American Character

 

Colin Woodard, American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good

Viking Penguin, 2016

Penguin (paperback), 2017

 

After the 2020 election, in which the anticipated “blue wave” failed to materialize, David Brooks said that the lesson is that the country remains deeply divided and we’re going to have to learn to get along.  That would not have been a surprise to anyone who has read Colin Woodard’s American Nations and American Character.

In American Nations, Woodard posits the existence of eleven cultural units, or nations, in North America, nine of which significantly influence U.S. politics.  In American Character, Woodard traces how they have participated in the fundamental tension between individual liberty and the common good throughout our history.

This tension plays out all the time, sometimes in surprising ways.  We have seen it in this plague year in the politicization of face masks; one side stressing the common good of “flattening the curve” and the other seeing mask mandates as an infringement of individual liberty.

In a way, the tension between individual liberty and common good is a good thing, given that either position, carried to an extreme, leads to tyranny:

As different as they were, the Soviet and antebellum southern systems had several things in common.  They were profoundly undemocratic, distinctly illiberal in their lack of interest in the civil rights and liberties of the vast majority of their citizenries, profoundly unfair in their distribution of national wealth, and ultimately unable to compete, economically, militarily, or diplomatically, against less autocratic external rivals.  Each society denigrated one or the other of the two vital components of mass human freedom—individual rights in the case of the Soviet Union, the collective good in the case of the Deep South—putting each on an inevitable track to tyranny.  Their lesson for humanity is that liberal democracy requires balance between freedom’s completing mandates.

So the question is, “What’s the appropriate balance?”  American disagreement on this issue is so very deep because, unlike most countries, we are not a single, homogeneous culture.

The historic seat of small-government libertarianism is the Deep South; other cultures with libertarian streaks are Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, and the Far West.  The historic seat of communitarianism and faith in government to improve society is in Yankeedom, rooted in the Northeast; it has long been in a political alliance with New Netherland and the Left Coast.  El Norte’s Hispanic culture has lately lined it up with the Northern alliance.  The Midlands, communitarian but suspicious of government, is the true middle-of-the-road swing region.

 

Colin Woodard’s Eleven Nations.  Credit: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-11-nations-of-the-united-states-2015-7

The Constitution was a compromise between these competing regional cultures, but the South was the power center of the early republic, and succeeded in keeping the Federal government weak until the Civil War.  This allowed the Southern states to preserve their libertarian systems, hierarchal in the Deep South and Tidewater, egalitarian and fiercely individualistic in Greater Appalachia.  With the South temporarily absent from Washington during the Civil War, the North was able to institute a series of “common good” measures (e.g., transcontinental railroad, Land Grant College Act, Homestead Act).  However, in the years following the war, the tension between business-friendly policies and egalitarianism came to the fore.  The Republicans were committed to equality of opportunity, but any policy promoting a specific group was regarded as kow-towing to a “special interest.”  Combined with the South’s libertarian impulses, the result was a laissez-faire era running from 1877 to about 1930.

The result, according to Woodard, was a disaster.

By the early twentieth century, reformers calling themselves the Progressives would be fully ascendant, not least because a predominantly laissez-faire policy environment had so clearly brought Americans not greater economic and political freedom, but rather monopoly and oligarchic tyranny….  [T]he unregulated marketplace had stifled innovation, destroyed the possibility of meaningful competition, artificially depressed economic development and market pricing in entire regions of the country, and resulted in higher prices for consumers.  Total economic freedom was destroying the free market itself.

These conditions allowed Progressives to put some reforms into place, for example, reigning in caveat emptor and monopolies, but the policies continued to be largely laissez-faire.  Nevertheless, early 20^th century presidents of both parties (except Coolidge) recognized that “individualism was a communal enterprise,” and that government had a role in promoting equality.

