, Lake has offered a “descriptive” account — what Laudians thought about themselves and their enemies. While Calvinist churchmen saw no similarity between their preaching and calls for reform with the various radical sects that crept in different towns and counties, Laudians saw them all as part of a single conspiracy. A Calvinist who sought strict sabbath worship, sermons on election, and a Presbyterian reform of the episcopate was on the same spectrum of a Familist that denied the Law of God, rejected original sin, and maybe even denied the resurrection of the dead. Laud personally was prone to paranoid fits, but he was not wrong to detect conspiracies against his government. Promoted to Bishop of London in 1628 and then Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633, Laud became a core advocate for Charles’ Personal Rule and style of absolutism against substantial critics. Laud was not crazy to believe “puritanism” or the Calvinist hegemony was a real threat to his style of churchmanship. There were two rival worldviews, with most actual people scattered across the spectrum with variant levels of devotion.

Therefore, against this “evil twin,” it was necessary to attack the cornerstone of Calvinist divinity: predestination. Again, Laudians were not necessarily offering a rival metaphysical speculation (though some did, and Laud did not like them), but they wanted to put an end to public debate on it. Laudians did not reject predestination or election, they sidelined these doctrines. Predestination was a mystery and it was foolish to try to divine it (Lake, 360). However, negation often produces its own novelties. Calvinist “innovation" was rejected for an awareness that salvation could, indeed, be lost if a moral life was not maintained (Lake, 371–75). The sacraments were a means of grace, but one had to prepare one’s heart to make them efficacious, an accent that landed more strongly on piety and penitence (Lake, 405–407). Unlike Calvinist piety that emphasized an internal struggle to condemn one’s sins and reflect on gracious Omnipotence, good works in the public worship of the church anchored the soul (Lake, 420–25). Though Laudians were generally averse to direct confrontation (with Laud occasionally censoring rabid Arminians in print and speech), there was a general sense that both Charles and Laud hoped to “Arminianize” England through changing the acceptable terrain of debate. The Calvinist “science” of speculative divinity would give way, not defeated but deactivated, to the Laudian “conscience” of practical, obedient, morality (Lake, 429–30).

Here was the Laudian worldview from the analysis of a “lumper.” Now, in the latter half of the book, Lake takes a “splitter” approach to the diversity of the coalition. Some were true believers, revolutionaries from the colleges of Cambridge who wanted to put an end to the Calvinist hegemony. Others were moderate Calvinists, even puritans, who desired renovation of church buildings or found the political agitation of some Calvinists (like William Prynne, whom Laud had his ears cropped for insubordination) unsettling. And of course there were “trimmers” and “tackers” who joined along hoping to sense where the winds were blowing and find preferment and promotion through conformity, sticking to the winner. Laud was nervous in steering this movement, always with an eye on the potential backlash to the most radical members. One Laudian, James Buck, rejected justification by faith alone, questioned whether original sin existed, and made confessional regular in his parish (Lake, 524-530). Another Laudian changed a chapel in Cambridge to have images of angels, which were turned during the opening words of the Trisagion (“With Angels and Archangels…”) (Lake, 496-499). Such moves could easily alienate moderate fellow-travelers.

And it did when this movement came to an abrupt end. The king’s effort to impose a distinctly Laudian Book of Common Prayer on the Scottish Kirk provoked a rebellion. England lost, the Short and Long Parliaments were called, the Earl of Strafford was blamed as an evil counselor and executed, Laud himself would fall soon after, and then after two bloody wars, Charles himself was on trial, refusing to budge and playing the role of a royal martyr (even though he was willing to embrace Presbyterianism for a Scottish army). Charles’ incoherent combination of Machiavellian scheming and neo-Stoic inflexibility did more to doom him than the Lords that refused his efforts to control Parliament.

In the aftermath of the English Republic and Protectorate, the Restoration would bring back Laudianism in a toothless form. The development of a “High Church” party in the Church of England, from the late seventeenth century into the eighteenth, would embrace Laudian distinctions in a sacerdotal ministry and royal supremacy. However the main concerns faded, as Calvinism lost its hegemony and became an embattled dogmatic subset in an age of moral improvements. Laud was canonized as a fallen martyr to Puritan madness, and the matter seemed to be at an end. The nineteenth century saw a revival of interest in the past, with Evangelical Anglicans claiming the mantle of the Calvinist hegemony while Tractarians and Ritualists hearkening back to the Via Media between Rome and Geneva, a sacramental church that rejected Evangelical dogmatism and Broad Church modernization. This mood would later catalyze into Anglo-Catholicism which drifted further away from the Reformation. It was this shift, this worldview, that would mark the American Episcopalian church, leaving a splinter (the Reformed Episcopal Church) that attempted to preserve Evangelical doctrine.

Laudianism was thus a revolutionary movement, one that did not accept things as they were, but sought to recreate the Church of England in its own image. Lake is an old Boomer Labourite atheist, so its natural that Laudians reminded him of Maggie Thatcher: “It was just as much a Laudian, as it was to become a Thatcherite axiom that if it wasn’t hurting, it wasn’t working” (Lake, 569). Lake is not saying the modern Tory party is the descendant of Laud, but that they both had a revolutionary impetus to change their contemporary course of things. They were a sort of traditionalist, even patristic, form of puritanism, that demanded reform in the name of the Fathers, history, and “the beauty of holiness” for a sacramental-ecclesiastical complex.

Of course, when Scripture is displaced, then these reforms not only seem arbitrary, but become muddied with the very visible, very legible, history of early modern England. Unlike ancient churches with a millennium of history buried in hagiography and pageantry, all the foibles and sins of royal supremacy can be seen governing the reforms of the Church. In many ways, as groups ranging from the Nonjurors (who broke from the Church of England in the 1690s and 1710s over royal overreach) to the Tractarians (who began as a protest against Parliament’s intervention in ecclesiastical affairs, namely the Gorham Controversy) noted, the Church of England was more often a political creature than not. How does that square with a view of a mystical institution that reveals Christ on Earth? Was it any wonder John Henry Newman and other Tractarians swam the Tiber?

This is the core error of Laudianism, and all other movements that have sought, since the seventeenth century and continuing on into today, to diminish the doctrines of grace. It may seem antiquated to fixated on predestination, unconditional election, and justification by faith alone when the modern world and its problems seem to have little to do with these dogmas. But they are the foundation, even if architectonic, for the far more pragmatic and immediate policy concerns of today, why they have any significance at all. What is man? Where did he come from and where is he going? What is this world and what is its order, if it has any? Where did it all come from? What is Ultimate, and if he have a will, what is it? These questions undergird all consideration about border quotas, taxation, government spending, and state capacity, even if they need not be stated every time a policy question emerges. The Omnipotent Lord, who not only creates but sustains, breathes an order of things in rhythms of justice and mercy, establishing hierarchies in Truth himself. The lightning unsheathed of the dread suzerain makes all vassals, all magistrates, accountable to him.

In this vein, if there was any reason for Parliament to batten down the hatches of Westminster against Charles and his raised standard, it was the Law of God. Anglicans today are entire rudderless and lost because they find their stability in an embarrassingly historicized tradition, which means one subject to the ugliness of compromise, governance, and the vice of necessity. The Reformation did not bring about the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I because it was moderate. Another historian, Karl Gunther, has demonstrated that the Henrician Reformers, most especially William Tyndale, were extremists in defense of gospel liberty. They forged the Calvinist hegemony that guided the ministry up to the reign of Charles I, bringing godliness and a return to the fountain of Scripture across the whole of Europe. That was why English bishops appeared at the Synod of Dort to condemn the Arminian corruption in the Netherlands. It was this singular vision for why anything was done at all, with the Law of Heaven as superior to the laws of magistrates (no matter how illustrious their titles and domains).

What is the legacy of Laudianism? What is the legacy of ritual pageantry, anti-Calvinism, moralism, and royal supremacy? It is the current Church of England and the Episcopal Church. Anglo-Catholicism is far from Laud and Charles, both of whom considered themselves adamant Protestants, but it has roots in the same retreat from the very basis of the Reformation. Luther’s discovery of St Paul, of salvation anchored through faith in the declarative work of Christ Jesus, was the reason, the only reason, to raise a standard against Rome. It was the sovereign will of God to elect his people, not on the basis of sanctity and self-emptying but faith in what the promised priest-king secured, that gave resistance a purpose. The more that was disintegrated in the name of royalty, clerisy, and a vulgar union of prince, priest, and thrall, the more it was useless. It is consistent for those who reject this legacy to inch towards an alternative, and Rome offered one. Charles and Laud did not want to do that, though they could rest secure in the king’s authority and his rows of bishops. Now? Woke King Chuck is an ecumenist druid and he has authorized his chief ecclesiastical minister to be a woman. One may still celebrate the circuit of the sun and moon, the diversity of a tolerant England, in a church almost barren of the gospel. If thinking Catholics are increasingly hopeless due to Pope Bob, there is far little hope in the Windsor monarchy and its quasi-pagan hierarchs.

The past may be a safe location to hide as a would-be-Laudian, but even today’s established guardians of Tradition have little reason against violating apostolic prohibitions on female ministers, sodomy, child-murder, body mutilation, among other crimes. The royalist cause has been dead for centuries and even modified Conservatism has sunk with the First World War. Encrusted authority, no matter how bejeweled, has neither the legal authority nor the will to bring about anything resembling a Natural Law. Showing many Traditionalists a florilegium of Patristic prohibition on dancing is likely to elicit a laugh or smile. If said Traditionalist takes it seriously, almost certainly his priest, to whom he has pledged canonical obedience, does not. While Catholics and Orthodox, among a few others, have greater ground to construct an entire worldview out of mountains of unread texts, Anglicans have no such luxury. Everyone can see the ebb and flow of the Church of England. If it has no higher standard than itself (no matter how that is masked through Branch Theory) then it is more pathetic than any other Christian body on Earth.

One does not need to accept the Laudian caricature of Puritans, who did not depreciate the sacrament as much as demand the Word. In a world of barely emergent mass literacy, where Tyndale’s prophecy that the ploughboy would one day read the gospel as well as the pastor, intelligibility is gold. Solomon in his Proverbs, in the mouth of Wisdom, considers it worth more than gold, silver, and rubies. What is even more pathetic, in a contemporary environment which is increasingly post-literate, is the same Anglican traditionalist sneering at Baptists who have a demographic significance in preserving something as simple as being opposed to gay marriage, while the flocks in Apostolic Communions throughout the West tolerate every modern decay, while at the same time moralizing about the terrors of Donald Trump. Their tradition, what was actually passed onto them, has diverged widely. By what standard will one hold the times in judgement? Development of Doctrine, which Tractarians themselves pioneered, means going with the times as they unfold in an organic manner. At this point female ordination is now Tradition throughout the Anglican communion.

There is no reason to theatrically bow one’s neck before a clerisy that has little authority, and even less ability, to speak. The administratively able, who can cite Roberts’ Rules more thoroughly than long passages of Scripture, have more pleasure in hunting the enemies of the Zeitgeist than antagonists of the Holy Ghost. It is worth saying farewell to the ghost of Laud, who dissipated totally in the carnival of the 1960s. Grasping the historic Laudianism helps one understand why it was not only a bad revolution, but a failure. The Church of England only grew when this spirit was curtailed, especially when contested by powerful social forces that could not be wished away through parliamentary censures and ecclesiastical mummery. Lake’s descriptive approach helps understand a sympathetic enemy, one that seeks a greater foundation for the church and the hierarchy of a society, but builds it upon sand. As much as this essay has attacked Laud, he was an able academic administrator and even brought a competent Arabic department to Oxford. He was a competent revolutionary, though one who sapped the walls of an Evangelical church.

If there’s hope for the universal church of Christ, understood eschatologically in its true catholic scope, then it is through a commitment to the lens of Scripture, the intelligibility of doctrine, and, yes, effective preaching. There is a long road ahead for reforms of these kinds, especially as many modern Evangelicals want soothing messages of “He Gets Us” instead of a fiery sword that divides bone from marrow. Firm biblical preaching is not shut up in dusty commentaries that leave day to day life untouched. Neither is election a moth-eaten idea that gives a man security on his death bed. Rather it allows one to wield a two edged sword, taking captive princes and singing out the sentence of the Lord. May that, and that alone, justify the cause.

When Richard Nixon won his smashing victory against the New Left in 1972 and Ronald Reagan smashed through Carter’s bulwark of left-liberal centrism in 1980, what was the centripedal force that pulled a diverse coalition together? The Silent Majority included Southerners and Northern urban ethnics and the Reagan Revolution steamed ahead with Moral Majority, neoconservatives, and advocates of Reaganomics. There was a broad reaction against civil rights, desegregation, forced bussing, a coercive minoritarian welfare state, high taxes and regulation, doctrinaire feminism, and a foreign policy that bowed to the fact that Communism would remain an option well into the future. Leftists have constructed their demonology that now includes Donald Trump as a cesspit of reaction, stooges for big bigoted business, with no positive vision whatsoever. In contrast, the disproportionate number of Catholic and Jewish think tankers and policy scribblers have claimed their own inchoate, foreign, communitarianisms and libertarianism as the essence of the American right. Even more garish is the so-called “fusionism” that supposedly remade the conservative movement.

In the age of Trump, new-come ideologues to this dilettantism have offered new accounts of how the Republican Party has changed, once again, to shake off the fetters of the old. What if these self-serving narratives of rebirth are just that? What if there is a greater continuity that stretches across the twentieth century to define America’s rightwing politics, that includes divergent factions, wings, and cliques that vie for their place in the maelstrom? If that is the case, what is it? What is the American right and where did it come from? The answer is found focused on one man: Herbert Hoover. Despite the tragedy of his administration, Hoover helped mold the distinct concerns of rightwing Progressives in a political movement that offered an alternative to the emergence of the increasingly intersectional New Deal coalition that would, equally, produce a legacy for the American left, even as it too included a multitude.

Therefore, to understood Herbert Hoover, it is necessary to understand the Progressive Age as an ethos. Contrary to standard conservative declension narratives, Progressivism was not some abstract shadow that came from nowhere to ruin America. Rather, it was a suprapolitical sentiment shared by an emergent professional middle class of American stock in the main who were shocked at the rapid erosion of the United States.

When the modern day commentariat are blithe about successful immigration in the past (and thus Americans, whatever that is, should open their arms to the world), anything but success was the truth. American cities were unintelligible hives of crime and decay. Ghettos were rampant. The rapid cartelization of industrial manufacturing and its adjuncts, particularly steel and railroads, created a voracious appetite for cheap labor. The hordes of Central, Southern, and Eastern European peasantry poured into the United States. Boston ceased to be a Yankee city and now belonged to the Irish. Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago followed the same course. Even worse, the Frontier, that hope to reignite the American spirit through new settlement, had closed. Now Americans were forced to deal with a metastasizing disaster. Politicians were bought and paid to keep the money flowing and ethnic ward gangs increasingly controlled sections of local and state politics. More intellectual immigrant pockets, like Forty-Eighter Germans, had platforms to systematically induce socialism. The possibility of self-ownership had become eviscerated and possibility of national renewal seemed lost. Progressivism was the wide spectrum of what to do in response, lest the race fall to the barbarians already within the gates.

Hoover entered these circles through his own frontier experience. A Californian who rose from modest means, Hoover would establish himself as a competent businessman, geologist, and administrator. Though a committed Republican, the Progressive Age was a time when party alignment mattered less, when both major national parties were in disarray between rival interests. Thus Hoover, when called, would ably serve a man whom he would continue to admire as a political hero. Woodrow Wilson was, for Hoover, a conservative Progressive, and one who would remain a model for the American right going into the New Deal. In retrospect, writing in 1958 about his time in the administration, Hoover would honor Wilson in these terms:

Wilson was “a Jeffersonian Democrat,” he was a “liberal” of the nineteenth-century cast. His training in history and economics rejected every scintilla of socialism, which today connotes a liberal. His philosophy of American living was based upon free enterprise, both in social and in economic systems. He held that the economic system must be regulated to prevent monopoly and unfair practices. He believed that Federal intervention in the economic or social life of our people was justified only when the task was greater than the states or individuals could perform for themselves. (Herbert Hoover, The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson, vii)

Hoover never ceased to admire Wilson’s vision to extend the Monroe Doctrine to bring peace with Europe. He did not believe in Fortress America, even if he abhorred belligerency. During World War One, Hoover was the architect of the relief efforts that saved Belgium from famine and mass death. It was this experience in particular that formed Hoover’s rank hostility towards German militarism. He did not like the junkers or their ruthlessness in expansion, which led to thousands upon thousands of Belgians hauled off to work-camps. So he resented that his enemies accused him of being soft on Germans for advocating Wilson’s policy of peace without victory. There would be no European peace if there was not a framework for mutual support (Hoover, Ordeal, 75).

Hoover backed Wilson’s efforts at regulating and guiding American society towards the war-effort. In this way, Hoover was an early advocate for unitary executive theory, advising Wilson to not fall into the bureaucratic quagmire that many parliamentary governments got stuck within:

To meet the cry that these were dictatorial powers, the President at the beginning developed the idea that they should be administered by boards, commissions, councils or committees. I had reported to him mistakes the Allies had made by this sort of organization at the start, and their ultimate but slow recognition that administration must be conducted by a single head. As a matter of fact, a single executive had been the basic concept of organization of our Government and our business world ever since the founding of the Republic. I was fortunate in persuading the President that a new term, “Administrator,” would not connote dictatorship. (Hoover, Ordeal, 11)

It was not that party partisanship had dissipated in the 1910s, but Progressives like Hoover saw over these divisions towards a bigger idea. Despite not wishing to get involved in electoral politics, himself being a Republican in a Democratic administration, Hoover extended his aid to Wilson by calling on Americans to return a Democratic majority in 1918 so the President’s enemies and wary friends in Europe would not misinterpret these affairs as a repudiation of Wilson’s program. Nevertheless, despite Wilson retaining a slim majority, Versailles was a disaster, and Hoover saw the debilitated Wilson fail to bring his vision into being. Hoover would helped the succeeding Harding-Coolidge administration on its domestic affairs. However, on foreign policy matters, the Republicans did not represent a turn towards isolationism. The League was repudiated (which Hoover lamented as short-sighted and foolish), however the Versailles treaty was ratified by America individually with each Entente nation. Harding even attempted to join the World Court, an alternative (though more impotent) body that former Republican Secretary of State Elihu Root had helped design (Hoover, Ordeal, 298-299).

Hoover, decades later, never repudiated the need for America’s involvement in world affairs as ballast. Rather, he had qualified praise for the United Nations, not as a system of world government, let alone a new world order, but as a forum for free civilized nations to coordinate. The United Nations did that, though less effectively, but it was flawed in its membership:

The United Nations’ organization except in one particular, follows very closely the pattern of Woodrow Wilson’s League. The Council, dominated by the Great Powers, each with its veto, the Assembly, the Secretariat, the machinery for appeal in case of aggression, the processes of investigation, conciliation, arbitration, the economic and military sanctions all these were better formulated in the League and with fewer words. But the admission of aggressive dictatorship to its membership would never have been accepted by Woodrow Wilson. He conceived the League as an association of free nations, not to include men and dictatorships conspiring for its ruin. (Hoover, Ordeal, 302)

On the domestic front, Hoover as Secretary of Commerce kept the skunk works in stellar condition. Hoover was not a free-marketeer, he realized that part of the purpose of the state was to guide the market. It was not that Old Guard Republicans were free-traders, usually the contrary, but Hoover’s reforms often jammed up their log rolling. As a modern Hoover biographer, Kenneth Whyte, put it, Hoover was too much of an engineer to be stupid about regulation:

Unlike his president, Hoover, the trained geologist, the practicing engineer, had no doubt that the business cycle, a “natural” phenomena, was susceptible to human ingenuity. He told the delegates that downturns could be “modified and possibly controlled by practical remedies available through cooperative service on the part of those abundantly able and doubtless eager to render it.” It was their job to mobilize the assembled “intelligence of the country” to prevent the miseries and losses of future depressions and eliminate unemployment. (Kenneth Whyte, Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, 262)

The possibility of manipulation threatened to harm native Americans. In terms that sound contemporary, Americans were increasingly priced out of home-ownership and there were little means to acquire the credit necessary to make it affordable. Hoover helped reform this process in both quality and quantity:

His vision was explicit in Hoover’s attempts to standardize the American hearth. Home ownership had dropped slightly between 1900 and 1920, due in part to scarce construction during the war. As many as one-third of Americans lived in crowded and ill-equipped rental properties. Hoover worked with the American Institute of Architects to produce plans for standardized houses made of standardized building materials with the aim of reducing the cost of building by a third. He backed the Better Homes Movement as it embarked on a nationwide celebration of home ownership: its demonstration models of the new standard homes with modern plumbing and the latest electrical appliances were shown in more than a thousand towns and cities. Hoover also succeeded in promoting improved mortgage terms for consumers. He produced model zoning ordinances and municipal building codes to support best practices among developers and local administrators, literally shaping the houses and neighbor- hoods that generations of twentieth-century Americans would dream about and live in. (Whyte, Hoover, 274)

For Hoover, the spirit of America was progress and that meant a limited state creating opportunities where they had been shut up. The Chicago Tribune compared Hoover favorably with Alexander Hamilton, being the core intellectual muscle that implemented conservative and progressive policies to create opportunities for the humble (Whyte, Hoover, 301). Hoover was not a relic of the nineteenth century, but understood what a future oriented political economy must involve in order to succeed. It was for this reason Hoover pressed a fear that the so-called Roaring Twenties would go bust if monetary policy, and credit, was not addressed. World War One had ended with a massive influx of gold into the United States, which secured American prosperity but it threatened to doom Europe, and reflexively America, to abandon the gold standard. The increasing loss of access to specie made fiat monetary policies, usually driven by political expediency, more popular abroad, which could damage global trade and lead to a massive crash. Hoover could see the coming storm:

Hoover was among the first to voice misgivings over the accumulation of gold in America. As early as 1923, he had warned of the enormous temptation to use the excess bullion to create “a castle of credit and currency” in the United States. The result would be “the greatest era of inflation and speculation in our history. Americans would import like mad, price themselves out of export markets, and produce an adverse balance of trade that would someday “cause this gold to flow abroad with a rush from under our castle of credit and we should have an unparalleled financial crash.” He wondered aloud if the excess gold might be taken out of circulation or somehow transferred back to Europe. Anything that could be done to make it easier for major trading partners to return to the gold standard, he reasoned, would stabilize the foreign scene and lend security to his domestic economy. (Whyte, Hoover, 318-319)

As a sample of Hoover’s policies in the Harding-Coolidge administration, they could appear to be an inchoate smattering of pragmatic adjustments. Hoover hoped to bring their greater interconnectivity, and significance, to bear in a short pamphlet, American Individualism (1923). In contrast to European drives towards collectivization, be that any form of socialism or the guild-state efforts of Mussolini’s Fascist party in Italy, “Individualism” was the political genius of America. It meant meritocratic equal opportunity, where anyone has a chance at entry, even if there is an inevitable inequality of ends. Individualism, for Hoover, was different than capitalism, syndicalism, socialism, or any crossbreed between them. Individualism was not atomic, it included voluntary cooperation and organization towards greater ends. It combined altruism and self-interest. Individualism repudiated equality of ends as “claptrap” from the French Revolution (Herbert Hoover, American Individualism, 8-19).

It may sound strange to claim that individualism requires groups, but Hoover understood these voluntary cooperations as training for greater levels of leadership and guidance. Chambers of commerce, labor unions, banking boards, farmer associations, all of these created “an opportunity for self-expression and participation in the moulding of ideas, a field for training and the stepping stones for leadership.” The threat, however, was that these groups may attempt to merge themselves with the state, repudiating their free, private, and voluntary nature as outside of government. If the state becomes the territory of some particular private party, then “our government will then drift into the hands of timorous mediocrities dominated by groups until we shall become a syndicalist nation on a gigantic scale” (Hoover, Individualism, 42-43). Hoover made explicit reference to Mussolini, considering his state control of all voluntary organizations, for the sake of equilibrium, as a recipe for both tyranny and stagnation.

The role of the state, in contrast, was a regulator. It was for this reason that Wilson was an advocate of “Jeffersonian liberalism” in the twentieth century. There was no room for individual merit and expansion if these were precluded through a monopoly. Whether it was a class or a cartel, the American individual required a dynamic government that could keep some private clique from closing the door to future Americans:

To curb the forces in business which would destroy equality of opportunity and yet to maintain the initiative and creative faculties of our people are the twin objects we must attain. To preserve the former we must regulate that type of activity that would dominate. To preserve the latter the Government must keep out of production and distribution of commodities and services. This is the deadline between our system and socialism. (Hoover, Individualism, 56-57)

The goal of American Individualism was the preservation of the “American pioneer” who embodied all that was great and glorious in the nation. He represented that individualist spirit, “the response to the challenge of opportunity, to the challenge of nature, to the challenge of life, to the call of the frontier” (Hoover, Individualism, 63-64). Therefore, in Hoover’s analysis, the essence of the Progressive movement was to preserve the Frontier in a time when it had geographically closed. There was a need to establish intangible realms of intellect and spirit that solicited boundless development and exploration. The right kind of Progressive was committed to preserving this national fire.

On the surface, this platform was general, platitudinous, and somewhat vague. It was the kind of thing that HL Mencken considered as the stock and store of the booboisie. It was also the time where social critics, like Mencken, believed that the 1920s signaled the end of civilization. Whatever faults may be attributed to Hoover’s vision, it was a platform for a national movement that cut across social strata and regional differences. It could become the basis of a national politics that could mobilize voters beyond short-sighted pragmatism, let alone succumbing to an equally banal platform in a very different direction.

And that is, in fact, what occurred.

Hoover would have his day in the light, the selfless engineer who ascended over political hacks and hucksters through sheer genius. Hoover trounced the greasy Al Smith, and his “states rights” Tammany Hall machinery, in 1928. He even won a few Southern states, as “Hoovercrats” would rather vote Republican than allow an urban ethnic Democrat, with a penchant for boozing and Romanism, to take the White House. With his successful alliance with the “Lilly White” Republicans to secure support, Hoover presaged the Southern Strategy forty years before Nixon.

Then the Great Depression swept America. It is nostrum in American history textbooks that Hoover was out of touch, did nothing, and left the country to rot until another Roosevelt swept in to save America. The opposite was the truth. Hoover’s cooperative focus brought about a stabilization of the economy to the extent that businesses cooperated. Some did, others squealed and hoped to be bailed out. Hoover would later lament that Roosevelt would take his rostrum, as governor of New York, to deplore the economic royalists, reactionaries, big business cronies, and Tories in the White House that let America drown, while letting his own constituents struggle. As Hoover understood, the problem with collectivism was not only socialists but businessmen who enabled them through short-sighted greed and a dependence on the government:

What was needed, he said, was for the strong banks to recognize their obligation to weaker banks around the country and pledge 2 percent of their assets to a $500 million support fund that would lend to troubled institutions on less rigid terms than the Fed required. “I consider some such program essential in the public interest,” he said, adding that “if present tendencies are allowed to continue unchecked, there is no telling where the movement will stop.”

Many of the bankers, having been tipped by [Federal Reserve] Governor Meyer as to what the president wanted, had come to the meeting reluctantly. They were unenthused by Hoover’s proposal. They believed that 1907 was ancient history, and that the creation of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 had relieved them of collective responsibility for the financial sector in such crises. They asked why they should risk their own balance sheets in service of banks they viewed as not simply illiquid but insolvent. They saw Hoover’s plan as throwing good money after bad and suggested the government furnish the bailout pool.

This was a major miscalculation by Hoover. He had thought the bankers, a conservative lot, would be hostile to a direct and unprecedented federal intrusion into their sector. He had wielded the publicly funded option as a threat, and he was dumbfounded when the bankers welcomed it. He returned to the White House annoyed at the timidity and condescension of the Wall Street heavyweights, who had seen fit to lecture him on the basics of banking and finance. Meyer stayed behind at Mellon’s residence and convinced those gathered to subscribe to a pool as requested by Hoover. They agreed, huffily, on condition that a public solution would follow in the event of failure. The very existence of this backstop, obviously, did not bode well for their commitment to making the private fund work. (Whyte, Hoover, 466)

Despite cajoling and lecturing, this process began to work. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, that backstop Hoover pursued, began to incentivize business that the worst was over. Roosevelt, however, would trounce Hoover in the elections, a swamping that came from Roosevelt’s ability to reconstitute the Wilsonian electorate of Northeast, South, and West, as well as his better handling of the press. Additionally, other issues that drove the election were the repeal of Prohibition (which Hoover, as a half-hearted defender, alienated Dry constituents) and economic nationalism. Hoover had reluctantly signed the Smoot-Hawley Act, a tariff that created greater economic panic as trade threatened to dry up. Roosevelt in 1932 called for greater economic nationalism, also lying through his teeth about a defense of sound money. Franklin Roosevelt was the true liberal, the true nationalist, the true conservator, the advocate of states rights and a robust federal government, and a radical who would send big business and their conservative schemes packing. Everyone got something and nothing, and the chaos over Roosevelt’s coy refusal to say what he would or would not do prior to the inauguration sunk most of the 1932 recovery.

Once power was his, Roosevelt began to shake off his fooled allies. He abandoned his economic nationalism and instead pursued policies of bureaucratic expansion, the threat of nationalization, and novel experiments in monetary theory.

The New Deal was the coalescence of leftists from within the Progressive Age with labor unions, ethnic ward bosses, the nascent black vote in the urban North, the patronage machines of the Old South and doctrinaire socialists. It was incoherent, pragmatic, and broad enough to allow a variety of wings and factions to emerge. It was also what provoked Hoover to create the American right to preserve the heritage of Harding-Coolidge and reject Roosevelt.

As an early outline of what would become the American right, The Challenge to Liberty (1934), Hoover attempted to reclaim “liberalism” from Roosevelt, whose New Deal was the antithesis, what Hoover termed “regimentation” (an incoherent tyrannical combination of the worst aspects of Fascism and Socialism). Liberalism meant ascension through merit and equal opportunity, the permission to form cooperative voluntary societies that remained outside the purview of the state. This “American System” rejected all forms of illiberal privilege, be it the ownership of slave labor which locked out free labor or corporate cartels that prevented new economic entryists. Economic freedom did not prevent regulation, but it did stop state control:

The American System holds equally that monopoly, group or class advantage, economic domination, Regimentation, Fascism, Socialism, Communism, or any other form of tyranny, small or great, are violations of the basis of Liberty. True Liberty requires that all claims to human power must be subject to live criticism and the common judgement. (Herbert Hoover, The Challenge to Liberty, 34)

Socialism and Fascism were not the current threat in America, even as both made all private voluntary organizations subject to state discipline. The threat was New Deal regimentation, which threatened to assume control of American industry and business. The National Recovery Administration had become a way for bureaucrats to beat businessmen for no cogent effect. The Tennessee Valley Authority went well beyond tampering excesses among utility companies, sapping private initiative for a socialist-lite agency that dissolved free competition (Challenge, 85-89). This problem was not only the tyranny of Roosevelt’s bureaucrats, many of whom had a penchant for pink politics. It also created poverty. Hoover’s assessment has received a recent confirmation in the work of George Selgin, a conservative economist who wrote a recent history of the New Deal. The real issue was the fear that Roosevelt continued to manufacture among small and big businessmen. It was not the case that the war saved the American economy, but the war began the process of cooperation that Hoover had pursued. The New Deal, in contrast, was economic Jacobinism:

The planners frightened small businesses by treating them as relics of a bygone age and compelling them to abide by codes mainly set by their larger rivals. The trustbusters scared big businesses by threatening to break them up. Neither group put much store in either monetary or fiscal policy, let alone John Maynard Keynes’s advice to the effect that a depression was not the right time to be pushing their reforms. This was one of several respects in which, far from having tested Keynesian policies, the New Deal was at loggerheads with Keynes’s own advice for achieving economic recovery. (George Selgin, False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, Ch. 26)

Hoover’s aim was not a return to laissez faire, but a state that could send the right kind of signals. Markets were human and men operated through rational calculations, and if not rational then irrational calculations born of emotional turmoil. Constant threats destabilized the future, and the state had a right to till the soil so conditions were good for free enterprise. The Federal Reserve Banks, the Federal Land Banks, the Federal Home Loan Banks, the Farm Cooperatives, all of these Hoover approved as a defense of the American way of things. The problem was when signals became control, when a traffic light became “the corner policeman being given the right to determine whether the citizen’s mission warrants his passing and whether he is competent to execute it, and then telling him which way he should go, whether he likes it or not” (Hoover, Challenge, 199-200). Liberty was order, not regimen:

We require a system which will serve as a brake upon that optimism and inflation which create booms, with their speculative building or gambling, and will also be impregnable to destruction from the fear which accelerates depressions. (Hoover, Challenge, 175)

Eternal war against the New Deal and the defense of the true America — that, from the 1930s onward, became Herbert Hoover’s crusade. The failed attempt at setting terms led Hoover to accept his enemies as “liberals” and instead don the mantle of “conservative,” though one future focused. Hoover would remain a stalwart in American politics, often being the enemy of Roosevelt’s campaigns despite him never being a candidate (but a constant threat he would be, Roosevelt would continue to run against Hoover into the 1940s). Hoover’s many warnings, however, were not heeded. Many Republicans of the 1930s and 1940s believed it was necessary to adopt aspects of the New Deal to win over so-called liberal voters. They rejected Hoover’s belief that an adamant stance on rightwing principles would win elections. Thus Alf Landon and Thomas Dewey both sunk in the 1936 and 1944 elections, respectively, for their “Me Too” appeals to the left. Wendell Wilkie in 1940 was even worse: a big business plant that tried to ape Roosevelt, yet ended up campaigning like a Roosevelt man (being that Wilkie was a Democrat up until a few months before he won the nomination, then, after his loss, he received a government position in the third Roosevelt term as an ambassador for world government).

Hoover understood that the clash with the New Deal had introduced a real political crisis in America. There was now a political left and right, and it was up to the Republicans to shed their uneasiness and embrace the right. This division was not an abstract split into ideological camps, but the question of real progress or collapse. Selgin noted that the only other major country that did as bad as the United States in leaving the Great Depression was France, which followed a very similar trajectory of policies (Selgin, False Dawn, Ch.1). Leon Blum’s Popular Front government had a similar political alignment to Roosevelt’s New Deal Democracy. Foreign contemporaries understood the meaning of this similitude in clear terms. When Hoover took a 1938 tour of the Continent, he met with Leopold III of Belgium. He informed Hoover the real problem with the weak yet aggressive French:

I asked him how [King Leopold] accounted for the degeneration in France. He said:

Probably the primary cause is the depletion of the race for a generation as the consequence of being bled white in the last war, but the immediate cause is the disintegrating influence of the Russian Communists and Communistic ideas which reached alarming proportions under Prime Minister Blum.

He said it was so bad that Blum’s continuation in office depended upon the Russian Ambassador. He then smiled and added,

Blum was trying to imitate your New Deal. He called it by that name. (Herbert Hoover, The Crusade Years, 114)

Hoover was entirely aware that the great menace in European power politics was the Soviet Union. No friend to Fascism or Nazism, Hoover deplored the idea that the United States should back the power that was not only militaristic and expansionistic, but had an ideological direction towards global domination. It was quite natural that Roosevelt, being surrounded with the mean men he had, would choose to surrender Eastern Europe to the Soviets at the Tehran Conference of 1943. Hoover rejected the unnecessary war in Europe and continued to repudiate it well after it was over. In a 1952 address to the Republican National Committee, Hoover remained unreconstructed from postwar self-narration:

Our critics are correct that most Republicans opposed our joining with Stalin in the second World War. We believed these monsters, Stalin and Hitler, should exhaust each other. We said repeatedly that by joining with Stalin in the war we would spread Communism over the earth. If this was isolationism, I am proud of it. (Hoover, Crusade Years, 326)

Hoover was quite clear that Roosevelt’s government was not what it seemed. Whatever his political predilections, Roosevelt was a Russophile and surrounded himself with Fellow Travelers and men who would turn out to be Soviet moles (e.g. Henry Dexter White, Henry Hopkins, et al.). Hoover’s unpublished critical history of the war, Freedom Betrayed, was an early work of revisionism that saw World War Two as the cause of the Cold War and its crises. Roosevelt’s coterie went further, even influencing the relationship between the American and British left with government sanction. Hoover, in 1942, was blunt with members of the British cabinet:

During 1942, I had several calls from British Cabinet members such as Ministers Sir Oliver Lyttleton, Lord Beaverbrook and Brendan Bracken, together with Mr. Arthur [W. S.–ed.] Robinson, Mr. Churchill’s “Colonel House.” I took those occasions to impress upon them the dangerous fire with which the British were playing in the character of propaganda lecturers and missionaries they were sending to the United States. They were dominantly of the Fabian Socialist Party, such as Harold Laski, H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestley, and [Hewlett Johnson] the Red Dean of Canterbury. Their purpose was to cultivate permanent collectivism in the United States. I suggested that if we in the United States went collectivist, Britain would follow. My auditors insisted that they had to send men agreeable to Roosevelt. (Hoover, Crusade Years, 239)

There is more to be excavated in the role the British played in the rise and success of the Soviet Union, but that is another essay.

However, despite all this flirtation with doctrinaire socialists, the Solid South remained loyal. Some conservative Democrats, like Virginian Senator Carter Glass, broke with Roosevelt over his monetary schemes and repudiation of the gold standard. Yet most Southern Democrats remained loyal to Roosevelt, even as it was clear (perhaps only retrospectively) that the national party was slipping away from them. Hoover accounted this continued loyalty as a form of ignorant, short-sighted, greed:

Either out of moral zeal or to capture the negro vote in the North, Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt for years advocated everything with respect to the negroes that was obnoxious to the Southern Democrats, yet they still voted for the Roosevelts. The reason was obvious. By holding the Democratic Party in power in their state and county governments, they held the power over the negro. Some of them even liked Mrs. Roosevelt’s negro agitations as it took votes from the Republicans in the North, and gave the Democratic party command of the Federal administration with its patronage. But equally important, the President spent a volume of Federal money in the South that amounted to an indemnity for the Civil War every twelve months, all of which transcended the collectivist issue and its breaking down of states’ rights, etc. (Hoover, Crusade Years, 160-161)

Federal subsidies, a hope to be left alone, even reparations, all high time preference policies that blinded the shift underway. The needs of a very poor South may be understandable from their side of things. However, even so, it is a very contemporary story.

The death of Roosevelt put a pause on ramshackle machinery of the New Deal. Harry Truman succeeded him and, to Hoover’s delight, he had a gut instinct towards the right. Many New Dealer hardliners (e.g. Stettinius, Ickes, Morgenthau, Wallace) were sent packing. More conservative Democrats (e.g. Byrnes, Forestal) entered the administration. Hoover made allies and helped to officially drive out any notion of the Morgenthau Plan, the mass deindustrialization and destruction of Germany, for plans of rebuilding. West Germany would become a bulwark against Soviet Communism for decades to come. However, Truman was a creature of the Pendergasts, he was first and foremost a vote catcher. He knew he needed the Northern leftists, while equally knowing he had the Old South in his pocket, loyal through “fish and loaves” spending and an expectation to retain “white ascendancy” in their states (Hoover, Crusade Years, 243; 264).

