An Urban History of Prosperity’s Menace, and Those Who Sought (and Still Seek) to Tame It

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Regarding Abundance

One of the big topics of conversation among left-leaning and liberal pundits, politicians, and intellectuals so far in 2025 has been “abundance.” The key idea—mostly tied to the publication of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book of that title, but also related to many other claims that have been building for years—is that the United States has forgotten how to build things, and in particular, how to build things for the common good. Making policy changes so as to prioritize the government getting homes built, grids wired, bridges erected, etc., as opposed to prioritizing other, more egalitarian or environmental aims, is the best way to create an electoral constituency for otherwise popular progressive goals, or so the argument goes. 

The data behind the argument is hardly original; libertarians have talked about how America has paralyzed itself through regulations for decades, and socialists have talked about how America’s obsession with profit has resulted in bloated corporations sucking up our inventiveness for just as long. But Klein and Thompson’s Abundance is significant because it uses this data to make an argument that challenges America’s liberal establishment directly (an establishment that both authors are very much a part of). The book itself is open-ended about the direction of that challenge. Is it a call for a return to the New Deal, with the government taking a direct hand in boosting basic industrial and economic projects (but mostly only those)? Or is it a neoliberal apology for big business, who would be happy to lend their productive powers to America’s state capacity in exchange for being released from various democratic restrictions and procedures? (That the Trump administration has gleefully ignored Constitutional process in the name of “getting stuff done” has only complicated the call for, and the costs of, an “abundance” orientation.) 

A Different, Yet Defining Perspective 

Daniel Wortel-London’s superb new book, The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981, appears to have no direct relevance to this debate. But indirectly, Wortel-London (whose politics are clearly leftist, and highly critical of the too-common celebration of capitalist development in American life) presents a way of understanding “abundance” that is, I think, of immense value. Like the very best forms of historical research, The Menace of Prosperity uses a particular place (America’s largest and most influential city, New York) and a particular time (the 1870s to the 1970s, a century during which New York City’s citizens and leaders alike saw, celebrated, and struggled against their city’s transformation from a large urban center to a global financial megapolis) to reveal something general—in this case, something essential to the urban landscapes where 80% of all Americans live. By so doing, Daniel-Wortel also provides readers with something close to a defining perspective on how we should think about economic growth today.

Wortel-London takes his title from a line in Lewis Mumford’s 1938 classic, The Culture of Cities: “From the standpoint of decent metropolitan living one might well speak of the ‘menace of prosperity.’” The specific context of Mumford’s comment was the push in the 1930s by a large number of New York City’s power players for “fiscal stabilization.” Following the start of the Great Depression in 1929, the immense debt being carried by American cities led many urban leaders and bodies (though not, it must be said, anything like a majority of New Yorkers) to embrace a surprising mix of local conservation and progressive reform, some of which echoed the premises of early New Deal programs like the National Resource Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Cities, this argument went, needed to restrict speculation and preserve their locally available economic stock (in terms of land, natural resources, material goods, labor, and productive capacities). As Wortel-London puts it: 

At their most ambitious, these entities promoted a truly radical understanding of municipal well-being: one based not on meeting the whims of the wealthy through debt but on meeting the needs of the city’s working people through its existing resources. Meeting these needs, to be sure, might require deflating the speculative expectations and property values that had accrued in more irrational times. But the reward for this deflation would be abundance: cheaper land would enable more sanitary low-income housing, restrictions on development would enable green spaces, and all this would, in the end, save New York from the instability and social costs that “prosperity” had inflicted upon it (The Menace of Prosperity, p. 121, bold added).

What is being pulled out of this particular moment in Wortel-London’s argument is a different understanding of abundance. Rather than focusing on an abundance of produced goods, focus on an abundance of productive land; rather than building an orientation around increasing supply, build an orientation around the collective use of that which has already been supplied—which for cities means the productive locality upon which one stands. This is not low-tax conservatism, nor is it supply-side progressivism; it is conservation for the sake of democratic empowerment. This is my formulation of Wortel-London’s language, and he may not agree with it, but it shows the value of his research to the abundance conversation—and The Menace of Prosperity has a rich historical tale on its side.

Of course, the insights which history reveal to us will never remain static, and Wortel-London’s careful, sharply detailed unpeeling of NYC’s fiscal evolution demonstrates this well. The particular moment of urban reform which Mumford sought to build upon unfortunately passed, as all moments of reform similarly come and go, some leaving lesser or greater improvements in their wake, but all contributing to the constantly evolving struggle which American cities face. The key point of that struggle is presented at the book’s beginning as the repeated realization by multiple generations of New Yorkers that “the costs of elite-driven growth outweigh its benefits” (p. 2). But why is that a lesson that never sticks?  

