John Judis is one of America’s smartest liberal thinkers; this isn’t just because he has a Gigantic Brain, which he does. It’s also because he makes smart choices about what to think about. In a short piece in The New Republic, he looks at what he calls the ‘anti-statist’ tradition in America, the dislike and suspicion of government that so many Americans spontaneously feel. Instead of going all whiny and resentful over it, which is what many liberals do when confronted with evidence that the American people don’t agree with them all the way, he tries to understand it, and advises liberals on how to cope. He takes it seriously as an intellectual matter, grounding it in John Locke’s thought and acknowledging its role in the political movements led by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. If more liberals understood this stuff as well as John Judis, they would get more done, our political process would be less frustrating and more civil for liberals and conservatives alike, and we’d be able to think our way through to constructive compromises more often on divisive issues.
But there’s also an American statist tradition; liberals need to understand this better than they do, because it’s one of the most powerful forces shaping the American liberal world. It doesn’t come from Marx and it doesn’t come from France. It comes from colonial New England and nineteenth century Boston. Liberal political thought and liberal political values in America today have a lot to do with the Puritans.
The Puritans weren’t about individualism and liberty. They were about organizing society around a common moral consensus. They didn’t see government as dangerous in itself. They believed that in a well organized commonwealth, where godly people ruled, the government could and should be the moral agent of the community consensus: a force to do God’s will. They believed that the godly members of a community had the obligation to work together to dominate the political process and build a strong state that could reform or at least control the ungodly in accordance with the divine law as understood by the elect.
The Puritans didn’t separate church and state; in Connecticut and Massachusetts the Puritan church remained the established religion well past the Revolution.
Liberals today disagree with the Puritans over many doctrines and ideas, but culturally, the liberal impulse in America today looks a lot like the Puritan ethos. They believe in reform guided by the elect, and they believe that it’s the duty of the elect to impose their world vision as far as they can. The state is the natural and appropriate agency that can and should enforce the vision of the elect, control the behavior of the ungodly, and educate the rising generation in the value and faith that shapes the elect.
Doctrinally, the Puritans were Calvinist Christians; in the late 18th century many became Unitarian and through the nineteenth century Boston society gradually moved toward more and more attenuated forms of Christianity as figures like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau took the Puritan tradition in a more secular direction — without losing its fierce moral urgency. The Republican Party was originally a New England based, Puritan party; it combined a passion for political causes like abolition with the vision of a strong federal government promoting both the ethical and the economic development of the American people. Reconstruction was a Puritan attempt to reshape the South; the progressive movement, which began as a current in the Republican Party was a new iteration of the old Puritan approach.
This is a noble vision and it has made many contributions to American history. We would be a weaker, poorer and dumber country without the Puritans among us. But at least in my opinion this would be an unlivable country if the Puritans actually ran it for long. Prohibition was a Puritan idea; today they probably wouldn’t ban liquor though there’s nothing they like better than draconian drunk driving laws, but you can see them working up to ban tobacco, trans-fats and red meat. I couldn’t take it. You’d find me hiding out with Anne Hutchinson, Huckleberry Finn and the other renegades and rejects before long; I just don’t have what it takes to live up the rigors of the Puritan vision.
In the great and, for him, very readable novel The Bostonians, Henry James gives a brilliant portrait of the feminist and archly strait-laced bluestocking world of nineteenth century Boston progressivism and moral improvement. By making one of his characters a newly impoverished Southerner come north to seek his fortune after the Civil War, he’s able to look at the culture clash at the heart of American identity. If you want to understand American politics today, read this book. It’s eerily prophetic; the world Henry James saw is still around us, shaping our politics and our headlines today.