After Truman narrowly won reelection (which, according to Gus Russo, may have been secured through Truman’s choice to recognize Israel, leading Sid Korshak and his associates in Chicago to get him Illinois [Gus Russo, Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Associates Became America’s Hidden Powerbrokers, 107-108]), he unrolled New Deal ultra policies. The Fair Deal included government ownership of medicine, utilities, and major industries, as well as increased spending on foreign manufactures (that would eventually put America on its back foot in the 1970s), rent controls, repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, and advance civil rights (Hoover, Crusade Years, 279). Hoover would continue to support his preferred candidate, Senator Robert Taft, to head the Republicans against Truman’s regimentation.

By 1952, Hoover was tepid about Dwight Eisenhower, someone who seemed too prone to “Me Too” sympathies. He did, however, find a protege, a combative rightwinger, in the young Vice Presidential nominee, Richard Nixon. It would be Nixon who would carry the banner of Hoover’s platform to success, warring against communists foreign and domestic. This platform Hoover ably summarized, in the form of a historic overview, in a 1950 radio broadcast to the nation:

Sixty years ago our American System was divorced from the Laissez-Faire lady. We started proceedings in 1887 when we created the Interstate Commerce Commission, thereby initiating the control of natural monopolies. But far more revolutionary was the Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

Western Europe has never had effective Anti-Trust laws. To the contrary, there grew up in those countries a maze of state-favored private trade restraints, combinations, trusts and cartels. That form of economic organization sought profits by fixing prices and by control of production and distribution.

Under our revolutionized American System, competition fairly well remained the restless pillow of progress. It had to seek profits from improved technology and lowered costs of production.

In time, Western Europe, without the full pressure of competition, lost much of the impulse to improve methods and equipment. Plants became obsolete; standards of living stagnated.

In contrast, our technology with one hundred times as many inventing laboratories and a thousand times more trained technicians has steadily improved its tools. Our standards of living increased with cheaper costs and more goods. Our system was dynamic; theirs was static.

Finally, Western Europe, with its obsolete plants, its inability to compete in world trade, except at the expense of labor, was desperate. It took to hard drinking of the potions from the shades of Marx, Mussolini and Keynes— plus the New Generosity.

Our American System continues to produce despite periodic indulgence in these drinks. It does it despite two world wars, innumerable interferences with incentives, and a government take of 60 or 70 percent of its savings. It still retains the dynamic power to provide the greatest and widest spread of comfort to our people that the world has ever known. That is, if we would join Alcoholics Anonymous and quit mixed drinks. (Hoover, Crusade Years, 291-292)

When Herbert Hoover passed on in 1964, outliving even John Kennedy, he had left behind an effective legacy. The New Right was not really new except for some of the hanger-ons, it was an expanded coalition that articulated the same platform against modern New Dealers, be they labor princes like Hubert Humphrey or dovish libertines like Bella Abzug. The victories of Nixon, Reagan, and Trump were articulated through the platform that Hoover built. It is vague, somewhat uninspired, and may induce eye-rolls from the more philosophical. It is not deep, though it is broad enough to allow many factions, wings, and conspiracies. Whatever its failings, it articulated an alternate modernity, one that did not sink into irrelevance but offered a general means for a wide, and changing, coalition to fight back against the left at the ballot box. Ability, not equality, would be the watchword.

Herbert Hoover may have failed as President, but he was pivotal in founding the crusade to reject socialist narratives of inevitability. They are not the force of progress, but decay and rot. However the right may proceed, its coalition shift and its banner gain new stripes (now immigrant remigration), may it develop this legacy further as the force of the future. May Hoover’s crusade carry on.

It has become common currency among professional Evangelicals to become Neo-Anabaptists, accepting the communitarian gospel as a new law of the Radical Reformation, while rejecting the self-exile from mainstream society. The gospel is now a “radical” and “disruptive” means of counter-culture against the World. From the early 2000s, Evangelicals embraced this disposition, ranging from David Platt’s call for every Christian to abandon all to become a missionary in Burma to Shane Claiborne’s call to become a revolutionary in urban slums like Mother Teresa or Dorthy Day. “Traditional” Christianities have moved in a similar direction from the opposite side. Beginning perhaps with John Howard Yoder’s career as the first global Mennonite theologian teaching at Notre Dame, the conjunction of radicalism and traditionalism marked his disciple, Stanley Hauerwas, the tough-talkin’ Texan who was an ardent dove. Even earlier, perhaps, was Karl Barth’s neo-orthodoxy that drifted further into Vatican II Catholicism through Hans urs von Balthasar among others. Nowadays Traditionalists, even of a “Reformed Catholic” bent, will publish with a neo-Anabaptist magazine like Plough.

In a very different way, neo-Lutheranism fascinated some Evangelicals, who emphasized a gleeful contempt for the law. Tullian Tchividjian, the disgraced grandson of Billy Graham, advocated for a lawless grace approach to ministry. Neo-Lutheranism dropped most Lutheran confessional attachment, yet adhered to the supposed existential core at the heart of Luther’s radical, grace-centered, theology. Rudolf Bultmann, among others, rejected all claims of natural law (especially as claims of nature became associated with NSDAP philosophy) for existential grace, one that exceeded and overcame all conventional moralities. Gerhard Forde, leaving his imprint on the exvangelical rag Mockingbird, would go as far to describe the law as a kind of demonic face to God, the divine as the devil, that could only become through the cancellation of the law in Jesus Christ.

What all of the above has in common, despite different philosophical starting-points and rhetorical temperaments, was a commitment to set Jesus against the Old Testament. The gospel becomes not the fulfillment of the law, but its abrogation or cancellation, implicitly (or explicitly) setting the two in conflict. In the case of Neo-Anabaptists, the gospel is a superior law of ascetic pacifism that overcame the Old Testament law of bronze and blood. With Neo-Lutheranism, the Old Testament stands for the perennial struggle for forgiveness to defeat justice. Both have a tendency to embrace the current spirit-of-the-age in Social Democracy and functional egalitarianism. Both fail to understand Christ when he pronounced: “think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but fulfill.”

What does “fulfill” mean? Does it mean abrogation or cancellation for a superior law, or the grace of a lawless law? While usually not ejecting the entirety of the Old Testament (occasional fragments from the prophets or psalms buttress their case), Jesus is not the authoritative expositor of the law, let alone the means to hear and obey it, but the means to invent a new gospel to produce a new law, one that justifies the average NGO’s mission statement on refugees and urban relief. Part of this new law is to unroot and reinterpret one of the two greatest commandments, “love your neighbor as yourself,” the flagship verse these post-Christian ethics of universal leveling. While only the second greatest commandment, the first (“thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength”) often is rolled into the second through a verse like 1 John 4:20 (“If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen”).

However, if “neighbor” did not mean what is commonly assumed, that a neighbor was not an abstracted human individual one comes in contact with on the road, then the heart of this post-Christian ethics collapses. Even worse, if “neighbor” had connotations of kinship, then questions of ethnicity and race are not simply tangential to biblical ethics, but at their very heart. To restore the Old Testament and the torah to the base of the New Testament is to retrieve the definition of neighbor, and its antonym, and reconstruct the basis of Christian ethics.

Who is my neighbor? The second greatest command is not a novelty that Jesus invented to supplant or deactivate the law, but comes from Leviticus. It is worth quoting some of the wider context to the precept:

Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people: neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour; I am the Lord.

Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him.

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the Lord.

Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee. (Leviticus 19: 15-19)

Neighbor is not an abstraction, but a close relation. Per Hebraic idiom, that the Authorized Version’s English captures beautifully, synonym couple to deepen the point. The neighbor is equivalent to brother or kinsman. While neighbor did not always mean a literal relative, its use for a close friend (as in Hushai, David’s counselor [2 Samuel 15:37]) hammers down the meaning (especially when juxtaposing Hushai, the loyal ally, against Absalom, David’s treasonous son). Therefore, the godly man does not bear witness against his kinsman, he does not spread rumors or gossip (whether true or false), out of a desire for correction and the restoration of fraternal bonds.

This desire, to sacrifice short-term personal grievances for the long-term love of a kinsman, is why Jesus condemned hatred for a brother as murder in the heart (Matthew 5: 21-26). It was also behind Jesus’ interpretation of an “eye for an eye” (Matthew 5: 38-42). Abstracted from the Old Testament, both of these texts have been leveraged to teach pacifism and hostility to punitive justice. Rather, the command involved personal sleights and the restitution of honor.

David Daube, a non-Christian legal scholar and philologist of Antiquity, noted that Jesus missed the most shocking part of the Torah command: life for life. Even so, using the example of turning your cheek after a slap seems fairly modest compared to “eye for an eye” retribution. For Jesus, as it was for Second Temple jurisprudence of Scripture, “life for life” was distinguished from “eye for an eye,” the criminal punishment from the civil. While “life for life” involved the lex talionis, “eye for eye” was the command that dealt with damages, originally in terms of property, but increasingly abstracted among lawyers and scribes for personal sleights and an attack upon one’s honor. The teaching from the Sermon on the Mount interpreted the biblical precept to reject this application, a refusal of personal retribution and a willingness to have one’s honor wounded by a kinsman in order to save him from his sin:

[The teaching] is concerned with something far more fundamental, namely, the urge to resent a wrong done to you as an affront to your pride, to forget that the wrongdoer is your brother before God and to compel him to soothe your unworthy feelings; and it advocates, instead, a humility which cannot be wounded, a giving of yourself to your brother which will achieve more than can be achieved by narrow justice. Insult, because immediately aimed at the victim’s dignity as a human being, and thereby at the image of God, was considered by the Rabbis as a terrible sin. For them, one striking his fellow, or even one putting his fellow to shame by a hurtful remark, was the typical rasha, ‘godless man.’ (The rendering ‘Resist not the wicked man’ or, for that matter, ‘Do not prosecute the wicked man’ would be no less in agreement with the Rabbinic attitude than ‘Resist not evil’). It is precisely this most direct attack on your personality which the saying here discussed expects you to bear without resentment. (David Daube, “Eye for an Eye” in The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism, 258-259)

The important point was to not let personal vindication get ahead of fraternity. Suffering a wrong from a kinsman, the dishonor of being slapped, and exercising patience was preferable to dissolving familial bonds. Better to hurt today and recover a brother later than to have a high time preference for petty justice. The “eye for an eye” was not to destroy the very community that kept the divine statutes. It was extremely important, too, that these commands did not discriminate between the better and lesser sorts of kinsmen. When Jesus gave a parable about the Final Judgement, the sheep and goats were separated on how they treated the “least of these my brothers,” an extension of royal honor to his relatives. Contrary to more universalized readings, there is no reason to consider Jesus as teaching that “the least of these” as simply the abstract poor. These were the weaker brethren who had, by kinship, a bond with the Lord as he stood for judgement.

Who are the Lord’s “brothers” then? It is true that this fraternity is supernatural, with men being kinsmen to the Lord not through human efforts (of biology or volition), but through the will of God to adoption (John 1: 12-13). Jesus came to reconstitute his people through adoption so the many nations may call upon God as their father (Galatians 4: 4-7). However, as much as “there is neither male nor female” in Christ did not stop the Apostle Paul from giving distinct ethics to men and women, each in their varied social roles, so too does “neither Jew nor Greek” fail to dissolve these kin bonds. One is responsible for parents, children, and a spouse. Jesus had, during his ministry, condemned Pharisees who abrogated the need to care for parents through “spiritualizing” one’s duty to parents as now due to God (Matthew 15: 3-9). There is no difference for the Apostle who condemned men who failed to care for one’s own household as worse than an unbeliever (1 Timothy 5: 8).

Even more, St Paul demonstrated this point through his argument in his letter to Philemon. While traditional interpretation (since, at least, Chrysostom) has made this letter about a simple fugitivus and the Christian ethics for masters and slaves, the story is more than this. Consider Paul’s admonition to receive Onesimus in verse 16: “Not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord?” Paul’s appeal is not to abolition in the abstract, but abolition for a brother in the flesh. Paul derived his ethic from the Old Testament on enslaved kinsmen. It was possible for Israelites to own other Israelites, usually out of debt payment, but it was not good. A Hebrew slave was free on the seventh year, and he owed his master nothing to depart if he wanted to leave (Exodus 21: 2). It was not only that Onesimus was a Christian, and thus was a brother in the Lord, but Onesimus was Philemon’s kinsman. Philemon had a responsibility, one more profound if offered from his own heart and not by apostolic command, to free his neighbor and love one another as brothers.

Being bolder, the importance of kinship may offer an additional layer of significance to the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus commended the lawyer for citing the two greatest commandments, but, seeking to justify himself, to assert that he and his cohort were faithful to these commands, the man asks “who is my neighbor?” Well, Jesus gives a damning ethnic scenario. A man came from Jerusalem, most certainly a Jew. He was beaten and robbed (also by Jews?) as he walked to Jericho. The first two men who pass him by are his own kin, but even more than that. The priest and the Levite were both responsible republish and interpret the law. They, like the Pharisee who tithes mint but ignores righteousness, have likely placed a fear of ritual impurity over care for their kinsman.

Then the hero arrives: a Samaritan. The significance of a Samaritan is easy to miss in its fullness. The Samaritan was not so much a despised foreigner, he was too close for comfort. The Samaritans were mixed blood, Israelites of the Ten Tribes who mingled with Gentiles and had become both related and not. The mongrelization made Samaritans worse than Gentiles for most Jews. Why did Jesus select a Samaritan? Perhaps it was not only because he was an outsider, but faithful to his insider status. He did not stop to help a total stranger, as if it were a tale of anonymous support, but to help someone who he claimed as a kinsman, but that feeling was not reciprocated. He honored his Israelite blood, his fidelity to the covenant, the least of his brothers. He went above and beyond, not only rescuing his kinsman, but paying for his room at the inn, his sustenance, and his medical treatment. The ethic was that the lowest, most despised, blood relative proved himself faithful to love his kinsman as himself, where the highborn with high responsibility passed him over. The lowest were pushing into the Kingdom of God, while the greatest excluded themselves.

It was from this sense of neighborliness that Jesus could interpret the relation between the people and foreigners. When Jesus came across the Canaanite woman with the sick child, Jesus gave her a silent rebuff. When he finally spoke, he informed her that he had not come for a dog like her, but to the children of Israel, his neighbors (Matthew 15: 26). Yet she persisted, for even dogs got scraps from the table, even outsiders to the covenant were to be blessed by those within. Even as an outsider, with no rights, she begged out of her faith that Jesus mediated the might of Jehovah. This scenario was not so dissimilar to the Roman soldier, equally a foreigner, who appealed strictly to the good pleasure of a sovereign lord to command. He had no rights, he only asked for kindness (Matthew 8: 9). Without knowing it, the Roman understood that even foreigners received the cascading grace from the people of God.

As Israelite was a foreigner, a “stranger,” in Egypt, so too would Israel not oppress foreigners, not cheating them through false measures (Leviticus 19: 33-36). Foreigners could dwell within the midst of Israel, but assimilation meant total obedience to the law, and multiple generations of assimilation. Edomites were proximate in blood and only required three generations to assimilate. Egypt’s kindness to the stranger was reciprocated in kind through three generations. Hostile and alien nations, who hated the law of God, like the Moabites, required ten generations of faithful assimilation. Bastards too, who had no proper lineage, also required ten generations to assimilate, to have any rights whatsoever in the commonwealth of God (Deuteronomy 23: 2-4). There was no room for multiculturalism or multiple standards, yet even foreigners would receive a blessing within the land of the people.

While the nations would, through the atonement of Christ, be welcomed into the New Jerusalem, the law of blood and nations did not cease even as the nations themselves required healing and regeneration. The bond of the Lord brought to fulfillment the bond of flesh, where Jews and Greeks, Canaanites and Romans, would find eternal salvation for their peoples in the covenant of God. The fulfillment of love for neighbor did not erase the bonds of kinship, the distinction between brother and stranger maintained.

However, the stranger was a possible threat, a means of divine chastisement against the people when they fell away. If Israel failed to be faithful, then God would curse Israel with foreign domination. The strangers would rule over the people, devour the fruit of the land, kill sons and daughters, destroy property, take the best land, disregard both the young and old, create division among the people who would betray their own for foreigners, and subject the nation to humiliation, causing the people to fear for their future (Deuteronomy 28: 33-68). There is every reason to expect the same penalties to befall those covenanted nations who have been grafted onto the tree of Israel, their collective identity remade through Christian civilization, where the elect persist as a remnant even as judgement comes like a wave down upon the nation. On the surface, therefore, it would make sense to hate these foreigners, for they could become the enemies of the people and God’s law.

Jesus commanded a different interpretation of the love of kinsman. It did not mean to hate the enemy. Rather, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to those that hate you, and in so doing one is faithful to God, who also loves his enemies by allowing the sun to shine on all and the rain to fall on all. It is not enough to love your kinsmen, but even foreigners and enemies, to be perfect like the Lord (Matthew 5: 43-48). Why? The general shape of the Sermon on the Mount concludes with the major point after stipulations along the way. The point of good works is faith, therefore one does not do performative righteousness, prayers and donations, before crowds. That was what the Pharisees loved to do, treating God as a public opinion poll. Rather, as the Lord’s Prayer teaches, the expectation is for heavenly vengeance. Therefore, Jesus continued to teach against hypocrisy, superficial correction (a beam vs. a mote in the eye), wasting your time teaching the belligerent, and confidence that God is the one who will give the Spirit of power to overcome. If the repentant elect in an apostate nation believed, then they would persist through divine judgement as the house built on the rock, while others, trusting in themselves, would be swept away as a house built on sand. The waves, nevertheless, were coming.

St Paul taught the same: vengeance belongs to the Lord, he will repay. Therefore, the believer will reciprocate good for evil. Why? Because of selfless ascetic benevolence for all? No: for good works to the wicked heaped up judgement (Romans 12: 19-21). Paul buttressed his argument with a citation from Proverbs 25: 21, kindness to the evil was like coals of fire dumped on their head. In a world today, where Providence is unbelieved, this ethic is strange, if not absurd. For Neo-Anabaptists and Neo-Lutherans this idea sounds cynical and sinister. However, they exist as products of flatulent excess in a declining empire. Kindness to the evil is in expectation that divine judgement will punish them severely. It is a sign of both the believer’s repentance and the wicked’s doom, for if they do not realize their evil and smash themselves upon the Rock, then their fate is sealed as they will be ground into dust. Private patience will lead to public reckoning.

It is for this reason that the Psalmist could praise the virtuous man as the one who can set aside wrath. “Evildoers shall be cut off, but those that wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth,” for the time of the wicked is short. They will disappear, while “the meek shall inherit the earth” and rejoice in the land (Psalm 37: 8-11). That is the ethic that Jesus called upon in the beatitudes, not a universal standard of gelded pacifism, but the patience necessary to achieve the total and full judgment upon the people of God. It was the only way to vindicate the brother and neighbor, who often embroil a man in petty struggles, against the enemy and the foreigner. For the covenanted nations, that have remained themselves even as they have taken their place in the New Jerusalem, the same Old Testament ethic applies.

The love of the kinsman neighbor and brother motivates both patience and an expectation of revenge against the perverters, within and without, of God’s Law.

“What wrong I pray you did the Apostles in going about to alter the lawes of nations , euen against the expresse commandement of the princes, and to set vp the throne of Christ.” - William Symmonds, Virgenea Britannia, 1608

It is very common from older conservative circles to lament America’s “empire” and the turn away from “republican” government. As late as the Tea Party, the common refrain was that America was a republic, not a democracy, and thus institutions like the electoral college or an unelected judiciary should remain against the pull of Obama’s call for Change. The abstraction of “Progressivism” receives much of the blame, a turn to other abstract problems like technocracy, elitism, a military-industrial complex, and various political projects that supposedly support utopias operating in the register of socialism. If only American can close its eyes to the world and turn inward then peace, particularly of the kind that operates in a small homestead or smaller village, will return.

This antiquated critique is on its way out. As historians of various eras, but united in a shared value judgement, have demonstrated since Independence that America has always been an imperial project, always oriented outwards, whether in the form of trade or territorial expansion. Projects to acquire Caribbean and Pacific islands date to the founding generation. Republics are warlike and require a mandate for imperium, the exercise of control, the right for one people to determine the norms and laws for another. Not every war is righteous and war should not be pursued for its own sake, for moral equivalents to war have often been productive. Americans have engaged in territorial expansion, commercial enterprise, innovation in agriculture and industry, as well, most importantly, preaching the Gospel to the nations. The goal of an elect nation is not to subsist, but to go outwards and expand.

America emerged as an independent empire that sought the same end as the English empire, an empire that many Americans believed had gone astray, oppressing its own people, a royal confederation that had gone awry. This original vision, rhapsodized through men as temperamentally different as John Milton and George Berkeley, remains essential to any recovery of “America” as a nation. While it is quite common to denounce “propositional nations,” the core issue is not that a nation is propositional (of course it is) but what the propositions include. In other words, even an ethnostate requires a set of propositions about the “ethnos” that constitutes the state. The problem is not the importance of ideas, but the impoverishment of what an idea is and how it operates. The propositions here behind America are that it is a Gospel empire of the North Seas on a new continent with a call to be the shield of liberty. If there is any hope for an American future, it will be recovering this self-understanding, haunted with failures and scarred with victories, and end.

An early advocate for this vision was the American-born preacher, Samuel Davies. An orthodox Calvinist with a tendency towards the New Light divinity of the First Great Awakening, Davies was one of the few Presbyterians in Virginia who received a license to preach from the House of Burgesses. Davies looked upon Virginia with both hope and disdain. While modern commentators may see in the “cavalier” planters of Virginia a rightwing Greek Life image of vague moralisms as a coat for conventional, maybe even aristocratic, wickedness. Lauren Winner’s Cheerful and Comfortable Faith attempted to justify this sleepy faith in a way that made George HW Bush the paragon Christian statesman. However, the Gospel demanded more than embroidered bible verses and the begrudging respect for the tippling parson who had the credentials to mumble through the Book of Common Prayer to perform a baptism or a funeral. The issue was not social conformity through a moral standard, it was the very existence of Virginia.

In 1755, as the French and Indian War was on the verge of outbreak, where young Virginians were engaged in border skirmishes to defend their empire, Davies preached to young militiamen (Religion and Patriotism: The Constituents of Good Soldiers) who were prepared to engage in combat. French “papists” and “savage” Indians were on the verge of invasion. It was a battle for the soul of North America and the kind of civilization it would receive. Reading history forward, rather than backward (retrojecting contemporary concerns), retains the importance of this struggle. For an American, the liberties of self-governance, self-policing, electoral representation, and limits on an energetic, virtuous, chief executive were prized against the absolutism of the French monarchy and the superstitions of the Roman church. However, victory was not something that emerged from mere carnal reasonings, troop placements and supply lines. It was ultimately something that descended from the hand of God.

Davies set the bar fairly low. It was imperative that Virginians not forget that all events, every success and catastrophe flowed from the decree of the Lord. Even pagans believed that God governed the world, though they call him Fate or Necessity. It was a “fundamental article of natural as well as revealed religion” to understand that the destiny of armies depended upon higher powers. Therefore, Virginians as a chosen people of the Lord should “live in the world as in a territory of Jehovah’s empire.” Every action must be undertaken with an awareness that every man has a part to play, even the wicked in the day of doom, and to fight accordingly.

However, it was because of Davies’ belief in England’s vanguard for Gospel empire that he criticized failure. Virginians did not live this way and did not act as the righteous against the forces of foreign barbarism in the wilderness. “It concerns you all seriously to reflect upon your own sins, and the sins of your land, which have brought all these calamities upon us.” As a Christian, and not a strict republican, Davies did not believe war was intrinsically good or helpful, rather that it was necessary as a form of wrath. The purpose of command was to secure peace, but God threatened to remove this mantle. This war was due to the wickedness seething throughout the British Empire, that had become weak with fat — indulgent, vain, insular. Virginia was full of drunks “swilling down their cups, and drowning all the man within them,” blasphemy, greed, and oppression that was “grinding the face of the poor,” the kind of closed door to the landless that had provoked Bacon’s Rebellion nearly a century before. Virginia was full of prodigality, vanity, and sensuality, and the total disregard for the Lord’s ways. Davies lamented that “you see cards more in use than the Bible” and “the backgammon table more frequented than the table of the Lord.”

These sins would not only lead Virginians into Hell, but they would lose their country as well. “The issue of a horse-race or a cock-fight [is] more anxiously attended to than the fate of our country,” a colony dying from the same spiritual torpor that animates Barstool Americans. These sins were not being shouted down from an immaculate pulpit, for the churches of Virginia were not much better. They too did not preach a Solemn Providence, only concerned for the middling social status of a rector in parishes where superficial moralisms reigned. There were “crowds of professed believers, that are practical atheists; nominal Christians, that are real heathens.” “Alas,” he cried, “who would think that those thoughtless assemblies we often see in our places of worship are met for such solemn purposes as to implore the pardon of their sins from an injured God, and to prepare for an all-important eternity.” Churches, particularly the episcopalian Church of Virginia, had taught complacency and had now rallied the souls of men with the very reasons why the English Empire existed, and ultimately why they had settled the American wilderness and become a new people.

It is worth emphasizing that this vision, and fidelity to it as a gift received from Above, is not the same as morality and moralizing. It was not one more rousing call to remember that men live in a society, where common decency and focus on the family should reign. “How many discourses are delivered, how many prayers offered, how many good works performed, in which there is scarce anything of Christ,” leaving all the good works of decent people as“shining sins, glittering crimes.” “The dull ox knows his owner, and the stupid ass his master’s crib; you see the workings of gratitude even in your dog, which welcomes you home with a thousand fondling motions,” but Virginia had denied recognition of the Lord who granted this fief to His vassal. “May it not be said of the men of Virginia, as well as those of Sodom, they are wicked, and sinners before the Lord exceedingly?” All of this degeneration only brought about defeat, disease, and death.

In other words, the genius of a race that received such a mantle of responsibility must not forget how it came about in the first place. England was a peripheral rock in the affairs of Europe until its sudden rise, coinciding with bursts of zeal and understanding. Victory did not map onto moral performance, as if the Lord did not use peculiar figures to bring about judgement and redemption. God had brought punishment upon the colonies, especially Virginia, to revive a young nation to arise and shake his invincible locks. Davies implored the Virginians to pray privately, and when practical to pray together publicly, sharpening their minds and focusing their awareness of Almighty Providence. They were the source of hope for an American Empire, they were “engaged in a good cause, the cause of your people, and the cities of your God”. God alone would grant them victory, grant them the chance to come home to the loving arms of friends and kin, rejoicing that Britain, not France and her Indians, would rule upon the continent.

Davies would live to see Virginian victory, the British defeating the French at the Plains of Abraham, and the wider war winding down in favor of the Americans. At this crescendo, George II, king over this royal confederacy, died in 1760. Davies preached a eulogy (On the Death of His Late Majesty, King George II) for the deceased king on account of his long reign of peace, his engagement in war when only the enemy threatened the tranquility of the British Empire. George II had joined with Frederick II to resist “French perfidy and Austrian ingratitude” in Europe, but more importantly he had brought peace to the colonies through defeating “that mongrel race of French and Indian savages” that dwelled in Canada. “Asia and Africa, as well as Europe and America, have trembled at his name; and felt the force of British revenge, executed by his righteous hand.”

Part of the king’s glory, however, was how he defended a broad Evangelical coalition within his empire. George II “never usurped the prerogative of Heaven by assuming the sovereignty of conscience or the conduct of human understanding” on theological divisions. “He knew the nature of man and of Christianity too well” to force any single model of church. He allowed differences in “forms of worship and ecclesiastical government,” preserving “free inquiry and the rights of private judgement.” However, these operated not in a secular vacuum, but because the British Empire was a Gospel civilization and the king was“the guardian of Christians in general.” He was for “the defense of the Dissenter as well as the Conformist; of the toleration, as well as the establishment.” Davies did not reject the possibility of a Christian establishment, even if it was on contrary to his views on hierarchy and the doctrines of grace, but there was space for liberty among brothers. George II rejected both the narrowness of a confessional state while also rejecting elite secularity for the awareness that God would preserve his people and this warm climate allowed the possibility for the revival and regeneration of elect nations without pretense and formulaic persecution. It was not narrow theological debates that become increasingly abstract from the lives of kingdoms, but a defense of christendom.

Davies proclaimed that “the Christian cannot but be a patriot,” for he “who loves his neighbor as himself, must certainly love his sovereign: and he who fears God, will not fail to honor the king.” Of course this hope was predicated on the continued justice of the sovereign, where George II respected the rights of the aristocracy in the House of Lords in their “authority and independence” and the rights of the democracy in the House of Commons through their “freedom of speech and determination.” It was necessary to remember the Providence that establishes all, where all kingdoms were “little provinces or districts of Jehovah’s immense empire, in which he presides, and manages all their affairs,”

Davies died a few months after this sermon, having received the presidency of Princeton in 1760. Perhaps God spared Davies, only 37, the pain of seeing continued corruption tear apart Britain and see thirteen colonies reject the overweening authority of Parliament over their own elected, and representative, assemblies. Patrick Henry would grow up in the flames of Davies’ preaching and would maintain this faith through his political career. Though committed to the Church of Virginia, Henry had the same hope in Providence and the English commitment to a Gospel empire in America. In 1775, at the second Virginian Convention to debate another peace proposal to the king or the possibility of independence, Henry would throw his lot in with Providence. Critics of independence feared that the Americans were underprepared, lacking resources and money. It did not matter if the cause was right, for “there is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us,” for victory did not belong to the strong, but “to the vigilant, the active, the brave” (Patrick Henry, Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death).

In post-Independence America, Henry would continue to fight for the Virginian commonwealth within a new federal imperial system. Henry was opposed to The Constitution if there were not protections on the rights of the commonwealth within this Empire of Liberty. Despite his criticisms of Hamiltonian visions of replicating some of the more dangerous aspects of the British system, Henry sided with the Federalists to defend the broader idea of America as the hub of evangelism. He despised the French Revolution’s atheism and despised even more Thomas Jefferson’s plan to implant secularity in Virginia. Henry nearly succeeded in creating a pan-Evangelical establishment that would allow Virginians to choose which church received their mandated tithe, opening up the Episcopalian dioceses of Virginia to be joined by Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists. Madison had a narrow parliamentary victory that prevented this policy from coming about (Thomas Kidd, God of Liberty, 167-168). Even though an official pan-Evangelical establishment would fail, America, especially the South and its Bible Belt, would persevere and subsidize the construction of Christian education, grant churches tax exemption, and promote Bible societies and foreign missionaries.

A common criticism from left-liberals during the Global War on Terror was that George Bush was waging a holy war, mixing faith with politics, and was a tool of a theocracy. In more grandiose terms, a documentary like Zeitgeist combined accusations that 9/11 was an inside job with Christ-mythicism, with the Evangelicals as jackboot fascists to impose a global government in the name of Amun Ra and other forms of the incarnated sun deity. Paleoconservatives and Paleolibertarians have winced, appealing to the Founding with its inoffensive republicanism and cry for liberty. But freedom was always free to live and advance a certain vision of civilization, one that had a mandate to shine light into the world.

The New Jerusalem was neither England nor America exclusively, but they had been summoned, as a race, to answer this call to advance. It meant repentance and faith, spoken collectively through suffering and fasting as well as in victory and feasting. The American race, more concentrated in some parts of the United States and dispersed in others, retains this mandate to lead the nation, even if it be more sodom than not, on this path. It is not as a form of social technology or moral inculcation, however. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, and that alone is the fount of civilization.

The Age of Trump, and the continuous support the president receives from Evangelicals, has produced a minor industry of books on the religion of hate. The true Jesus, these authors claim, was an advocate for peace and toleration, a welcoming of all peoples to worship God in whatever way they choose, galvanizing candidates like Mainline seminarian James Talarico of Texas to win the Democratic primary. Cant about faith traditions and wonder has reintroduced a communitarian and non-secular bent into left/progressive politics, even leading theatrical stunts from Mainline clergy in confrontation with the administration and its anti-immigration policies. The age of Gnu-Atheist modernism is over and, instead, an older tradition, one that married communitarian traditionalism with social democratic secularity into a modern left that cares less about industrialization or dialectical materialism for intersectionality, has ascended. The slogan to “Trust the Science” during COVID occurred at the same time when CDC released a statement to justify Black Lives Matter marches because white supremacy kills more people yearly than a world-stopping pandemic. The science includes so-called “indigenous ways of knowing” that defend literal witch-doctors and snake-oil as holistic and alternative, even superior, ways of health and healing.

For some, this turn reveals the “puritanical” nature of the left, superstitious and moralizing about great ideals against the grain of reality. What does that mean? Is it true? If not, what is the “faith” of the modern left? An older, and somewhat antiquated, account of restoring this communitarian vision comes from Philip Gorski and his American Covenant. Written during a time when Ronald Reagan was still the great Satan and the Koch Brothers, with agents like Ron and Rand Paul, threatened to unleash corporate fascism, Gorski wants to chart the true history against radical secularists and the religious right. It is not quite a third-way, because Gorski does not think the radical secularists are wrong in their ends, they only do not understand the nature of Human sociality. Without heroes and villains, without stories, progressive politics is “uninspiring” and the community loses its center (228). Instead, with an appeal to David Foster Wallace’s banality that “everybody worships” (14-15), Gorski hopes to restore the religious and communal center to America through a retelling of its history. It is the use of seemingly conservative and stable categories that advances an entire inversion of the people that claimed to know and worship the true God.

Gorski is a functional atheist, but he knows people need stories, formed through collective experiences that respond positively or negative to symbols. Civic religion is a means to conceptualize a people in a community, something that Robert Bellah and Alasdair Macintyre tried to theorize for left-liberals who increasingly gave into “individualism” and the kind of consumer selfishness that American sociologists have flogged the nation for since the 1970s. For Gorski, it is important to recover this secular Christianity, tolerant to allow outsiders of all stripes but religious in orientation, that could buoy a wider political community. “Republicanism” thus became the means to offer an anti-communist left a justification for civic engagement, against “liberalism” which prioritizes a public/private divide against wider collective engagement in both social and political projects. Only if the religious aspect of this republicanism is reintroduced, only if the symbols and stories retain relevance for a wider public, will democracy persist against the threats of extremism.

The danger is, frankly, the religious right believes a different story about America. It is one that is inegalitarian and imperial, but is is fundamentally a question between two different peoples. Gorski utilizes a variety of analytic frameworks to diagnose the corruption. One is “apocalyptic,” something that is simultaneously a contrived modern corruption and a barbaric relic from the past, that emphasizes Friend and Enemy, Holy War, the final concluding crash to history that is around the corner, where all of God’s saints must battle the dark. It is an ahistorical fiction that galvanized Americans to vote in Ronald Reagan, but it is also something with roots in the foundations of the nation. In comparing it to the true “tradition” of the church, it is impressive, even bonkers, how many howlers Gorski can fit in a single paragraph:

The early church read [the Scriptures] allegorically, rather than predictively. The great battles depicted in the apocalyptic texts stood for great battles within the human heart. The premillennial interpretation is likewise a modern invention that did not become widespread in American Christianity until the early to mid‐twentieth century. Before then, the general view was “postmillennial.” Christ would not return until the church had already transformed the world. Literalist interpretation of Christian scripture is also not traditional but arose during the “fundamentalist/modernist” controversies of the early twentieth century. Before that time, scripture was read in multiple registers (e.g., the typological, the allegorical, the symbolic). Nor was revenge a central motif of traditional Christianity: the Roman church had emphasized redemption with its doctrine of purgatory. In short, the apocalyptic worldview is not an integral part of “traditional Christianity.” Rather, it is characteristic of a certain kind of American Protestantism that arose during the early twentieth century. (22)

Evangelicals defy the early church because they, unlike the venerable fathers, take the text too seriously. The Bible was rather, supposedly, a canvas to project social justice projects, to inspire the masses with dreams of equality and justice for all as the ultimate end to things. Salvation and redemption are simply metaphors for a functioning welfare system. Besides this apocalyptic tradition being a novel and rootless creature, it is also bad because it is scary:

What makes apocalyptic religious nationalism so dangerous? First, it leads to hubris. It seduces its followers into claiming to know things that no human being can possibly know. Second, it leads to demonization of others. Our enemies become physical embodiments of evil. Third, it leads to fatalism, suggesting that wars and other calamities are beyond human control. Finally, and most fatefully, it suggests that the ultimate solution to all problems is a violent one involving the annihilation of one’s enemies. (22)

Apocalypticism is new and old, false because we just know it is not true, and causes violent extremism through apathetic fatalism. To resist this tendency, civic religion stands against the apocalyptic. This tradition is traced through John Winthrop, who, because he commended mutual social relief (despite a socially stratified hierarchy of better and lesser sorts), offers an alternative. Instead of a form of Christofascism, Gorski sees in Puritan New England the seeds of civic religion, a separation of church and state within a somewhat democratic republic. It did not matter that magistrates still consulted ministers, consulting the Bible, with proper interpretation and drafting of laws (45). It did not matter that Puritans hung Quakers, whipped sabbath breakers, and waged wars against Indians as satan worshipers. It also did not matter that “the religious nationalist script was not penned by Jerry Falwell in the 1970s; it was written by Cotton Mather in the 1700s” (201). What mattered was that the Puritans did not practice the Austrian School of economics and held votes. Even though Gorski can admit that Rhode Island was the exception and fairly irrelevant, he also contends Roger Williams represented the truth of puritanism, a republicanism that would move beyond the “godly” (and English) towards secularity and equality for all (55).

Of course it was not everyone, but it was a start. Jefferson and Madison defended a secularity that would allow broad tolerance in a bid to construct public virtue. Hamilton, in contrast, engaged in “proto-liberalism” when he considered that “the chief danger to a republic was not corruption, but anarchy and, more specifically, demagoguery, in which an ambitious man allies with the many against the few” (64). The architect of Washington’s political economy, the very start of the United States, rejected equality and supported empire. While his star fell, another villain arose against the egalitarian republic and its civic religion: John C. Calhoun.

Despite Calhoun being a Deist and an early Jeffersonian republican, Calhoun was like Evangelicals because he was a textual literalist about the Constitution, utilizing “proof texts” against the spirit of the text that was contained in the Declaration of Independence (86-87). In contrast, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass understood civic religion as “prophetic,” a way to criticize interpretations of the text in the name of a “living covenant with an evolving God” (181). Lincoln may have been a conventional white supremacist, whose meeting with Douglass was in a bid to convince the freedmen to voluntarily leave for somewhere else (Lincoln’s preferred destination was Nicaragua). However, Douglass hoped the war would be for abolition and he could force Lincoln into glory (as one book on Lincoln’s racism from a disgruntled black liberal is titled). It was this tradition, this prophetic critique so-called, that stood to replace the misfires from before.