The Dilemma of Cities Over Time 

Cities are places of expansion and experimentation. They have been imagined as such in the Western world ever since their emergence as centers of commerce and education in the late Medieval era, promising opportunity and freedom—“Stadtluft macht frei”—to all who relocated there. That such opportunity and freedom were entwined with alienation and poverty was, of course, also understood by many; hence the abiding Jeffersonian preference for an agrarian life. But the specialized material promises of city life—the occupational and social variety, the artistic excellence that even Jefferson admitted to, the tolerance, and the wealth they provide a social space for—have nonetheless continually drawn the masses of humanity into urban environments, meaning that the governance of such cities is always centrally about responding to the demands for growth, and then managing what Wortel-London refers to as their “social costs” (p. 3)—economic stratification, disinvestment in marginalized neighborhoods, community breakdown, and that old Jeffersonian concern, dependency. 

The history of American cities following the Civil War, as the American economy came to prioritize large-scale manufacturing and trade over agriculture and small-scale artisanship, became a history of capitalizing upon land—the land that city-dwellers were moving to occupy, the land that entrepreneurs wanted to place factories upon, the land that investors realized would increase in value. This search for capital was driven by both voters and speculators—and since cities were Constitutionally-defined non-sovereign entities, subject to state and the national governments, that capital could mostly be obtained in only a few ways. Slowly, through taxation, which has never been a popular revenue stream; more quickly, through debt-financing, the easiest and most fiscally devastating stream that cities have relied upon; or most directly of all, through transfers from other jurisdictions and governments, which is the stream they have the least amount of control over. (The additional possibility of cities running, on behalf of their citizens, profit-making public utilities to generate funds has been, as Wortel-London details, sadly reduced as a viable option.) The latter two methods qualify as “elite-driven”—and redirecting these methods of raising capital towards actual democratic, broad-based uses, as opposed to following elite development preferences, was (and is) something rarely accomplished.

The Menace of Prosperity’s hundred-year survey of the “fiscal imagination” of NYC’s (and, across America, other urban) leaders is essentially a remarkable recitation of attempts at this kind of redirection. The pattern is similar: the costs of elite-driven growth are recognized, are responded to with reforms, and those reforms, successful or (more commonly) not, eventually become embedded in the continuing evolution of the city, such that they develop their own constituencies and become a new basis for demands of, again, elite-driven relief. That may sound like a hopeless cycle, but it isn’t presented as such. With each response to every fiscal crisis in New York City’s history, Wortel-London shows us individuals thinking creatively to craft solutions that will improve the life of the city—though he also shows us how the “sunk costs” of previous efforts to tame elite-driven growth and make the productive possibilities of urban spaces more available to all city inhabitants add up over time.

In the 1880s and 1890s we see Henry George and his “fiscal republican” followers fight to institute some version of a land-value tax, one that would “by taxing land at 100 percent of its value….force landlords to either lower land prices in the hope of attracting productive enterprises to their property and making some kind of profit, or to sell their land to those who would….[thus] liberat[ing] urban real estate markets from the distortions of the speculator…[and] making it easier to establish businesses and freeing cities to reach their economic potential” (p. 36). The failure of the Georgist campaign was a great loss—one unfortunately tied to its unwillingness to consider cooperative alternatives, with its hyper-focus upon real estate development undermining its own constituency “once opponents of fiscal republicanism provided alternative policies for acquiring property ownership and achieving local growth” (p. 51).

Forty years later, the once-Georgist homeowners and local producers in New York’s outer boroughs, who had learned to organize—in good local democratic fashion—on behalf of the debt-financed integration of the city’s periphery with the downtown through subways, bridges, and more, were now the key opponents to the aforementioned “fiscal stabilizers.” In the view of reformers, the public sector—which “was not as committed to pursuing speculative profit”—was crucial to the development of an “economically self-sustaining” housing market which could cool the fluctuations of New Deal-era urban economies (pp. 115-116). In one of his more insightful arguments (in a book filled with them), Wortel-London details how elements of the New Deal’s conservation orientation were compromised by its sincere attempt to include “local governments and civic bodies,” with the result that “rather than seek out new solutions,” many in the Roosevelt administration “attempted to supplement older approaches with new financing, standing ready to pick up the municipal slack for assisting realty along the same lines local governments had.” The result—“federal support for suburban homeownership”—predictably “worked against efforts to restrict peripheral growth” (pp. 134, 136). Public housing couldn’t compete with such subsidized expansion. 