The Great Depression led to National Liberalism, the “liberal consensus” that government should take a much more active role in promoting equality of opportunity, regulating business, and managing the economy.  Near the end of his life, FDR tried to go beyond National Liberalism to Social Democracy…

proposing a “Second Bill of Rights” in his 1944 State of the Union address, which included the right to a living wage, decent housing, “adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment,” a “good education,” and medical care.  “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” he explained.  “’Necessitous men are not free men.’  People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

It was not to be.  Instead, National Liberalism was the consensus position for the next three decades.  But eventually it would fall to a resurgent Dixie.

The “intellectual” foundations of a new libertarianism were being laid by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.  Both refugees from Austria and both scarred by the rise of Naziism, they became overly sensitive to anything smacking of communitarianism, seeing it as a slippery slope to either right- or left-wing dictatorship.  That they were proven wrong almost immediately when “social democrats in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark built some of the richest, happiest, and most economically free nations on the planet” impressed their American adherents not one whit.  Hayek’s Road to Serfdom became the bible of the US libertarian right, even though “By the early 1950s … few in Western Europe took either Hayek or Mises seriously.”

Woodard agrees with Brown University historian Heather Cox Richardson that the libertarians’ basic political problem was that their program was deeply unpopular.  Their response was to brilliantly substitute cultural resentments for policy discussion.

Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt, progressives had sought to create a government of experts guided by rational inquiry, sound science, and statistical analysis rather than by political objectives of one or another interest group….  By the early 1960s, the individualist right was painting these experts as enemies of freedom and oppressors of the masses and business leaders alike.  Entire professions were in on the plot….  They claimed to know what was good for you, your city, your state, and the world.  They were arrogant, out of touch, and elitist.  Most important, they were un-American….  It was a powerful argument because it solved the perennial problem of the laissez-faire effort: how to convince working- and lower-middle-class voters to ally themselves with and champion the causes of wealthy industrialists.  It substituted cultural resentments for economic arguments.  It would ultimately split the national liberals from their historic blue-collar constituents.

This school of thought chipped away at the liberal consensus and the working-class base of the Democratic Party for decades, until they suddenly found themselves more or less in control in the Reagan years.  The reaction of the Democrats, logically, would have been to strengthen their brand.  Instead, they tried to triangulate, adopting business-friendly, tough-on-crime, and tough-on-the-poor policies.  Woodard is unsparing in his criticism of this approach:

Since the emergence of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in the early 1990s, Democrats had sought to make themselves more competitive in the South by becoming more like the Republicans of the era….  Instead of holding ground in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and Tidewater, the DLC era resulted in the rapid consolidation of Republican control there.  Instead of drawing the wide center of the American electorate to their camp, the party’s pro-business policies drove white working-class voters from their coalition, endangering the party’s competitiveness in the key swing states of the Midlands.  Given a choice between a Republican Party and a Republican Party Lite, most voters had decided to opt for the real thing.

The Democrats’ abandonment of the left (Woodard notes that Obama “was, by West European standards, a center-right politician, and a liberal Republican by U.S. metrics”) pushed the Republican Party farther right, resulting in the rise of a radical right in the early 21^st Century.

Woodard cautions that we will never be a European style social democracy, but he does see a path to restoring the liberal consensus with a “fairness doctrine” that stresses government’s role in creating a level playing field for all.  Although four American nations lean libertarian, there are differences that can be exploited.  The Deep South is hierarchical, believing that a small elite should rule for the benefit of the elite.  It will never go along with any type of communitarian program.  Greater Appalachia and the Far West, however, are more egalitarian.  A program that stresses “fairness” and could split those regions from the Deep South.  It would also bring the Midlands, the truly centrist swing region, securely into the northern camp.  Demographic changes are already splitting Tidewater from the Deep South.  All this would result in stable supermajority that isolates the Deep South.

I hope Woodard is right.  As for my opinion of Woodard’s Eleven Nations hypothesis: I am both attracted to the explanatory power of “big picture” theories and suspicious that they oversimplify history.  Woodard marshals a lot of facts to support his thesis, but I would be interested in seeing what other historians think.

Regardless of what you think of the theory, American Character is engaging and thought-provoking.  Recommended.