It is why Gorski understands Douglass as the true Lincolnian advocate for democratic equality and a prophetic civic religion. When it came to the Progressive Era, racist liberals like William Graham Sumner stood for free-trade and eugenics (despite being an atheist) against John Dewey’s bid for greater civic equality, Jane Addams’ feminist enfranchisement of women, and W.E.B. Dubois’ advocacy for civil rights. This narrative cuts through the twentieth century, with Roosevelt’s New Deal as economic democracy, as H.L. Mencken sympathized with Germany and sulked about the boobs. Then there was the postwar order, with Reinhard Niebuhr’s self-criticism of American hubris, Catholic inclusion through liberals like John Courtney Murray, leading into the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s crusade for civil rights as the telos of America’s democratic destiny. Obama could have been a hero to continue this movement, the first black president who said Niebuhr was his favorite theologian. But he was too wonky and bookish, he did not have the same kind of civil religious spice to tell Americans that civil rights for all kinds of oppressed intersectional minorities was not only a social good and a nice thing, but a god given demand. Only then will the kooks be put out of power and America could be saved from apocalypticism.

The historicity, or even these frameworks of textual literalism or religious apocalypse, is irrelevant. When Gorski explains his project as the restoration of “a sovereign and democratic people” who exist to realize “universal political ideas” like “freedom and equality” that nevertheless move through time as an “ever expanding river” towards “an uncertain horizon,” it sounds like colorless vague proceduralism. He hopes “quiet conservatives” and “open-minded progressives” would join hands in defending this ideal (222). But why would they do that? To defend the republic? Whose republic? It does not matter that republics have been historically identified with wars of expansion and conquest (which Tom Paine feverishly denied in his propaganda piece Common Sense). It does not matter that republics often practiced slavery, with clear demarcations between free and slave. It does not matter that republican citizenship was tightly guarded and not accessible for foreigners showing up. The real project, behind the proceduralism, was a question of national replacement. If there is a covenant with the American people (despite Gorski’s agnosticism that none of it expects divine judgement), who are they?

As in every republic, citizenship was bound up with kinship and kinship was bound to race. The patrician and the plebeian was not a social artifice, but reflected family relations and the process of inheriting a family and clan name. “Apocalypticism” is dangerous, and therefore evil, because it spends a lot of time talking about blood, and blood involves division. This “tradition” takes blood seriously:

So why does talk of blood sacrifice remain a part of Western political theology? Because the conquest narrative helps legitimate political violence, particularly violent forms of nation building. Blood helps define the nation. Shared blood (“race”) tells us who is and is not a member of the nation. Aren’t the true Israelites the blood descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Aren’t they forbidden from intermarrying with other peoples? (21)

The real issue is not that the “apocalyptic” wants to define the American people as a particular race, one that includes and excludes, but that it is the wrong race. When Simon Bolivar denounced pardocratia, which he associated with the anarchy of unruly masses against the propertied and educated few, he was also aware of a particular ethnogenesis that had occurred in Spanish America. The pardo was one who was a blend of European, African, and Indio. It was this race that threatened to usurp Gran Colombia from criollos like Bolivar. In America, the term would be better defined as “People of Color,” one that globalizes and integrates the experiences of those whom Franz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” those victims so-called of Western imperialism and racism. Behind the juggling abstractions of “apocalypticism” and “literalism” that somehow define libertarianism as a form of authoritarian fascism, it is, simply, that this covenant between God and the American people was not those English men in the wilderness, but it originated with the first African slaves. The covenant and the republic begins with them.

W.E.B. Dubois understood this point when he rebuffed Yankees with their memorialization of Puritans and Plymouth. Gorski can barely contain himself in summarizing Dubois’ righteous indignation against “the city on the hill”:

“Your country?” he demanded. “How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here.” Following in the footsteps of the black abolitionists, he challenged the Puritans’ status as a chosen people. Were blacks not more like the Israelites? “Fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of right,” Du Bois thundered. Maybe it was the African Americans who were the real saving remnant, he mused. Maybe it was black righteousness that had shielded a white nation from divine retribution: “Generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse.” (120-121)

Progressives like Dubois would increasingly swell to dominate the mainstream, with civil rights becoming this civic religion. When MLK would criticize black radicals, like Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael, it was because they were bad at strategy. There was not going to be a global third-world revolution against to overthrow the “white power structure,” it was “fantasy” to think otherwise. Andrew Young, a black liberal who was Jimmy Carter’s UN Ambassador, praised King for this “Christian realism” (152). It is not hard to read between the lines and understand “realism” is an idealism chastened to act at the right pace to achieve maximal results. When Gorski lamented that Memorial Day became a national holiday to remember a tragic war between brothers, it was the black community that preserved “democratic republicanism” by remembering the war differently (which today has been nationally hallowed as Juneteenth). This counter-tradition, this prophetic civil religion, was the “gift of black folks” for the United States (100). Ultimately, it was the mingling of those misguided but well-meaning traditions of the West with the experiences of blacks slaves that has redefined the republic, a different people under a different covenant than Winthrop upon the Arbella.

This critical review may, for some, be disturbing. The attacks upon feminists or communists operate in the realm of ideas, that these defy American norms, that is easy enough. Easier still is reckoning the “apocalyptic” confrontations between the righteous and wicked in Scripture. There is no need for “textual literalism” to see Jerry Falwell’s denunciations of homosexuality as analogous to Isaiah’s attack upon the poles to Ashtoreh. But what about blood? The issue is not truly racism against antiracism, but the redefinition of things to achieve a global ethnogenesis, a community with a tradition that has one form in the arc from slavery to civil rights and beyond. It is this “living tradition with an evolving god” that then marks true civic religion of ecumenical universalism in the new age.

The Puritans were not averse to understanding things this way. Their covenanted towns segregated Indian converts to their own towns. The “Praying Towns” were under the authority of English law and norms, treated as Christians yet different. Puritans had no confusion of peoples, that when St Paul spoke of Greek and Jew as united in Christ, these races were not dissolved anymore than male or female. This republican style of government operated similar to multi-racial empires, where one race often imposed legal norms over others, even while there was relative permission to retain licit customs. The Holy Roman Empire imposed Frankish norms over others, even as these nations persisted. Nations like the Wampanoag and Abenaki were expected to conform, but they remained Indians, they did not become English. Blood remained paramount in Puritan towns for the simple reason that the Puritans read their Bible and understood themselves as the English in covenant with God to bring discipleship to the nations.

Of course, English is a composite identity formed through historical intermingling of Angles and Saxons, as well as with the native Britons and settled Romans, upon the British Isles. Races are historical, with some coming into existence and others fading. In America, that racial genesis involved being “white,” which marked the definition of American during the colonial period well into the twentieth century. It demarcated the method of assimilation, the Anglicization of European peoples (originally from the west, and to a limited extent from southern and eastern Europe). Christopher Columbus (not Cristobal Colon) became a symbol of Italians being assimilated into American. The reality of races is a historical phenomenon, the tree of Adam seeding into a massive forest over millennia, trees not all identical, relative in merit, not all blessed or pruned in the same manner. The social and the biological, the cultural and racial, are inextricably intertwined. Both have their ultimate existence from the God who called all peoples into existence, some with a noble harvest, others with a tiny remnant. Rahab stands near alone as the Canaanites received judgement.

Ultimately, the difference between religious left and religious right is genealogy, how the story is told between two ideas of two peoples. The contrived scaffolding between apocalyptic vs. prophetic, or literalism vs. allegorical, reflect an attempt to seize upon a form with a hostile content, where Puritans with their Bibles most certainly would not recognize the modern left as their descendants, anymore than the modern left would claim them as their forbearers. It is not only a question of ideas, but the people befit to them. The spirit quickens and gives life, but that life is in the blood.

When he took up his post as Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton would offer a comprehensive account of what must be done to preserve the Union of American republics. While each colony had pursued its own vision of economy, more often in conflict with Parliament than not, Hamilton conceived measures to keep this new federation from tearing apart. Like many of the Revolutionary generation, Hamilton cut his teeth on the Scottish Enlightenment, a mix of pessimism in the usual republic-of-letters circuit which praised Human reason and progress. Rather, many Scots enlighteners understood the ignorance and malevolence of men, how vanity and passion not only lead to destruction, but that these affects are natural to all men. Every race of man was prone to the tendency towards degeneration. Enlightened thought was the search for answers, in and out of the Reformed faith.

One of Hamilton’s primary foils in unfolding his vision was Adam Smith. It was not faith in humanity that motivated Smith’s thought, but the tendency of selfishness to correct itself, vanity and passion creating sociality in spite of themselves. The problem for Smith was “mercantilism,” that system of Whiggish state control over the economy that prevented contest through artifice. The Whigs were “neo-Machiavellian,” believing the world was zero-sum and the government must, through the “jealousy of trade,” rig the world-economy to benefit the English state against its rivals. Lesser nations must be placed in conditions where they became net-positive exporters, but also not hoarding English bullion (Istvan Hont, The Jealousy of Trade, 54-62). This required intervention and aggression, what John Brewer termed the “fiscal-military state” which saw England’s rise to continental hegemony.

Smith disdained this system not only because it lacked enterprise and entrepreneurs from the world of competition through artificial measures like licensing and chartered monopoly, empowering an oligarchy whose interests became identical with the state (e.g. shareholders in the Bank of England or the East India Company). This system also provoked war, which was, contrary to republican thought, not the health of the state, but its bane. The solution, as most cursory introductions to Smith emphasize, is a hands-off policy, to permit the flourishing of individual competition which, as if through an invisible hand, would be restrained to promote mutual prosperity. Selfishness could not be overcome, but it could be channeled.

The result was not necessarily an anarcho-capitalist paradise, or even the limited “nightwatchman state” that would later mark doctrinaire liberalism. Rather Smith, in a forecast of how liberalism itself would develop into the twentieth century, recommended government investment into national infrastructure (including schools) to allow this competition to develop. A turn to the natural (not artificial) liberties of trade required the state to not only defend property, but build public works:

All systems, either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which, no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works, and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual, or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society. (The Wealth of Nations, IV.9)

Nature could be manipulated, men can cheat natural law. The state had a role to enforce the rules of the market-place. Smith was never dreamy in his belief that this system could be imposed instantly from above, something he criticized Physiocrats (“a sect”) for failing to understand the constraints of Human nature (Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 99-105). However, Smith seemed to miss how the demands of this policy, the drive towards free-trade, would require an equally interventionist order, though one that will claim the name of Nature or global. This system would require an even more aggressive and interventionist fiscal-military state to prevent the slide away from free-trade. (Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 77-83). There was no escape from Human action in economy, it was always political economy. The difference was, ultimately, for what entity.

Another Scot that influenced Hamilton was David Hume, an enlightened Tory who despised the Whiggish oligarchy. Hume, however, was more concerned with the authority to course correct a government by money. The more money the state (which at Hume’s writing was the Imperial Parliament in Westminster) borrowed, the more power it gave to creditors. The more power creditors acquired, the more they would direct the state to enrich themselves further, particularly through war. Constant battle would cause social dislocation and unrest, eventually provoking social collapse (not unlike what had happened during the English Civil Wars and would soon occur in France). The only hope for Hume was a “patriot king,” a monarch that would repudiate the debt, even at risk of collapsing the economy, before a revolution swept all before it (Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 325-353). Once again, the passions must be actively checked, or lust would ruin the nation.

Hamilton took Hume somewhat to heart, but not entirely. As a Scot by blood, it was no surprise he would adopt their gloomy pessimism (seemingly out of place with the optimism of Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty”). However, contrary to Smith, selfishness could not offer its own corrective. The role of government, be that the states or the federal union, was to induce proper actions and educate. When Smith advocated public schools to prevent brutishness, Hamilton had more a vision for government to create incentives. It was not that the American Treasury would manage the economy, let alone own it, but to create the feeling and energy necessary for it to work in a positive direction. In particular, the wealth of a nation would be linked to its capacity for industry:

Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the [most] ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance and by slow gradations. The spontaneous transition to new pursuits, in a community long habituated to different ones, may be expected to be attended with proportionably greater difficulty. When former occupations ceased to yield a profit adequate to the subsistence of their followers, or when there was an absolute deficiency of employment in them, owing to the superabundance of hands, changes would ensue; but these changes would be likely to be more tardy than might consist with the interest either of individuals or of the Society. In many cases they would not happen, while a bare support could be ensured by an adherence to ancient courses; though a resort to a more profitable employment might be practicable. To produce the desireable changes, as early as may be expedient, may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government.

The apprehension of failing in new attempts is perhaps a more serious impediment. There are dispositions apt to be attracted by the mere novelty of an undertaking—but these are not always those best calculated to give it success. To this, it is of importance that the confidence of cautious sagacious capitalists both citizens and foreigners, should be excited. And to inspire this description of persons with confidence, it is essential, that they should be made to see in any project, which is new, and for that reason alone, if, for no other, precarious, the prospect of such a degree of countenance and support from government, as may be capable of overcoming the obstacles, inseperable from first experiments.

The superiority antecedently enjoyed by nations, who have preoccupied and perfected a branch of industry, constitutes a more formidable obstacle, than either of those, which have been mentioned, to the introduction of the same branch into a country, in which it did not before exist. To maintain between the recent establishments of one country and the long matured establishments of another country, a competition upon equal terms, both as to quality and price, is in most cases impracticable. The disparity in the one, or in the other, or in both, must necessarily be so considerable as to forbid a successful rivalship, without the extraordinary aid and protection of government.

But the greatest obstacle of all to the successful prosecution of a new branch of industry in a country, in which it was before unknown, consists, as far as the instances apply, in the bounties premiums and other aids which are granted, in a variety of cases, by the nations, in which the establishments to be imitated are previously introduced. It is well known (and particular examples in the course of this report will be cited) that certain nations grant bounties on the exportation of particular commodities, to enable their own workmen to undersell and supplant all competitors, in the countries to which those commodities are sent. Hence the undertakers of a new manufacture have to contend not only with the natural disadvantages of a new undertaking, but with the gratuities and remunerations which other governments bestow. To be enabled to contend with success, it is evident, that the interference and aid of their own government are indispensible.

Combinations by those engaged in a particular branch of business in one country, to frustrate the first efforts to introduce it into another, by temporary sacrifices, recompensed perhaps by extraordinary indemnifications of the government of such country, are believed to have existed, and are not to be regarded as destitute of probability. The existence or assurance of aid from the government of the country, in which the business is to be introduced, may be essential to fortify adventurers against the dread of such combinations, to defeat their effects, if formed and to prevent their being formed, by demonstrating that they must in the end prove fruitless. (Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures)

If there was an invisible hand for Hamilton, that hand was inertia and it too could be spurred by outsiders seeking to wreak ruin on the new American republic. Hamilton’s nationalism was not egalitarian or flattening, as if each state or section had identical people. However, if this union was to persevere, with respect to each state and each section, then the federal government must have the power to create incentives to bind together as one. The role of government was to create the desire to be free that would allow the American people, continuously, to resist degeneration and idleness. As one Hamilton biographer, Francis McDonald, summarized his vision:

The function of government should be to promote a general spirit of improvement. It should reward productivity and punish dissipation, idleness, and extravagance. Taxes should be designed to encourage industry, never to impede it. Regulation of productive activity should be confined to inspection to prevent frauds and ensure the highest quality and marketability of products. If such policies were adhered to, every member of society would gain — the poor as well as the rich, the farmer as well as the manufacturer and merchant (Francis McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography, 235)

It was for this reason that Hamilton, against Hume, rejected the idea of defaulting on debt (particularly the war bonds sold by the Continental Congress during the war, many ending up in the hands of financiers). To default on the debt would not only lead to possible capital flight from America, but it would induce an unwillingness to advance. On this point, enemies of Hamilton, ranging from the suspicions of Jeffersonians through Charles Beard’s accusation of class interest, accuse him of greed. The Hamiltonian vision was simply the Whig oligarchy redux, with Hamilton as a new Robert Walpole, the greasy first “Prime Minister” of Great Britain. But Hamilton was fully aware of this danger. It was a dangerous game, in the waning decades of the eighteenth century, to court Great Britain’s wealth without falling under its influence. It was only if the federal union was dynamic in guiding and protecting the various state that the United States could become a great power. It was the birth of a “market-state,” a government over governments as part of a custom’s union and shared source of credit, before the letter.

A major plank in Hamilton’s system was the use of tariffs. Though Hamilton disliked overwhelming protectionist policies, which could retard industry or create self-complacency by reliance on the state, the tariff was a way to combat foreign influence. Hamilton personally preferred the use of temporary and precise subsidies, “bounties,” to defend nascent industries under attack. The tariff would become a core issue in American politics, but its early supporters not only included fellow Federalists, but even Hamilton’s great political foe, Thomas Jefferson. While he despised the use of state power in the economy, Jefferson was not ignorant about the needs of national defense from subversion abroad:

Where a Nation imposes high Duties on our productions, or prohibits them altogether, it may be proper for us to do the same by theirs, first burthening or excluding those productions which they bring here, in competition with our own of the same kind; selecting next such manufactures, as we take from them in greatest quantity, and which at the same time we could the soonest furnish to ourselves, or obtain from other Countries; imposing on them duties, lighter at first, but heavier and heavier afterwards, as other channels of supply open. Such duties having the effect of indirect encouragement to domestic Manufactures of the same kind, may induce the Manufacturer to come himself into these States, where cheaper subsistence, equal laws, and a vent of his wares, free of duty, may ensure him the highest profits from his skill and Industry. And here, it would be in the power of the State-Governments to co-operate, essentially, by opening the resources of encouragement which are under their controul, extending them liberally to Artists in those particular Branches of manufacture, for which their Soil, Climate, Population, and other Circumstances, have matured them and fostering the precious efforts and progress of household manufacture by some patronage suited to the nature of it’s objects, guided by the local informations they possess and guarded against abuse by their presence and attentions. The oppressions on our agriculture in foreign ports would thus be made the occasion of relieving it from a dependence on the Councils and conduct of others, and of promoting Arts, Manufactures, and Population, at home (Thomas Jefferson, Report on Commerce).

Jefferson was no liberal or doctrinaire free-trader, but remained aware of that republican concern about the “jealousy of trade” that animated states to wage war by other means necessary. In this case, beyond the division of American history between Hamilton and Jefferson, there was concord on the need to protect America’s industries, and industriousness, from collapsing into torpor from corruption abroad.

These commitments would inspire the next generation of American political economy. Against Southerners who yearned to preserve their squirearchy (known often as the “Tertium Quid”) and New Englanders unwilling to diminish their mercantile dominance (a sectional elite that had ceased to be Puritan and rapidly became Episcopalian or Unitarian), the self-professed National Republicans, carrying the torch of both Federalists and Jeffersonians, would advance a version of Hamilton’s vision. The focus moved away from philosophy and anthropology towards a more concrete set of proposals. The purpose was to develop America as a market to itself, with roads to connect the states, tariffs to prevent outside interference, and credit to fund these operations. Though later critical of how these policies unfolded, John Calhoun lauded these efforts as a means to growth “to every capitalist however inconsiderable” (quoted in Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy, 148).

Without this internal market, America could easily become a pawn to more powerful nations. The paranoia of British subterfuge was widespread, and at times exaggerated, but it was not unjustified. Advocates of what would be termed as “the American System” were aware of an infamous quote from Whig MP, Henry Broughman, in a parliamentary speech:

“It was well worth while [for Britain] to incur a loss upon the first exportation in order by the glut to stifle in the cradle those rising manufacturers in the United States which the war had forced into existence contrary to the usual course of things” (quoted in Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War, 34-38)

It was for this reason that the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed, not only a statement about the independence of Spanish America from its metropole, but the aspiration to gain control of the hemisphere. Britain was no mere European power, but the global power to which America would eventually contest throughout the nineteenth century. This vision had many critics (including the Tertium Quid and quondam Federalist Ultras in New England), and it would gain many more as corruption in the federal government raised questions over its accountability. Yet even the rising tide of criticism about a national bank, national internal improvements, and high tariffs did not stifle the original concern. It was Senator Andrew Jackson whose vote passed the 1824 tariff that created higher rates of protection on Pennsylvanian steel and coal. The tariff was to protect the average American laborer from being swamped (Bolt, Tariff Wars and the Politics of Jacksonian America, 49-51).

Thus, when the issue of tariffs came up in Congress, it was this shared commitment that drove Henry Clay, the champion of the American System, to appeal to the President against a growing interest in free-trade. Clay appealed to this shared defense of national political economy against those like former Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin, who increasingly embraced free-trade as a natural system of prosperity (even if it favors, at least for a time, British industry). Clay denounced these proposals with venom and fire:

When gentlemen have succeeded in their design of an immediate or gradual destruction of the American System, what is their substitute? Free trade! Free trade! The call for free trade, is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child, in its nurse’s arms, for the moon or the stars that glitter in the firmament of heaven. It never has existed; it never will exist. Trade implies at least two parties. To be free, it should be fair, equal, and reciprocal. But if we throw our ports wide open to the admission of foreign productions, free of all duty, what ports, of any other foreign nation, shall we find open to the free admission of our surplus produce? We may break down all barriers to free trade on our part, but the work will not be complete until foreign powers shall have removed theirs. There would be freedom on one side, and restrictions, prohibitions, and exclusions, on the other. The bolts, and the bars, and the chains, of all other nations will remain undisturbed. It is, indeed, possible that our industry and commerce would accommodate themselves to this unequal and unjust state of things: for such is the flexibility of our nature, that it bends itself to all circumstances. The wretched prisoner, incarcerated in a jail, after a long time, becomes reconciled to his solitude, and regularly notches down the passing days of his confinement. Gentlemen deceive themselves. It is not free trade that they are recommending to our acceptance. It is, in effect, the British colonial system that we are invited to adopt; and, if their policy prevail, it will lead substantially to the recolonization of these states, under the commercial dominion of Great Britain. (Henry Clay, In Defense of the American System)

Tariffs would prevent foreign industry from sweeping away America’s industrialization. However, part of the American System was not merely the negative effort to prevent foreign meddling, it was also a positive prescription. If America pursued entrepreneurship and industry, as opposed to merely rent-seeking, then it needed a source of credit to encourage investment. It was for this reason that the heirs of Jefferson, including even James Madison, embraced a national bank. Hamilton’s original idea was that a source of reliable and stable credit, particularly through a public debt, would promote bullish investment:

Ultimately, the only way to establish public credit was in the marketplace, and the marketplace dealt in beliefs as well as facts. As Hamilton put it, “in nothing are appearances of greater moment, than in whatever regards credit. Opinion is the soul of it, and this is affected by appearances as well as realities.” If the market prices of government securities could be raised to their par value by any means whatever, the investing public would be convinced that public credit had been established; and if and when investors believed public credit had been established, it would ipso facto be established. (McDonald, Alexander Hamilton, 164)

What originally divided Clay and Jackson (originally) among other “Soft Money” Democrats was where the power of credit creation resided. A national bank, if in the wrong hands, could paralyze as much as it inspired. When the renewal of the Bank of the United States came to an early vote, it had already produced about 40% of the paper currency in circulation (Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, 365). The bank’s stability could be an anchor for investment or become a tool of a rent-seeking oligarchy. For some Americans, all forms of paper credit empowered oligarchs and the only form of money should be in specie, where no government could manipulate credit. This policy not only ignored how Great Britain advocated the gold-standard because it controlled the gold, but it also sapped means of advancement. Jackson would later be won over to the “Hard Money” side of the Democracy, and would implement a policy that, in terms of the South, would kick down the ladder from poor whites:

Furthermore, at the request of Andrew Jackson, Congress had passed the Specie Circular Act in 1836, making it much harder for poorer farmers to purchase land. The act stipulated that the government would accept only gold or silver for land sales. Even banknotes were turned down, meaning that middling and poorer Americans could no longer buy on credit. Saving enough to buy land outright – especially good quality farmland – became extremely difficult for Americans who started life out with little or no wealth inheritance. And as land values rose, it was harder to parcel land out to multiple beneficiaries. This land shortage meant that many sons of yeomen farmers began their adult lives without owning any kind of real estate, causing them to fall into the category of poor white laborers and tenants (Keri Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, 47).

The California Gold Rush and the War (through both the Union and the Confederacy utilizing fiat paper currency and Treasury bonds) would forestall the impact of this credit crunch. The problem was the perennial question of how Spain became so rich in gold and silver and yet was so poor in the eighteenth century. How could a public be animated towards industry? This “spirit of capitalism” that Weber described was not found in finance, despite being the arch-capitalists in most eras. It was in the industriousness of small burghers, who sought to innovate and improve, to experiment and explore. The tendency of the great houses of capital was to rent-seek, often quite cautiously. The Hamiltonian vision against man’s inertia, corruptibility, and laziness was to inspire a spirit to not merely labor, but to create. If the government did not create incentives to enslave finance to industry, then industry would likely suffer enthrallment to finance.

It is common knowledge that Abraham Lincoln was disciple of Henry Clay and advocate for the American System. The South too had nationalists, even if Southern nationalist led away from the Union towards a new federation. Jefferson Davis was a disciple of John Calhoun, who has often been confused for an abstract apologist for states rights and limited government. Calhoun, however, remained a nationalist all his life, though one increasingly focused on a union limited to the slave-holding South. Davis as a Calhounite would advocate industrial development, the use of public credit, and a realism towards conflict with Great Britain as the great hemispheric threat to an independent South (Jeffrey Zwengrowski, Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 27-48).

Against this vision, Davis and other Calhounites contended against the Southern version of New England mercantilists, men who imagined Charleston as part of an international system of free-trade, with loyalty to Liverpool’s textile mills as much as to a Confederate customs-union. Virginians were mostly opposed to this planter agronomic oligarchy for industrial developments, arguing that the Confederate Congress adopt a 15-20% tariff on their coal and steel (a rate that was much more Hamiltonian and less protectionist than the Union). Planters resisted these efforts damaging trade relations with Great Britain. Calhounites had to dance on the edge of a knife, depending on British purchasing of cotton without becoming enslaved to their capital (John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation, 108-139). It was for this reason that Davis, prior to the War, supported William Walker’s coup d’etat in Nicaragua. An American government would roll back the financial influence of Great Britain throughout the hemisphere (Zwengrowski, Jefferson Davis, Napoleonic France, and the Nature of Confederate Ideology, 49-67).

With the defeat of the Confederacy and the defeat of Reconstruction, the task of the grand customs union continued apace. Railroads crisscrossed the Continent, tying together the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, knitting together the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande. The struggle was now to advance American interests in a shrinking world of truly global empires. As Alfred Thayer Mahan schooled another generation of statesmen, the sea was the source of power. Lose the sea, lose your freedom. American growth required the means to protect the sea lanes. President Rutherford B Hayes and Secretary of State James Blaine would advocate further rollback of British interests and securing the hemisphere. As a precursor to the Organization of American States, Blaine would attempt greater cooperation through the International Conference of American States, utilizing soft power and diplomacy. The goal for Republican administrations, stretching from Hayes to Benjamin Harrison, was to acquire Hawaii, Samoa, the Panamanian isthmus, as well as other key locations for coal stations and naval bases (Marc-William Palen, The ‘Conspiracy’ of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896, 94-102). President McKinley won on a commitment to retain this strategy, something that continued to mark the Republican Party into the 1930s.

The movement against the American System continued. Some advocacy for tariff reform reflected the fear (and reality) of unfavorable reciprocal tariffs on American goods. Many farmers who joined the populist movement desired tariff reform (Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade, 239-245). However others had embraced a more Smithian defense of free-trade, in part because of idealistic commitments to world-harmony against the aggression of empires. Their argument was these customs unions, with Britain nearly turning its white colonies into one, would lead to catastrophic war. However the desire to prevent this catastrophic war and customs union reciprocal tariffs would also require war. There was also a commitment to Anglo-Saxon civilization, something that could unite the United States and British Empire, which free-trade represented.

That was what the Council on Foreign Relations hoped to bring about, uniting the two, or perhaps America operating as the successor state to maintain a free-trade empire into the twentieth century. Edwin Gay, dean of Harvard Business School and the only academic in the original CFR, put it bluntly: “When I think of the British Empire as our inheritance, I think simply of the natural right of succession. That ultimate succession is inevitable” (Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: the CFR and US Foreign Policy, 11-19).

This Anglo-American commitment to the system of free-trade (which meant an Anglo-American global zone) motivated the demand to war with Germany, the great continental rival whose customs’ union threatened to block British hegemony from Europe. The interests of the British Empire took a second place behind a commitment to a global system, one that would sit upon America’s shoulders to uphold. The presidency of Franklin Roosevelt would reorient American political economy substantially towards this vision. Despite being elected on a kind of economic nationalism, FDR’s commitment to free-trade became clear in the Trade Agreement Act and the chartering of the Export-Import Bank in 1934 (Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 25-28). The Century Group, an adjunct to the CFR, nudged Americans to support Britain against Germany once again (Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 123-137). The postwar order continued these policies through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, both of which protected and promoted free-trade (Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 166-169).

In a matter of course, Smith’s vision won out, producing not world peace but an even more aggressive world-empire, committed to trade more than industry (except as an adjunct to trade). The “mercantilism” that Smith despised as a form of crude rent-seeking reappeared. The system of free-trade became more important than the energy of a people. The organism was sacrificed to a strange machine. There was also a problem of sustainability. When the postwar order cracked up, when America could no longer operate as the world, members of the CFR split between those who would rather save American political economy and those who would rather save the system of free-trade. The Trilateral Commission, with David Rockefeller and Zbignew Brzezinski as key architects, accepted that the interests of Americans within a customs union were subordinate to the interests of the global economy. Trade had to be depoliticized (Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 262-274).

However, plenty of Americans, across the political spectrum, have grown in opposition to this globalism. Even though Reagan was elected to remove regulation and cut taxes, he also engaged in a massive trade-war against Japan (one of the sides in the Trilateral system). The Trump tariffs have also restored a wider awareness that trade is political and other countries may rip each other off. The original vision for the American System still remains paramount in understanding that, whether as a Christian or a naturalist, men are governed by their imaginations, they are susceptible to noble intentions and the lust for filthy lucre. It is in the hands of men, through the cunning of Providence, to resist the slide into decay and advance through the halls of time.

“Before creation there must be destruction. If my soul stands in the way, then I'll toss it aside. Yes, I have no choice but to move forward.”

President Woodrow Wilson won reelection in 1916 because “he kept us out of the war.” Then, in 1917, in response to the disastrous Zimmerman Telegram and Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, Wilson sought a declaration of war, seemingly giving into the Anglomania war fever of imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge.

Why?

Was Wilson a tool of international capitalists and banking clans, the same who some suspected of starting the war for gain? Or was Wilson enthralled to the British, luring the American public to support a conflict that, seemingly, had nothing to do with their interests? And what was the League of Nations anyway? Was it a harebrained idealist scheme to create one-world government as its critics claimed?

The short answer: No on all charges. Wilson was not an idealist (nor a realist) and he was not ensnared to any but his own conscience. He pursued an ideal that ultimately failed, but offers a vision today for America’s role in the world. It is a paradigm that should inform America’s future relationship not only with Europe, but also, in conclusion, with Latin America. The idea of the League of Nations is a paradigm, though deeply misunderstood, to advance out of the current darkness.

It is important, first, to clear up misconceptions. Wilson was undoubtedly an Anglophile. He admired the premiership of William Gladstone, but his anchor was the political philosophy of Edmund Burke. He rejected the “Whig” view of “Newtonian” government, the state as a machine that could be adjusted at whim. Rather, government reflected the nation as an organic entity, one that grew out of the people it oversaw (Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 54-55). That, however, did not collapse American interests into British interests, even as the two people shared common heritage and virtues. The American nation grew apart, and its own history had carved a very different future with a different canon of heroes. It was why Wilson would praise democracy, though in a way many contemporary anti-Wilsonians may find surprising:

I do not believe in a democratic form of government because I think it the best form of government. It is the clumsiest form of government in the world. If you wanted to make a merely effective government you would make it of fewer persons. If you wanted to invent a government that would act with speed and quick force, you would be doing a clumsy thing to make it democratic in structure. That is not purposed to be the best form, but to have the best sources.

Did you ever think how the world managed politically to get through the middle ages? It got through them without breakdown because it had the Roman Catholic Church to draw upon for native gifts, and by no other means that I can see. If you will look at the politics of the middle ages you will see that states depended for their guidance upon great ecclesiastics, and they depended upon them because the community itself was in strata, was in classes, and the Roman Catholic Church was a great democracy. Any peasant could become a priest, and any priest a chancellor. And this reservoir of democratic power and native ability was what brought the middle ages through their politics. If they had not had a democratic supply of capacity they could not have conducted a sterile aristocratic polity. An aristocratic polity goes to seed. The establishment of a democratic nation means that any man in it may, if he consecrate himself and use himself in the right way, come to be the recognized instrument of a whole nation. It is an incomparable resourceful arrangement, though it is not the best practical organization of government. (Woodrow Wilson, Robert E. Lee: An Interpretation).

The purpose of democracy was not efficient government, but the conditions to allow national genius to coalesce even amongst the most humble. The lack of class meant any man, through his power and charisma, may ascend to the highest ranks of leadership. Wilson’s apology was not an argument for equality, but the possibility of the great man.

It was also a criticism of aristocracy, often degenerating into a self-interested dysgenic oligarchy, that perverted a nation’s greatness. Britain and Germany both had enshrined plutocrats that dominated their governments, and Wilson never conceded his general wariness of the dominant European powers. When the Great War began, Wilson was sympathetic to the Entente because of German brutality towards the Belgians and the subversion of their national sovereignty. Nevertheless, Wilson was no less hostile to the British when brutally repressed the Irish in the Easter Uprising of 1916. As Wilson put it: England had the Earth and Germany wanted it (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 343). Despite Wilson’s reliance on Colonel Edward House, a man he often called his second self, Wilson distanced himself increasingly from the wily Texan when the President learned of his deceit. In short, House sold Wilson as an Anglophile interventionist secretly, in spite of Wilson’s reservations about support for Britain (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 295). In all things, as the President told the press, the policy was “America First,” a term he coined that would later be used against him (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 278).

So why did he change? Wilson did not enter the war for democracy and had no interest to impose democracy on any nation, as some nations were not fit for this form of government (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 431-432). Wilson also did not enter the war as an eager ally of the Entente, with the American Expeditionary Force operating under its own separate command (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 402). It was the case that German aggression, in Mexico and on the high seas, eventually forced Wilson’s hand. But that does not explain why Wilson sought war, what he hoped to gain. It was, ultimately, to bring the Monroe Doctrine to its full form:

On January 22, 1917, the president delivered his “peace without victory” address to the Senate. The war must be ended on terms that would establish, declared Wilson, “not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace.” The only way to achieve that end was through “a peace without victory. It is not pleasant to say this ... I am seeking only to face realities and to face them without soft concealments. Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser” and would therefore “rest only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.” Wilson hoped to establish such a peace through “an equality of rights” among nations. The indispensable right was self-government, he contended, “not because of any abstract principle . . .but for the same reason that I have spoken of the other conditions of peace which seem to me clearly indispensable—because I wish frankly to uncover realities. Any peace which does not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably be upset. It will not rest upon the affections and convictions of mankind.”

Wilson also proposed to build lasting peace upon the free use of the seas for commerce and upon relief from the burdens and dangers of excessive armament. Above all, he pledged “that the people and government of the United States will join the other civilized nations of the world in guaranteeing the permanence of peace upon such terms as I have named.” Wilson closed with an argument intended to disarm domestic critics. “I am proposing, as it were,” he asserted, “that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world ... I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power; catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own affairs with influences obtruded from without. There is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. When all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose all act in the common interest and are free to live their own lives under a common protection.” These were, Wilson insisted, “American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others.” Since they were also desired by “forward looking men and women everywhere,” these were “the principles of mankind and must prevail” (Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 313).

Contrary to conservative critics of Wilson, he had not begun a new form of American imperial internationalism (something that bubbled to the surface during the administrations of McKinley and Roosevelt). Rather, Wilson fulfilled the essence of the Monroe Doctrine, not to entangle America in one set of European powers against another, but to end entanglement altogether. The American cry — “Lafayette, we are here!” — reflected Wilson’s vision, it was time to unite Europe around a new and lasting peace, one that flowed from the bosom of Columbia. If Wilson’s intervention had any parallel, it was Metternich’s Concert of Europe to reset affairs after the revolutionary fires of Jacobinism and Bonaparte. America did not enter the Great War to change human nature or unleash an ideological end to all war. Rather, it was in recognition of man’s frailty and sinfulness that a new international order, among civilized peoples, could bring collective justice and prosperity. Wilson did not want the war, but he would risk all in the strife:

Wilson’s basic argument in the war address was analogous to Luther’s contention. In trying to make the world freer, more just, and more peaceful, both he and the United States confronted the sin of the World War. Yet, as he argued, continued armed neutrality would result in much of the destruction of war without the advantage of being able to influence the war’s conduct and aims. Wilson’s choice, therefore, was not the possibly lesser, but also less promising, evil of staying out. Rather, for the sake of greater leverage in pursuing his international program, he would “sin boldly” by going into the war. He made the decision, not as a Nietzschean Priest or Superman, but as the protagonist in a Christian tragedy (Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 323).

As the title of Cooper’s work suggests, Wilson did not fit the Nietzschean paradigm of charismatic genius. He was not the warrior, but neither was Roosevelt, who was more the blustering and scheming priest who used the name of God to advance his own interests (it was unclear if Roosevelt even believed in the existence of God or an afterlife, despite his frequent use of KJV English; Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, 88). Wilson was reserved and he did not dare to casually invoke the Bible to advance his political aims. Rather, like the prince of a Trauerspiel, Wilson risked his reputation and his very soul in a bid to bring about a true peace, one not forced upon one set of Europeans by another. American power and American distance could bring all to the table, England and France as well as Germany and Austria (even Russia), to forge a new settlement.

This mutuality did not mean neutrality. Wilson blamed the Second Reich for the ravages of France and Belgium, and it was they that must bend the knee to the Entente. The Germans must remove their armies from the field and cease their attacks upon commerce. Wilson, however, did not want to punish or ruin the Germans. There was no talk of invasion, let alone unconditional surrender. It was the ultimate decision of the German people to determine their own future, one that would only happen through diplomacy (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 444). War was the ugly sin of directing this process, not letting Europeans butcher themselves until none were left. America had a role to fulfill in brokering a peace, and Wilson risked America’s soul in the contest.

America won, the Central Powers ended the war, and Wilson failed. The story of the League’s rise and fall is commonplace. The French scorned the Fourteen Points as more onerous than the Ten Commandments, Wilson more demanding than God. The British rejected any idea that the seas did not belong to them. Wilson’s good-will and lack of experience (in spite of The Inquiry, an expert team to compile policy dossiers on all the powers involved) doomed his efforts. The treachery of Colonel House left the British delegation incensed that Wilson had no intention to posture as the victor over the defeated. The French wanted blood, bearing a hatred of Germans unmatched until the Red Army and the Morgenthau Plan in the Second World War. The border realignment with Italy failed, setting the stage for the 1920s. The Ottoman Empire was carved into Protectorates that the victorious powers would fail to maintain, ultimately creating the conditions of Middle East chaos today. The Entente shattered the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in spite of Wilson’s effort to retain the polity (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 395). The settlement of the Great War reflected less Wilson than David Lloyd George, who coined the phrases “the war to end all wars” and “self-determination” for the new states of a deimperialized Europe (Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography, 6).