By the 1970s, as movements in support of civil rights, women’s rights, and the environment reached their peak, suggestions in response New York City’s latest crisis over growth were perhaps more radical than they had been in nearly a century. While the city’s liberal establishment embraced the post-WWII logic of corporate growth and redistributive taxation, others, inspired by visionaries like Paul Goodman and Jane Jacobs, started to push for rebuilding the city’s economy through decentralization, a move towards empowering neighborhoods and communal associations through “close-grained tax allowances” and the loosening of centralized zoning rules, without reliance upon “cataclysmic money” from the national government (p. 177). For the first time in the city’s history, non-Caucasians had a major presence in these arguments, as many Black activists came to see the “lack of local economic control” as a central concern (Wortel-London reports that as of 1960, “four-fifths of Harlem’s commercial and residential properties were owned by non-locals” and “four-fifths of the Harlem workforce was employed outside the community”—p. 183). But the immense momentum enjoyed by New York elites—both governmental and corporate—who bet on making the city a center of the globalized economy gave them resources to finance Jacobsian-style reforms in the city’s built environment, all while ignoring the fiscal imagination of these cooperative radicals: 

At their most ambitious, groups holding to this [cooperative, localist] vision claimed that New York’s existing development strategies—recreating the city in the image of its most powerful and profitable enterprises—was both unjust and uneconomic. And at their most radical, they argued that the economic health of neighborhoods could only take place through outright community ownership. Nonetheless, most of these “fiscal communitarians” lacked the agonistic edge that earlier fiscal reform movements held. While White brownstoners were eager to preserve some of the city’s existing housing stock, they had little inclination to displace the white-collar enterprises where many of them worked. And many in the city’s Black neighborhoods were less interested in empowering their communities than in empowering their own enterprises within those communities. Ultimately, New York’s liberal policy-makers were able to meet these demands while further accelerating the city’s white-collar development…. Oblivious to the costs of private growth and unwilling to imagine alternatives, New York’s liberal establishment would keep their faith in the city’s white-collar economy (p. 192).  

An Abundance of Urban Alternatives, If We Can See Them 

 In the end, Wortel-London believes the history of New York City’s repeated reforms of, and frequent failures in redirecting the consequences of, elite-driven growth, teach that “we cannot frame the fiscal dilemmas of local governments in simple terms of economic development versus economic decline” (p. 225). The assumptions of NYC’s elites—that subsidies can provide fiscal solvency, that wealth generation can pay for welfare—unfortunately continue to obtain throughout American cities, despite concerted efforts to show the long-term financial costs and liabilities of expanding infrastructure, and the equally devastating social costs of centering city life around the cult of business development. Growth, very simply, should not be entirely about expansions of supply or increases of goods. Partly because those expansions and increases depend too often upon the exclusionary capitalization of spatial resources that urban communities nominally offer to everyone who relocates to them, and partly because such capitalization invariably cannibalizes itself, requiring the process of seeking elite investment and debt-financing to continue unabated, perpetuating the crises which The Menace of Prosperity expertly details. 

But Wortel-London doesn’t leave his readers without hope. On the contrary, in the book’s final pages he affirms that we can build upon the history of America’s cities, as so many reformers have done before. It’s been more than 40 years since the end of The Menace of Prosperity’s story, and fiscal struggles remain; why not turn again to considering how it is that “locally oriented firms with alternative ownership structures…can provide more public revenue, with less public costs, than seemingly ‘wealthier’ firms,” and that “lodging the ownership and operation of economic enterprises within [a city’s] most marginalized communities….[will] provide these communities with much needed resources while expanding their political autonomy,” thereby working to democratize the finance structure under which all of us who live in cities depend (pp. 225, 227)? 

In a recent essay, Wortel-London looked at the likely next mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, as the latest potential participant in this ongoing struggle. Many may dismiss him the moment they hear him self-identify as a “democratic socialist”—but for city-dwellers who want (as they should) to take the lessons that The Menace of Prosperity laid out seriously, Mamdani’s talk about municipally owned grocery stores, rent freezes for qualifying tenants, and loan forgiveness for small businesses, ought to provide some food for thought. Financing these programs is the problem, as always—and yet those with urban faith might look to cooperatives, land trusts, public banking, and other innovations (all of which have drawn upon the same lessons this book reveals) as routes to explore. 

The faith that something cooperative, something Jeffersonian, can be built into the operation of urban liberalism may seem a faint hope. But for close to 1000 years, people have come to urban centers looking for opportunities, carrying with them new ideas, hoping for the freedom to build upon them. The wealth of America’s cities are immense; the most important lesson of Wortel-London’s magisterial history is that, if tens of thousands of city residents over the years have seen, in their time and in their particular context, a means to tie that wealth less to elite use and more to abundant employment, why shouldn’t we join those who are continuing to seek to realize, in today's context, this vision once more?

Minding Laurie Johnson’s Gap

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly conservative state, and am a life-long member of a mostly conservative church; hence, the relatively small number of Republicans I know who still dissent from the faux-populist posturing, paranoid postliberal muttering, and borderline criminality that has overtaken most of what passes for politically “conservative” thought these days tend to really stand out. They’re honorable folk, these teachers and police officers, filmmakers and military veterans, farmers and parents and good friends, and the criticism they receive from their supposed ideological allies when they refuse to celebrate the latest mad (or Musk-influenced) order from Washington DC is painful to watch.

I don’t know if recommending Laurie Johnson’s fine book, The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars, to them would provide them with much solace, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Johnson identifies herself at the start of the book as “an early ‘never Trumper,’” a registered Republican who broke from her party as she saw the conservative movement she’d long identified with turn into a “right-wing capitalist-friendly ethnically based populism” that idolized “an ill-equipped, seemingly unbalanced nationalist” (who also just happened to be a “narcissistic and unstable reality TV star”—p. 11). If you find such language describing the current occupant of the White House inaccurate or indefensible, then Johnson’s book probably isn’t for you. But that would be unfortunate, because the book—which was written and came out before the 2024 election—actually gives a pretty balanced assessment of Trump’s appeal to the sort of culturally conservative and rural voters whom Johnson (who, like me, lives in Kansas; she teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan, while I teach at Friends University in Wichita) knows well.

Johnson’s book is sometimes meandering, but always thoughtful; as she writes at the outset, she thinks that the time for “narrow but safe and sure scholarship” (p. 12) is past, at least for her. Her overarching aim is to sketch out the long history of intellectual developments which have, in her view, turned inside out the positions she once held to, positions which most long assumed were deeply rooted in the cultural practices and perspectives common to our shared home in the Sunflower state. In turning to radical thinkers both right and left, Johnson's account of these developments turns primarily on, first, a process of “dislocation”—both material and moral—which has uprooted the cultural foundations for diverse, stable lives and sustainable living environments which were built up over generations, and second, a process of “strong-arming”—both ideological and religious—by which we submit to or participate in a collective attempt to paper over deep disagreements or deeply inhumane assumptions about the lives we live. I think her account is, ultimately, a wise one—but as someone who thinks Trump’s presidency was and will be appalling, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Johnson is a complicated thinker and a careful writer; those looking for facile diagnoses and easy prescriptions also won’t find this book to their liking. She interchangeably employs both political psychology and political philosophy in building her arguments, making use of everything from sociological examinations of cults to complex agricultural economic data to the history of Bible translations to reflections on television sitcoms along the way. But consistent throughout her analysis is the attention she pays to “domination,” and particularly the cultural and social effects of economic dominion.

Johnson does not frame that domination in terms of class; she’s no Marxist, though she thoughtfully explores what she thinks his philosophy both got right and got wrong. Rather, the domination that she feels far too many of her fellow citizens have chosen not to see or have failed to see clearly is primarily ideational. American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities. The domination of the calculating liberal individualist model has not only pushed us away from one another; it has cramped our appreciation of the real-world diversity and richness which open cultural engagement and collective action ought to allow. The omnipresence of “free-market liberalism,” in Johnson’s view, has reached the point that it “shares some of the totalitarian aspects of more openly apocalyptic revolutionary regimes,” with its insistence that “marketplace thinking works equally well for all people in all times and places” (p. 33).