The idea of a League of Nations survived, but the American public rejected it (with imperialists, like Lodge, switching to isolationists out of cynicism). Wilson had his final, debilitating stroke, and while his subordinates broke the power of the reds in the United States, his vision was dashed. In his last days, still frustrated with the stupidity of French wrath, Wilson predicted that one day soon another Bismarck would appear in Germany and this time France would be steamrolled for good. Then that day came, the new Germany departed from the League of Nations, and the toothless body came to an end. Wilson’s dream incinerated in the conflagration that Wilson had fought to prevent.

Liberals have claimed Wilson as the progenitor for the United Nations, that feckless impotent chamber of internationalists, but that is far from true. First, the United Nations is clearly structured as a postwar spheres-of-influence foreign policy that Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, advocated. The security council was intended to be a means for the Allies to govern the world, something that eroded into the Cold War tit-for-tat. Secondly, the United Nations did not have qualifications for membership, which was early married to the American policy of decolonization. While the nineteenth century brought the nadir of colonial empire, with all the hopes of uplift and regeneration belied through uprisings and self-criticism. Wilson did not favor naked dominance of non-European peoples, though that did not mean they had a right to govern themselves or possessed peer status to sit in a concert of power (Wilson was opposed to Japanese equality with the League nations). Third, even more importantly, the League of Nations did not come with a policy of economic globalization. There was no talk of a Bretton Woods agreement to strap Europe to dollarization. Rather, the Bank of International Settlements would have likely come about to continue a mutuality between the various powers of Europe, good or ill.

It is precisely because globalism has failed (the postwar order’s transmutation from Bretton Woods to Trilateralism), it is precisely because the United Nations is worthless, that Wilson’s dream should not be forgotten. It is easy for Americans to posture as isolationists, but the interests of Americans (as a people) cannot forget or ignore the needs of Europe. This need is not only for economic purposes, though the tendency towards widgit protectionism (i.e. to onshore industrial wage jobs in America because they’re jobs) would plunge America into the nadir of Kirchnerismo. Free trade with other western peoples, markets opened to American production, is a positive good. However, the concern is also in terms of culture and foreign policy. The performative scorn that some online Americans indulge is counter-productive. Americans should not laugh at Europeans struggling against demographic and cultural crises, especially as America’s foreign policy establishment (especially under Clinton and Obama) has driven political alternatives to the blob out of the political mainstream, even to the point of targeted prosecution.

The League of Nations was an attempt at confederated mutuality, America providing the balance to unite Europe. Obviously, this disposition involves a high view of America and Americans, a nobility of spirit and intentions, that not a few Europeans may find haughty if not ridiculous. It may not have much empirical evidence, but it is an aspiration in the genius of the nation, one that produced men like Sergeant Alvin York of Tennessee and continues to create American heroes today. It is to reject both chauvinism and retreat, let alone their loathsome combination which has reared its visage during the Carter and Obama administrations. Nationalism has a higher end beyond itself, the freedom and prosperity of nations maintained through cooperation towards a shared civilizational end.

In ecclesiastical terms that may have sat in the recesses of Wilson’s soul: it was neither the imperialism of the papacy nor the retreat to a national church-structure as some Anglicans have pursued. Rather it was a confederation of sister churches that supported one another in their plurality. It was the Reformed consensus that could unite Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Scots, Swiss, and imperial Germans to issue a dogmatic statement in the Synod of Dort. Per political theology, concepts of church reflect concepts of states and vice versa. It is Christian nations in cooperation, brothers dwelling in peace, that will bring shared prosperity and justice to all involved.

The League offers a way forward, not simply contempt for America or neglect for American friends abroad. It is for this reason that a similar model should form America’s partnership with Latin America, a concert of power that is dedicated to the same civilizational aim without confusion or conflation. America plays the role of the keystone: a burden that may easily be resented or abused, but it is a burden that must be risked. A neo-Wilsonian League for the Americas constitutes the coalescence of what shall be called “the Pan-American Network,” a concept that will become more important as the century unfolds. It is neither swinging a big stick nor groveling for being a bad neighbor, but is the alliance of mutual support and trade, towards a similar end of national leaderships derived from a similar heritage.

It is hard to say what Wilson would make of the contemporary world. But his vision should not be abandoned. It is, perhaps, the only workable future.

America needed a national exorcism after Obama’s second term and Willy’s Wonderland delivered a cinematic expurgation. An absurd slasher film, utilizing standard tropes almost like a genre parody, Willy’s Wonderland combines horror, action, and black comedy into a masterpiece that serves as a backwards look on America and its filth, demanding retribution. Like the silent and nameless protagonist (played by Nicolas Cage and listed as “The Janitor”), only an outsider in the twisted end of the twentieth century can sever the ties of darkness.

The plot is very simple and the writing sub-par. After witnessing the brutal death of a couple at the hands of murderous animatronics, a stranger in a Camaro runs over a spike strip in Anywhere, USA (Hayesville, Nevada, a location that has little to do with the plot). A tow truck “happens” upon the traveler and gives him a ride, informing him he can fix the car for a few thousand, but only in cash (he does not trust credit cards and the ATM does not work because the town does not have internet because they just don’t). This ridiculous set-up is to get this nobody to work a night at Willy’s Wonderland, a Chuck E. Cheese-esque playhouse that is an homage to the popular horror-survival game Five Nights at Freddy’s. The victim is not intended to survive and his car will be added to the personal collection of the owner (a ten-gallon hat snake oil salesman named Tex MacAdoo).

As the town’s sheriff later explains: the animatronics require constant human sacrifice so they do not then feed upon the people of the town. Forgettable outsiders, especially of a low moral character, are offered to Willy and his gang as part of their mutual pact. These animatronics were once humans, a gang of pedophiles and serial killers assembled under Jerry Willis, the original owner. After a spree of rapes and murders, the numerous missing children and strange smells summoned the police to arrest Willis, but, before they could, the gang had committed ritual suicide in a bid to transfer their souls, in a Satanic ceremony, to inanimate bodies. Thus they became the mascots of the playhouse and feasted upon the witless townspeople. This movie, however, is not a survivor horror story.

The deuteroprotagonist, Liv, was the little girl of the murdered couple. The sheriff, a world-weary old hag, felt compassion on the girl and raised her as her own. This guardianship, however, was resented (to keep Liv from screwing around with Willy’s, the sheriff handcuffed her to a radiator and left her some chips and a bucket). Nevertheless, Liv persisted and got her clueless townie friends to join her in burning down the creepy evil Willy’s Wonderland. The group is a standard stock of slasher tropes: the jock, the slut, the nerd, the protector, and the extra (though, defying the usual gag, it’s a white guy, not black, who dies first). Before they light the match, Liv notices the Janitor inside and begs him to escape. He is disinterested. Perplexed, Liv enters into Willy’s to discover that this man was no sacrificial lamb, but a reckoning.

The Janitor is mute, stoic, and possesses an immaculate work ethic. Even when it is clear that the building is infested with murderous robots, and he has been tricked, the Janitor continues to work. He mops, polishes, sweeps, trashes, wipes, and organizes, punctuated with the occasional break (following the advice from Tex to not work so hard). After beating the first animatronic to death and ripping out its mechanical spine, he gets back to the job. One after another, the Janitor slays them, changing his employee shirt every time it gets stained with the oily blood of the machines. It is never a competition (though he bandages himself with duct tape). Even the final boss, Willy, is nothing. The Janitor receives a beating, rearms with taped together sticks and a bag of sodas, and beats Willy to death, severing his head. Instead of Liv and her friends saving this witless victim, the Janitor puts an end to Willy’s once and for all. However, he saves neither the complicit townsfolk, who are brutally killed when they come upon the animatronics, nor Liv’s friends, who are systematically killed as they tried to help Liv (though their entrance into the building was an accident). With the town judged, the Janitor, with Liv as his apparent ward, drives out onto the open road on the wings Skynyrd. The end.

Willy’s Wonderland is not interesting for its plot, dialogue, character development (there is none), or cinematography. It is a vignette of mythical Americana, a symbol of rejecting the malaise of Obamunism and turning to an undisclosed future.

In Obama’s first campaign, the fairly unknown Senator from Illinois kindled the sparks of Populism into a rhetorical revolt from the Elite. It was Main Street against Wall Street (which Fox News, ignorantly, called class warfare). Republicans and other Free-Traders had opened the borders to depress the wages of American workers. The nation was ruined through endless wars in the Middle East (though Obama was careful to distinguish the good war in Afghanistan from the war-for-oil in Iraq). Predictably, Obama rode the wave of anti-Bush and anti-establishment sentiment into the White House, even capturing red states like Indiana and North Carolina.

Obama’s first term was a struggle against the superficially libertarian Tea Party, which was motivated against government bail outs for large reckless corporations more than Austrian economics. Obama had signaled, through his administrative selections (relying on old Clinton hands like Larry Summers) and his uncritical acceptance of the TARP Act (2008), he was no different. He was a “neoliberal,” a Clinton Democrat that was indistinguishable from the Bush people, fiscally conservative and socially ambivalent, committed to an internationalist globalist foreign and economic policy.

Occupy Wall Street from the left and the Tea Party from the right, both failed to unseat Obama or substantively restrain his agenda. Republicans could be blamed to marshal leftist voters for something closer to universal healthcare. Democrats were blamed for introducing death-panels and a rebirth of totalitarian Leninist-Hitlerist thought under the guise of an Islamic atheist. The end result was Obama’s uncontested renomination and the Republican nomination of Mitt Romney, a formerly liberal governor of Massachusetts who first introduced Obamacare at the state level. According to Jane Meyer’s book (Dark Money) on the Koch Brothers and their involvement in the Tea Party, Obama had to pull back the staffers who wanted unleash sentiment against the “vulture capitalism” of Romney when he was CEO of Bain Capital, a notorious line-go-up asset stripper firm. Obama wanted to win, but not to destabilize his continuation of the same. Many rustbelters, the same who had voted for Obama at least once and would later vote for Trump in 2016, could only hang their heads and shrug.

It was only after 2012, when the opposition died, that the truth of Obamunism emerged. He was not a Populist, but an idiot contortion of The West Wing’s Jed Bartlett, Aaron Sorkin’s self-professed mediocrity’s idea of a smart leader. Obama was the cool and slick sheen of the Blackberry (an obsolescence symptomatic of the entire administration). The jobs were not coming back. Immigration was not going to be solved, but intensified (the DREAM Act was a fitting coda to thirty years of NAFTA). The kulturkampf was over and the so-called progressives had won. America would face its legacy of sins and mistakes, it would bow its head to the yoke of rainbow nation squalor of controlled decline. Obama may have betrayed more traditional class based politics of the left, but that was dust that had already been blown away in the seventies. The intersectionality of the New Left had already gutted the strictly economic arguments of labor Democrats. Instead, now was the time to avenge the oppressed identities that suffered under the hegemony of straight white men. Black Lives Matter surged, its excesses mostly overlooked. The “Social Justice Warrior” began his war against the bigots. Obergefell vs. Hodges (2015) cemented gay marriage as constitutional. None of these reforms had anything to do with reviving American industry. The Sorkinite staffers ruled. The lizard people were in charge.

Obama was, retrospectively, the last twentieth century President. He represented the climax of the Bush-Clinton synthesis of vain technocracy that could only have the appearance of solutions. America was in a state of managed decline, a reality that the Trilateral Commission in the seventies was called upon to solve. The Reaganite hopes of “Morning in America” dashed against the shoals of this dour multipolarity. Western Europe and Japan, possibly also Dengist China and Glastnost Russia, would join to manage a new world order. Man was a series of interconnected sense organs. The end of history had arrived in the form of mail-order steaks and internet pornography. What began as George H.W. Bush’s pseudo-Reagan internationalism continued into Clinton’s New Democrats. He balanced the budge, cut taxes for the middle class, continued welfare reform. Clinton also brutally repressed the fringes of the New Right, with theatrical displays in Ruby Ridge and Waco. Multiculturalism, multiracialism, religious plurality, these were in service for a vulgar materialism that treated politics as a matter of stomachs and wallets. It was the economy, stupid! It was an identity politics that treated intersectionality as consumer choice. It was why, in spite of the possible crusade that 9/11 could have unleashed, the second Bush told the American people to shop and that Islam was a religion of peace.

This banal worldview was consistent with its nocturnal underbelly. The internationalist world-order of globalism facilitated the expansion of occult perversion. The Satanic Panic was real, with the country rocked from the seventies into the nineties with cases of ritual abuse. Tim Tate’s Children for the Devil is a stomach-churning documentation of how police and politicians callously allowed children (not teenagers) to be molested, sodomized, forced to consume drugs and excrement, commit cannibalism, and witness animal (even human) sacrifice. The public was outraged that strange weirdos (such as the family that ran the McMartin preschool) were allowed to commit the most vile atrocities. While not overtly satanic, the Franklin Scandal (well documented by the eponymous book by Nick Bryant) revealed the interlinkage between state politics, local business, and charity organizations in service of drug dealers and pimps. The lavender mafia had been pulsating in Washington DC for decades, but it seemed to become increasingly ravenous. The Finders of Lost Children was never fully explained beyond being an anomaly, an odd, possibly criminal, experimental school that operated in Georgetown and Northern Virginia. The discovery that this group had engaged in the same occult rites of animal sacrifice and child abuse has led nowhere. And these groups did not simply operate for themselves, but an international black market of child pornography and snuff films. The sewer surged beneath the streets of American Sodom.

As Wikileak’s Podesta email dump demonstrated, many high profile figures liked to wade in these dark waters. Representative Madison Cawthorn was likely only describing the tip of the iceberg when he recounted, in an interview, that he was asked by a senior Republican lawmaker to come to a sex party. This refusal to play ball may or may not have caused him to get primaried for fairly pedestrian offenses, but it’s likely the norm in the Capitol. Whether it’s for pleasure or a desire to overturn God’s world, these parties also serve as mutual blackmail, a pledge to be apart of a system. The more heinous one is, the more one is sealed. Thus, the discussion about pizza and hotdogs is the revel of truly being an insider, of truly being beyond the simple ideas of good and evil, to enjoy a richer palette of tastes that defy the increasingly debauched American public. The revelations around Jimmy Savile should dissuade any incredulous peacocking.

What Obama accomplished in his triumph of lizard people and actual pedophilia was making all this perversion boring and banal. Comet Ping Pong Pizza was not a secret hidden venue that kept its tastes a secret. Rather, it made tasteless social media posts indulging in their interests. One involved a little girl with arms taped to a table, kneeling, with a man standing behind her with a comment “new seating area/procedure for your youngest guests? Hilar.” The shop also would regularly invite a band, Heavy Breathing, that made recurring references and jokes to pedophilia. It was in line with Obama’s culture, where John Podesta was known for sexually graphic art that involved minors (Phillip Fairbanks, Pedogate Primer: The Politics of Pedophilia, 123-126). Eight years of Obamunism made the Pentagon’s operations predictable based on which nights the gay bars were empty. The ugly animation of Rick and Morty expressed this vile cynicism as boring and exhausted. Whatever the social commentary, most episodes involved drugs, orgies, and monologues on the meaningless of life (so get power through “Science” and enjoy what thou wilt). Debauchery had become commonplace.

Trump, symbolically, disrupted this arrangement. Trump waved a banner (regardless of his failures) against the Beltway Babylon. It was now possible to name and drain the forces that held a vice grip around the spirit of a depleted nation. As Trump’s first term demonstrated, the problem was not just in the Capitol, it was all throughout the nation, in the form of disloyal Republicans and local businessmen. Obama may have lied about his promises, but he was right that the average Republican donor was one who depended on a world of vampirism, national dissolution, and a predatory approach to the youth of America. As the case in Springtown, Ohio demonstrated, it was not deranged gender goblins that overturned the demographics of a sleepy rustbelt town. It was a sleazy alliance between landlords, regional industries, and local government that partnered with relocation NGOs to bring Haitians into the middle of nowhere. It has often been a similar kind of partnership, as it was in the case of the Franklin Scandal, to rape the youth for the pleasure of deranged and flatulent geriatrics. The whole country, even down to Hayesvilles, needs cleansing through fire. Thus, the Janitor arrives.

The outsider is a consummate figure in Americana, the roady who appears from nowhere and disappears after the problem is solved. He has a fast car and a can-do attitude. The Janitor is so sober, he does not even drink alcohol but soda (from cans with a fist to make the imagery clear). Throughout Willy’s Wonderland, there is an inexplicable power to the animatronics that seems to fail when it comes to the protagonist. While Willy can sever a body in half with a swing of his claws, he is helpless against the Janitor beating his head in with a pair of sticks and a garbage bag of cans. The friends of Liv are unceremoniously sliced, eaten, skewered, and disemboweled. But she, a mere waif, is able to stand her ground. Why? Is it just bad writing? It was, per the slasher genre, because the Janitor and Liv were good. The corrupt townspeople suffer brutal deaths, and so do the friends (who indulged in pot and sexual exploits [or would-be for the protector who is Liv’s simp]). Any attempt at compromise, such as the protector falling for a plea from one animatronic that he is not like the others and is a Nice Guy, receives death. The righteous, instead, have an effortless ability to beat the satanic serial killer machines to death.

The film dramatizes this effortless vengeance in a pinball montage. The Janitor discovers, as he is cleaning the kitchen, a custom game designed for Willy’s. After cleaning it on his break, the Janitor will eventually play it, with joy and odd dancing to a synthpop track, and win. The entire movie is recapitulated in this scene, with the ball running over the heads of all the characters of the playhouse. There are even tables full of hotdogs and cake, with a quick flash to an actual hotdog (the first time food is actually shown), which are not so obscure references to the world of child abuse. The Janitor overcomes them all, kills the evil, spares the innocent, and sets out onto the next town. It is never clear why he is traveling, what he wants, or what he is doing (besides his love of soda and pinball machines). He is the wanderer.

The Janitor is the judgement on Obamunism, a diseased nation found wanting. All this elaborate evil is overcome through one roving outsider. Walter Benjamin referred to the violence that sweeps away without a seeming purpose or replacement as “divine violence” and the Janitor bears that upon the town. He is not there to fix the town, but to sweep it clean. Anywhere, USA must be the site of this purgatorial fire, not just in Washington DC but everywhere. This cleanse is as unceremonious as it is total, like David felling the glorious Goliath with a single smooth stone.

There is no battle of wills, there is no white magic vs. black magic, there is no existential struggle. It is not the enemies of the free that stand against Mordor. There is simply a man with sticks and sodas that removes the head of the damned. It is the stranger who comes to town.

Asa Gray stood at the threshold of the Evangelical crisis. As one of the premier scientists of the nineteenth century, a unique American contribution in a sea of Europeans, Gray was both an orthodox Calvinist and an evolutionist. Nearly beating Gregor Mendel to the discovery of genetics, Gray stood against the doctrinaire agnosticism of Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, the circle around Darwin who popularized his theories and supposedly misrepresented their master. Instead, Gray defended Darwinism (natural selection, descent with modification) as not only compatible with theism, but a sure proof of theism against the regnant materialism of his contemporaries. While Gray would later be embarrassed with Darwin’s more explicit drift towards agnosticism, he would never accept the criticisms of his fellow orthodox Calvinists, be he Charles Hodge or Robert Dabney, that Darwinism was incompatible with faith. Rather, Gray’s apology for Darwin opens a vista on rethinking the core theological problems of evolution and creation, their origins in a very different set of categories.

The problem was not mechanism, but Naturphilosophie. Over the course of the nineteenth century, philosophy and natural philosophy (the sciences) had drifted against the occult mechanisms of Newton. German Idealism had depicted an interlocked organic world that pulsed with life. These Romantics toppled the watch-maker tyrant of Christo-Deism (which Wordsworth most vividly depicted in Prometheus Unbound) and exalted Nature. The world was god-intoxicating because the world was God. Pantheism became regnant (that dark night, Hegel would later mock, in which all sheep are black). This Naturphilosophie would also dominate Western biology, particularly in the immigrant and premier American scientist, Louis Aggasiz. Life burst forth from life, nearly spontaneously, and it followed the ever-churning of Nature. Aggasiz had defended a kind of materialist creationism, that all the various species appeared in their own form according to Nature’s generations. The whole formed the particulars and thus individual organs were formed according to function.

Aggasiz was Gray’s foe, who appealed to empiricism against idealism. When the biologist discovered seemingly useless organs, how could Aggasiz defend them? Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace had led a counterattack against this pantheistic creationism, noticing that organisms appeared adapted to their environment, rather than a randomly generated manifestation of holistic Nature. Some organs appeared vestigial, no longer in use, remnants of organs that lay dormant in the organism without contributing much to their function. Aggasiz had denied the meaning of these vestigial organs, whereas Darwin had discerned some logic behind their existence.

Against Naturphilosophie and its American advocates (such as the Transcendentalists, like Thoreau and Emerson), Gray rejected this pantheistic, magical materialist, creationism, Nature spitting out combinations that conformed to the existent sea of being. Against randomness, Gray saw “evolutionary teleology” (as he named his final essay in his Darwiniana [1876]) as proof of Providence. When biologists saw so many organs that seemed redundant, useless, or wasteful, it was proof of God’s plan over time. When biologists found a variety of organs that were nearly similar, but performed a variety of functions (as if they adapted to aid the survival of the organism), God guided the direction of these changes. It was Darwin’s theory that revealed Christian Providence in Nature against the pantheists:

By the adoption of the Darwinian hypothesis, or something like it, which we incline to favor, many of the difficulties are obviated, and others diminished. In the comprehensive and far-reaching teleology which may take the place of the former narrow conceptions, organs and even faculties, useless to the individual, find their explanation and reason of being. Either they have done service in the past, or they may do service in the future. They may have been essentially useful in one way in a past species, and, though now functionless, they may be turned to useful account in some very different way hereafter. In botany several cases come to our mind which suggest such interpretation.

Under this view, moreover, waste of life and material in organic Nature ceases to be utterly inexplicable, because it ceases to be objectless. It is seen to be a part of the general “economy of Nature,” a phrase which has a real meaning. (Darwiniana, 375)

Redundant, useless, or wasteful organs or systems were not signs of randomness, unless one already presupposed randomness. Rather, it revealed God’s cunning. Creation was not something done in an instant, but was ongoing through the ages, creatures molded and changed as they moved across the vast expanse of God’s world, all of which was in his Providence. God did not create as if he started at the beginning, but God is beyond time, seeing beginning and end simultaneously. The whole plan was not necessarily visible in any particular moment. If God could so foreordain Joseph’s enslavement, through the treachery of his brothers, to save both Egypt and his own people, how much more could God ordain the various adaptations through natural selection to the developments of creatures to his glory? What the environment meant for evil, God meant for good.

Of course, these claims could be a convenient just-so story to explain away disorder. Hume noted, long before Darwin in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), the problem with all arguments for design are in the perspective. The order of the spheres happened alongside seemingly useless destruction and catastrophe. Gray was not unaware of this problem, but this further strengthened his case:

What results are comprehended in a plan, and what are incidental, is often more than we can readily determine in matters open to observation. And in plans executed mediately or indirectly, and for ends comprehensive and far-reaching, many purposed steps must appear to us incidental or meaningless. But the higher the intelligence, the more fully will the incidents enter into the plan, and the more universal and interconnected may the ends be. Trite as the remark is, it would seem still needful to insist that the failure of a finite being to compass the designs of an infinite mind should not invalidate its conclusions respecting proximate ends which he can understand. (Darwiniana, 380)

In other words, Gray, as a good empiricist, ends up a presuppositionalist through the backdoor. One must have a vision of the whole, which no concatenation of observations and facts can grant, to understand the arrangement of the whole. One must understand the plan to understand the significance of action. In an earlier essay, “Design Versus Necessity, a Discussion” (1860), Gray compared natural teleology to two pool players shooting from different sides of the table, striking their balls in the middle and redirecting them. This distinguishes mere actions from intent:

Now, let it be remarked that design can never be demonstrated. “Witnessing the act does not make known the design, as we have seen in the case assumed for the basis of the argument. The word of the actor is not proof; and that source of evidence is excluded from the cases in question. The only way left, and the only possible way in cases where testimony is out of the question, is to infer the design from the result, or from arrangements which strike us as adapted or intended to produce a certain result, which affords a presumption of design. The strength of this presumption may be zero, or an even chance, as perhaps it is in the assumed case; but the probability of design will increase with the particularity of the act, the specialty of the arrangement or machinery, and with the number of identical or yet more of similar and analogous instances, until it rises to a moral certainty—i. e., to a conviction which practically we are as unable to resist as we are to deny the cogency of a mathematical demonstration.” — in relation to the example of two pool players having their balls connect as they struck in opposite directions (north to south pocket, west to east pocket). (Darwiniana, 70)

Gray also used the example of a man striking another man with a boomerang. Superficially, a man throwing a curved stick away from a man seems to have no ill intention. But given enough throws, and the discovery of the concept of a boomerang, even the greatest imbecile will begin to suspect that the man is trying to hit him. How can anyone know if the two pool players are trying to hit their balls in the middle? Do the players even know? The plan, and the mind of the planner, would have to be presupposed to make sense of the coherence of actions that accomplish their goal. In the realm of biology, it was life always moving to find a way against hostile conditions. The design behind natural selection accumulates in the same way that watching those two pool players, time and again, strike in the middle may create the inference that they know what they are doing. Of course, these collisions may be a series of coincidences. There is no amount of demonstrations that can ever prove design.

Therefore, given the plethora of these examples of seemingly redundant/useless/wasteful organs in Nature, one must either presume a great design or sheer randomness of ever-churning Nature:

It is very easy to assume that, because events in Nature are in one sense accidental, and the operative forces which bring them to pass are themselves blind and unintelligent (physically considered, all forces are), therefore they are undirected, or that he who describes these events as the results of such forces thereby assumes that they are undirected. This is the assumption of the Boston reviewers, and of Mr. Agassiz, who insists that the only alternative to the doctrine, that all organized beings were supernaturally created just as they are, is, that they have arisen spontaneously through the omnipotence of matter. (Darwiniana, 153-154)

It was Darwin that armed the Christian to assert the scientific basis of Providence. Here was a teleological, and theistic, evolution against materialist creationism, God against Chance. While many other orthodox Christians considered Darwin as further atheism in the reign of randomness, Gray was not entirely alone. He found a friend in fellow Yankee and orthodox Calvinist, George F. Wright, who had prompted him to collect and edit the Darwiniana. Wright was a Congregationalist minister and geologist. He would remain committed to creationism, even as he had to let go of some aspects of evolution as Darwin’s agnosticism became undeniable. Even so, this later contributor to The Fundamentals against theological liberalism, remained committed to theistic evolution. Wright would go even further than Gray in arguing that Darwinism shored up Calvinism as the proper interpretation of natural revelation:

Wright contributed to the discussion the idea that the tenets of Calvinistic theology had much in common with Darwinism. For instance, he said that the “Calvinistic doctrine of the spread of sin from Adam to his descendants has also its illustrative analogies in the Darwinian principle of heredity.” Also, the “adjustment of the doctrines of foreordination and free-will occasions perplexity to the Calvinist in a manner strikingly like that experienced by the Darwinian in stating the consistency of his system of evolution with the existence of manifest design in nature.” (A. Hunter Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810-1888, 363)

Gray and Wright would later fade from the scene as the Fundamentalist/Modernist Controversy would place Darwin surely on the side of the Agnostics. Many Christians agreed with their Spencerian liberal opponents, if Darwin was right than the Bible was wrong. It was not that Darwin created theological liberalism, but theological liberals shifted from Naturphilosophie to Darwinian evolution as the exuberance of liberalism waned. Darwin was something of a conservative, though ameliorative, rearguard defense against the further development of liberal revolution, where Idealism (albeit turned on its head) found a full expression in Socialism, especially Marxism.

Socialists did not altogether accept the Darwinian, and neo-Darwinian (after integration with Mendelian genetics), paradigm of finding adaptability within individuals. Instead Lamarck made a return, a Naturphilosophie that was shaping and guiding Human history towards an evolutionary rebirth. Neo-Lamarckian theories marked Socialist sciences, particularly in the Soviet Union and its variations in the form of Lysenkoism (often conclusively blamed for the rippling famines that nearly killed more Communists than the Third Reich). Liberal Darwinists and orthodox Christians in the West often joined forces against the pantheists and their magical materialism, but that was a lopsided partnership. Creationism has fled, legally and educationally, from the public. Creationism now only exists in nooks and crannies of home schools and Christian private schools, reduced to a disreputable opinion that kooky and dimwitted Evangelicals maintain.

Of course, modernist Christians accept orthodox neo-Darwinism and what it entails for the Bible. Even the Vatican accepts a “theistic evolution” which makes the account of Genesis a pious myth at best, bronze age nonsense from barbarians at worse. The current debate is between the reliability of Scripture against the scientific consensus. Critics may point out that neo-Darwinism has changed significantly from the Victorian era, and that many of Darwin’s theories have been modified beyond recognition, but that has done little to dislodge the basic paradigm.

But that may simply be the wrong way to frame the problem. What Gray understood was that Darwin was a question of mechanism or means, not why. Many Creationists accept the basic mechanisms of evolution (descent with modification, natural selection) without its cosmology. Does knowledge of evolution require a particular history to life? Darwin had come to believe that all living organisms had descended from an original life-form, usually told in the mythologeme of a lightning bolt striking a soup of amino acids. Is that the case? The problem was not evolution, but a certain interpretation of natural history through geology, where there was progressive, not catastrophic, development that could be read as ages. Only if Earth is billions of years old with incremental development of life that the standard Darwinian attack on Creationism holds. But apocalypticism (repressed for political reasons as much as, or maybe even more than, theoretical failures) has made an increasing return. The uncontroversial theory of punctuated equilibrium would see massive changes in life-form that interrupted periods of stability. There is no reason to interpret these demonstrations according to a barren and dead cosmos.

Darwin had begun his work with an account of domesticated animals, their variety of breeds that look remarkably different. Wild cows may be mistaken, at first blush, for a different animal than the standard meat and milk cows of industrial factories. Man plays the role of the designer on his farms, creating a variety of life-forms to serve particular designs and plans. Evolution is true, but perhaps within certain limits, according to certain kinds. Modern Darwinists reflect the same incoherent conclusions of modern globalists. The fact that national identity can be blurred on the edges does not mean nations do not exist. In a different light, one may note that God established seventy nations in Genesis, and yet those nations do not exist, at least not in any original form, by the time of the New Testament. God created all nations from one blood, as St Paul preached in Athens (Acts 17), and yet these nations still persist as distinct races, with their own borders and cultures. The kinds of creation are not fictive taxonomical categories, anymore than national existences are fictions of international law. The natural selection of various kinds into various forms does not deny divine election in the calling of the saints.

The problem is paradigmatic. All accounts of non-biblical natural history invent just-so stories. All evolutionary science can demonstrate is the mechanism, not the whole scope of its occurrence. Appeals to geology are just as unreliable as in Darwin’s day, where opponents of evolution argued that the fossil levels did not bear out incremental development. That cuts both ways, requiring a presupposition of a framework to interpret the evidence, even if the framework is not arbitrary. Evolution also does not require any singular or unitary origin point, something Darwin believed originally, as well as Gray. Evolution was not an iron law of nature, but the normative means of continued and active Providence. Returning to Gray, there was no need to equate design with a miraculous, spontaneous, appearance:

If he cannot recognize design in Nature because of evolution, he may be ranked with those of whom it was said, “Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe.” How strange that a convinced theist should be so prone to associate design only with miracle!

All turns, however, upon what is meant by this Nature, to which it appears more and more probable that the being and becoming—no less than the well-being and succession—of species and genera, as well as of individuals, are committed. (Darwiniana, 389)

The problem with Darwinism, ultimately, is its implicit cosmology, one that is sometimes shared with some Creationists that fundamentally brackets Providence. God the Creator is almost treated as the Deist watchmaker. Instead, Gray’s creative adaptation can be leveraged further. Again, there is no reason to accept actual boundaries between kinds even as there is wild diversity from within. There is also no reason to think that rapid changes cannot be a Providential design in and through history. Therefore, one can suppose, following the mythopoetic history of Genesis, that God created kinds that would find rapid change in a cursed post-Edenic world. Noah’s ark did not need to preserve every single variation and breed along an evolutionary branch as long as it preserved the kind. It was, perhaps, the vile antediluvian world that produced horrible and vicious birds that today are referred to as dinosaurs. The current extinction of species does not mean man has overcome man’s creation. Natural history and man’s history are integrally intertwined, where God preserves kinds as God preserves man. It does not mean all creatures are equal or have the same longevity, even as the general race persists. There are no more Amorites or Hittites, yet man survives. There is unity in Adam, but that does not mean a Roman is a Papuan.

These considerations are not for doctrinaire agnostics. An atheist scientist may scoff at the appeal to Genesis as so much mumbo-jumbo, but has an instinctive attachment to the questionable Out of Africa theory. Even more, every agnostic scientist accepts non-empirical claims about the possibility of his research, such as the uniformity and intelligibility of nature. Why suppose that an ape brain can learn anything about the nature of the world, except in as much as it seems to work? A biologist has no reason to accept the equality of races, anymore than a neuropsychologists accepts free-will, yet both act as if they are true in their interactions with the world. One cannot prove that human rights exist, and yet the standard academic will without fault pull the lever for the center-left or left candidate. The point is not that they are wrong intrinsically, but rather they cannot give an account of the paradigms they utilize. Appeals to decency and Human progress are just as mythopoetic as the revealed Law in Genesis, though ones that are even more empirically ridiculous. It is to take the boomeranged man as a victim of random circumstances, correctable through school lunches and counseling services.

When it comes to presuppositions and a “worldview,” it is not the question of a randomly confected paradigm to explain events ad hoc. It is not merely the venerable status of the Bible, but its maximal coherence in interpretation of Human history and, arguably, natural history. The idea of an originally good man that has fallen and has destroyed the world with him seems to have played out as millennia of the two pool players synchronizing their shots. The Bible is science, it is knowledge of the shape of the world and its progression. It is a glimmer of Providence, the plan that all things, be they flora or fauna, follow, willingly or unwillingly. This claim does not mean the Bible has instructions on how animals and plants procreate, but it does explain what this progeny means.

There is no need to repeat errors with dubious moral evaluations about how Darwin led to imperialism and racism. There is no need for naive, and false, appeals to naturalistic design. Creation is not so much a theory of science, but the science itself, an interpretation of the facts that requires a paradigm beyond mere naked facts. One does not need to lapse into the insipid idealism of Naturphilosophie to stand against halfwit mongers of the empirical. There is a dynamic relationship between interpreter and the interpreted that, while unfolding through time, may receive a revelation of the eternal. The problem is, as George F. Wright forcefully understood, was not empirical observations, let alone the theories that bubbled up from these investigations. It was always the presupposed cosmology behind these:

The worst foes of Christianity are not physicists but metaphysicians. Hume is more dangerous than Darwin; the agnosticism of Hamilton and Mansel is harder to meet than that of Tyndall and Huxley; the fatalism of the philosophers is more to he dreaded than the materialism of any scientific men. The sophistries of the Socratic philosophy touching the freedom of the will are more subtle than those of the Spencerian school. Christianity, being a religion of fact and history, is a free-born son in the family of the inductive sciences, and is not specially hampered by the paradoxes inevitably connected with all attempts to give expression to ultimate conceptions of truth. The field is now as free as it has ever been to those who are content to act upon such positive evidence of the truth of Christianity as the Creator has been pleased to afford them. The evidence for evolution, even in its milder form, does not begin to be as strong as that for the revelation of God in the Bible. (“The Passing of Evolution”)

The generation, regeneration, and degeneration of orders that have seemingly apparent boundaries, in nature as much as in history. These facts conform fully to the biblical account of life, the world, and man. Such is the cunning of a solemn Providence, from whom all things flow and to whom all things bend.

The West is a Concentration Camp Nursing Home. Giorgio Agamben has found this process in the production of the Homo sacer, the man who had no legal-ontological existence, an offscouring non-man that could neither be killed nor sacrificed, only eliminated. How did this come to be within the West? Why have more and more aspects come under governance at the same time that constitutional law has become suspended? The problem is rooted in the modern definition of sovereignty.

Carl Schmitt understood that the rule was best defined by its exception, that the law (recht) was best understood in its suspension. The state of exception was not a rejection or overthrow of the constitution-state (rechtsstaat), but rather its protection. The nineteenth century had seen the dominance of liberal jurisprudence, where law not men ruled. However the capacity to suspend certain constitutional provisions in a time of emergency was necessary. The body that could decide the moment of exception was the sovereign, a figure (individual or corporate) that stood outside of the law simultaneously as it stood within the law. He stood inside as constituted through law, but outside to decide when the law must be set aside, that an exception must be made. For Schmitt, who also pioneered study in political theology (where all secular political concepts originate theologically), the exception was the legal equivalent of a miracle, where God set aside his normative government (Nature) to intervene. The purpose of the exception was ostensibly to save the constitution, but what if the crisis never ended? It is this problem that has become endemic to the modern West:

Modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of a state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called democratic ones. (State of Exception, 2)

The origin of the constitution-state are also the origins of permanent crisis. The National Assembly of the French Revolution was ever writing a constitution to define and defend the rights of citizens. Who were these citizens? Did it include counterrevolutionaries? Aristocrats? No, they were no longer citizens, they had excepted themselves, they had become the legal equivalent of bandits or pirates, literal outlaws, that could be exterminated as if insects, vermin, or contagion. While the Revolution would conclude in the reign of Napoleon (who was never emperor of France, but of the French), the constitution-state became normative throughout nineteenth century Europe, especially in the unification projects of Germany and Italy. These states were constituted for the national community, The People, the sovereign that stood both within the law and outside of it. The People, through their representatives, could determine the state of exception for the constitution-state, including excepting some peoples from the provisions of national citizenship.

The United States pursued this same trend, but its federal structure retarded centralization. Abraham Lincoln may have utilized the powers of a commissarial dictator in preserving the Union, but these were within the purview of the President as Commander-in-Chief. The real advance towards modern sovereignty came with Woodrow Wilson, who received dictatorial powers to censor the media, fix prices, and detain citizens without due process. The shift was not simply Lincoln’s use of presidential power in a military capacity, but that Congress had legislated to set aside constitutional provisions. Congress, as The People, could abrogate the constitution to defend it during a period of war. Franklin Roosevelt would follow Wilson, asking Congress for laws that entered a state of exception, but without the pretext of international war. Like many interwar European states, Roosevelt had suspended the constitution to combat an economic crisis. The United States entered the same incoherence that has continued to blanket the West:

It is well not to forget that, from the constitutional standpoint, the New Deal was realized by delegating to the president (through a series of statues culminating in the National Recovery Act of June 16, 1933) an unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economic life of the country - a fact that is in perfect conformity with the already mentioned parallels between military and economic emergencies that characterizes the politics of the twentieth century. (State of Exception, 22)

Roosevelt was a good Schmittian. But what was the higher law that justified the New Deal? The People themselves, who both constituted and were themselves constituted through the written constitution. The appeal to natural or divine law had become defunct for many nineteenth century jurists, with the constitution being the necessary instrument to define and invest political authority to act, defining and delimiting all rights and responsibilities of the citizenry. What happened when a crisis occurred outside of the constitutional provisions to settle it? The law was set aside, leaving only lawless authorities that operated as if they were constitutionally constituted government.

Who had this right? It was arbitrary and anarchic. This modern phenomenon was not like Roman dictatorship which was an office included within the Roman constitution and judged by the senate. Rather, it was like the Roman legal category iustitium, which suspended the law and justified lawlessness as if it were lawful. When Scipio Nasica led a mob to lynch Tiberius Gracchus, the Senate deemed that Scipio had not murdered the land-reformer but he had executed him as if he were consul. This “as if” marks the lawless capacity within any constitution, which has only become more arbitrary as it morphed into the blob of democratic sovereignty. Violent mobs may assault, loot, and destroy “as if” they were state agents:

If we wanted at all costs to give a name to a human action performed under conditions of anomie, we might say that he who acts during the iustitium neither executes nor transgress the law, but inexecutes [inesgue] it. His actions, in this sense, are mere facts, the appraisal of which, once the iustitium is expired, will depend on the circumstances. But, as long as the iustitium lasts, they will be absolutely undeniable, and the definition of their nature - whether executive or transgressive, and, in the extreme case, whether human, bestial, or divine - will lie beyond the sphere of law. (State of Exception, 50)

It is no surprise that Western democracies, for their own purposes, implement a form of iustitium for its preferred agents. The problem today is not authoritarianism or dictatorial uses of the power, but the opposite, the suspension of law enforcement, the state of exception where violent mobs are mostly peaceful protestors, a constitutionally legal body. Juridically, the reasons for these exceptions are mysteries, exercises of arbitrary acts of state power. The secret, as Schmitt understood, was that every constitution-state had its ultimate power in lawless anarchy. As the inability to legislate has increasingly dominated the West, so too has the state of exception become the abnormal norm.

The state of exception operates as a threshold between the creation and destruction of law, where law is set aside. This legal blur is similar to the ancient definition of civil war (stasis), which con-fused the distinct realms of private and public, of the household and the city. The Greeks had nearly perfected the chaos of civil war into an art, where political allies were renamed “brothers” and kin could be denounced as political enemies. The civil war was not a division between in favor of the law and those against the law, but the law had to be set aside to determine the law. The civil war is a moment of anarchy:

The stasis - this is our hypothesis - takes place neither in the oikos nor in the polis, neither in the family nor in the city; rather it constitutes a zone of indifference between the unpolitical space of the family and the political space of the city. In transgressing this threshold, the oikos is politicised; conversely the polis is ‘economised’, that is, it is reduced to an oikos. (Stasis, 16)

The Ancients, however, knew how to reconstitute the boundaries after the crisis had passed. The settlement included political ignorance (amnestia) for all deeds committed during the crisis, kinship and citizenship were restored and the boundary between household and city repaired. Forgetfulness was necessary to normalcy. The West, however, has inverted this legal counsel, with disastrous result. The crisis must never be forgotten, and therefore the law can never be reconstituted. The sovereign is incapable of determining the close of the exception.

Why has sovereignty become impotent? The early modern drive towards absolutism had defined sovereignty in terms of will. Like God for Late Medieval Nominalists, the sovereign acted for inscrutable reasons, beyond appeal to an intelligible divine or natural law. The sovereign could decide the exception, but this very resolution could breed its own crisis. Reflecting a century of European civil war, Thomas Hobbes grasped this problem in the image of the Leviathan.

Contrary to the interpretations of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt, Hobbes was not an esoteric thinker. The magisterial Leviathan was intended to be the future textbook of political theory, not a cryptic expression of atheism and materialism. Hobbes, a royalist during the English Civil Wars, was concerned in placing the kingdom on firmer ground, a sovereign that contained all power, temporal and spiritual, to resolve conflict. But Hobbes was aware that this very process provoked its own collapse. Many critics of Hobbes failed to understand his project as descriptive. Many critics failed to understand why Hobbes named his “mortal god” state after a devilish figure from the Bible. The key to understanding Hobbes is in the carefully drawn frontispiece to his opus.

In the image, Leviathan stands large and looming, a crown upon his head and with a body made of many souls staring upwards to their monarch. On the surface, here is the omnipotent state that rules over all, absorbing all subjects into his person. But it is not that simple. The Leviathan holds a sword and crozier, representing temporal and spiritual power respectively, but in the wrong hands. Medieval iconography recognized the spiritual as superior to the temporal, the former God’s normal means to govern and the latter as the necessary coercion in a Fallen world. Christ, therefore, ruled with the crozier in his right hand and the sword in his left. Images of antichrist inverted this arrangement of power, and thus Hobbes intentionally depicted Leviathan as an antichrist. Even more oddly, Leviathan stands outside the city, likely on the waters beyond the cliff (and perhaps even on a fish, which was a common image of antichrist upon the sea beast, Leviathan). Additionally, the city itself is nearly empty, with the only identifiable figures being armed guards and plague doctors. Who is it that the state rules over?

Who is the Leviathan? His face appears like a Stuart monarch, even as his body is made up of various, upwards looking, subjects. But the Leviathan may be nobody. Noel Malcolm has demonstrated that Hobbes was fascinated with optics, particularly the development of camera obscura and kaleidoscopic images. Contemporaries had invented an illusory image where a single face would emerge from viewing multiple faces through a kaleidoscopic lens. What if the sovereign is only an optical illusion? When the various individuals in a state of nature, seeking to escape lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short,” they invested their power as The People (populus) into a sovereign, be it a monarch, a senate, or an assembly. What if that was always an illusion to avoid the irrepressible viciousness of Fallen humanity? The state is collective optical illusion to keep power from the other biblical monster that terrorized the land, Behemoth.

When The People are forged into a state, the varied individuals dissolve into a non-political mass of subjects (multitudo), who may threaten to subvert and rebel against the state. This Behemoth required restraint lest a state of nature return, and thus the Leviathan, though satanic, must restrain the other demonic beast. Rather than a positive recipe to bring peace, Hobbes offered a pessimistic account of Human sin, one that was unleashed in the Civil Wars through religious zealots, political intriguers, and greedy merchants. God had given one demon to restrain another until the end of time came.

For Agamben, Hobbes is not the theorist of authoritarian statecraft, but the anarchy of sovereignty. The state of nature is buried within the absolutist state, a necessary evil that is always at war with itself. Western democracies have not abandoned this definition of the arbitrary sovereign, The People who are the highest law in their own representatives that exist to contain them. The COVID-19 panic made these dynamics manifest, a state of exception that offered to strip constitutional rights of citizens because they had become, through being unvaccinated, contagion. The iustitium that Black Lives Matter protestors were exercising their rights to assemble, while lockdown protestors were superspreader contagion, reflected the arbitrary judgement of The People. It was fitting too that, in America, that the mindless Joe Biden was an optical illusion of a presidential administration, operating arbitrarily according to the swarm of bureaucrats each pursuing their own ends for their own inscrutable reasons. The COVID-19 panic never concluded, it simply faded away.

The Hobbesian nightmare, however, contains a seed of hope. The reason Hobbes detested both Papists and Presbyterians (discussed in Book IV of Leviathan) was due to his own eccentric ecclesiology, which radically separated the kingdom of God from the church. Clerisy and priestcraft always threatened to marshal Behemoth against Leviathan, more despicable because they claimed to speak for God. The only end to this cycle of monsters was the Appearance (parousia) of the Christ. Hobbes had placed this event at the end, but it may be theorized for a different vision of political theology:

If we take seriously the Hobbesian assertion according to which the Kingdom of God should be understood not metaphorically but literally, this means that at the end of time the cephalic fiction of the Leviathan could be erased and the people discover its own body. The caesura that divides the body political - a body visible only in the optical fiction of the Leviathan, but in fact unreal - and the real, yet politically invisible multitude, will be bridged at the end in the perfect Church. But this also means that until then no real unity, no political body is actually possible: the body political can only dissolve itself into a multitude and the Leviathan can only live together up until the end with Behemoth - with the possibility of civil war. (Stasis, 63)

Moving beyond Agamben, the Appearance is the extra-constitutional power that can restrain both Leviathan and Behemoth. Like Psalm 74 (“Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness.”), the absolutist sovereign can be smashed to pieces following a higher law. James called the gospel the “law of liberty” (James 1:25) and Paul referred to the “law of faith” against the “law of works” (Romans 3:27). Applied politically, it is a recognition of a law beyond law, where the fulfillment that Christ worked in his resurrection forms the basis of a new kind of jurisprudence, one formed on wisdom, or what Agamben had called “play:”

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of [Walter] Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical. (State of Exception, 64)

The problems of the state of exception and civil war, one which threatens to dissolve citizens into Homo sacer which may be eliminated as vermin, operate in the modern West. They derive from a broken attempt to solve gaps within Western law, to overcome dualities that have existed since Antiquity, through collapse. Modern sovereignty attempts to solve the problem, but only produces more crisis, an anarchy unleashed on the basis of state incapacity. In contrast, a different, divine, kind of anarchy, one that authorizes prophets and judges to remove the wicked. The West has become paralyzed within itself, but there is a solution from beyond, not in the destruction of the old system and the creation of the new, but through an appeal to a higher law than law itself. Only a political theology that recognizes the Appearance, a the righteousness that the law cannot produce of itself, can restore the West.

However, before further theorizing a solution, it is necessary to explore that this problem in law and politics has deeper roots in Western metaphysics. The limits on thought reflect limits in language The problem of the categories is next.

The West is a Concentration Camp Nursing Home. Why? To answer this question, Giorgio Agamben, Italian philosopher and public intellectual, has contemplated the collapse of man into the blob of flesh known as the Homo sacer and the Messianic politics to overcome this nightmare.

What is the Homo sacer? Literally the “Sacred Man,” a man was ritually assigned in ancient Roman law as one who could not be killed or sacrifice, only eliminated. Puzzling even the great jurist Cicero, this ancient law removed man as such from the world of Humanity, set apart for the gods, without him becoming anything else (he does not become god even as he leaves the realm of men). He was not-man, but also not-not-man. He entered a zone of indecision, being nothing and not-nothing, and thus his eradication was not liable to law, since he no longer existed as man under the law that governed man. The Homo sacer was simply destroyed, his life already gone in spite of his continuing existent flesh. In this odd figure lay the secret to the incoherence, and barbarism, of Western jurisprudence.

Utilizing the concept of “apparatus” (dispositif) from Michael Foucault, Homo sacer was a category of an apparatus that organized sheer facticity into an order of things. The Homo sacer may appear as a man, but he was not, legally and even ontologically, man any longer. As it was in Antiquity and remains so in Modernity, no man is ever merely a man, but is recognized through the lens of a law-order. In Ancient Greece (and subsequently Roman and European civilization), man was bifurcated into man-in-household (oikos) and man-in-city (polis). As Aristotle categorized these distinctions, the man-in-household was the master over sheer animal corporeality, regulating the bodies of wife, children, and slaves. The household was the site of mere living organism (zoe). In contrast, customary-law (nomos) recognized man-in-city as a citizen who obeyed a certain form-of-life (bios). The man-in-household was a master over the creation of sheer life, but when he left the boundary of his household into the city, he was now a citizen, bearing equal rights with fellow citizens as they deliberated over the course of action to preserve and enact their form-of-life. Here was the fountain of both cult and culture.

How did the man-in-household ever cross into the man-in-city? Aristotle puzzled over this question of origins, of who created who first: did city create the household or did the household create the city? At what point did an aggregate of households form a city? And how could a city, emergent from this bond of households, ever delimit the boundaries of the household? At what point did the city recognize the man as no longer master of the household but citizen of the city? What was this threshold which man passed through? Could he ever get stuck between these two realms? What was a man who stood in the gap between household and city? And what if these two realms ever became confounded as one and the same? That latter possibility marks the transition to modernity, the political foundation of the Concentration Camp Nursing Home:

The entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis - the politicization of bare life as such - constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political philosophical categories of classical thought. (Homo Sacer, 4)

Unlike Antiquity, which policed and ritualized the transition between the household and the city, the modern world, in its liberal globalist form, has collapsed the political into the economical, the city into the household. Politics is now the question of hungry stomachs and diseased bodies, manifest in the role of governments during the COVID-19 panic, which had an unlimited commission to prevent the loss of life, whatever curtailments of freedom or destruction of business. Biopolitics was the preservation of bare life, the determination of the human from the not-human, the capacity to determine which pound of pulsating and rotting flesh was a man and which was not. Such power was demonstrated in the ritual designation of the Homo sacer:

The inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original - if concealed - nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond [...] between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii (Homo Sacer, 6)

Before returning to the Homo sacer as the product of this juridical-political collapse, it is more important to reflect on this problem as first visible in ontology. Agamben pursued this study in an earlier work, The Open, to understand man from the animal world that surrounded him. For Alexandre Kojeve, the animal world was what would finally win over man the historicized beast. It was because man was historical that he felt alienated from his own nature that was intrinsically historical. Only as a material dialectic unfolded, completed in the republican citizenship of Napoleonic France (and repeated ever since), could man escape his lack of belonging. It was only when man became fully de-politicized, no longer seeking the cultural expressions against the brute nature of the Ancien Regime, when man would be free to be post-man, to be an animal. Kojeve had seen this process in the rapidly socializing America and the rapidly capitalizing Soviet Union. Both led to statecraft that was the allocation of resources for the post-human, one produced art as unreflectively as a spider produced web. All that remained left for man was “snobbery,” the formal criticism one saw in Japanese culture, a meaningless enterprise that only had meaning when it was executed properly. Art was now the mere sign without signification. History, and with it the false ideal of transcendence, had come to a close.

Or had it? Agamben rejected this idea, the post-man as cultural ape, as insufficient. Kojeve misunderstood the problem, politics was not complete in economical man but politics-as-economics provoked the never-ending crisis of man. The state did not wither, but gave birth to endless governmental agencies to regulate every movement and frailty of the body. It was precisely at the moment that government exalted man that man disappeared. Man was linked to an integral set of functions of this warm and pulsating body, but when was this congealed flesh something called man? When did it cease to be man? When did man emerge?

Unlike medieval theologians, who debated the nature of man in paradise (would he have intestines if he did not defecate? would he have genitalia if he did not procreate?), modern anthropologists had no interest in seeing the earthly body in service of some heavenly eschatology. Man was man according to his biology, but how did that remove him from the apes? Pico della Mirandola’s Renaissance humanism, through neo-Platonism, recognized man lacked dignitas, he had no fixed rank. Man may ascend to become like the angels through intellectual contemplation, or man may descend down to the beasts in his use of intestines and genitalia. If treated strictly according to the body, Carl Linnaeus, pioneer of modern biological taxonomy, could see little difference between man and ape on the bush of evolutionary life. It was unclear that man had any particular end in himself if he was more than an ape, which modern enlightened struggled to refute. If anything, man was the ape who could speak, but the capacity for language was something risked in time (as the example of the Wild Girl of Champagne [1731] demonstrated, a woman who failed to enter into language). There was no other “missing link” between man and ape, man’s very body was that missing link:

Both machines are able to function only by establishing a zone of indifference at their centers, within which - like a ‘missing link’ which is always lacking because it is already virtually present - the articulation between human and animal, man and non-man, speaking being and living being, must take place. Like every space of exception, this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew. What would thus be obtained, however, is neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself - only a bare life. (The Open, 37-38)

Ontologically, what the modern state had done was to collapse the speech of man into the body of the ape, thus struggling to ever distinguish the two. The category of Homo sacer was a means to disaggregate, to determine the living man as no longer man, as a blob of flesh that could not be killed or sacrificed, only eliminated. It represented the fundamental problem of a law-order, which struggled with its own internal tensions between the justice it secured and the violence it wielded. Nomos, Hesido sung, brought divine justice (dike) unlike the animals, but yoked it with the violence (biaia) of the animals. Beasts hunted and killed, but not so with man. Yet the law had the capacity to remove men from its political rights, permitting the reemergence of the jungle that allowed the elimination of life. The law included exception (ex-ceptio), the recognition that it could remove the protections of the citizen and subject him to the world of beasts. The exception proved the rule. Given that justice was natural and divine, the removal of citizens from its protection, executing or exiling them, was part of the Greek law-order. But what happens when law is no longer natural nor divine? What happens when the state must decide not between citizens, but all as household dwellers who was truly human, who had emerged from the “anthropophorous” ape-body as fully human?

Part of the problem lay in Aristotle’s categorical distinction between actuality and potentiality that would mark Western metaphysics, physics, and thus jurisprudence. Potentiality, the possibility of an act, was only proven in actuality, the execution of a potentiality. The state only demonstrated its right to take a life and to remove a citizen from the law-order of the city when it did so. It was only when the violence of the jungle reappeared that the divine law was reaffirmed. But what if the state refrained? Was the refusal the act a demonstration of its capacity to act, or its incapacity to act? At what point did a state’s inaction signal its impotence? But if a state always acted, this action was only potential in hindsight, a counterfactual of what it could not have done but did do. Modern states, as they have rejected the death penalty, have forsworn the willingness to declare a citizen stripped of a right to life, but that does not mean that the process of disappearance has disappeared. Instead, the question is not whether one has warranted the justice of violence, but whether one simply ceases to become a citizen without becoming something else. There is no longer death penalty, but the state has excepted abortion and euthanasia as a form of killing. These are lumps of flesh that are eliminated. Through these processes, all citizens of a modern democracy have become potential Homo sacer:

Homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. The political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted through a double exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life - that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed - is the life that has been captured in this sphere (italics original, Homo Sacer, 83)

It is the decision of the state, designating this fetus or this euthanasia applicant, as no longer alive, only a lump of flesh can be eliminated. This process is entirely arbitrary, since modern jurisprudence, without Nature or God, has no basis for decision besides its own will. It is no longer man because the sovereign state, be it in the form of one man or a committee, decided it so. It is no surprise, therefore, that the rise of legal positivism coincided with the rise of modern sovereignty, where there is some final arbiter, a god on Earth, that can decide with finality. However this sovereignty is, as it reflected theological trends, arbitrary. It has no basis outside of itself, which is, in principle, outside of its own decisions codified as statute. The secret is bald: the modern state is the only permissible outlaw that may commit licit crime because it has ex-cepted itself from these legal norms. The modern sovereign is the one who enforces the law lawlessly. It was for this reason that Thomas Hobbes identified the modern sovereign with Leviathan, a satanic figure, though one hidden through compact and mutual support:

The understanding of the Hobbesian mythologeme in terms of contract instead of ban condemned democracy to impotence every time it had to conform the problem of sovereign power and has also rendered modern democracy incapable of truly thinking a politics freed from the form of the State.

The relation of abandonment is so ambiguous that nothing could be harder than breaking from it. The ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as nonrelational. What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it, at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured. (Homo Sacer, 109-110)

Because modern democrats, through figures like John Locke, failed to understand the Hobbesian sovereign as a ban, and instead saw him as the instigator of a constitution, they failed to understand the nature of what they undertook. The Hobbesian People who constituted Leviathan did not make a contract with Leviathan. They, instead, banned themselves through the erection of a representative, dissipating into a “multitude” that always threatened to reemerge as Behemoth, the threat of civil war between a legitimated and an illegitimate god. In modern democracy, every election summons the people to vote so they may exile themselves from the politics, subject to a government that rules as them over the multitude that remains. While ancient democracy, in contrast, never transferred its rights from the assembly and asserted a law-order to which men conformed, modern democracy is in a constant state of crisis and has only considered the body as political. Citizenship is something corporeal, reflected in the liberal nationalist uprisings of the nineteenth century to create racial nation-states. Napoleon I was not emperor of France, but emperor of the French. As liberalism developed, in pace with its civilization mission to regenerate inferior races, so too did its mission expand. The nation-state became the welfare-state, an agency to regulate the bodies in its zones of jurisdiction. Citizenship became increasingly abstracted. It was all the economy, stupid.

Modern democracy, unlike royal kings, multiplied the bodies politic. As Ernt Kantorowicz excavated, kings had a double-body: one was his earthly form and the other his undying royalty as state. The two overlapped, especially in early modern absolutism, where the fornications and bowel movements of kings became a matter of aristocratic attendance. This collapse of political into earthly frame has expanded in modern democracies to make “The People” apparent in the diverse swarms of citizenry. The state could appear in any of them. The mistreated minority is now the bearer of “The People,” requiring the welfare entitled to all who may bear this sovereign crown. The welfare-state is not a departure of the nation-state, rather it is the full development of it. The government need to regulate, supervise, and watch the race transferred to the teeming population who may, at any time, appear as sovereign. Thus the strange irony: the totalized nation-state of National Socialism was far exceeded in its successor states. Social and Christian Democracy took National Socialist regulatory logic far beyond the Third Reich:

On the one hand, the nation-states become greatly concerned with natural life, discriminating within it between a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every political value. (Nazi racism and eugenics are only comprehensible if they are brought back to this context.) On the other hand, the very rights of man that once made sense as the presupposition of the rights of the citizen are now progressively separated from and used outside the context of citizenship, for the sake of the supposed representation and protection of a bare-life that is more and more driven to the margins of the nation-states, ultimately to be rectified into a new national identity. (Homo Sacer, 132-133)

Agamben’s point has become in the politics associated with the Anglozone film Adolescence. The minority’s plight is a reflection of the sovereign, as the radicalized white teenager has ex-cepted himself through his misalignment. The refugee reflects “The People” while the native Briton has become an outlaw. Wrong-think has, in Hobbesian fashion, manifested Behemoth who threatens the satanic state Leviathan. It was also manifest in COVID-19 quarantines, with each lock-down as a ban on an threatening Behemoth population. In these constant crises, which representatives of Leviathan bemoan, potentiality is actualized. Every outlaw justifies the outlawry of the sovereign state. Every case where the state determines “The People” status of an agitator justifies it.

In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the non value of life as such. (Homo Sacer, 142).

It is for this reason that modern medical jurisprudence cannot decide who is dead or not. Traditional definitions (incapacity to breathe) have faded with machinery that can produce organ function. Machines can conduct kidney dialysis, machines can pump blood, machines can even maintain a man who has suffered brain death. The latter category, despite the man being biologically alive (“warm, pulsating, urinating”), has been ruled dead. He is a “neomort” who is no longer legally alive, even as the body continues to exist. He may be terminated without legal recognition. He is Homo sacer.

Agambem lived experienced modern democratic sovereignty through the COVID-19 panic. He refused vaccination, and thus he, in an Italian state of exception, was not an Italian citizen but a plague-bearer. Without MRNA vaccination, his body was no longer citizen. The Concentration Camp Nursing Home became life, it is:

The new biopolitical nomos of the planet. (Homo Sacer, 176).

There may be no way backwards, no way to restore the ritual ordering of Greece. But it was in the Homo sacer that Agamben saw a hope of escape:

Just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new body - a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body - in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve the interlacement of zoe and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe. (Homo Sacer, 188)

What does Agamben mean by “a bios that is only its own zoe?” To answer this question, one must turn to the thought of Martin Heidegger, an important source for Agamben’s philosophy. Heidegger became fascinated with the biological experiment, where a tick was contained in a jar. The entirety of a tick was contained in its instinct to search for blood. What was life to a tick in a jar? What was time? Instinct revealed that animals were neither world-less like a stone nor were they world-builders like man, they were world-poor. They could only follow the drive, be it the tick in search of blood, the bee in search of nectar (who would continue to suck if the inhibitor, his abdomen, was removed), or the moth in search of light. The last of these could even self-destruct, as a moth would fly into fire to satisfy this instinct. Man has an inverted experience through boredom. A man waits for his train, walks about, observes objects, checks his watch — it has only been ten minutes. While man is the world-builder, he cannot function when he is bored, when he is forced to wait. Nothing holds his interest, nothing is meaningful. But that is when self-consciousness may occur, when what Heidegger called “the originally possibilitization“ [die ursprungliche Ermoglichung] was possible. In the moment that nothing became possible, man could imagine the possibility of the possible, opening a whole new vision.

This Heideggerian observation is the key to inverting modern politics. Modern man has collapsed the political into the economical, where the role of government is to check temperature and pulse. It has resulted in the dull meaningless search for a job:

Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity - who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity [inoperosita] - and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task? Even the pure and simple relinquishment of all historical tasks (reduced to simple functions of internal or international policing) in the name of the triumph of the economy, often today takes on an emphasis in which natural life itself and its well-being seem to appear as humanity’s last historical task -if indeed it makes sense here to speak of a ‘task.’

The traditional historical potentialities - poetry, religion, philosophy - which from both the Hegelo-Kojevian and Heideggerian perspectives kept the historic-political destiny of peoples awake, have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden - and the ‘total management’ - of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate.

It is not easy to say whether the humanity that has taken upon itself the mandate of the total management of its own animality is still human, in the sense of that humanitas which the anthropological machine produced by de-ciding every time between man and animal; nor is it clear whether the well-being of a life that can no longer be recognized as either human or animal can be felt as fulfilling. To be sure, such a humanity, from Heidegger’s perspective, no longer has the form of keeping itself open to the undisconcealed of the animal, but seeks rather to open and secure the not-open in every domain, and thus closes itself to its own openness, forgets its humanitas, and makes being its specific disinhibitor. The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalization of man. (The Open, 76-77)

In other words, while modern democracies may be in crisis, constantly justifying their own sovereign potentiality through arbitrary decisions between man and the not-man lump of flesh, it is here an alternative may become presence. Zoe cannot provide its own bios, but what if bios became its own zoe, that biological life was set aside in pursuit for a form-of-life according to a law-order? As Agamben noted in Titian’s Nymph and Shepherd (1570), the two lovers face away from each other, exhausting their sensual use of bodies, now to gaze beyond carnal relations. Only when they understand the expanse of celestial possibilities beyond flesh may they forgive each other for their fleshiness, that there is more to life than intestines and genitalia. Thus emerges Messianic politics, thus emerges the original possibilization. But before that can be fully grasped, the weight of the crisis in law and politics must receive further attention.

The Kennedy family is one of the worst things to happen to America. Within their rapid ascent and their progressive fall, the would-be royalty defined the American crisis of the twentieth century, its mastery of the world and internal collapse, the Liberal Establishment that would commit suicide and form the basis of the exhausted, post-something, that came after it. This blame is not simply heaped upon Irish Catholic interlopers, clannish and sexually depraved, who invaded a fine-tuned WASP establishment. Rather, it was the WASPs, the blue-blood Eastern/Liberal Establishment, the “Yankees” of the Preppies and Ivies, that the Kennedys exemplified as near caricature paragons, the nadir of their bankruptcy and corruption. They represent a curse on the United States and the near total disaster that this country faced through their near-fifty year dominance over the political ideals of the nation. Many problems today have roots in the Kennedy rot.

The story begins in the death of Boston. Contrary to stories of “successful assimilation” that many Americans tell of earlier waves of immigrants, the Irish successfully invaded and conquered the land of John Winthrop and Samuel Adams. Perhaps blame can be placed on these Yankees for their several apostasies, abandoning the covenant that their forefathers swore to Jehovah, but nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, New England had rapidly changed. The “Curley Effect” of Irish party-bosses meant a mayoralty that was committed to ethnic chauvinism and strategic immiseration to drive the native stock away, leaving those who remained in a constant dance to negotiate. That was the world that Jack Kennedy’s maternal grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald helped erect, a monument that the languid Henry Adams could only lament.

In this era, a man like Joseph Kennedy would have heaped scorn on the dilapidated world of Puritans. But the Boston Brahmins were not finished yet, not when American destiny was on the cusp of fulfillment. That was what Theodore Roosevelt saw and, befitting his place as one of the ancient Four Hundred who preserved noblesse oblige in advancing a continental empire of Anglo-Saxons, he forged a new path forward. American Empire was a shot in the arm to a dying quasi-aristocracy, a reinvigorated race through blood and turmoil. Cuba, the Philippines, the growing clouds of clashing dominions in Europe, America’s place on the world-stage beckoned, a destiny beyond America slumping into a northern Argentina of political radicalism and agitated labor. Roosevelt had made the WASP into an ideal, an ideal that Old Joe found attractive. He was an outsider, but he would fight his way to the top. The importance of Old Joe was not simply his naked and seething ambition, but the filthy lucre he accumulated. He was a stock-market fixer, he built his empire on the back of his father’s modest wealth, married into Boston political royalty, and forged important ties with the crooks and gangsters that would define the legacy of Camelot:

Kennedy was one of the first to seize dominant position in the liquor importing business. He used medicinal permits to avoid the restrictions of Prohibition, gaining intimate knowledge of the industry that would place him ahead of his competitors for the legal trade when the moment arrived. He swept into London in the fall of 1933, when it was clear that Prohibition was about to end, and signed agreements making him the sole American distributor of two premium scotches and Gordon’s gin. Kennedy established Somerset Importers Ltd., and operated it until its sudden sale, for $8 million, in 1946. (Seymour Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, 46-47)

For Old Joe, the Great Depression was creative destruction, an opportunity to leap further upwards. But he was not the kind of man that made Roosevelt’s New Deal, even as he was a reluctant partner to it. Contrary to many misaimed criticism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, carrying the flame of his cousin’s muscular aristocratic leadership, was neither a class-traitor nor a socialist. He welded together masterly a majority of minorities that would mark Democratic dominance into the twenty-first century, but the New Deal was not to be led by anyone. It was on behalf of the poor and destitute, be they little white farmers of the South, ethnic white ward gangs, or the growth of a politicized black vote. But its leadership was for the WASP:

Drawing on novel theories of economic regulation and European ideas of social reform, America’s twentieth-century patrician reformers discovered a new means of enjoying the old feudal pleasures, and they found in the Creed of the Expert a way to effect their salvation as a class. They claimed a mandate for a new and Enlightened approach to the problem of human pain and human suffering, but beneath the trappings of science and economic sophistication lurked the familiar paternalistic ideas of the past. (Michael Knox Beran, The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy, 21)

When Roosevelt, in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian tones, denounced “economic royalists” and made gestures towards Christ cleansing the Temple, Roosevelt’s bank war against the filchers and looters, he was not going after his own. He was going after the ethnic mobsters and corporate heart-landers. He was avenging the WASP against the upstarts (Beran, 25). The Expert could not supplant the new money. The Expert could not squash Old Joe, for he had already planned for these contingencies. He was part of Roosevelt’s coalition, receiving the top job at the Security Exchange Commission (FDR commented that it took a thief to catch a thief) and later the awkward diplomatic post at St James in London. An Irishman representing America to fellow Anglo-Saxons, it was a nasty joke. But it also removed Kennedy from threatening Roosevelt, two scorpions in a bottle, two enemies poised to destroy one another with blackmail until Kennedy’s loud-mouth spoke too highly of Germany. Old Joe was finished, cemented with the victory over Hitler in World War Two. But hope would be kindled in his WASPified sons.

What did it mean to be a WASP in the Liberal establishment? It meant pragmatism to solve problems. FDR, like many other WASPs, admired Mussolini as much as he admired Stalin. Stripped of ideology, the two were treated as democratic strongmen, flexible and domineering helmsmen to guide society through bold and dynamic leadership. Nationalism was fluid, the Liberal stood against both outmoded conservatives and radical socialists. Mussolini broke FDR’s heart with Rome’s pact with Berlin. Soon Stalin would break the hearts of WASPs with his doctrinaire Communism. But the spirit that defined these hard-working, hard-drinking, hard-playing, consummate mediocrities was Stimsonian. Named after Henry Stimson, FDR’s liberal Republican Secretary of War, depth and purpose was alien to the new bureaucracy of experts, but action was paramount (Beran, 34). These were men who read in order to perform serious though contrived “on the one hand…but on the other” discourse at cocktail parties. This world the WASPified Kennedy sons adopted as their own:

For all its notions of progress and possibility, the American liberalism that grew out of the Stimsonian philosophy was a curiously regressive phenomenon: though it ostensibly celebrated the Forgotten Man, it in fact trivialized and diminished him. Where compassion had once consisted of giving a man the tools and the opportunity, as well as the self-confidence, to forge his own destiny, it now consisted of making him more comfortable in his mediocrity. (Beran, 45)

After the war’s conclusion, Old Joe would rail against Roosevelt’s betrayal, another dispossessed Catholic drunk like Al Smith who resented getting the boot. FDR was accused of being red and Bob Taft was now a hero (Beran, 63; 79). But the Kennedy sons took flight from this miserly attitude, theirs was the Congress and then the Presidency. They put their shoulder to the wheel as arch-WASPs, more refined than refined, more Georgetown than Georgetown. Thus, Jack (Joe Jr. perished in the war) bore the weight of his clan’s legacy upon his twisted spine. He would be elected to the Congress, in the class of 1946 alongside Richard Nixon, as a representative from Massachusetts. Accomplishing little, he would squeeze his Irish Catholic vandals for the votes to overcome the old hand Brahmin, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., in 1952 for a Senate seat.

While Nixon had ascended into the Vice Presidency for his anticommunist crusading, Kennedy would do nothing in the Senate, attaching himself (and his name) to the push for an independent Algeria. Decolonization was, in the main, a strategy to pivot between European imperialism (which had become increasingly unpopular and sclerotic for most of Western Europe) and Soviet Communism. The Black Feet would resent this obnoxious grandstanding American and his empty-headed support for Arab independent, but it did not matter. It was a step to improve the Kennedy name, a process that primarily unfolded among the Georgetown Set, befriending and screwing the world of Phil Graham, Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze, and the Alsop brothers. The postwar order was a world of chic townhouses where WASP bureaucrats, politicians, and journalists quizzled over “what are we going to do about the Italian election?” as they wobbled sloshed. Their world was simply the world (Gregg Herken, The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington, 8). With Germany shattered and the Soviet Union actually communist (a true shock to Liberal ideologues), only these Stimstonian WASPs could perform the Atlas task of holding up the world, through the Marshall Plan and Bretton Woods, for the purpose of material uplift. The goal of civilization had been found in the vacuum cleaner and electric dish washer. The Kennedys bided their time to strike for the top.

When 1960 came, it was never a fair fight against the stiff shouldered Nixon. Unlike the blue-blood impostor, Nixon was an outsider, a permanent chip on his shoulder. Jack had Harvard and Dick had Whittier College. The two were ostensible friends in Congress, two Liberals allied against the Communist menace, Kennedy never returned Nixon’s sincere affection. Jack nearly died during back surgery for his scoliosis. Nixon wept. Unlike RN, who had accomplished flagship legislation (e.g. the Nixon-Mundt bill that curtailed Soviet influence among labor unions) and forged a reputation as a red-baiter, Kennedy had no legacy but money. That was enough to turn Kennedy into the presidential JFK. Thus, against a prince of labor, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Jack bought the Democratic primary in West Virginia:

In interviews for this book, many West Virginia county and state officials revealed that the Kennedy family spent upward of $2 million in bribes and other payoffs before the May 10, 1960, primary, with some sheriffs in key counties collecting more than $50,000 apiece in cash in return for placing Kennedy’s name at the top of their election slate. Much of the money was distributed personally by Bobby and Teddy Kennedy. (Hersh, 95)

Jack with Bob and Ted, along with the occasional phone in to Old Joe — that was how the game would be played. With the Democratic nomination tied up, Jack made a deal with the leather-faced crow of Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson, to shore up his support in the South. It was no easy thing for a Roman Catholic to become President of the United States, as even secular Protestants remained uneasy across the nation. But Jack promised never to be a Roman Catholic in the White House, he was an ardent Liberal through and through, which stung, but did not kill, his Catholic support among ethnic whites.

Against Nixon, it did not matter that the Vice President had experience, will, and a bulldog capacity to fight on the issues. He had inherited the Eisenhower gilded age, but Nixon became the whipping boy for the old and colorless administration (or so its opponents accused). Nixon was weak, Nixon had allowed a “missile gap” (a term coined by Kennedy friend and ally, Joe Alsop) to close between America and the Soviet Union (Herken, 242). Kennedy also punched Nixon where it hurt, the loss of Cuba to revolutionaries that seemed to drift further into the Communist orbit. Nixon knew Kennedy had an inside man, he thought it was Allen Dulles, but it was likely Missouri Senator Stuart Symington (a former Defense Secretary under Truman) or his aide, Thomas Lanphier, who told Jack about the plan to invade Cuba. Nixon was sworn to secrecy, he wanted the operation to succeed, and could only appear lame against the robust hawk Kennedy.

Did this strategy work? Was Nixon the weakling? Did the voters think it was time for New Leadership? It did not matter, for Kennedy stole the election anyway. Through the machine of Mayor Daley of Chicago in the black wards of the city (2, 3, 4, 6, 20, 24) and Democratic machine of Texas that mined predominantly absentee blacks (Brooks, Cameron, Dimmit, Duval, Hidalgo, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Kenedy, Kleberg, La Salle, Nueces, Starr, Webb, Willacy, Zapata), Kennedy clinched the votes necessary to appear decisive (see Irwin Gellman, Campaign of the Century for conclusive proofs). Nixon suspected Jack and the Democrats stole the election, but conceded for national unity. Any irregularity in an American election would be fodder for Soviet propaganda. Now JFK was President and poised to destroy the United States of America.

What was Kennedy’s presidency? On domestic affairs, JFK was ambiguous and mixed, combining soaring rhetoric with tepid policy maneuver. Civil rights was mostly fobbed off with a paternal smile. JFK was primarily concerned with foreign policy, which would engulf the White House in a series of roiling crises.

The first, and most obvious, was Eisenhower’s planned overthrow of Castro. The Bay of Pigs, as all know, was a disaster. Was it because Kennedy, the innocent dove, fell victim to the cruel schemes of fasciti WASPs like Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell? Not a chance. Kennedy was averse to military conflict, but unlike Eisenhower he was vain enough to screw an operation to save face. JFK would never damage his reputation through a “send in the tanks” policy that smacked of the Soviets in Hungary in 1956. JFK wanted Castro dead without finger prints, a James Bond-esque operation (Hersh, 200). When the invasion failed, and calls came in for further bombing, JFK was confused. The original plan involved cooperation with the Syndicate, the Jewish-Italian-Cuban organized crime that had previously ruled in Havana and failed to assassinate Castro. The only way to save the Cuban exile militants was to offer them military support, which JFK would not do. He backed away, better a little dirt on his face than infamy as Illiberal. The CIA and their parapolitical web had screwed up. JFK apologized and moved on (Hersh, 214). Or so the public thought. Liberals were in disarray and confusion, as Richard Helms, future Director of Central Intelligence, would testify:

In a letter to his former boss, Richard Helms confessed to Wisner that the agency remained in “shell shock” since the debacle at the Bay of Pigs: “I do not have to paint a picture for you of the gloom and bitterness which have pervaded these halls. The former is the obvious reaction to a failure, the latter results from what many of us feel to be the high-handed manner with which the activity was mounted” (Herkel, 266)

As part of saving face, Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell were fired, the controversy swept away. JFK aped penance for a cud-chewing public so he could privately carry on with a different operation. Dulles and Bissell had not gone anywhere, but were shuffled into new positions to carry out the Kennedy black bag job. The new plan was ZR/RIFLE, a new plan to kill Castro with a CIA neutered and leashed by an angry Bob Kennedy. Tapping Bissell and William Harvey, as well as secular Jewish socialist and would-be chemist assassination connoisseur Sidney Gottlieb, JFK pioneered Task Force W:

In the fall of 1961, Harvey was assigned to what became known as Task Force W, the CIA component in a get-Castro squad that was assembled by the White House. He spent much of the next year and a half plotting to overthrow the Cuban leader — and growing increasingly frustrated about the constant pressure to do so from Robert Kennedy. Harvey’s animosity toward the attorney general grew with each failed assassination attempt. It was Harvey’s frustration, apparently, that led to a breach of hsi rules about never talking out of turn. At some point he told a valued colleague, Samuel Halpern, the executive officer of Task Force W, what no one in the CIA would ever tell Congress: that Jack Kennedy had personally authorized Richard Bissell to set up ZR/RIFLE before his inauguration. (Hersh, 192)

JFK never gave up on killing Castro, even as he offered official promises to leave him alone. All the better to lull him into a false security. ZR/RIFLE gave way to Operation Mongoose, where the CIA would again try to use the Syndicate, the combined might of Meyer Lansky, the Five Families of New York and the exiled Trafficante brothers, to reclaim Cuba. Bob would lead this Get Castro task force, moving it out of the hands of WASP old hands. The failure of the Bay of Pigs introduced the first crack where the Kennedys no longer trusted their blue blood sycophants, who existed on the same plane of whores that chased Kennedy celebrity and wealth. The administration began to mirror Jack’s body: superficial public images of toughness, but private bouts of degenerated, incapacitated, weakness. As almost a fitting allegory, JFK personally suffered from debilitating venereal diseases that were easily transmissible to the hookers that circuited the White House in their infamous pool parties (Hersh, 232). As Jack put it, “You know, I get a migraine headache if I don’t get a strange piece of ass every day” ( Hersh, 389). That would later bite him.