The alarm she expresses at the effects of the homogenizing success of the so-called “American way of life,” as she has come to understand it, is present in every chapter, whatever its specific focus. She sees our valorization of this image in “the imperative to be efficient in the making or acquiring of …goods and services” (p. 99) when writing about human anthropology and psychology; and she sees it in the “politicized Christian opinion leaders” that focus parishioners solely on “worldly ends” (p. 228) when writing about political theology. Near the book’s conclusion, she puts forward a lengthy jeremiad that perhaps comes closer than any other single passage in the book to being an overall thesis statement about how she sees this constrained notion of liberal freedom and economic success as having warped American life:

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are concerned about the current state of our culture because of its contentiousness, seemingly amoral nature, the way it breaks up families, our loss of community, and the every-swifter march of secularization, look no further for the cause than the economy that thoroughly dominates us. Our “freedom to choose” does not stop at our toothpaste brands, though it apparently increasingly does stop at being a small businessperson or a small farmer. We are also free to choose to stay married or not, depending on how we feel. As we have less real choice due to our mounting social stratification and precarity, our “freedom to choose” necessarily gets more and more intensely expressed in our personal moral choices and lifestyles, as well as our stylistic choices. If you don’t like the way the kid down the street dyes their hair purple and wears tattoos, remember that they’ve been taught that the pinnacle of American freedom is in accumulation and personal expression. In effect, we are all in a constant state of flux, and yet we are taught to fear the actual trans person, the one who has the courage to disregard the superficial freedoms most Americans “enjoy” every day because they feel in their interior person that they are not what their exterior says they are. Before we launch any more assaults on our trans neighbors, we need to consider the largely life-frittering ways in which the rest of us are inauthentically fluid, and change our own ways if we do not like what we see (pp. 274-275).

The language by which Johnson condemns the consequences of liberal capitalism--its competitive demands, its expectations of constant change, its condescending charity, its mentality of disposability, its victimizing of those who fall behind, and most of all (echoing Wendell Berry here) its stultifying assumption of “inevitability”--has many echoes, and she does a superb job integrating the many facets of this sort of non-Marxist (though clearly Marx-influenced) cultural critique together. While her analysis mostly bypasses recent integralist critiques, Johnson is clearly respectful of those Christian thinkers who have called for a collective retreat from our corporatized capitalist state. However, reading through her broad-ranging assessment of how the dominance of market values and personal choice has warped American life, and torn a “gap” in structures of community life—a gap which, in her view, Christian churches and those who populate them have overwhelmingly failed to sew back together—makes it pretty clear that she has no interest in fleeing towards some reactionary religious position. (Some of this is plainly personal; twice in her book she details ways in which church communities she was part of simply failed to address the needs of suffering parishioners or to even understand what those needs were, in ways that both involved and affected her directly.)

Johnson’s training as a political philosopher was grounded in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s one she holds to. As such, she blanches at the idea of “a return to some sort of benevolent aristocracy/oligarchy” (p. 231). For her, religious strong-arming and economic domination have mostly developed in tandem, in opposition to a proper articulation of the rights we can exercise in communities built through work and cooperation, free from the worship of political saviors or Silicon Valley “innovators.” That freedom—a small-scaled civic one—won’t be achieved through revolution; as much as she clearly appreciates Marx’s assessment of power under capitalism, she’s not looking for any new vanguard (much less new government programs) to lead us forward.

Rather, Johnson’s hopes—to the extent they exist; her writing is more realist than romantic, and she is better at providing information than inspiration—lay in a different sort of movement, one more focused on recovering habits of work and association than affirmations of identity or authority. Her concluding chapters look closely as distributism and the Catholic Worker movement; she has praise for both, but also gentle criticisms, partly because she is clear-eyed (in ways that more than a few of their advocates are not) about some of the bottom-line realities of exploring these alternatives to capitalism: that is, having less money, less resources, less “stuff” all around. But making due with less is one thing that Johnson can speak to as something more than an academic and critic.

Johnson was instrumental in setting up the Maurin Academy, a multifaceted organization which includes both a farm and a school, one which seeks to provide both content online and food in-person, all in a way which challenges both profit-mindedness and state dependency. Inspired by the legacy of Peter Maurin (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, along with Dorothy Day), the idea is to provide a place for the kind of “persistent, often unglamorous work” that she believes—and, I think, has argued persuasively for in her book—is “real and compelling” in the way that life defined by our corporate capitalist and governmental masters is not (p. 269). She recognizes that what they are doing could easily be categorized—especially in the absence of shifts in the state and federal money which keeps our exploitive food systems operating as they have for decades--as just more “quixotic attempts at economic and social experimentation,” but what else, she says in her conclusion, can we do? “We can smile and talk all we want about the benefits of localism, farmers markets, and mutual aid, but how many of us even remotely approach consistently adopting those practices?” (pp. 286-287)

Johnson’s book may not be the antidote to the Trump years which her (all too rare) sort of small-c conservative might need. But she is at least living out, in part, her own retreat from the corporatizing of disruption that seems to be the American lot, at least for the next four years. She is walking her talk, and as much as there are ideas and arguments her book that I admired and learned from (including a few I strongly disagreed with), I find the person she actually is even more admirable still.