While Mongoose continued, Kennedy applied his strategy to face down the Soviets over the threat of an armed Cuba. The USSR had placed missile weapons and Kennedy balked. Genteel WASPs, like Dean Acheson, suggested that JFK get tough and bomb the Soviet sites in Cuba. Jack, more like an Eleanore Roosevelt or a Henry Wallace, refused (Herken, 272). The JFK strategy was to talk tough, call a bluff on television, fail, turn to back channels, and save face. Thus, JFK boldly stood against Soviet aggression in public, while privately sending Bob to beg for a compromise with Soviet ambassador Gromyko. The result was the Soviets appearing to back down, only at the cost of American missiles in Turkey (Herken, 276). JFK appeared to be the bold hawk, but in reality this Soviet gamble to support a far-flung ally with a gesture of military build up secured their own borders. JFK failed privately, succeeded publicly, and the blame fell on those WASPs who did not offer their unqualified support to the Kennedys.

It was not that JFK was a secret conservative, as foolish rightwing dissidents and libertarian tax cutters believe. To the contrary, Jack hated the American right, especially its media network working through talk radio, and summoned United Auto Workers union president, Walter Reuther, to draft a plan to shut them down (see Paul Matzko, The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement). Even so, Jack increasingly despised all those who refused obedience among his fellow Liberals and locked them from power. The WASP establishment was useless if it was not bought and paid for with Kennedy money. Therefore, the Kennedys unleashed another CIA op, Mockingbird, to put a leash on already slobbering journalists:

Not trusting Hoover and the FBI, the Kennedy brothers turned to the CIA to preempt future news leaks by spying on selected reported. Under pressure from the attorney general, the director of the CIA, McCone, ordered the agency’s Office of Security to wiretap the home and office telephones of Robert Allen and Paul Scott, two Washington-based journalists who, like Baldwin, had recently published classified information in their syndicated column. (Hersch, 282-283)

The CIA was not JFK’s foe, he made it his pet. Cuba taught Jack and Bob a valuable lesson: trust only family (Hersh, 221). Delegated to Bob, the glorious crusading Attorney General and ruthless bagman, the Kennedy true government would browbeat, harass, humiliate, condescend, and berate his dumbfounded WASP peers. Task Force W, a Kennedy creature, would receive repeated tongue-lashings:

There was further humiliation for the men of Task Force W. Bobby Kennedy, increasingly impatient with the lack of progress in Cuba, decided in the early spring of 1962 to run his own operation. He once again moved into the back channel, as he had done with the Soviets, this time working with the Mafia. […] “[Charles Ford, AG’s personal agent as CIA operative] spent the next eighteenth months, until the assassination of President Kennedy, making secret trips, at Bobby Kennedy’s direction, to Mafia chieftains in the United States and Canada, while continuing to serve with Harvey. (Hersh, 286)

Contrary to wet-eyed liberals like Oliver Stone, JFK never gave up on getting Castro’s head. Even worse, he had no idea how to do it. Convinced that the Syndicate had connections still in the Cuban cities, Bob hammered the CIA to make use of them to invade and assassinate. The result was insane and dreamy plots, like one from Edward Lansdale who believed spies could insert a rumor of Jesus Christ’s imminent return to the Catholic population, paint Castro as a Communist antichrist, and then fire off some fireworks to signal that Jesus was on his way. Experienced CIA hands found these plans ludicrous, but that was Operation Mongoose, that was the President’s order, and thus they played stupid with Bob’s incessant demands to get it done (Hersch, 375-376). At the same time, JFK sealed this partnership between government and organized crime through his recurring relationship with girlfriend Judy Exner, a courier-slut between the President and mafia boss, Sam Giancana of Chicago (Hersh, 295). As CIA failures mounted, Bob took things into his hands more and more, giving personal orders to Cuban exiles that contradicted, and confounded, CIA orders to eliminate Castro (Hersh, 379).

The failure of these dirty tricks in Cuba reflected failures elsewhere. An oft forgotten case was in Indonesia, where Kennedy had banked on a democratic strongman to win over the anti-Soviet left and advance a middle-course. JFK’s plan had clashed with Me Too Republicans, particularly Allen Dulles who pursued a realistic strategy of effective rule through military figures. JFK, instead, chose a bungled compromise of indirect army rule through social democratic form and reform:

Kennedy’s plan clashed with the ongoing strategy of regime change that DCI Dulles had set in motion six years earlier. JFK intended to utilize the Indonesian army as “servants of the state” of Indonesia, not for the army to assume power. And second, Kennedy’s intention was to maintain the presidency of Sukarno” […] Unlike Dulles, Kennedy’s plan to make use of the large number of Indonesian army officers being trained in the United States did not have violent regime change in mind. While both Dulles and JFK intended to use the army as a modernizing force, Kennedy was advocating “civil action programs that dovetailed perfectly with modernization theorists’ emphasis on the constructive role of the military safeguarding and shepherding the development process” (Greg Poulgrain, JFK vs. Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia, 195)

Reading between the lines of this parapolitical author, JFK wanted an army rule that had a humanitarian face, though this policy would lead to incoherent support for nationalist wars, a softer, less effective, and unstable regime. Removing the Dutch to forestall the Soviets, JFK would even support Indonesia in a territorial war against Malaysia, which did not serve American interests but did save face for Indonesia’s social democratic independence leader, Sukarno. Additionally, the failure to bridle this crude nationalism resulted in the expulsion of the Han Chinese, which inflamed the People’s Republic of China. These efforts at meddling and backing a mediocrity like Sukarno had further increased a Soviet-Sino alliance that was increasingly on the rocks. JFK nearly used a potential ally to fortify international communism.

This incompetence would shape JFK’s Vietnam policy. Since World War 2, Indochina was a powder keg. Japanese partisans had warred against the White Man and now France struggled to hold onto its colony. Though a compromise with the royal prince, Bao Dai, was possible, Eisenhower effectively supported Ho Chi Minh against the French through a policy of inaction and intelligence sharing. Rocked by labor strikes in the metropole and losing military effort (with no help from America), Vietnam achieved independence through a settlement that divided the nation. Even though American ex-OSS officers flanked the triumphant Ho, his doctrinaire communism (once again shocking Liberals) alienated him from the Americans. The solution was a South Vietnam under a social democrat, American educated, Catholic, Nho Dinh Diem. The Americans, however, ended up pushing an immigration policy that destroyed the cogency of an independent South Vietnam:

This influx of over one million northern Catholics [whom Diem felt closer to than most Southern Vietnamese] was, without question, one of the most inflammatory causes of hostility throughout South Vietnam, as the CIA and its allies intended it to be. The stable, nonmobile natives of the south were overwhelmed by these new arrivals, whom the Diem government favored and had settled on their land, into their established way of life and inflexible economic system. (Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate Kennedy, 249)

While JFK was sympathetic to Diem for his social democratic Catholicism, he was also frustrated with Diem’s inability to maintain the stability of South Vietnam against this admixture. Diem was more sympathetic to these Catholic refugees, but they immediately found themselves impoverished and radicalized. Additionally, the native South Vietnamese were besieged with immigrants that threatened their ancient livelihood. Combined with Northern pressure towards unification, Diem pursued the militarized resettlement of government funded “Strategic Hamlets” that would prove a disaster:

Knowing what we do now about the Strategic Hamlets, the million Tonkinese “refugees,” and all the rest of the Saigon Military Mission’s make-war mission from the CIA, it is staggering to realize that by September 2, 1963, Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could write, in a memorandum to the President: “Finally, progress continues with the strategic hamlet program. The latest Government of Vietnam figures indicate that 8,227 of the planned 10,592 hamlets had been completed; 76 percent, or 9,563,370 of the rural population, are now in these hamlets.”

The government provided food in vast quantities, medicine, and small-arms ammunition for the inhabitants of these Strategic Hamlets. Because of the enormous number of starving, homeless people wandering around the country, it was inevitable that they would direct their attacks at these well-supplied hamlets. It got so bad that the new hamlet residents would have to leave the hamlet at night as swarms of bandits pillaged these government stockpiles. They were afraid to live there because they were unable to withstand the ever-present threats from the outside […] By this stage, the Kennedy administration had begun to experience serious doubts as to whether the Diem government was “winning the war,” or even capable of doing so. (Prouty, 254-255)

Throw bags of money and pull the plug when failure inevitably set in, that was JFK’s method. Kennedy was sick of Diem’s failures, but he did not give up on the region:

President Kennedy had reached the decision that the United States should do all it could to train, equip, and finance the government of South Vietnam to fight its own war, but that this would be done for someone other than Ngo Dinh Diem. (Prouty, 272)

Vietnamization, which was Nixon’s bluff towards a triangulated peace in 1972, was JFK’s policy from the beginning. Give money and weapons, hope it all settles out in the end (especially if it improves the poll numbers). Most of JFK’s foreign policy depended on his election to a second term, which he would win if he could maintain the suave, robust, image that launched him into the White House and the pool-side orgies he would oversee. When JFK’s senior military advisers, Maxwell Taylor and Walt Rostow, returned from South Vietnam, they acknowledged the need for substantive military support for a flagging military, with the suggestion for eight thousand combat troops. Jack snorted and sent more guns (Herken, 284). It was not about success, but the appearance of success, which was always difficult to stage manage between the brothers. Thus JFK, humiliating the bureaucracies of the Military-Industrial-Complex, would threaten to willy-nilly move money around to make a point. Fletcher Prouty’s Kennedy partisanship cannot disguise the naked use of power to throttle the Pentagon:

Kennedy’s plans for reelection were based in large measure on the allocation of billions of Defense Department dollars available in the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX) construction program. This money was going to states and counties that had had the closest balloting during the 1960 election. The $6.5 billion TFX budget made it the largest government contract ever put together. In the process of divvying up the funds, Kennedy had made it clear to the gnomes of the military-industrial complex that he was in control and they were not. (Prouty, 287)

The “gnomes” were simply creatures to be creatures of the family, one that had no concept of honor beyond what could be cast in a ghost-written frauds of valor. If patrimonialism was ever in the United States, it appeared in the hands of the Kennedys — diseased, intoxicated on power and barbiturates, hungry for more. When JFK supposedly pledged to shatter the CIA into a thousand-pieces and cast them to the wind, it was so he could rebuild the fragments into a private Kennedy organization. Bob’s job was to make this happen, buying and cajoling the disloyal:

According to a former Senate investigator, who worked with Senator Long’s committee on eavesdropping, “Bobby Kennedy had a lot of problems with Hoover. There were things Hoover simply wouldn’t do for him — usually because they were illegal. So Bobby created I-don’t-know-how-many proprietaries, including a couple of detective agencies, basing them in big cities down South and in the Midwest. Places like Milwaukee and Detroit. Anyway, they were the Kennedy’s babies, and they did what they were told; sometimes they worked against Hoffa or organized crime, and other times they did political stuff. Actually, they’re supposed to have been set up with discretionary funds from the White House, but there’s no way to be sure. You had a unique situation back in ‘sixty and ‘sixty-one. You had one brother controlling the Presidency, and the other brother, Bobby, wearing a couple of hats. He was Attorney General, sure, but he was also overseeing the CIA: I mean he ran it. What I never understood was all that stuff about Jack’s supposedly wanting to ‘smash the CIA into a thousand pieces.’ Hell, it was his brother’s operation! Anyhow, they had a thing called ‘the Five Eyes’ or ‘the Three Eyes’ — I swear it was owned lock, stock, and barrel by the CIA. And it was a Kennedy enterprise — not legally, but in fact. They got their orders from Bobby, and they carried them out.” (Jim Hougan, Spooks, 101)

The names were an acronym: International Investigators Incorporated (Three Eyes), chartered in Indianapolis, Indiana (Five Eyes), founded by three former FBI agents (George C. Miller, George W. Ryan, and Thomas A. Everson) with a total of thirty-four years experience between them. The liaison between Three/Five Eyes and Bob was Walter Sheridan, a possible contender for one of the people that made up the composite character “Deep Throat” in the Watergate coup (Hougan, 102-103). The Kennedy family even made use of the security firm Intertel, which men like Nixon feared as effectively a bought and paid arm of the Kennedy mafia:

Under Peloquin’s leadership, Intertel’s acquired more than two hundred clients, most of them under “oral” contracts and most of them blue-chip corporations. […] Intertel will protect “proprietary information” (secrets), whether it’s on tape, in print, or an employee’s head; perform background investigations and “employee attitude assessments”; establish industrial “intelligence systems” and guard against corporate espionage; provide “defensive electronic surveys” (debug); authenticate, or discredit, documents using state-of-the-art laboratory equipment and techniques [some of Intertel’s clients included Resorts International, McDonald’s, and ITT] (Hougan, 331-336)

When Nixon formed his “Plumbers” as President, it was in response to the fear that he would get raided through Kennedy private assets. Nixon was reasonably paranoid.

However strong the Kennedy network was, with the capacity to buy-out any blackmailer, no matter how many affairs and murders the Kennedys committed, the sleaze would eventually become fatal. In the fall of 1963, an investigative group of Republican senators uncovered the identity of one of JFK’s pool girls, Ellen Rometsch, an East German spy (Hersh, 387). Rometsch frequented the pool parties where “everyone ran around naked” (Hersch, 390). This kind of scandal had already tanked a British government in the Profumo scandal. Would the Kennedy clan go down in flames? JFK was already sharpening an axe for Lyndon Johnson, his iced out Vice President whose power in the Senate had languished in his absence. Scandals involving his bagman, Bobby Baker, could easily justify JFK dropping Johnson from the ticket. Could Republicans strike a blow, against either figures in the administration? Would they want to? A diseased, crippled, sex maniac who turned the CIA into a hit-squad, that relentlessly pursued Jimmy Hoffa, the leader of the Teamster Union, less out of justice than personal vendetta? The man who stole the 1960 election and bought, bribed, murdered, fucked, and ruined countless WASPs and would-be contenders? What would that make of the Liberal Establishment but a bawdy joke in Moscow? It was probably the case that men, who may or may not have personally liked Jack, decided it was time for his apotheosis.

Cloaked in mystery still, November 22nd, 1963 remains difficult to parse. JFK was blown away and the blame, after some waffling on right-wing extremism and an international Communist plot, fell on the lone-nut shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald. Contrary to the Warren Commission (which was quick to lionize and bury the rotting corpse of Jack), it was likely that several moving parts brought the President down. Johnson, now the presidential LBJ, had saved his hide from a possible jail sentence. The Liberal Establishment, seething with resentment for how they were used, had secured their reputation, now even with martyrial glow of St Kennedy. JFK died for America, against the fascist kooks and the Communists, standing for Decency and Democracy. Parapolitical Kennedy investigators never contemplate that the men who shared so many of the President’s ideas feared what he could do to them, whether through his own private army of bagmen and gangsters, or his own mountain of scandals that would destroy the postwar order.

While Oliver Stone piously depicted JFK in films, like Jesus Christ in Ben Hur, as the off-screen titular hero, he was a fundamental threat to the social democracy that latter day conspiracy theorists believe as the last great hope for mankind. It can be conjectured that the CIA hired hitters from among their ex-Fascist contacts (organized in Madrid) to pull off the job. It was likely French Algerians, including Pierre Lafitte and Jean Rene Souetre, who gunned down the President. They had reason to hate the man who had pointed a finger against the Black Feet for their efforts to preserve their homeland. Having created the opening, figures in the CIA likely called upon the Syndicate to clean up the mess, with a Lansky lieutenant, Jack Ruby, silencing Oswald forever. This runs against the usual JFK conspiracy literature, but it draws upon the deep wells of their research. There is no final proof either way, but H.P. Albarelli Jr.’s Coup in Dallas excavates the actual shooters that would tie this theory altogether.

The epilogue to this tragedy involved a William Stockdale, a Kennedy supporter tasked to raise off-the-books money. $50,000 — for what? Stockdale did not know, the money was received in a brief-case, and tossed, reportedly, into a closet with so many other unmarked briefcases. Was it for Ellen Rometsch, which may have required an endless flow of cash to keep her mouth shut? No one knows. With JFK’s death, the disappearance of this money, which was supposedly for the reelection of the President, disappeared. Stockdale was accused of theft and promptly, within two weeks, committed suicide. His son still wanted to know, as late as the 1990s, why he raised the money in the first place (Hersch, 408-411).

Thus, the mantle fell upon Bob, who took to reinventing himself as the nation radicalized between the New Left and the New Right. Jack was indifferent towards Civil Rights domestic policy (which has, ever since, occasionally been mistaken for his nascent conservatism), but Bob would rectify this mistake by adopting Civil Rights as his own, a surrogate for the failures in foreign policy. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was now a Progressive, a champion of black plight, one that was far to the left of LBJ’s southern swagger and paternalism. Bob would make civil rights his family’s legacy:

He was therefore determined to foster the notion that his brother had been a consummately progressive President, one whose last wish had been to launch a great federal war to “end” poverty. The fact that Jack Kennedy had been, in Bobby’s view, so distinctively progressive a President made it all the more necessary for Bobby himself to embrace the progressive cause with a becoming zeal. (Beran, 93)

As Bob persisted forward, bracketing out the death of his brother (he was seemingly careless, or disinterested, enough to refer to the shooter as “Harvey Lee Oswald”), he would hammer LBJ for the failures of Liberalism. Johnson did not do enough, despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, to alleviate the poverty of blacks, he did not allocate enough funds for public housing (Beran, 99). But as the welfare state became, conceptually, insufficient for the New Left, who found it demeaning scraps from an out-of-touch elite, Bob jumped ahead of the problem. He would become the champion of Progressives. The problem could not be solved through central bureaucracy and welfare. The Stimsonian Age and all its Liberal paternalism was over. Following the New Left, Bob emphasized community over corporations and complexes. Now Senator of New York in 1964, Bob would criticize LBJ from the left, attacking the administration for its failures abroad and at home. Bob let his heart bleed for the public, turning his sacred face towards the ghettos and barrios of America:

The “rebuilding” efforts that Bobby proposed in the January speeches were to be the work of individuals and communities, not of government bureaus; Bobby called upon individual citizens themselves to “take the first steps” toward a restoration of their blighted neighborhoods.”; thus he admired Cesar Chavez & his movement: “You are winning a special kind of citizenship,” Bobby told Chavez’ people in Delano, California “no one is doing it for you — you are winning it yourselves — and therefore no one can ever take it away.” (Beran, 107)

To be an American was, for this Kennedy, to build a Community, to agitate and seize your rights for your own. The problem with welfare was that it still prioritized the WASP as paternal support. But America’s New Left no longer wanted that pat on the head and patronizing wink. It wanted empowerment and dignity, new slogans to emphasize a shift in the coalitions power. A majority of minorities no longer included the old demands of Southerners or ethnic whites. Welfare was outmoded and insufficient, it was a kind of dirty bribe to the People of Color in America whose time had come. Bob would embrace this rhetoric, as he preached to the Chicanos of Delano:

“In our generosity we have created a system of hand-outs, a second-rate set of social services which damages and demeans its recipients, and destroys any semblance of human dignity that they have managed to retain through their adversity.” (Beran, 108)

This framework came with later policy suggestions of federal investment to aid private neighborhood activism. It was the Folks that would be given the means to support themselves in their Communities. Bob had presaged both conservative Jack Kemp and neoliberal Al Gore in their schemes for building enterprise through federal investments in failed and failing urban blight zones (Beran, 130). What if it did not work? Did it matter? The point was a willingness for public abasement, a willingness to suffer abjection on behalf of color, appealing to black radicals, as a white ally, directly:

Bobby Kennedy began to listen to black voices, “he seemed almost to enjoy the degree of humiliation involved. And these encounters were exercises in humiliation, exercises in which Bobby very deliberately abased himself.” Andrew Young was “impressed” with Bobby taking tongue-lashing from angry blacks; Bobby said later “After all the abuses the blacks have taken through the centuries,” he continued, “whites are just going to have to let them get some of these feelings out.” (Beran, 139)

These moves were an attack on the Liberal Establishment, now pegged as a cynical elite seeking to fob off the wretched of the earth through pay-offs. They were the guilty conscience of a failed promise.

The irony, however, was that an attack on the welfare state and the Liberal establishment could sound rightwing. Nixon agreed with Bob that they were both on the same page in 1968 against the Liberal Establishment. Reagan joked that he and Bob must be using the same speechwriters (Beran, 202).

Bob had become the torchbearer of the New Left, not only distinguishing himself from LBJ and the Liberal Establishment (many of whom were Kennedy men), but also stole the thunder of Nixon’s Silent Majority. Could Bob have pulled it off? Certainly he may have seemed a serious, even saintly, alternative to Republican critics, as well as being the clear choice to unite a fragmented Democratic party. The bullets of Sirhan Sirhan, or perhaps another Liberal Establishment assassin that involved a woman in a polka-dotted dress, silenced the attack dog. He too joined the pantheon of American gods. The Kennedys clan continued to produce martyrs for a system that they repeatedly tried to raped.

The mantle then fell upon hapless Ted, the last fraternal bagman. He took up the Family’s senate seat in Massachusetts, holding it until his bloated corpse gave out in 2009. It was not that he did not seethe with ambition to retake the White House. Watergate, that seemingly minor burglary that had little ties to major figures in the Nixon administration, became a bonfire through Kennedy gasoline. Kennedy Democrats were prime pushers to draw out the investigation to hurt Nixon as much as possible. Kennedy Democrats may have also been the men who would get John Wesley Dean III to turn against his President (Geoff Shepard, The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President, 32). Dean had skeletons in his closet, manifest in his whore girlfriend (and later wife) Maureen Binder, someone who worked for Heidi Rikan, a madam and friend of Joe Nestle, a DC crimeboss, who ran what was likely a honeypot operation out of the Columbia Plaza hotel, right across the street from the Watergate. There is more about this seedy world in Phil Stanford’s White House Call Girl: The Real Watergate Story, but that is another story.

Ted’s goons tightened the noose around Nixon with loyalists that flanked the office of the special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Nixon may have fired Cox out of principled opposition to a conflict of interest, or maybe he acted out of good strategic sense. Either way, the removal provoked screeching about executive abuse and corruption, with a media complex still in love with Camelot, denouncing Tricky Dick the Illiberal red baiter (Shepard, 167). Besides pressuring Nixon to resign, another result of Kennedy Democrat involvement in Watergate was the Watergate Special Prosecutor’s Campaign Contribution Task Force, which targeted and threatened Republic donor networks. 158 companies and 131 private citizens (including Ross Perot) were investigated. The scare, and threat of litigation, did not make Ted President in 1976, but it did damage Republican efforts to retain the White House (Shepard, 199-201).

Ted had all the cards, but the Kennedy magic to rig the game had declined. The drunken murder of Mary Joe Kopechne in 1969 at Chappaquiddick had basically sealed his fate, even if it was not clear until Ted made his bid for the presidency in 1980. With the election of Jimmy Carter on hapless dim-bulb populism, Carter’s technocratic willingness to slash welfare and his reliance on the “Georgia Mafia” clique had increasingly alienated Democrats, especially Kennedy Democrats, from Carter’s seemingly conservative pivot. Ted would exploit this rift and assume the role of a critic from the left. In a speech that operated as an attempted epitaph to Carter’s administration, Ted would cry up the spirit of Kennedy and Democracy:

It is wrong that prices are rising as rapidly as they are […] It is wrong that millions of our fellow Americans are out of work […] It is wrong that cities are struggling against decay. It is wrong that women and minorities are denied their equal rights. And it is wrong that millions who are sick cannot afford the care they need […] There could be few more divisive issues for America and for our party than a Democratic policy of drastic slashes in the federal budget at the expense of the elderly, the poor, the black, the sick, the cities, and the unemployed. (Rick Perlstein, Reaganland, 411-413)

The solution was, like Bob, doubling down on the New Left to fulfill the promises of the Liberal establishment. The solution was not mere welfare, but empowerment and outreach to the Communities. Ted clearly favored universal healthcare against Carter’s two-faced lies and deficit hawking. Ted was also in favor of increased immigration from the Third World. However Chappaquiddick caught up with the would-be EMK, leaving the blustering lion mute before a concerned, but sympathetic, media complex. He held onto his senate seat, but Ted’s presidential aspirations evaporated like a snail in the sun. Nevertheless, he continued to trumpet the cause of the New Left, even being the architect of the Immigration Act of 1990, prior to the signing of NAFTA, that has formed America’s current demographic dilemma.

The night of the Kennedys had come to an end.

There have been aftershocks and epilogues. John Jr. was a playboy who died in a plane crash. Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter, married into New York Jewry and has disappeared, as much as the WASPs have disappeared in the intermarriage with the rise of new elites. It is fitting that the Irish family that had barged their way into WASPdom, also participated in its own evaporation through intermarriage into the post-WASP cosmopolitan circuit. Many Kennedys have met untimely ends, with political careers ended through nymphomania, drug-abuse, and cartoonish corruption. Until Donald Trump saved him (for the small-bang of some loyal “Independent” voters), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had embroiled his campaign in an absurd sex scandal of sleeping with the reporter who covered his campaign. His vocal paralysis is the product of venereal disease and a worm, according to him, has eaten part of his brain. Joe III failed to challenge Elizabeth Warren for her senate seat. Jack Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg may return his family to New Left politics.

The Kennedy clan was a scourge for America, a legacy of WASP incompetence and self-destruction. One may hope, at the very least, that poor sister Rosemary, whom Old Joe’s daughter lobotomized for behavioral problems, may find reconstitution in the Final Judgement, as the rest of the family ascends as the smoke of torment, a monument to oblivion.

The Everlasting Struggle for World Supremacy Fought between the Powers of Technology and Magic.

Thus opens Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, an epic fantasy adventure with a blunt political vision. Bakshi is one of America great animators, an Ellis Islander from the Pale of Settlement, who reflected, in his peak decade of output, the cultural vision of the New Left. Bakshi attacked not only Capitalism, Imperialism, and White Supremacy as expressions of the ur-evil of Fascism, but also Communism. All technocratic regimes of modern states reduced man to inhumanity, a core commitment of the New Left against both the United States and the Soviet Union, a revolt against the System. However, this analysis is entirely consistent with the personalist drift of Catholicism that marked the development of Christian Democracy (one that could retain traditional aesthetics or modernize). It was no coincidence that the Bakshi who created Wizards would also make an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rights. While the two had a slightly different cosmology, they shared the same vision of man’s humanity, one that would degrade man into the quaint fantasy of the village against the glory of man’s technological accomplishments. It was the same rot of communitarianism that has plagued the West for the last several decades.

Wizards is a colorful film with a very simple message: stop Fascism. The story begins in a far distant future, one where nuclear apocalypse annihilated most of the population on Earth. The remnants of Humanity coalesced into two different groups: the mutants on the bad lands and the fair folk on the good lands. The former represent the First World nations that depended on the toxicity of industry and thus poisoned the land. They became a race of dimwits, sneaking and useless without firm leadership. The good land, the Third World untouched by the poisons of the West, restored the purity of the Human race in the form of elves, fairies, and dwarves, the primordial ancestors of Humankind. They live in peace and harmony, in spite of the scattered mutant hordes, in the kingdom of Montagar.

However, the queen of these folk, Delia, sensed a foreboding time of crisis, taking ill and giving birth to twins. Like Jacob and Esau, the two boys became good and evil, Avatar and Blackwolf, who would eventually war. The good son Avatar defeated the evil son Blackwolf, who fled into exile and rued revenge. While he initially gathered the mutant forces, along with literal servants of hell, this plan failed. While he had rediscovered Technology, through the use of guns and bombs, the mutants were too cowardly to execute the invasion of the good lands. More was needed in the form of ideology. So Blackwolf searched and found an answer: Hitler edits.

The discovery of ancient reels of film, Nazi propaganda that proudly played the Horst Wessel Lied, inspired the troops and debilitated the enemies. Elven armies fell before the mutants. It led even to the successful assassination of the Montagar president, a likely stand-in for JFK, with the narrator explaining the degradation of the times meant that the people of Montagar would likely blame internal forces, than the Fascist International, for the murder of their leaders. Avatar, in a boozy daze, is finally propelled into action to stop his brother in his desolate capital of Scortch I. Taking his well-endowed fairy girlfriend, Elinor, along with an impulsive, but good hearted, elven warrior Weehawk and the reprogrammed assassin robot, now named Peace, Avatar seeks to prevent another Holocaust. The imagery is not subtle: Blackwolf’s men wear iron crosses and swastikas, he is referred to as the Fuhrer, and he mumbles “Sieg Heil” as he paces within his castle. Blackwolf’s ultimate plan is to take the good lands so he may have a healthy environment to make an heir. When the leader is informed his wife (or concubine?) is pregnant and will give birth to a mutant, Blackwolf callously remarks that he will have to try again. Technology is a way to force the evil upon the good who live in communion with nature, not exploiting it.

The mutants themselves are simple and comically foolish. Two recurring soldiers, who act as a running gag of incompetence, interrogate priests of a temple in Montgar. With the holy relics are Sixties era peace-signs and hippy paraphernalia, the two ministers put up a charade for several hours to prevent their demolition (with one lisping “o Lord!” in an Episcopalian prayerbook affect, and the other a rabbi chanting in a garbled Hebrew). Eventually the two soldiers catch on and artillery levels the temple. Scortch itself is no better, with ugly mutants being accosted by ugly hookers. The life of technology is the impurity of whores, degenerates, guns, bombs, poverty, and oppression. The simple elvish swords and arrows of this world’s Vietcong do not compare to the vicious instruments of war.

Against Blackwolf and his hellspawn, Avatar is a bit of a bumbler. Given to spirits and platitudes, Avatar always finds himself in the moment of need. He seeks the simple things of life: food, drink, a good woman, plenty of rest, and nature’s bounty. And while he has no desire to save the world, he is willing to do it, even if he, along the way, gets frustrated and acts out of impulse. While infiltrating Scortch, Avatar gets upset with the ugliness of this dark and metallic city, summoning flowers to beautify it. He is bearded, small, in his cups, but he remains tough as he is humble. Elinor, her cleavage bursting, always teases him and pushes him to act beyond his immediate self-interest. When Avatar finally confronts Blackwolf, the bathos is stupid, with the former simply pulling out a pistol and shooting the fuhrer, putting an end to the whole empire. Leaderless, the mutants melt away, the literal demons retreat back to Nazi hell, and Montagar is now safe, where Weehawk may return as chief of his village and Avatar, though thousands of years old, still has a thousand more to pluck Elinor as his wife and have a few kids. Earth returns to the bounty of banquet, booze, butterflies, and the harvest.

Wizards offers a simple opposition between militaristic technology and the humane desire to return to nature. Is that not the ethos of the New Left? The goal is the reestablish the truly Human against the inhuman ideologies that continue to afflict the West. Obviously the New Left sees the Right, and its enablers like Nelson Rockefeller, as the great enemy, the Fascism found in cops, soldiers, and junky Neo-Nazi bikers. For Bakshi, this cruel and violent force exists to victimize, particularly the downtrodden blacks of AmeriKKKa. In an early, and far more violently explicit, film, Coonskin, Bakshi depicts America as a buxom slut, seducing virile black men and then beating them to a pulp or killing them. It is not far from a similar anti-American sentiment found in the Canadian band Guess Who, where “American Woman” is the great imperial whore with her ghetto scenes and war machines. In the Seventies, when self-criticism was not verboten, the crude criminality of blacks was used as a call to action, to give up on the false white America and pursue something else. The human, for Bakshi, must overcome the inhumane of Fascist capitalism.

This critique, however, involves a level of inside criticism. Fritz the Cat, Bakshi’s first major film, opens with a gaggle of white women ogling a black man (an anthropomorphized crow) with a litany of college liberal platitudes. They love blackness, make reference to authors like James Baldwin, and the Jewish girl even claims Jews are closest to blacks (and she’s a Jew by the way). The beatnik crow stomps off with a lispy affect: “I ain’t no jive ass black nigga honey.” They’re left stunned as Fritz snickers. But he is no different. After a failed orgy and a police raid, Fritz takes cover in a synagogue where two literal pig cops follow him. While one is puzzled with the mumbling rabbis, the other explains (as a fellow Jew) that they are in a synagogue. As he crawls on the floor apologizing to every rabbi (who intersperse their mumbled Yiddish with petty jealousy), they eventually come upon Fritz. But before he can be caught, the radio announces the United States will be selling weapons to Israel, which causes the rabbis to dance in celebration. Fritz easily escapes. Later, after meeting with some black crows in Harlem, Fritz preaches Marxist revolution, which falls on deaf ears until he denounces the pig cops for their oppression, sparking a race riot. Fritz escapes, the military intervenes, and Disney characters celebrate on the side lines as Harlem is bombed into rubble. The inside critique, a secular Jew who detests not only the Judaism of the rabbis but the Communism of the garment district, is more than on the nose. Jews are part of the problem when they cling to their worthless traditions and their ethnic pride. Take off the yarmulke and fight for the liberation of mankind. It should be no wonder that a number of New Left Jews lead the marches for a free Palestine.

It is from this attitude that Bakshi fell in love with the world of Tolkien, even later claiming to understand him against the clueless and gaudy Peter Jackson interpretation. Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings is parallel to Wizards, only the tone is more serious and there are no large breasted fairies. The battalions of orcs, speaking phonetically German gibberish, take the place of the mutants with their swastikas and guns. It is not hard to see Avatar in Gandalf and Blackwolf in Saruman, though both partake of a more theatrically English demeanor. Tolkien, like Bakshi, despised industrialization and modernization, the reduction of man to machine and the horrors of war. They both despised authoritarian dictatorships and found solace in the vulgar materialism of simple village life.

Tolkien’s Catholicism, though claimed as Traditional, reflected Rome’s increasingly positive approach to the body. Neo-Thomism’s reinterpretation of natura pura meant something like a natural world, with natural goods, that could be judged independently of the supernatural (even as the supernatural completed ultimate questions). The worldly life of the hamlet, with its dances, festivals, and simple indulgence in food and drink (and sex) represents the purpose for which God made the Earth. Not a few cultural Catholics today, especially as they hover among the communitarian right, juxtapose hearty and human Catholicism (with its river dances and siestas) against the heartless Protestant Work Ethic which expects more from mankind than mud villages. Hilaire Belloc’s praise of Catholicism as the world of laughter and glasses of wine is the ideal of which the Hobbits in the Shire, as much as the fairies of Montagar, partake. It was precisely the worlds of Bakshi that Tolkien did envision.

But before the inevitable roar — that Tolkien imagined heroism and bravery, he had kings and traditional hierarchies — it is important to not fall for simple forms. Tolkien did not think highly of authority and power, even as he draped his world in kingship and sorcery (so did Bakshi). In his own words, writing to his son Christopher, Tolkien painted his own anti-politics of anarchism (quoted in full):

My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inanimate realm of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could get back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the an and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so as to refer to people. If people were in the habit of referring to ‘King George’s council, Winston and his gang’, it would go a long way to clearing thought, and reducing the frightful landslide into Theyocracy. Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The mediævals were only too right in taking nolo efiscopari as the best reasona man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that – after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world – is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. The quarrelsome, conceited Greeks managed to pull it off against Xerxes; but the abominable chemists and engineers have put such a power into Xerxes’ hands, and all ant-communities, that decent folk don’t seem to have a chance. We are all trying to do the Alexander-touch – and, as history teaches, that orientalized Alexander and all his generals.The poor boob fancied (or liked people to fancy) he was the son of Dionysus, and died of drink. The Greece that was worth saving from Persia perished anyway; and became a kind of Vichy-Hellas, or Fighting-Hellas (which did not fight), talking about Hellenic honour and culture and thriving on the sale of the early equivalent of dirty postcards. But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin’s bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.

Well, cheers and all that to you dearest son. We were born in a dark age out of due time (for us). But there is this comfort: otherwise we should not know, or so much love, what we do love. I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water. Also we have still smalls words to use. ‘I will not bow before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.’ Have at the Ores, with winged words, war-adders, biting darts – but make sure of the mark, before shooting. (November 29, 1943)

If Tolkien praised kingship, it was because he hated all forms of modern politics. He had no sense of court life or the governance of historical kingdoms. Instead, it was government with a personal touch, which loathsome states, be they fascist, democratic, or socialist, had rejected. The idea of a king, for Tolkien (as well as for many self-professed traditionalists), was the kindly quest-giver, someone who never bothers even as he may be bothered. It is an early manifestation of the anti-politics that led socially conservative Libertarians, who wanted to be left alone to grill in peace, to embrace caricatures of royalism and mock appeals to Francisco Franco. The telos of this political vision is the simple village, left alone and in peace to pursue its traditions since time-out-of-mind (though, in reality, recently contrived and compiled). There is really no difference between this Traditional Catholic ideal and the New Left’s communitarian ethic. Contrary to many critics, the New Left did not advise individualism or atomization, but organization. The Traditional Catholic, who slinks into a form of Christian Democracy critical of capitalism and socialism, is on the same field and same side as the Social Democrat, hostile to both AmeriKKKa capitalism and Soviet Communism. The New Left who welcomes foreigners with their Third World traditions and food is no different than the Traditionalist who considers Catholicism a race and the familia of Latin Americans superior (and mucho conservative) to white American capitulation.

While it may shock to hear a comparison between Bakshi and Tolkien, a New Left Jew and a Reactionary Anglo Catholic, it is not historically odd or radical, not now and not then. Consider the warm friendship between Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky, the personalist Catholic (whose theology heavily influenced future pope John Paul II) and the “takin’ it to the streets” leftwing activist who formed Obama. Christian Democracy and Social Democracy may have disagreed on the basis and justification for their particular politics, but they shared a commitment to a nearly identical policy. Activism, be it a clerical procession or an activist march, could pressure the evil and chaotic forces of democracy towards a more just end, uplifting the material and natural conditions of the common citizen. Mauritain and Alinsky even agreed on the race problem in America:

The Montgomery bus affair—inspired by Gandhi and the Gospels—implied in actual fact a certain conquest of power. Your own bus affair for Negro registration—inspired by your ideas about power—implied in actual fact the exercise of moral power (the only power and weapon by which oppressed black people can immediately manifest superiority with respect to white people).