How Informational Overload Destroyed American Democracy (Maybe)

[A slightly different version of this essay appears in Current.]

James Davison Hunter's new book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Politics Crisis, is a wonderful, provocative, and also I think ultimately depressing synthesis of America’s cultural history. “Wonderful” because, while Hunter–as he says at the outset of the book–provides no new historical research, the “selective and interpretive history of American public and political life” (p. xv) which it provides is filled with insights and comparisons worth pondering. “Provocative” because those insights and comparisons point out connections that reveal deep-seated problems that sit directly alongside the very assumptions which most of those who value the liberal democracy Americans have attempted to build over the past two and a half centuries hold dear. And ultimately somewhat “depressing” because, despite the book’s Coda explicitly invoking the idea of hope and providing descriptions of the conditions for such regarding America’s future, it is hard to take in the cultural scope of those aforementioned deep-seated problems and not think, whatever his protestations, Hunter may well be convinced that American-style liberal democracy will not emerge from its present crisis–and as someone who explicitly describes our country’s particular political experiment as “among the greatest achievements of human history” (p. xvi), that can’t help but come off as a little sad.

Let’s begin with the wonderful and provocative parts first. In writing a history of the cultural underpinnings of America’s liberal democracy, Hunter begins by refusing to specifically define what it is he’s talking about. The closest he comes is when he writes that the “ideational center-piece” of democracy in America includes “the premises and principles of individual and collective freedom and representative self-government,” along with the recognition that “society is inherently diverse in its interests, ideas, values, and commitments,” necessitating the creation of governmental “mechanisms for addressing...differences in ways that can lead to common goods” (p. 13) Any of those premises, values, or mechanisms could, of course, be subject endless philosophical and practical debate–and it becomes clear from the start of his history that being purposefully indeterminate about those endless philosophical and practical debates is exactly the point. Repeatedly, Hunter insists that the genius of America’s expansive and always changing demos is that it has, until lately, remained capable of doing the “working through” (he prefers the German term durcharbeiten) which solidarity requires primarily because America’s self-understandings were and are not definitive, nor clear. The context in which these self-understandings arose Hunter calls America’s “hybrid-Enlightenment,” and that context involved, in his view, certain necessary conditions. But so long as those conditions obtained, the self-understandings which followed were regularly opaque, implicit, vague, inarticulable, and that is what made them so valuable, because it made America’s liberal democratic identity adaptable, yet still plausibly continuous with what came before. In his words, “a very specifically American adaptation of the Enlightenment project provided the cultural conditions for the emergence of liberal democracy in America...[and] because of its unique adaptation, flexibility, and opacity, it could in principle...evolve and adapt to historical circumstances over two centuries (p. 49).

He follows this praise of America’s liberal democratic order, however, with the sad observation that “for all that we can see, those conditions are no longer present.” Why is that?

Hunter is far too learned a scholar to propose any single overriding explanation; over the nearly 300 pages which make up the heart of his historical analysis (basically from chapter 4, “America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment” to chapter 11, “A Great Unraveling”) Hunter touches upon an enormous range of intellectual, political, and economic developments, and the responses, involving both inclusion and “boundary work,” which he presents them as having given rise to. Hunter does not present any of the cultural conditions upon which this range of ideas and arguments played out as singularly foundational, but if any comes close to that title, it’s probably what he describes as America’s “epistemology of transcendence,” a “synthesis between the Reformed Christian and secular Enlightenment traditions over the eighteenth century.” As he elaborated: “Even though it was understood in radically different and somewhat competing ways, the notion of transcendence at play was sufficiently capacious as a concept and sufficiently opaque as a sensibility that it could absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions” (p. 60). Accepted by nearly all as the default presumption of nearly all argument and contestation in American life–up to and including the fight over slavery, since in President Lincoln’s famous words, both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War “read the same Bible and pray to the same God”–this sense of transcendence endured in American life well into the 20^th century, continually allowing those in positions of authority, however constructed or challenged, to speak “a common language and a common grammar,” thereby sowing “the seeds of social solidarity” even in our deepest disputes. 