In the spiritual realm (the Church as Mystical Body of Christ) the only power to be essentially and primarily aimed at is the power of love, which is that of a transcendent order. (Other kinds of power, in the ordinary sense of the word, are also necessary—because such a realm exists on earth and in this world,—but only in a secondary way.)

In the temporal realm (civilization) it is normal to aim primarily at power in the ordinary sense (implying coercion, pressure), but such power will inevitably become corrupted if the only incorruptible power, the power of love, is not quickening the whole business. (Your own case, my dearest Saul. Remember your conversation with the guardian of the cemetery. All your fighting effort as an organizer is quickened in reality by love for the human being, and for God, though you refuse to admit it, by a kind of inner pudeur.)

As a result: there will be no solution to the racial crisis in the US if people like you and Silberman and people like Martin Luther King do not meet together and recognize the essential unity of their effort, and the essential complementarity of their methods and inspirations, different as they may be and appear. (Maritain to Alinsky, September 14th, 1964 in ed. Bernard Doering The Philosopher and the Provocateur)

The Human spirit would triumph through love, either one understood through Vatican Catholicity or through Human Rights. Both sought to curtail the inhumanity of the modern world through an appeal to the equality of man. While issues like abortion would continue divide ethically, Christian Democrats could come to understand the need to provide and protect the woman and her child, even if she was promiscuous and conceived out of wedlock. The modern Catholic magisterium seems unwilling to personally condemn politicians that support a women’s right to choose, reflecting this ethical “complexity” that the Bible would condemn as whoredom and murder. With a phenomenon like Liberation Theology, or the hippy-adjacent theology of a Thomas Merton, there was even the possibility of more thorough commingling in pursuit of Human love against inhuman technology and industry, one that would bring the Liberal Establishment and its postwar order to its knees in the Seventies. This overlap continued into the Twenty-First century, with frivolous academic books of political theology, such as Eugene McCarraher’s The Enchantment of Mammon (published by Harvard) which advocated for Occupy Wall Street Bernie Sanders with Franciscan characteristics. This common bond continues through a Vatican magisterium allied with antifa against the Trump administration’s “cruelty” towards illegal migrants and criminals.

It is funny that Bakshi’s final film in his decade run, Fire and Ice, conceded (perhaps accidentally) to the cultural counterrevolution. Under the influence of Frank Frazetta’s primordial and fleshy imagination, magic is now entirely associated with the evil prince Nekron (a recycled named from Wizards), who unleashes brown hordes of literal subhumans to destroy the world. Only the axe of Darkwolf’s revenge against Nekron and a literal holocaust of a triggered volcano, which genocides the subhumans, restores the Earth to the kingdoms of man. While similar to many other Bakshi works, its tone reflects (even if accidental) a very different spiritual climate, one of the New Left’s utter defeat against Reagan’s Morning in America.

It may be a bitter pill to swallow that all the communitarian, environmental, little guy concern about the Ring of Power is identical to the New Left and its hippy affect. It may be a bitter pill to realize the hollowness of much Traditionalism as nothing but a gloss for the same politics that have been spinning in the mud since the Seventies. It may hurt to realize that this dead-end results in nothing but a trash heap of middle-brow mortal filth. But it is time to gird thy loins and put away the fairies.

Moreover Uzziah built towers in Jerusalem at the corner gate, and at the valley gate, and at the turning of the wall, and fortified them.

Also he built towers in the desert, and digged many wells: for he had much cattle, both in the low country, and in the plains: husbandmen also, and vine dressers in the mountains, and in Carmel: for he loved husbandry. (2 Chronicles 26: 9-10)

Straightforward narrative, this passage of Scripture describes the prosperity of King Uzziah for his fidelity, one of the godly kings of Judah in its latter days who, like the kingdom, would fall into grievous sin. Some ancient Christians, however, warped this passage, through allegory, to become an account of the soul’s aptitude and pursuit of virtue. It was this method that Maximus the Confessor utilized to explain what he saw was an incongruity in this passage, explaining away difficulties in Holy Writ. But in so doing he, and the allegorical method he utilized, made a mess of the Word of God.

In general, for Maximus, this passage is laden with a-textual symbols that describe the ascent and purification of the nous to participation in the divine energies. As a figure of Christ, Uzziah reveals the divinization of the soul. Therefore the “towers” he built signify the pious feelings necessary to acquire virtue in the flesh. The towers are the “correct spiritual principles of the doctrines concerning natural contemplation” (On Difficulties in Scripture, Volume II, 48.6). The “corner” where the tower was constructed was the union between flesh and soul, between the sensory and intellective. The “valley” where the tower was built represented the flesh, the corner as the flesh’s union, and the tower as the pious feeling to transform flesh upwards. Similarly, the “cisterns” that Uzziah built in the low valleys were the means to purify the Human soul, transfiguring the receptive flesh of the low valleys so it can receive “divine rains of wisdom and knowledge” (48.7). Therefore, this passage instructs Christians in metaphysics and the right kind of disposition necessary to achieve righteous immortality.

In the same vein, and the reason Maximus commented on this passage, was Uzziah’s vine-dresssers in Carmel. These laborers represent the souls that are at the height of divine contemplation, seeking a noetic vision of the divine. They were in Carmel because Carmel is a reference to circumcision, not the Jewish meaning of a circumcision according to the flesh, but the spiritual circumcision that “circumcises matter and material things from the intellect” (48.10). In this telling, the significance of circumcision marks the need for the highest aspects of the mind to remove attachment to sensory and material phenomena. These interpretations, so far, depend on seemingly contrived identification of various symbols of wealth and growth with the ascetic life of the monk. However, these receive a justification because the text contains an error (though one Maximus identified as intentional):

Before touching on the contemplation of these matters, however, I am astonished and amazed at how Uzziah, though he was king of Judah, according to the literal account, had “vine-dressers on Mount Carmel,” which did not belong to the kingdom of Judah, but rather to the kingdom of Israel, during whose reign the city of the kingdom of Israel was built. But apparently the text has mixed into the web of the literal account something that has no existence whatsoever, thereby rousing our sluggish minds to an investigation of the truth. (48.11-12)

Because obviously Uzziah could not have control of Mount Carmel, located in the northern Kingdom of Israel, it was clearly a divinely scripted error to provoke this allegorical interpretation. In reality, there is no textual problem or error. Carmel did not refer to a single location, and it did not always refer to the mountain in the North. Land near the southern hill town of Maon, deep within Judah, was also referred to as Carmel within the Scripture (described in detail when David met Nabal in 1 Samuel 25). There is no reason to think Uzziah did not possess this land. Maximus was simply mistaken. However, the allegorical method offered a way to avoid the meaning of the text and fly into fantasy.

This judgement, however, is not to pit antiquity against modernity. Not every ancient Christian believed in the allegorical method, which had a contested place in the Hellenic toolkit of literary criticism and analysis. Though it may elicit pearl clutching and howls, some of the best surviving ancient commentary on Scripture came from the School of Antioch, that matrix that produced the heresiarch Nestorius and his two teachers, Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, who were condemned centuries later, having reposed in the peace of a church that had overcome Roman paganism.

Diodore, in a preface to his commentary on Psalm 118, explained his method. There were multiple layers of Scripture, and there were different rhetorical methods to understand what the text taught, usually with reference to intra-textual reference. There were two means, the original surface meaning and a prophetic meaning, that both flowed from the text:

In any approach to holy Scripture, the literal reading of the text reveals some truths while the discovery of other truths requires the application of theōria. Now, given the vast difference between historia and theōria, allegory and figuration [tropologia] or parable [parabolē], the interpreter must classify and determine each figurative expression with care and precision so that the reader can see what is history and what is theōria, and draw his conclusions accordingly. (Diodore of Tarsus, Preface to Commentary on Psalm 118 in Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church)

History was the meaning of the text in the time it was written, but there were additional meanings that either emerged from within the same text, or from a later text that deepened the significance. History was never at odds with Theory, or the contemplation necessary to fully understand the text in question. One of the more obvious occurrences in Scripture, for Diodore, was figuration, or tropologia. It was when a symbol was used to describe something in more colorful language. Diodore gave the example of Psalm 80 when Israel was compared to a vine, a vine transplanted out of Egypt. It was not a stretch to understand the vine was the people of God, for the text immediately qualified that God removed the heathens from Promised Land it was placed within. Figuration was simply knowing the symbolic register that the Bible used. Vines did not mean divine contemplation, but the Israel of God. More could be said on why a vine was chosen, the tactile aspects of what a vine is and how a vine exists, but Diodore did not dwell further on this point.

Another aspect to Theory is recognition that later Scripture deeps the meaning of earlier, enigmatic, Scripture. Thus, Diodore gives the Serpent in Genesis 3 as an enigma, a mystery whose later significance is fully unveiled. Adam and Eve conversing with a Serpent, that deceived them and led them to disobedience and rebellion, was odd. No snake talks, let alone possessed rational thought. Nevertheless, later Scripture unveiled this mystery, that the Serpent was none other than a manifestation or form of Satan, the Devil, that wicked incorporeal intellective spirit that is chief rebel against the LORD.

Prophetic fulfillment also deepened the Historical reading of the Bible. Diodore thus compared the double-meaning of Psalm 118, which was about the return of the Jews from Exile in Babylon, but also had reference to the war against death that the saints continued to wage:

Now, if this is the subject of the Psalm and someone says that Psalm 118 fits all saints everywhere and that one should always pray to God for the general resurrection, as the exiles in Babylon prayed for their return to Jerusalem, this is no violation of propriety. Being so rich and lavish, the Psalm adapted itself readily to the exiles in Babylon for their request and prayer, but it adapts itself even more precisely to those who fervently long for the general resurrection. (ibid)

History and Theory did not contradict, but the latter intensified the former within the matrix of the text. Psalms about escape from Egypt, the conquest of Canaan, the glorious enthronement and reign of King David, his ignominious exile during Absalom’s coup, the destruction of Israel and Judah, and the return from Babylonia. All of these have Historical significance, but they also continue their meaning under the immortal reign of the Christ, as he gathered a people from the nations and leads them into the Promised Land of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Both the History and this Theoretical signification are simultaneously true, both enlightening the minds of the saints within the intra-textual canonicity of the Scripture.

But the above is entirely different from the equally Hellenic rhetoric/hermeneutic of allegory. This “other-reading” was a means to deactivate problematic texts. As one example, Diodore cites the poetic incest of the gods:

Zeus called Hera his sister and his wife. The plain text implies that Zeus had intercourse with his sister Hera so that the same person was both his wife and his sister. This is what the letter suggests; but the Greeks allegorize it to mean that, when ether, a fiery element, mingles with air, it produces a certain mixture which influences events on earth. Now, since air adjoins ether, the text calls these elements brother and sister because of their vicinity, but husband and wife because of their mixture. Of such kind are the allegories of the Greeks. (ibid)

One might object that Maximus did not engage in this kind of allegory, but it is not terribly controversial to see the lineage of Origen’s adaptation of allegory for the Old Testament continue through the centuries. As is commonly known, the Cappadocians considered Origen as a whetstone. His later condemnation involved errors that did not involve his exegesis (namely his supposed belief in preexistent souls and a recurrent cycle of the Fall). The above passage does not shy away from an open recognition of error in the text itself, not an error in a manuscript copy, though an error that was, supposedly, divinely intended. The allegorical method thus saved this text, and many others, from the carnal, fleshly, “Jewish,” interpretation that simply cannot be true, because it would mean later monks had a more divine understanding of the cosmos than the authors of Holy Writ. It was a pious desire, but one that leaves the text in disrepute.

If Origen’s method could be salvaged despite his personal errors, there is no reason to set aside Diodore and the School of Antioch, especially because its most famous son, John, remains a sainted hero of the pulpit. Below, Chrysostom preached from Galatians 4, explaining that the Apostle Paul’s use of the literal term “allegory” did not mean the Hellenic sense of the term:

Contrary to usage, he calls a type an allegory; his meaning is as follows; this history not only declares that which appears on the face of it, but announces somewhat farther, whence it is called an allegory. And what has it announced? No less than all the things now present. (Homily on Galatians, Ch. 4, vs. 24)

Thus, in interpreting the lives of Hagar and Sarah, Paul understood them figuratively as enigmas for the coming fullness in the Church of Christ:

Who is this who before was barren, and desolate? Clearly it is the Church of the Gentiles, that was before deprived of the knowledge of God? Who, she which has the husband? plainly the Synagogue. Yet the barren woman surpassed her in the number of her children, for the other embraces one nation, but the children of the Church have filled the country of the Greeks and of the Barbarians, the earth and sea, the whole habitable world. Observe how Sarah by acts, and the Prophet by words, have described the events about to befal us. Observe too, that he whom Isaiah called barren, Paul has proved to have many children, which also happened typically in the case of Sarah. For she too, although barren, became the mother of a numerous progeny. This however does not suffice Paul, but he carefully follows out the mode whereby the barren woman became a mother, that in this particular likewise the type might harmonize with the truth. (Ibid., vs. 26)

The “allegory” of Paul referred to the revelation of the Church, which has now encompassed the Nations, leaving the unbelieving Jews in the bondage of the flesh. They had relied on parentage and mere biological descent, and not the Promised Word that had drawn life from the dead. There was no embarrassment or error in Abram’s mistaken conception of Ishmael from Hagar, a half-brother that was not the promised seed, an enigma that would be fully unveiled in the coming of the Messiah. This reading is intrinsic to the whole text of Scripture, without the alien imposition of what would later simply be monastic common sense.

One does not need to heap contempt on Maximus or other Byzantine exegetes to grasp the point. Not unlike today, the educated and culturally attuned find the Bible to be an embarrassment. It contains many odd and bizarre stories from an era that appeared to later peoples (ancient as well as modern) to be barbarian. While Origen had no trouble with the supernatural and ascetic world of the New Testament, the Old remained a thorn in the side of any Hellene trained in the halls of Athens or Alexandria. Origen, however, was not alone in his embarrassment, as elite schools of philosophers struggled to appreciated their own cultural patrimony in Homer. Here was a world of petty gods and blood-smattered heroes, both puppets of a fate they could not resist or fully understand. It was simply not the case, for a Neoplatonist like Porphyry, that Homer sung of the carnal relations between Calypso and Odysseus, a lesser divinity lusting for mortal flesh that the hero, however reluctantly, supplied. To the contrary, it was a poem of the soul’s ascent from fleshly sense towards the One, acquiring virtue and purified from lesser attachments. Both the Old Testament and Homer could service the higher calling of an ascetic cleanse of the nous.

The same kind of uneasiness that Origen experienced with Israel’s conquest of Canaan is still contemporary. The simple, and at times rough, texts of Scripture are targets of Christianity’s cultured despisers. One need not be a Liberal Christian, who has rejected all forms of supernaturalism (and even theism), to understand the gravitational pull of this method and disposition. Allegory may no longer have any academic cache as literary criticism, but not a few commentators profusely apologize for the barbarity of Scripture as an ugly by-product of a less enlightened time. God had to work with the material he had, no matter how rude and unfit. These accounts undermine the sovereignty and majesty of God, as if he were a prisoner to time rather than its creator and lord. With Maximus, at least, there was praise of divine cunning to lure the mind upwards. Instead, God is reduced to the powerless sufferer of man’s many crimes, a strong right arm reduced to handwringing.

It is necessary, then, to embrace the better textual method. What was once urbane and learned now appears as ridiculous mental gymnastics, crazed toothless monks squeezing their moth-eaten scrolls. There is no reason to pursue these methods, no matter how traditional or seemingly spiritual. Instead, there are better, well-trodden, roads that continue, no matter how painful, to learn and embrace the ethos of Holy Writ, Scripture interpreting Scripture within the matrix of its own canon. Only in this way will Christians develop an understanding of their worldview to fight back against the typological Jezebels of today, against the degenerate will-worship and Human Rights fairytales that marks this age.

In my opinion the present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes—rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments. By these general views of the subject have my reflections been guided. I now offer you the outline of the plan which they have suggested. Let an Association be formed to be denominated, “The Christian Constitutional Society.” It’s objects to be

1st The support of the Christian Religion.

2nd The support of the Constitution of the United States.

Alexander Hamilton to James A. Bayard [16-21] April 1802

Alexander Hamilton died from his wounds shortly after his baptism into the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. His conversion to the Christian faith was not sudden, but the product of living through the turbulence of the French Revolution. There is no need to narrate the rise of the Third Estate, the creation of the National Assembly, the never-ending pursuit of writing a constitution, the continental wars, and the final fall of Patrollism (as Thomas Carlyle called it) to the earthquake of Jacobinism. These radicals mocked and scorned French Christianity, committing ever more audacious acts of sacrilege almost unto the point of state atheism. This Christian Hamilton was not the same Hamilton who, in a nasty quip, said the Convention simply forgot to include God in the new Constitution of 1787. But Hamilton’s turn to faith was not novel, but reflected the mood of many of the original patriots (particularly in New England) who defended their Christian republic. Federalism became identified with a strong central state and a Christian political theology. This vision became identified with an American Union.

As Hamilton’s idea for a Christian Constitutional Society had two components, this essay will follow these two distinctions, beginning with the latter.

As both Libertarians and Marxists have argued, the Constitution was a “counterrevolution” against the excesses of the 1780s. Many elite patriots, having fought for independence from the British Empire, were disgusted with rapid pace of social collapse. Independence was a fight to conserve the rights of self-governing assemblies, the idea of “True Whiggery” in the name of English liberty and faith exemplified in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. An Imperial Parliament had, supposedly (there is still a historiographic debate over how much Parliament really changed and whether the Americans ever really understood their constitutional position in relation to Westminster), threatened to rescind these liberties and Americans fought to preserve them. But now what? It seemed, to not a few, that America was dissolving into acid, with nothing to hold together a Union against European intrigue. Shays’ Rebellion in 1786, the year before the Constitutional Convention, saw western Massachusetts farmers (many of them patriot veterans) arm themselves against the tax collectors from the city-state of Boston. They were angered that the tax burden crushed them as the eastern merchants continued to accumulate wealth. They no longer felt represented in a government that they had helped to liberate. What was to stop western Massachusetts from fragmenting from the rest of the state? What was to stop the states from fragmenting from America? These new state constitutions were not universally beloved and there was little reason a new nation would endure. Many of the men who would become the Framers were mortified:

The Federalists, and Madison in particular, as they went about their work in the late 1780s were much more troubled over the irresponsibility and small-mindedness of the state legislatures in the years immediately following the Revolution than they were over the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation. What most offended them were such short-sighted actions as paper money laws, debtor relief laws, local tariffs, tax postponements, and a tendency to beat down court reforms and similar undertakings intended for the larger public benefit, all amid a babel of contending local demands, selfish private and parochial interests, and the pushing and shoving demagoguery of popular politics. (Elkins & McKitrick, The Age of Federalism, 702)

Contrary to received wisdom, the American Revolution was not fought for liberalism and liberalism did not frame this new Constitution. Even if James Madison was something of a proto-liberal, in his obsessive desire to limit and divide powers of government, he was an outlier among the men who gathered to draft a replacement for the Articles of Confederation. The goal of this new constitution was to limit parochial, small-minded, democracy and forge a powerful American state that could engage the powers of Europe without becoming a pawn (Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government, 3-4). Enemies of this new constitution, the Antifederalists, were an odd alliance of elitists and democrats across the nation, incoherent and unified only by an inchoate fear of “aristocracy” (which more often than not meant the weakening of local elite for a new national elite). They lost and pivoted to becoming strict constructionists, using the bare bone letters of the Constitution to hamstrung its intent that the Washington administration sought to implement (ibid., 29-30).

But what was the intent of this counterrevolutionary recht? In the main, it was, following the Glorious Revolution, statecraft that was married to a defense of liberty. It was a constitutional elective monarchy working through a new kind of parliament, constituted not by birth but by merit (Ibid., 63-69). For Hamilton, the British model, despite its faults and weaknesses, was still admirable. The English had built the kind of republican system that could preserve liberty through a strong state, not liberty at the expense of strength. Therefore, a standing army was necessary to not only defend the rights and interests of American citizens, but to prevent petty militarization of local militias that would not only lose in war, but could be used to divide the nation into competing confederacies (ibid., 123). Many of Hamilton’s enemies considered him a new Robert Walpole, the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, who maintained international peace through a strong military presence. In contrast, it was a “Country Party” Whig like William Pitt the Elder, advocating for local militia mobilization and decrying the tyranny of a standing army, who led Britain into the Seven Years War (one that nearly broke Britain’s financial back).

For similar reasons, Hamilton also advocated for federal tariffs and a national bank to foster a more stable economy. An indirect, but national, tariff would offset the burdens of taxation, allowing the federal government to assume many of coastal needs of the states. As Hamilton thought, the First Bank of the United States and federal tariffs reduced the tax burden as states charged less and placed more economic weight on mercantile commerce (ibid., 191-192; 211-212).

What motivated Hamilton and his fellow Federalists was a very different vision for the American state. In contrast to Jefferson, who advocated an “empire of space” to escape the Malthusian population trap, a never-ending popular expansion, Hamilton advanced an “empire of time” that could accept the civilizational necessity of a commercial republic while offsetting its possible corruption. (McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 5-11). As a disciple of the Scots Enlightenment and student of David Hume, Hamilton believed that the luxury and prosperity from a mercantile economy did not necessarily lead to vice, but could forge a virtuous and industrious people. Wealth did not necessarily lead to effeminacy and vice if proper channels and supports were in place (ibid., 29-32). A dynamic, even imperial, republic would allow both a strong and free nation, something that many “Country Party” Jeffersonians excoriated as impossible and absurd. Despite their own wealth and local power, they believed anything beyond the agrarian yeomanry, befitting the seventeenth-century republicanism of James Harrington, would be doomed to tyranny and wickedness. Federalists defied this pessimism in industry, but only if handled well.

How was this possible? If Britain was the model, did America need a royal family (which produced dynastic struggles and courtly intrigue that disgusted all republicans)? Did America need the patronage system of a hereditary nobility, which often acted as a burden upon talented commoners (such as Walpole and Pitt), to preserve social hierarchy? What about religion? Many republicans, in the tradition of Machiavelli and later Rousseau, believed Christianity as unfit for the masculine energy necessary to defend and uplift the state. Historians have debated whether Harrington was really a Calvinist Christian or disguised his pagan state-worship to avoid censure. How could Roman virtue be combined with the holiness of the saint?

The answer was not only in the Senate’s natural aristocracy, but even more primarily in the President as chief magistrate. The Constitution provided all the tools for an energetic elected monarch, a constitution, though powerful, executive that could preserve the nation. John Adams feared the growing power of a plutocracy, many being foreigners, who would corrupt and degrade America as an oligarchy. Only the One could overcome the Few and preserve the Many, who were often prone to self-destruction. Commerce may be necessary (though Adams believed it a necessary evil, with emphasis on evil), but His Excellency the President would be able to keep it from enslaving the population under financial speculators (Ryerson, John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many, 232-269; 399-432). Washington and Adams both demonstrated these virtues admirably during the crisis of the French Revolution, pursuing a neutrality against the revolving democratic tides of Francophilia and Francophobia. What caused Washington to be hated in his own time became his great credit in generations succeeding him.

It was necessary, therefore, to produce virtuous and talented men through national academies. During the 1790s, Federalists promoted the creation of these institutions to hone good breeding into virtue and learning, the gentlemen necessary to restrain democratic excess and dissolution (Boonshoft, Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic, 3). Contrary to the trend in English schools, American academies would focus on moral philosophy and political economy, an emphasis drawn from the Scots Enlightenment opposed to Francophile emphasis on courtly dance, music, and modern language (particularly French and Italian) (ibid., 37-38). The emphasis was on citizen-saints of a dynamic republic, not courtiers in the royal houses of Europe. President Washington even pushed for the creation of a national university, one that focused on talent over birth, though this received scorn from enemies of the administration (ibid., 75-76; 139). Only through a focus on institution building could the forces of dynamic growth be harnessed towards excellence, not excess.

It was for this reason that Federalists were accused of facing East, concerned with Europe, than West, the supposedly limitless frontier. Hamilton was concerned with competing among Europeans, but that did not mean Federalists were not expansionists. Rather, Federalists were concerned for an orderly settlement, one that brought civilization and social hierarchy into new territories. The Ohio Company, which handled much of the federal land in the Northwest Territory, was primarily a Federalist enterprise, particularly veterans of the War of Independence. Through the constructive use of public credit, a federal tariff, and a focus on domestic manufacturing, America could absorb more of its surrounding territories to replicate the growth and virtue in the original thirteen states (Maulden, The Federalist Frontier, 5-10). Per Manasseh Cutler, a US Representative from Massachusetts and Congregationalist pastor, the Ohio Company would provide that “every man could sit under his own vine and fig tree, with none to molest or make him afraid” (ibid., 11-12). As architect of the Northwest Territory’s boundaries and settlement, Cutler, among other Federalists, a controlled but sustained migration westward would bring peaceful communities that were not subject to the anarchy of squatter fights and Indian wars. A strong military presence and the development of new gentry, men of good breeding and ability, would bring an ordered liberty to the territory (ibid., 31-33). The Ohio Company even included land provisions for new churches, incentivizing eastern pastors to move west to shepherd these expanding flocks (ibid., 69).

In all of these ways, the Federalists had a design to advance an imperial commercial republic. But this republic had its reason in the Christian faith. While Hamilton was a later convert to this unique political theology, many Federalists advanced a broad Evangelical union of churches that would direct the spirit of the nation. These Federalists stood opposed to secularists, such as Jefferson and Madison, who increasingly sought to diminish Christian influence within the American public. This secularization included education, with Jefferson passing over a divinity department in his newly crafted University of Virginia. Instead he preferred a geology department (Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism, 43-47). Similarly, Madison had defeated Patrick Henry, an antifederalist convert to the Washington administration, in his bid to create a multi-confessional Protestant establishment in Virginia. It was for these reasons that New England Federalists saw these Jeffersonians as an image of antichrist, traitors to the spirit of American Independence.

Contrary to claims of American liberalism, the reason for American Independence included fear that Parliament was betraying the Protestant Interest, the broad irenic political theology that bound many British Evangelicals together in common cause. But Parliament, it seemed, had subjugated the interests of faith to political necessity. There was a growing fear that India would increasingly provide a role-model for colonial rule, where colonists (regardless of their race or faith) would be stripped of their rights and forced to pay tribute to Westminster. The East India Company’s control of India signaled future imperial rule over North America (Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III, 8-16).

But that was not all. This same fear applied to the newly acquired colony of Canada, filled with French Catholics who were now subjects of Great Britain. Parliament’s Quebec Act permitted public Catholicism, not only a betrayal of the Protestant Interest but a possible threat to New England. John Jay, a New York delegate to the Continental Congress, excoriated the Quebec Act as a means to divide and rule in New England, pitting foreign Catholics against Evangelical Englishmen (Den Hartog, Patriotism and Piety, 23-24). Similarly, the controversy over an American bishop from the Church of England reflected a fear that Protestant unity would be shattered through inter-ecclesial infighting. Like the defense of their established rights, which the Austrian Conservative, Frederich von Gentz had defended as fundamentally different from the French Revolution (with approval and translation from the once Federalist John Quincy Adams), the Protestant Interest was undermined through a new approach to Parliamentary overlordship.

It was this same Protestant Interest that formed American political theology. The Federalists, against strict constructionists, did not believe the Constitution was sufficient in itself. It was a “roof without walls” if a broad cultural Evangelicalism dissipated, a national faith that exceeded any single institution (ibid., 4-6). Timothy Dwight, president of Yale and Congregationalist who was convinced Jefferson represented the secular revolutionary interests of the Illuminati, rejected all leveling and all separation of church and state. Dwight argued for the public role of pastors in the social hierarchy, an armed populace, a limited franchise, and the priority (even majority) of small native property holders in a Christian republic (ibid., 63-64). New England would persist with its partnership of magistrate and minister well into the nineteenth century, with state sanctioned bible societies and evangelism.

But New England was not alone or alien in this drive towards a national Evangelical political theology. Georgia, Maryland, and South Carolina gave state funding for Evangelical churches after Independence. Even Pennsylvania, famous for its toleration under a Quaker non-establishment, required an oath for all public officers to believe in God, providence, and the divine inspiration of the Bible. This “Christian Republicanism” defined many of the new states and their Federalist advocates, a political theology that advanced good breeding, social hierarchy, and faith in Jesus Christ as the savior and ruler of the universe (Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, 20-22). Even blasphemy laws continued in the early republic, with the New York Supreme Court ruling in the People vs. Ruggles for the constitutionality of blasphemy laws (ibid., 65-68). Even after the Federalists fell from national power, reduced increasingly to a rump party against Jefferson’s conciliatory efforts (winning over some moderate Federalists), they continued to shape the nation’s religious ethos. The American Bible Society continued the drive for Christian Republicanism, where a commercial republic and social hierarchy flowed with a public faith in Christ (Den Hartog, 111-115). The Constitution and Christianity would only persevere together to maintain the ethos and structure necessary for republican government, under a monarchical chief executive, to resist the constant corruption that threatened to destroy it.

Jefferson may have succeeded in forestalling this problem through unbounded expansion and limited conquest, but with the close of the frontier, the same problems reemerged. Despite the defeat of the Federalists and this particular visions, instances of it continued to reappear in the birth of the National Republicans. Even the early Antimason Party was a populist expression of Christian Republicanism against the international infidelity of Masonry, which brought together European revolution and democratic leveling under a supposed occult elite (Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic, 22-33). John Quincy Adams, returning to Congress after his presidential term, ran as an Antimason against the threat of an upstart monied oligarchy that Antimasonry stood against (ibid., 154). Though the Whigs were incoherent and divided in their opposition to Andrew Jackson, leveler and Mason, Peter Augustus Jay, son of John Jay, still supported them against the Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren. An incoherent, but somewhat Christian Republican, party was better than the advocate of egalitarianism and infidelity (Den Hartog, 184-185).

This energy would continue through the nineteenth century, eventually influencing the muscular Christianity that propelled Theodore Roosevelt into the White House. It would continue, ebbing and flowing, throughout the twentieth century. After the Fourth Great Awakening of the postwar era, the heirs to this tradition, as part of the New Right, would eventually help catapult Ronald Reagan into the Presidency in 1980 and, in a similarly age defining election, Donald Trump as GOP nominee in 2016. While now far more populist in orientation (a product of mass democratic politics), the same vision can be seen throughout its many shifts, permutations, and turns. A strong dynamic commercial republic, with muscular imperial attributes, went hand-in-hand with a strong Christian political theology. The national-interest was not necessarily in contrast to faithfulness, as much as prosperity did not contradict virtue. The greatness of America could, and possibly did, flow with submission to the law-word of God. This vision provided an alternative to Jeffersonians and Jacobins in the past. It may once again offer light against the continued tide of darkness today.

Despite his scattershot political attachments, Richard Baxter was an architect of Christian Empire for an Evangelical England. During the Civil Wars, Baxter tepidly sided with Parliament in light of Charles Stuart’s supposed pledge to Irish Catholicism for an army. He deplored the Regicide, disdained the Republic, and disliked Oliver Cromwell, until he understood what the Protectorate had accomplished. Baxter then became a strong partisan for Richard Cromwell, never forgiving John Owen for his involvement in the Army coup and the restoration of the Rump Parliament. During the Restoration, Baxter quietly supported the monarchy as he continued a reluctant non-conformity outside the national Church. With the rise of James II, Baxter flirted with quietism and permanent separation, only to become a wholehearted supporter of William of Orange and the Glorious Revolution, believing that comprehension (the reabsorption of Presbyterians into the Church of England) could still work before his death in 1691.

Despite his oscillations between a reluctant parliamentarian, a partisan for the Protectorate, and then an apologist for royalty, a single vision of Christian empire unified Baxter’s political theology. The godly prince was the head of his realm, supporting righteousness through his justices and ministers. Baxter rejected the idea that power was ever fragmented into the highly tendentious categories of “civil” and “spiritual” which then belonged to prince and prelate respectively. Rather, this dichotomy corrupted reality, leading towards the transmogrification of ministers of the word into usurping prelates, who sought to build a Judaized universal empire under their own authority. Ministers had a unique delegated authority to teach, celebrate the sacraments, and discipline the congregation, but that authority was not a unique spiritual province that was equal to the prince.

It was for this reason that Baxter despised popery as the ultimate corruption of the Christian eschaton, where the gospel would not only conquer the hearts of princes but lead them to implement Christian kingdoms. Papists not only attacked this vision, but also both clerical Presbyterians (usually of a Scottish variety) and High Church Episcopalians (who were jealous to protect their power over the conscience as spiritual monarchs). Like Hobbes, Baxter rejected these divisions as subversive fictions, though unlike Hobbes, Baxter believed in a limited constitutional polity. Nevertheless, for Baxter, the Christian prince was paramount to the success of the gospel. High Church Episcopalians, in contrast, sought to bolster their authority by linking arms with the increasingly independent French Catholic Church. Under the sway of Louis XIV’s ambitions and Gallican ecclesiology, where the church was basically independent of the pope’s universal authority even as it preserved Tridentine dogma, some High Church bishops saw an opportunity to link England and France in a conciliar episcopal conference. For these High Churchmen, Christian princes, more often than not, hindered the spiritual principality of the Church.

Baxter had nothing but scorn for this disposition, writing in a letter to a friend:

Would we not have Christian Kings? Was not Constantines Reign a grand blessing to the Church? who knoweth not that it was he by advancing Christians that let in the Crowd of Hypocrites. And that they will come in when ever prosperity and Godly Princes do invite them: The most will be on the upper side. Shall we therefore be against the Kingdom of the world becoming Christ’s Kingdome? Or wish the Church to continue persecuted? If that be best, why write we against the Beast for persecuting? Why pray we not for persecution but against it? (in William Lamont’s Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English Revolution, 59)

The problem for Baxter was not with bishops (Baxter accepted a “primitive” episcopacy where bishops governed with and through their presbyters, not over them). The problem was the vaulting of a supposedly independent sacred authority in ministers that was antagonistic towards “secular” authority so-called. While Baxter opposed classical Erastianism, where ministers had no authority to discipline and only the state (be it king or senate) could enact moral censure, he believed that the success of Christian ministry depended on succeeding in converting the chief magistrate. It did not mean the churches were powerless in a time of heathen rule or anarchy, as Baxter’s Worcestershire Association (a cooperation of ministers — Presbyterian, Independent, and even some Episcopal — to effectively catechize the laity and maintain order) had accomplished. It was this spiritual union that the early church possessed until Constantine. But that spiritual union was always oriented towards Constantine, the telos of the Kingdom of God appearing among the realms. Under the Protectorate, Baxter’s associationism found legal sanction, where a generous orthodoxy was instilled through a Board of Triers, who tested ministers for competence and moral probity. With the threat of antinomians (who disdained any outward discipline), Richard Cromwell promised the restoration of a broad Evangelical front that had existed during the Tudors and would return under William.

Baxter’s vision for Christian Empire derived from his reading of the Apocalypse. Like many who have a brush with end-of-time doomsday hucksters, Baxter was initially sour on the use of Revelation to give any sense of interpreting the times. Quaker women ran naked into churches, Diggers enacted imbecile communism, and Fifth Monarchists were willing to pursue anarchy because of their false prophecies. Baxter, however, rediscovered the work of Thomas Bilson, a Tudor bishop who understood Revelation as the historical war between the rise of godly kingdoms and the sacerdotal antichrist of popery. Even more, to the consternation of Baxter’s peers, he followed the Tudor historian and theologian John Foxe, taking a more dynamic view of antichrist. While the papacy was one form of antichrist, it was not the exclusive preserve of darkness. All forces, Roman or Reformer, that sought to depreciate a Christian Emperor, that forestalled or subjugated Christian Davids, partook of antichrist. Revelation was the struggle between the godly to disciple the nations and the Satanic attempts, through beasts and whores, to destroy this work. Baxter called this polity “Theocracy,” a state “when Princes govern from God, by God, and for God in all things.” (ibid., 187). Revelation promised the saints eventual triumph to bring Theocracy, the iron rod of Christ unsealed in the scrolls of ancient prophecy.

Before he died, Baxter did see this unfold in the broad Protestant Interest of William III, with the 1690s unleashing a wave of patriotic fervor for an English Evangelical Empire. This attitude spilled across the Atlantic, influencing the growing sense of a Protestant nation of America. The Great Awakening, which gripped the colonies more than the metropole, forged a growing sense of a national religious ideal. In the lead up to the Revolution, many Americans had become frustrated with the increasingly secular imperial Parliament that would permit legal popery in Quebec and the plan to place a Church of England bishop over North America. The latter was hateful not because it was a bishop, but because it signaled an attempt to break up the broad Evangelical union. Defenders of an American bishop argued, instead, for a dichotomy of powers, a secular civil authority and a spiritual monarchy of prelates. This theopolitical concern was part of the broad Whiggish revolt against an imperial Parliament and its enablers (including, eventually, the king).

After independence, while the Constitution barred the creation of a national establishment, it did not dissolve the broad Protestant Interest that united Americans. Early fears of Presbyterian dominance (influencing the [in]famous letter to Jefferson from the Danbury Baptists, eliciting his support for a wall of separation) gave way to a desire for an Evangelical Union, one that intensified after the reports of Jacobinism. Much of American history can be divided between political secularists and political evangelicals, the latter coalescing into the Whig party. Part of the opposition to Jacksonian Democracy was the general unwillingness to be a public Protestant, with Jackson himself refusing to call a national day of prayer and fasting when cholera ravaged New York City. After the Civil War, a Third Great Awakening brought about the strong Evangelical presence in the Republican party, advocating for restrictions on alcohol, popery, and Mormonism. The president was expected to operate as a godly chief magistrate, to set the example and govern the nation. In retrospect, the arc of history, beginning with Washington and Jefferson, through Lincoln, led to Roosevelt Rex. Unitary executive theory has continued apace. It does not mean every Christian “prince” will be good (with Baxter having admitted that a Nero was preferable to anarchy). But it is the trend in the history of the establishment of godly empire, even in spite of efforts to forestall it.

To interpret and apply Baxter further, the distinction between the promise of godly empire and the antichrist inversion of it reveals different forms of universality. Godly empire was an instantiation of the New Jerusalem, a drawing down and figuration. It is the catholicity of this “form” that shaped the empire of the Franks and the empire of New Rome, where emperors were enthroned as new Davids and new Solomons to rule from God’s law. Edward VI was hailed as a new Josiah and Elizabeth as a new Deborah. In contrast, false universality is to forge the New Jerusalem on Earth. Most particularly this effort has come through the papacy, moving from a patriarchate that had become the province of Italian aristocrats towards the global institution of universal immediate judgement. Not all popes, let alone all Roman Catholics, have endorsed or have support this movement, but in retrospect historians have marked the rise of the papacy towards this imperial role as its destiny, especially those of a Newmanian bent. The church, and the entirety of the kingdom of God, was forced into a universalized institution, one that has also adopted increasingly, post Vatican II, a universalized humanity under a global government, which includes the spiritual sovereignty of the Pontifex Maximus.