Hunter, to be sure, is not inattentive to the changes and costs involved in these disputes which what he presents as a long-enduring condition enabled. On the contrary, he lays out, with wonderfully incisive details, many stages in the articulation of, defense of, and overturning of understandings of America’s common culture. There is the rise of the America’s self-understanding as a Protestant Christian republic; its contested collapse in the wake of the Civil War and high levels of immigration; the emergence of religiously inspired (or at least informed) reform movements throughout the late 19^th and into the 20^th centuries; and then the hollowing out of such movements by the economically and technologically enabled power of neoliberal individualism in the decades immediately following World War II; and much more. While there is in all these details multiple points that could be challenged, it is, in many ways, a deeply persuasive and even wise reading of American intellectual history, climaxing in a frustrating half-century of cultural dissolution that began in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to heal America: “King’s rhetoric....generate[d] greater solidarity than ever before on matters of race in large part because his appeal drew upon underlying assumptions...embedded within America’s hybrid-Enlightenment’s surface and deep structures....It was not to last” (p. 199).

Why didn’t last? Again, Hunter provides a wide range of interrelated explanations, delving into political theories, globalizing economies, and education paradigms. But where I believe his analysis turns most provocative is in his discussion of “the nearly infinite multiplication of sources of information–the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’–and the bewildering number of choices it forces upon all of us,” adding that “the entire informational ecosystem spawned by the new communications technologies and the market dynamics by which they proliferate...render truth and reality beside the point” (pp. 306-307). Hunter never makes this connection explicit, but it seems to me an obvious reading of his cultural analysis. If liberal democratic solidarity is invariably tied up in some kind inchoate trust in the transcendent validity of that which is employed as a common language or invoked as a common authority, and if the very concept of certain principles and practices possessing some kind of transcendent validity depends upon the endurance of cultural conditions whose public meanings are, by definition, undefinable and opaque and adaptable and implicit...then is it not reasonable that the swamp of information–always highly detailed, highly personalized, and highly contentious information, to be sure!--which surrounds us all could be exactly that which is undermining those conditions? To invoke an essay on a related topic I wrote in the wake of the 2000 elections, might it be that the anger and anxiety which characterized that terrible year was at least partly due to “an omnipresent social media ecosystem which rips context from every story,” leading us to believe that “the norms held to by one, or some, or all of the different sub-communities of this country...have been, or are being, challenged, upended, revealed to be otherwise than what we believe, or maybe just simply betrayed?”

I do not mean to reduce Hunter’s wonderfully provocative reading of America’s current condition to my own pre-occupations. Still, when Hunter acknowledges the fact that the cultural conditions for liberal democracy as he understands them actually do still abound on the local level, resulting in “an abundance of goodwill among ordinary citizens who are willing to do the difficult work of coming together to find democratic solutions to the problems they face,” yet concludes that “the interconnected cultural economies of technology, media and social media, the party system, and the like...render all such grassroots efforts ineffective” (elsewhere he wrote “There is no end to good intentions among ordinary citizens, but good intentions are no match for the kind of institutional power wielded by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their kind”), it’s perhaps reasonable to see the heart of his fear for America dwelling in the fact that our hybrid-Enlightenment adaptation was perhaps just not designed for a world of public discourse wherein “there is not no authority by which questions of truth or reality or public ethics could be settled definitively” since “it is not clear that anything is capable of penetrating [our] echo chambers” (pp. 300-301, 306, 367-369).

Hunter’s own sober and careful conclusions boil down to a hope for slow cultural work and a “paradigm shift” that would involve a sense of realism: “that the sources of social conflict can never be eliminated,” and “that politics is an administrative apparatus and is thus severely limited in what it can accomplish.” Such realism would mitigate against associating political elections with “redemptive or salvific” causes, and encourage the depoliticization of much of public life (pp. 378-380).To give his ideas some hope of survival, I wonder if his own analysis points towards the need for a more stringent structural and technological critique of how we share ideas in the first place—and how we might address the informational overload whose hyper-politicization crowds out the adaptative discussion of once more open-ended and opaque concepts, thus allowing us to do so again.