For Baxter, the errors of transubstantiation or justification by faith and works were of a secondary order to this division and subversion. In principle, Catholics who were anti-papal were less obnoxious than Protestants that vaulted an independent spiritual authority of the church against the state. It was not a question of the state controlling the conscience, which no creature had power over, but the laws of the realm.

These arguments for an independent “spiritual” power have far less purchase today, but they have an analog in the “social” (or “private”) that has an inviolable and total separation from public state authority. Per the thought of Jurgen Habermas, the “Social” became the domain of producing legitimacy and legitimation, with battles over the independence of the social from the political. Liberalism, in its start, operated as a strong demarcation between the two, usually at the expense of the latter. When Thomas Paine argued that society is independent of government which was only a handmaiden to the former at best, he can almost sound like Pope Gelasius. The Voice of the Church is now, in modern parlance, phenomena like Society, The People, Public Opinion, or even History (all equally malleable for the needs at hand). It is no surprise that the papacy has morphed increasingly towards being a global NGO, an arbiter of social opinion, a deterritorialized office that has increasingly little to do with Europe proper.

American Evangelicals, out of instinct, have condemned globalism as evil or satanic for impinging upon American national sovereignty. In spite of globalism being a tool for a certain vision of American dominion, these Evangelicals understand that something is wrong with this vision. The American state has become subverted as a tool for a kind of universal project, be it more pragmatic through the multipolar Trilateral Commission agreements and the World Trade Organization or something more dreamy through the United Nations. These NGOs often appear to be beyond the reach of American law to punish them when they fail the American people. It is not absurd to imagine a scenario where laws recognizing the spiritual inviolability of Roman Catholic confession may be used to protect illegal immigration and impose functional open borders. American Evangelicals, as part of the broader right, have generally been wary of “statism” and “authoritarianism” as the true threats to their freedom, but they have begun to come around the importance of robust executive power, especially in service to erection of a godly empire.

America has a long way to go before that epithet is applicable to the foreign or domestic policies of the United States, but there is hope through analogs to the Baxterian associations. For whatever reason or purpose, America has been gifted a strange and rapid place on the world stage. There is no need to retreat to weak and inept “ethno-states” that often demand to simply be left alone. Not all nations are equal and not all receive the call and means to rule over others. By providence, America has a call to rule over other nations and bring the light of the gospel. Charlemagne’s Franks ruled over a diversity of tribes and unleashed a renaissance of learning. Alfred of Wessex united the Angles and Saxons into a single empire, bringing enlightenment in the Dark Ages so-called.

America is certainly not the only, and will likely not be the last, great power to command others towards the illumination of divine law. But Baxter’s understanding of theocracy demonstrates the stakes. These are no mere accidents of history, but all contingencies bend toward the Book of Revelation, as the scrolls of time unfold. It would be better for American Evangelicals, in charity and unity, to understand the vision for a godly chief magistrate. Man lives not in the end-of-time, but the time-of-the-end, where the saints will persevere against the beasts and the dragon. May King Jesus rule with an iron rod through his president in the time that is given to the American race. By solemn providence, the angels shall continue to read the scrolls and sound forth the trumpets.

Like trauma in psychoanalysis, crisis, which has been removed from its terrifying place, reappears in pathological forms in every sphere and at every moment. It is separated from its “decisive day” and transformed into a permanent condition. Consequently, the faculty of deciding once and for all disappears and the incessant decision properly decides on nothing. Or else, as happened to Pilate, it suddenly reverses into catastrophe. The indecisive one — Pilate — keeps on deciding; the decisive one — Jesus — has no decision to make. -Giorgio Agamben

Time is important to Christianity because of God’s providential acts. There is no endless seasonal cycle or wheel of time, but God’s guidance towards an end, where the divine will be all in all. In the coming of the Christ, the end of man had come. The time of night had given way to the morning star. Yet even the Apostles were confused about the time of the Christ, asking Jesus before he ascended: “wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6) In Pentecost, Christ fulfilled his promise to return again to his friends, present now through the Spirit of God. It was now the time of the end.

Early Christians had different expectations of what this temporality meant. Some early Christians expected a soon coming material millennial reign, but others condemned this view as Judaized and confused. Christ’s kingdom was not a mega-Israel, even it included some nations besides Jews. It is the Heavenly Jerusalem, the eternal city, that is, like the Spirit, throughout the world and definitive for the world-order. It was this order of things that Eusebius of Caesarea articulated in his history of the Church, which concluded in his own day where a Christian Augustus had put an end to persecution and welcomed Christian teachers into his court.

Eusebius has always had his critics, especially in more modern times. After Carl Schmitt had wrote a short work on the importance of theology for understanding political concepts, Erik Peterson, a convert to Roman Catholicism, criticized this Eusebian, as well as pagan, “political monotheism” as unbecoming of the Church. Augustine, in Peterson’s contrast, had rejected all political theology and revealed that Christian was incompatible with it. Writing at the height of the NSDAP in Germany, and thus somewhat cryptically, Peterson saw the Augustinian Trinity as the end to all politics. The City of God was manifest in the Church and the Church was manifest in the liturgy. It was in the worship of Christians, not any Christian king or court, that Christianity demonstrated a fundamentally a-political disposition. History was emptied of all significance, where Rome had no divine purpose. Eusebius, instead, had reimposed pagan significance to empire, and thus supposedly confused the sacred with the saeculum, this worldly age that has, ultimately, no significance. Schmitt was thus Eusebian and betrayed the Church in the days of the Third Reich.

With the defeat of Germany and the ruin of Europe from the war, this interpretation seemed to be vindicated. Conservative Catholics, looking for a way out from either revolution or reaction, sought in Augustine a justification for a secular politics under, or beside, a sacred church. R.A. Markus, a Hungarian Catholic living in England, adopted this paradigm in his explication of Augustine’s ecclesiology. In Markus’ analysis, Augustine understood the Sixth Age of the Church as a flat line, though one full of struggle, between incarnation and final judgement. There was no meaningful significance to the conversion of Constantine or the Christianization of Rome, mere accidents of time that had no prophetic significance. Instead, the good of a Christian Rome was the good of any secular authority, namely to reduce trouble and support order. According to Markus, the Church was only ever a partner to these efforts, criticizing failures or supporting successes. Augustine thus not only paved the rejection of all charismatic dictators, but also all revolutionary socialist politics. There was nothing beyond this saeculum until God ordained it, but that seemed only to provoke agitation. Secular democracy was thus of no ultimate significance beyond its ability to preserve order, and therefore Catholic embrace of democracy for a pluralist and neutral society was entirely consistent with Augustinian apolitical theology. Nevertheless, Markus admitted that Augustine’s heir did not understand:

Orosius, who wrote his Seven books of histories against the pagans at Augustine’s suggestion, had wholly failed to understand his master’s mind. Orosius once more reverted to the tradition of Origen, Eusebius, Prudentius and the rest (Saeculum, 161)

Orosius was Augustine’s disciple and friend, who sought to carry on Augustine’s City of God and formed the Medieval basis of Christendom. But, according to Markus, he had slipped into the same political monotheism that other Christians accidentally fell into because of their polemics against pagans. Origen had, in his debates with Celsus, fallen into the trap of arguing the Christian God as guiding Rome against the pagan emanations of the Platonists. But behind Markus, and his version of Augustine, is an entirely different theological project. Schmitt had discerned the current direction of Europe, writing about a decade earlier than Markus, in response to Peterson’s criticism:

Our contemporary society is progressive. This unfettered progress entails a value-free and scientific attitude, the commodification of all values and the augmentation of liberal human consumption. Furthermore, our society is made up of a plurality of social groups in which everything becomes plurivalent, and it is finally, as J. B. Metz says, a hominising [humanisierende] society. I think that such a progressive, plurivalent, hominising society permits only that kind of eschatology which is immanent to the system and therefore also progressive and plurivalent. This kind of eschatology can therefore only be a homo-homini-homo eschatology. At most this eschatology is an utopia on the principle of hope, the content of which is an homo absconditus who produces himself and, moreover, produces the conditions for his own possibility. (Political Theology II, 54)

Schmitt thus revealed the great modern departure from the world of Eusebius and Augustine. There was no great break in political theology. Eusebius gave an account of victory through centuries of martyrdom, Augustine confirmed that suffering continued, even under persecuting or apostate caesars. Eusebius was not so narrow to limit imperial conversion to Rome and Augustine was not so secular to discount the triumph of Constantine. What Orosius, as Augustine’s disciple, transferred to the Germanic kings was this sense of universal cosmology, passing to them the mantle of not only Christian Rome, but Israel. They were not simply new august Constantines, but new Davids, the recurrence of the biblical forms among new peoples and new places. This political theology was thoroughly Pauline, in that the juxtaposition of Galatians 4 is between spirit and flesh, the Heavenly Jerusalem as the city of all the elect. It was from this source, of an eternal throne and eternal altar in an eternal city, that all Christian culture flowed, where even Franks could be baptized as Israel.

Biblical political theology was not the removal of sacred-history (heilsgeschichte) from a secular, this worldly age straddled flat between incarnation and parousia. But, rather, it was the expansion of sacred-history to be capable of absorbing all polities. As much as a people were in the Kingdom of God, their history was bound to the Bible. As much as a people were still under the rule of Satan, their history was still bound to the Bible as the Heathens and rebels. Under the rule of Christ, the whole cosmos was in the time of the end. It contained within it both apostasy and rebellion, it contained prophets and martyrs, saintly kings and pious judges, wicked rulers and compromised tyrants. The Church was thus the entirety of believers, not limited to a clericalism identified with sacred officers. It was the whole elect, of Christian kings and Christian bishops, of Christian nobility and Christian burghers, drawing down the forms of the City of God.

The corruption, inversion, and even parody of this vision was secularization. This process did not begin with liberals or republicans, though they advanced their own cosmological schemes. The process began often from within the church, the reduction of royalty and estates to purely secular authority as a means to assert clerical privilege. Crowns were simply of this saeculum, ultimately irrelevant to the sacerdotal power of priests. Concordats of mutual recognition often buried the irrepressible conflict, especially as Christendom, as Tyconius, the brilliant exegete and teacher of Augustine, understood, was simultaneously the Body of Christ and the Body of the Devil cohabitating the same space. The same body contained the two, as much as the same body produced Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob. It was this eschatological conflict within Christendom that would be twisted, that the instruments of godliness would receive a perverse parody. Every city may exhibit the Heavenly Jerusalem or it may become like the earthly Jerusalem, a diabolical Babylon.

The contemporary era, as Schmitt discerned, is a Humanist eschatology, where the saeculum has become the only reality. The Bible’s continued interpretation of events has been bracketed because the time of the end has been perverted into the end of time. New revelations, new prophecies, new time tables for the conclusion of this age become the oozing puss of this blackened satanic corruption. Various spiritual movements sought to turn the page and find the end of time, be they the medieval Spiritual Franciscans, the early modern Fifth Monarchists, or modern day Dispensationalists. Whether it was the coming Age of Spirit, the physical reign of Jesus in England, or the soon to come rapture, all reflected the need to bring something new beyond what Christ accomplished. His ascension, symbolized in the book of Revelation, has been diminished. Post-Christian ideologies, such as Jacobinism or Bolshevism, exude similar expectations of a fresh new world, of a liberated man and withered state. Like other apocalyptic movements, they find that they never arrive. They are stuck at the end of time, when the revolution breeds reaction and the intermediary stage never comes to a close.

It is for this reason that current debates about millennialism are misguided. The question is not premillennialism or postmillennialism, but whether the Bible still speaks. Many millennialists reduce Scripture to merely speaking of the beginning of the church-age (in a form of preterism) or the end of the church-age (predicing the final doom of things). Revelation is simply about already happened (perhaps with Domitian) or what never seems to come about (and therefore a book irrelevant outside the very end of time). But Revelation was a book not only for the time of St John, but for all Christians everywhere, an exposition, in visionary symbols, of the time of the end. With the perversion of this order, while some certain millennarians have abandoned all notions of a Christian politics, a vision of saeculum has moved into the void, marking the current neo-/post-liberal global order. Because Progress never quite arrives, it is simply management of resources and bodies to approximate a greater sense of human flourishing in a time without any form or meaning. It is, as Schmitt called it, Homo absconditus, the victory of man at the same time he disappears, or that the man global governments govern for is never yet there.Past man is always inhumane to present man, as present man shall shortly become to future man. Even though many Dispensationalist Christian would abjure this idea, they are no different, localizing all sacred-history in the supposed prophecies surround the Zionist state of Israel. Is it any wonder that apocalyptic media, be it ecological or extraterrestrial, is indistinguishable from fiction about the rapture and tribulation?

This irony marks this supreme corruption of Christian cosmology. The time of the end becomes the end of time. The state of emergency, the coming end, is always occurring but never comes. All laws become suspended in the urgent expectation that the crisis is coming, but it never does. Nothing ever seems to happen because crisis is always happening. It is this lawlessness that the Apostle Paul described in his 2nd Letter to the Thessalonians:

The day of Christ is at hand.

Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition;

Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.

Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things?

And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time.

For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.

And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming. (2: 2-8)

The appearance of Christ, the parousia, is not limited to the final judgement, in which all the sheep and goats shall be assembled together in the resurrection. But the appearance of Christ was in 70 AD, that shattered the Jewish construction of a saeculum, the end of time was upon them, even though they lived in the time of the end in the Christ. Their forces gathered and were smashed through Rome. What was an antichrist, hailing the lamb with the voice of the dragon, gathered together the deceived and was eviscerated through the Spirit. The Man of Sin was the Outlaw man, the man of Crisis, whom the Spirit overcame.

Giorgio Agamben understood this eschatological perversion in the resignation of Josef Ratzinger from the papacy. Seeing in this act great courage, Ratzinger had demonstrated the impotence of a Jerusalem (Rome) that had become earthly, that had become Babylon. In the Vatican’s embrace of the saeculum, as a partner of this liberal global order, it had made the focus the end of time, the endless progress never quite leading out. That was what Peterson and Markus, incidentally, theorized, an embrace of antichrist as the supposed accomplishment of Augustine. But the time of the end was a time of judgement, and judgement was something that broke into history:

I believe that only if the mysterium iniquitatis is restored to its eschatological context can a political action again become possible, in the theological sphere as in the profane. Evil is not a gloomy theological drama that paralyzes every action and renders it enigmatic and ambiguous, but it is historical drama in which each person’s decision is always in question […] And it is in this historical drama, in which the eschaton, the last day, coincides with the present, with the Pauline “time of the now,” and in which the bipartite nature of the Church’s body as of every profane institution is finally reaching its apocalyptic unveiling — it is in this drama, always underway, that all are called to play their part without reservation and without ambiguity. (The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, 38-39)

It is in judgement, which is given form and name through the symbols of the Bible, that reveals Christ’s lordship. It was a parousia at the Milvian Bridge that judged Rome, leading to the defeat of the reprobate and uplift the saints. That was what Eusebius understood, not as an imperial toady or wig dresser (as liberals have slandered this great history). Rome had become, in the biblical cosmology an instance of Israel, Moses the former prince of Egypt had now led the people of God out of the darkness. But this parousia is not localized to victory. For the appearance of God led also to the division of the kingdom into two and, ultimately exile. But a remnant, in all times and places, will persevere until the end of the end.

The goal, as Agamben wrote, is to free up action. It is to know the divine judgement standing over this world, that the Bible still speaks over all peoples, places, and polities. The body of Christ and the body of Satan coinhere in the same place, and the former will defeat the latter as it coalesces. When the global order’s sins have reached the fill, then it will be judged, slain with the breath of Lord, the one who already has arrived overcoming the ever failing attempt to appear. The saeculum is the perversion of the Kingdom of God, the exaltation of the flesh as an antichrist. It is only a matter of time when the mystery of iniquity is revealed, and the writing on the wall is read once again.

“Thus if there is a final answer or a first principle, investigation must stop somewhere; but if there is no final answer, there is no knowledge out of which to construct the objection” -Gordon Clark

Modern traditionalism has traded on its semi-awareness of epistemology to put down the simple Evangelical who appeals to the Bible in hand. If pushed on the reliability of Scripture, whether by a Traditionalist or an atheist, most Evangelicals will appeal to historical reliability and textual integrity. The Evangelical will demonstrate the basic case for Christ through the historically document death of Jesus of Nazareth, his publicly known burial, his bodily disappearance from the tomb, and his reappearance to his disciples. Taken together, the explanation that Jesus did rise from the dead as the Son of God, thus validating his words and the authority of the Old Testament which he cited, seems plausible. But does this case really establish the reliability of the Bible, Old Testament or New? What about the authority of other texts? What does any of the above have to do with knowledge of God?

The Traditionalist, like the atheist, forces the Evangelical beyond history and beyond the text. Higher Critics, such as the preaching atheist and New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, will not take texts as givens. A historical text is only an approximation of the real events that took place, and historiography is a further modeling from all the relevant sources. Form criticism was pioneered within the New Testament guild to explain the mostly unreliable nature of the four canonical gospels. Oral tradition congealed over decades, if not centuries, to produce texts that had the sayings of the historical Jesus lined with later fabrications due to polemical necessity from the various peoples that constituted these groupings. There was no single church, there was no single apostolic witness, but various competing factions that invented the myth of a raised savior god that comported well within a wider Hellenic world. It is unclear even who wrote the gospels, even if the historic Paul wrote at least some of his attributed letters.

The acid bath of most modern academic work on the New Testament is mostly a product of cynicism and criticism. Better historians have rightly course corrected against some of the most egregious forms of incoherent skepticism. Richard Bauckham in his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses demonstrated how the gospels were ancient biographies, like the work of Plutarch but dependent on living witnesses that contributed to forming static textual traditions. Most stunningly, Bauckham argued that the gospel of John was authored directly by an eyewitness (the historic “John the Elder”), not mediated through translation (Matthew possibly), the oral tradition of the twelve (Mark), or a historian (Luke). Even the claim of oral tradition has been mostly wrong, given that oral traditions do not permit accretions and oral societies rigorously judged good and bad recitations. One can see behind much of modern New Testament studies the empty hermeneutic of suspicion, that reduces anything the analyst does not like to class conflict or psychological disturbance. But even while Bauckham is a superior historian, this method cannot demonstrate the inspiration of these texts as a single canonical instrument. These texts may be reliable as far as historical witnesses go, but they are only probable approximations of the past.

What is wrong with probability? What is wrong with reliance on a probably accurate reliance on texts? Like the gospel authors, Plutarch wrote volumes of ancient biography about the great men of Greece and Rome, but many of these stories included the supernatural and the weird. Does the modern reader really believe the ghost of Caesar appeared to Brutus, for example, and presaged his impending death? Even if Plutarch’s witness was accurate (e.g. Brutus did have this vision of Caesar), does that entail the straight forward reading of the account? One must believe that wrathful spirits walk the earth to assume that is the most likely explanation, instead of this story reflecting a self-fulfilling prophecy from a guilty conscience. It may be probably true, from the historical witness, that Brutus met Caesar, but ghosts do not exist and therefore another explanation is more likely.

This same problem applies to the gospels. Even if Jesus did exist and die on a Roman cross, he was buried in a tomb known to all in Jerusalem, that his body did disappear, and that his apostles did see visions of him, none of that requires the belief that Jesus rose from the dead, let alone that he is the Son of God ruling over the universe. Perhaps, Jesus swooned and somehow, against all odds, survived, leaving the tomb, meeting his disciples, and going into exile. Perhaps, dogs ate the body of Jesus and the disciples, in grief, had a collective mass psychotic vision. Perhaps, God so loved Jesus that he swapped him with someone else and spared him the indignity of a shameful death, so he may bid farewell to his disciples and leave this world behind. Perhaps, Jesus did rise from the dead, but that meant he was a great prophet or this event was some weird extremely improbable happening that later science will somehow explain. These accounts all may appear to be special pleading and demand a revision of what the gospel authors themselves thought took place. But that is precisely the work of history, not simply to dredge up ancient texts as proof in itself, but piecing these witnesses together to create a mental construct to best explain the past. If one does not believe that the dead can rise, if one does not believe in any gods, one does not have to accept the Christian account. Even if Jesus did rise from the dead, that does not intrinsically validate the truth claims of the gospels.

This problem, the value of the witnesses themselves, was something the early Church faced immediately. So-called “Gnostics” (a term originally for Christians, but then associated with smaller esoteric sects) had claimed they had received additional, even superior, revelations about the nature God and the cosmos, which allowed them to more correctly interpret the New Testament than the “worldly”(psychikoi) Christians in the churches. Jesus is not the divine Son of the God of Israel, but reflected one of the archons that represent the One’s effusive efforts to rescue trapped spirits in the corrupted demiurge’s world of mud. Irenaeus, writing Against Heresies to refute these schools collectively, attacked reading the New Testament against its grain. If one may read the gospels this way, then the Gnostic revelations may be read as a story about melon farming:

There is a certain Proarche [eternal power], royal, surpassing all thought, a power existing before every other substance, and extended into space in every direction. But along with it there exists a power which I term a Gourd; and along with this Gourd there exists a power which again I term Utter-Emptiness. This Gourd and Emptiness, since they are one, produced (and yet did not simply produce, so as to be apart from themselves) a fruit, everywhere visible, eatable, and delicious, which fruit-language calls a Cucumber. Along with this Cucumber exists a power of the same essence, which again I call a Melon. These powers, the Gourd, Utter-Emptiness, the Cucumber, and the Melon, brought forth the remaining multitude of the delirious melons of Valentinus. For if it is fitting that that language which is used respecting the universe be transformed to the primary Tetrad, and if any one may assign names at his pleasure, who shall prevent us from adopting these names, as being much more credible, as well as in general use, and understood by all? (I, 11, 4)

The reductio ab adsurdum demonstrated that textual witnesses reflect the authority of the authors. One cannot claim to speak for the true Christ if one reads against the literal meaning of John’s Gospel, given that the author John was Jesus’ closest friend. It destroyed the integrity of the text as sacred writing, replacing it with a more sacred authority. It was a similar rhetorical strategy developed earlier by the Stoics, who reread ancient myths in accordance with their philosophical ethics to justify participation in civic cults. It was hardly consistent with wisdom to valorize the many rapes of Zeus, and so these were reinterpreted as the soul’s pursuit of virtue.

Early Christians deployed this literary method, particularly the great commentator and systematician Origen, to deal with the Old Testament. Stories of a wrathful God that destroyed the first-born of Egypt and commanded the total destruction of the Canaanites would be barbaric if literal, and therefore they must be re-read as part of the soul’s war against sin and vice. Origen was highly influential, but not every early Christian liked this perversion of the Old Testament in service to the New. Diodore of Tarsus attacked Origen’s glosses as “nocturnal emissions,” distorting the Old Testament as part of God’s unfolding salvation-history with his people. Particular Psalms may be prophecies of Christ Jesus, but they were also about the crises that Israel faced in the times that the Psalms were written. Psalm 23 prophesied Christ’s resurrection, but it was also the harrowing exile David faced against Absalom’s coup. Diodore defended the unity of both canons without having the New override the Old.

These conflicts reveal that hermeneutics flow from dogmatic commitment, and that included attempts to further buffer the sacred texts. When it came to questions of heresies within the church, councils were local means at consensual government. After the Roman Empire became Christian, these councils took on greater political significance, where caesars established dogmatic norms for the Roman “household” (oikumene) of faith. But these councils took on their own epistemic inspired authority, a “conciliar fundamentalism” that made ecumenical councils inviolable:

This new conciliar fundamentalism, where all the acts and not just the decrees were treated with exaggerated respect, not only developed after Chalcedon, but was closely connected to the dissemination of its acts, since no such acts survived from the ecumenical councils of Nicaea and Constantinople I, and only partial acts from Ephesus I. It found eloquent expression in a letter written by Deacon Ferrandus of Carthage in the mid-540s in protest at Justinian’s First Edict against the Three Chapters (which seemed to reverse some of the decisions of Chalcedon):

If there is disapproval of any part of the Council of Chalcedon, the approval of the whole is in danger of becoming disapproval… But the whole Council of Chalcedon, since the whole of it is the Council of Chalcedon, is true; no part of it is open to criticism. Whatever we know to have been uttered, transacted, decreed and confirmed there was worked by the ineffable and secret power of the Holy Spirit.

Whence came this failure to make appropriate distinction between the decrees of the councils and their debates? The explanation lies, I would suggest, in the likening of conciliar acts to the books of Holy Scripture. As Ferrandus wrote in the same letter, ‘General councils, particularly those that have gained the assent of the Roman church, hold a place of authority second only to the canonical books.’60 Of course not everything in conciliar acts was accorded equal weight, and they manifestly contained utterances by heretics, such as Nestorius and Eutyches;61 but after all not everything in Scripture was of equal weight, and Scripture likewise contained the utterances of the ungodly, such as Jezebel and Caiaphas. Perhaps a still more apt comparison would be with the writings of the Church Fathers: not all of the Fathers were equally venerated, and some of the writings of each one were more central in the tradition than others, but all of them had to be treated with respect and had prima facie authority.

The Council of Chalcedon was the first ecumenical council of which complete and full acts were published, and the emperor Marcian in authorizing their publication must have calculated that their honest disclosure of tensions and disagreements would prove the thoroughness and the freedom of the council’s work. For a modern reader they show the human side of what was brought about ‘by the ineffable and secret power of the Holy Spirit’. But by the sixth century the Acts of Chalcedon had come to be read by Chalcedonians as an authoritative text, and the story of the Council of Chalcedon, as revealed in the acts, was viewed as akin to sacred history. (Richard Price, “The Council of Chalcedon: A Narrative”)

Conciliar authority (which only claimed to clarify what was always believed, not implement a new dogma) offered a clear statement of dogma to read sacred scripture. But the councils themselves became embroiled in their own history and thus required further interpretation. Chalcedon, for example, had condemned Nestorianism once and for all, yet many Cyrilian partisans in Egypt and Syria claimed that the council was a victory for Nestorius. Later councils had to further interpret Chalcedon, to understand the extent to which it condemned Nestorius and the extent to which it confirmed Cyril. It was not enough to simply point to this statement or that council father. Emperor Justinian, who would eventually proceed over an ecumenical Second Council of Constantinople to clarify Chalcedon, understood that further dogma was necessary to interpret dogmatic councils:

Often at councils some things are said by some of those found at them out of partiality or disagreement or ignorance, but no one attends to what is said individually by a few, but only to what is decreed by all by common consent; for if one were to choose to attend to such disagreement in the way they do, each council will be found refuting itself (On the Orthodox Faith)

Just as the Bible included the words of the wicked (e.g. Caiaphas, Judas, Satan), so too did councils include statements from heretics. The fact that Chalcedon quoted moderate “Nestorians” favorably did not protect them from censure. Both Diodore and Origen, who had both died centuries before in the peace of the church, stood condemned in Justinian’s council. The clear victory for Cyril did not win back the hardliners and, in a sense, the council was an ecclesiastical failure. It also further revealed that councils offered no solution to the problem of interpretation. Every ecumenical council could receive a counter-council, every ecumenical council could receive a clarification or revision. How did one know which one was correct, or if a future council was not a betrayal of a previous council? The victors saw victory as proof of verity, while the losers saw their loss as consolation that the righteous suffered under the unjust. Dogma controlled the interpretation of the times.

It is no surprise, beyond the power games of princes and patriarchs, the thoughtful sought other dogmatic grounds for truth. The restoration of Aristotelian philosophy offered an empirical starting point that, seemingly, could overcome the naked assertion of sacred texts and living authorities. Aristotle was not an empiricist in the sense of what came later, but knowledge of the forms only came through sensory experience. For some Aristotelians, this philosophy fortified the naturals means man knows his world, leaving room for supernatural intervention. For Thomas Aquinas, man may learn virtue in this world through socialization and understanding man’s nature, but he needed God to show him the supernatural truth that would save his soul. But other Aristotelians threatened to overhaul Christianity, or quietly reduce Christian dogma to empty signals of loyalty. The Renaissance and Reformation saw further attempts to discover or discern the origin of thought, only to see Europe burn. Confessional statements (both Catholic and Protestant) sought to settle the issues once and for all, but they too suffered the same problems of external rejection and internal division. The Enlightenment, when it began, was an attempt to overcome the fragmentation of Christendom towards a unified Europe, a politics that reflected epistemology.

That was the context for the work of Rene Descartes, who wrote during the French Wars of Religion. It was not only that France divided between Catholics and Protestants, but even the old Aristotelian science came under renewed scrutiny for being insufficiently empirical. The hylomorphic intermixture of sense and intellect snapped, as the physical world appeared more and more mechanical and deterministic. Descartes attempted to solve these problems through an increasingly radical dualism. The sensory world operated according to matter and the soul operated in an intellectual world that somehow connected to the other. The Cartesian demon may destroy all reliability in what man sees or touches, but the fact that man thinks was enough to justify the existence of the mind. Therefore the beginning of knowledge was a set of logical axioms (e.g. Law of Identity, Law of Non-Contradiction) from which all other knowledge could be gleaned.

Rationalism was developed in different directions in Leibniz and Spinoza, among many others, but Empiricism was a firm rejection of this dualism and the forfeiture of material to the machine. John Locke, far more famous as an epistemologist than a political theorist, lived under the shadow of Thomas Hobbes, a seeming materialist that would dissolve the freedom of the soul into the machine of nature. Instead, nature was an unfolding force that impressed itself on the blank tablet of the mind. Unlike many philosophers who never dared to define the “matter” that made the sensible world, Locke was bold enough to profess ignorance. Matter was the know-not-what that separated the real world from dreams and visions. However, contrary to Hobbes, that saw mental operations as a by-product of bodily existence, Locke accepted the mind did not belong to matter, yet its relation was unknown. The mind was simply superadded to matter, distinct but not separable. The unity of the person was the mind’s capacity for memory, a continuity that held a subject together. While the soul would cease with the death of the body, it was God’s active involvement, including the resurrection, which made a final sense of self possible. Finally, it was this mind that could then take all these experiences and then abstract knowledge, deriving from experience the primary categories of space and time.

But Locke’s solutions were often too weak to be credible. Abstract knowledge of primary categories of space and time assumes the Human mind’s perception of space and time reflected a general real world. Did worms or bugs experience space and time the same way a Human mind did? Does the seemingly unbridgeable space between atoms mean a man can phase through a wall? Locke had tried to distinguish these primary categories from the secondary categories of unique Human experience, like color (which depended on the Human eye and refraction of light). But this distinction did not hold. Even definitional abstractions, like a triangle being three angles equal to 180 degrees, could not be known by various real existing triangles. Memory did not establish any unity to identity, as if a man ceased to be himself if he forgot something. But not all critics saw Locke as a threat as much as incomplete. David Hume thus rejected all claims to knowledge and identity. Man only relies on faith in custom, but this gave no knowledge for knowledge, at least it has been defined, is impossible. Things only seem to be the case and that was the end of the matter.

Hume had drawn these conclusions, he thought, from the incomplete criticism of the bishop George Berkeley. Against Cartesian dualism, Berkeley rejected the existence of matter as a nonsense category. Locke could not define matter because there was no substance beneath sensory experiences. It may sound absurd to place dreams and imagination on the same plane as “real experiences,” but the contemporary world of virtual reality should deflate some of these criticisms. For Berkeley, all sensory experiences were “ideas” that the mind, which he called “spirit,” perceived. Therefore, esse is percipi, to be is to be perceived. Halfwits will criticize this claim as refutable by kicking a rock, but that only proves Berkeley’s point. The rock has existence precisely because the mind experiences it as a rock (hard, heavy, rough), and all things continue their existence because God actively perceives all. In snapping the knot, Berkeley had overcome Locke, but this new dualism, between spirit and idea, left a variety of new problems, including the existence of spirit. For Hume, spirit was a jumble of bundled experiences, and thus had no unique existence form an idea. Additionally, what brought ideas together from constituent ideas? How could one discern “rock” from the ideas of hardness, heaviness, roughness, greyness, and so on?

Berkeley developed his thought further through the unsaid problem of language. Man thinks in language and through language, and it was impossible to separate the problem of knowledge from the problem of speech. Locke had attempted to clarify language as a means to clarify thought. Speech was purely denotative, it had clear referents. But how could theology be practiced if God had no clear objective referent in the sensory world? Locke was not a Deist, but his thought fit well the Deist removal of God actively from the world. The world showed the intelligence of design, and therefore logically entailed a designer, but the designer was not himself visible except indirectly. If the world was a clock, logical and directed to a purpose, then it required a clock-maker. But it did not need an involved and active force that sustained the clock, anymore then a clock needs the constant presence of the clock-maker. Lockean language then made God necessary, but distant. For Berkeley, however, God must directly gather and govern, forging the intelligibility of the world which spirits constantly received and organized:

187. At the transfiguration, the apostles saw our Saviour's face shining as the sun, and his raiment white as light, also a lucid cloud or body of light, out of which the voice came ; which visible light and splendor was, not many centuries ago, maintained by the Greek church, 'to have been divine, and uncreated, and the very glory of God : as may be seen in the history wrote by the emperor John Cantacuzene. And of late years bishop Patrick gives it as his opinion, that in the beginning of the world, the Shecinah or divine presence, which was then frequent and ordinary, appeared by light or fire. In commenting on that passage, where Cain is said to have gone out from the presence of the Lord, the bishop observes, that if Cain after this turned a downright idolater, as many think, it is very likely he introduced the worship of the sun, as the best resemblance he could find of the glory of the Lord, which was wont to appear in a flaming light. It would be endless to enumerate all the passages of holy scripture, which confirm and illustrate this notion, or represent the Deity as appearing and operating by fire. The misconstruction of which might possibly have misled the Gnostics, Basilidians, and other ancient heretics into an opinion, that Jesus Christ was the visible corporeal sun. (Siris)

The same way energy is in and through all things, so God actively is present in guiding and organizing the ideas before the spirit. It was this fire and force that interconnected the cosmos as a revelation of divine glory:

220. Force or power, strickly speaking, is in the agent alone who imparts an equivocal force to the invisible elementary fire, or animal spirit (a) of the world, and this to the ignited body or visible flame, which produceth the sense of light and heat. In this chain the first and last links are allowed to be incorporeal : the two intermediate are corporeal, being capable of motion, rarefaction, gravity, and other qualities of bodies. It is fit to distinguish these things, in order to avoid ambiguity concerning the nature of fire.

(237) [...] Nor will it suffice from present phaenomena and effects, through a chain of natural causes, and subordinate blind agents, to trace a divine intellect as the remote original cause, that first created the world, and then set it a going, We can not make even one single step in accounting for the phaenomena, without admitting the immediate presence and immediate action of an incorporeal agent, who connects, moves, and disposes all things, according to such rules, and for such purposes as seem good to him.

What Berkeley discovered, but Hume did not grasp from him, was that the mind was an actively creative imagination, working through all things as fire or light, shining out simply through subsistence. The mind is always active, not always passive, and thus God is active in every crevice of the universe. While Kant later depended on Locke in a novel way to abstract the limited knowledge man can know, saving both philosophy from being collapsed into mechanized pantheism, where everything is just everything humming along its course, he also followed the Deist theological drift. The world was signs that signified other signs that did not so much as reach God, but hit the ceiling, which meant the presupposition that there was something above what could not be reached which explained the existence of what could be grasped.

But this dualism, as in every dualism, is unstable and veers towards collapse. The history of German Idealism was, in many ways, an attempt to break the Kantian ceiling. But left behind in these accounts was the foundation of the faith which drove bishop Berkeley to reject Locke in the first place, namely the Word of God. What Berkeley had accomplished, whether or not he fully understood it, was what Plato had accomplished through the dual move of Socratic dialectic and myth. The defeat of empiricism, the unreliability of all sensory data which began a hopeless quest that ended in defeat, can only lead to dogmatic declaration. But what each dogmatic claim revealed was the possibility to dogmatize in the first place, that knowledge revealed knowability. It was this space of knowability that modern Platonist, Giorgio Agamben, understood. Plato’s description of space (chora) as the insensible sensibility that permitted sensory experience was the unfolding of the real:

Possibility ceases to express the relation of an object to the faculty of cognition and, detaching itself as the same time from every relation of presupposition with regard to the act, presents itself instead as the experience of a subject affected by its own receptivity. At the point where I experience my receptivity, this experience is perfectly real; however, to the extent that it has no object other than itself, and that subject and object coincide within it, it also discloses the space of a pure possibility, in which life and the world for the first time become possible for me. A receptivity that suffers itself is, in this sense, the only adequate definition of a possibility that does not remain imprisoned in a merely logical-modal dimension, and of a power that has no need to realize itself and to transition to the act. (The Unrealizable, 139)

But this space, as Agamben tacitly understood in his criticism of his fellow Italians bent over their phones, has an order. The possibility of the possible is constantly molding. It is not a space as much as a fire, consuming and purifying through sheer subsistence. Thus Ezra Pound, in his criticism of will-to-power, offers a useful corrective to Agamben’s possibility of the possible:

The will to power (admired and touted by the generation before my own) was literatureifyed by an ill-balanced hysterical teuto-pollak. Nothing more vulgar, in the worst sense of the world, has ever been sprung on a dallying intelligentsia. Power is necessary to some acts, but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power. The great man is filled with a very different passion, the will toward order. Hence the mysteries and the muddles in inferior minds. (Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 99)

Knowledge is not a collection of all existents, but the order in which they exist that gives them meaning, and thus being. The rock reflects the order of ideas, not merely the set of ideas. It is this order that is intrinsic to man’s mind, one that the Cartesian project had tried to find in the monologue of the soul. But if the soul must remember what it knows, as Plato believed, it is found in a word of address, for language is reason and man, as the image of God, is a word of God. The recollection comes in man’s capacity to speak, language that suffuses not only actual words but the constant experience of consciousness itself. Thus, the ancient Christian hymnographer, Ephraim the Syrian, understood the nature of man as an image of the divine in language:

For animals cannot form in themselves pure thoughts about God, because they have, not Speech, that which forms in us the image of the Truth. We have received the gift of Speech that we may not be as speechless animals in our conduct, but that we may in our actions resemble God, the giver of Speech. How great is Speech, a gift which came to make those who receive it like its Giver! And because animals have not Speech they cannot be the likeness of our minds. But because the mind has Speech, it is a great disgrace to it when it is not clothed with the likeness of God; it is a still more grievous shame when animals resemble men, and men do not resemble God. (First Discourse to Hypatius)

The search for knowledge, the basis of knowing that allows anything to be known, was found not above in Heaven or deep down in the being of things, but in the mouth and tongue that can speak blessings or curses. The Bible has the authority it possesses, along the literal interpretation that it means what it says, because it is the Word of God. Visions and miracles may have confirmed this case for those original witnesses, but it remains the same. The Word of God is the starting point of knowledge, one fully contained in the Bible, which remains the rule of interpreting all else, but exceeding it into all things. The Word of God is a rational fire, the cosmic order, discovered in the very fact that world unfolds before man as he speaks. The Bible authenticates itself in its very reading, interpretation emerging out of the text, for the words of the texts are the words of the Spirit of God.

It in this way that man knows God, the world, even himself. It is the word in the mouth and in the heart that saves. And when that shepherd of the cosmos comes speaking, the sheep will certainly know his voice.