Thinking About Wendell Berry's Leftist Lament (and More)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Wendell Berry’s sprawling, uneven, brilliant, and sometimes frustrating The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice will likely not, I think, be widely remembered after he leaves us as his greatest, most important work. But it is undeniably his longest, and arguably his most ambitious as well. Very late to the party, I have finally read through his wrestling with the entangled ideas of racism, history, patriotism, religion, public discourse, agrarianism, and more, and I’m glad I did. It is a book crammed with insights, thoughts that Berry has, as he makes clear in the book’s introduction, considered and re-considered, written, scratched out, and re-written, over many years. “I am surprised, slowly of course, by the slowness of my mind” he writes as a kind of apologia (p. 5). However, I was surprised as well to have retroactively discovered, long after completing the book, a through-line to his argument, one that mostly ties together most of its nearly 500 pages, despite the many zig-zags and dead-end observations (a few of which probably could have been eliminated or perhaps deserved further integrative reflection of their own) along the way. And surprisingly (or perhaps not), it was a work of Marxist economic history that helped me see it.

In my observation, conservatives who celebrate Wendell Berry's ideas deal with the seemingly leftist elements of his thought—his condemnations of corporate power, finance capitalism, and libertarian individualism most obviously, but his highly selective and somewhat distanced engagement with the traditionalist pre-occupations that define so much of our never-ending culture war is perhaps even more important--in a variety of ways. Some downplay those elements, some appropriate them into a post-liberal framework, and some insist that the localist or distributist character of the agrarian beliefs which he holds aren’t in any substantive sense leftist at all, but rather are actually conservative, properly understood. All of these approaches have their value—though given that Berry never makes, in all this massive book exploring prejudices in America, an explicit Burkean defense of prejudice, I am doubtful how far any of them can go in their attempt to claim these ideas of Berry's as "conservative" in any formal sense. Rather, while The Need to Be Whole will probably never be much read or appreciated by contemporary (and overly statist) socialists, I think his overarching intentions are clearly most at home with anti-capitalist radicals of the left. It is they, after all, who have most consistently lamented the destruction of the commons, and lamented all the divisive consequences which have followed its ruination at the hands of an expansionist capitalism which has, tragically, characterized American history from its beginning; their complaint is Berry's as well.

The destructive horror of slavery and its still-abiding legacies are, to Berry, not best understood in explicitly racialist terms, though obviously the primary way those horrors and those legacies were and are elaborated is via racial categories. Still, the millions whose lives were destroyed by the Atlantic Slave Trade and slave economy of the American South is, to Berry, of a piece with the—primarily socio-economic, though often also literal as well--destruction of millions of farming lives and hundreds of farming communities (which provided settled environments of provision and membership to families both black and white) by industrial agriculture. This is not some Heideggerian sublimation of human suffering to the logics of technology; Berry is excruciatingly particular in the way he talks about the ways in which Southerners of all races dealt with the Civil War and its aftermath, with reverberations that affect our historical assumptions and linguistic pre-occupations to this very day. But nonetheless, if Berry's book is to be understood as providing an alternative to the history of racial exploitation told in the 1619 Project, it isn't anything similar to then-President Trump's celebratory 1776 Commission; rather, it's a long, sad tale that begins with 1225's Charter of the Forest, and all the ways in which the fundamentals of common provisioning, which the gift of land makes available to all those willing to work it, have been continually whittled away in the name of profit. 

Some might question giving Berry even this much credit when it comes to his dealings with race, pointing to the sympathy he expresses towards Robert E. Lee in the book, and his dislike of those who attribute some kind of genetic trauma to any depiction or memorialization of those Southerners who fought for an understandable yet still evil cause from 1861 to 1865. All this attracted a fair amount of criticism when the book came out in 2022, and I’m not entirely unsympathetic to it. But an understanding of how Berry grounds his overall argument in the requirements of membership and community-building work should enable open-minded readers, I think, to see that he’s not minimizing the horrors of slavery when he shows some contextual sympathy for those born into its web of enveloping prejudices. Rather, he's extending the tragedy of those horrors and the devastation they justified, situating all Americans in the same destructive shadow that slaves and their masters were implicated in alike. 

He does this by way of an impressively wide rage of arguments, including a thoughtful consideration of the Sermon on the Mount, a critical reading a Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a reflection on the origin of Kentucky's state anthem, "My Own Kentucky Home," and much more. But the clearest elaboration of his entwining of moral, environmental, and socio-economic themes in his treatment of race in America comes through the lengthy consideration he gives to a conversation with the famed defender of both white supremacy and states’ rights, John C. Caulhoun, recorded in the dairy of John Quincy Adams in 1820—a conversation which Berry calls “essential to the sense of this book." He writes:

Calhoun’s significant distinction is between work that is not degrading, and therefore suitable for white people, and degrading work fit only for slaves. Adams defines the trouble exactly—“mistaking labor for slavery, and domination for Freedom”—and he clearly thought that the trouble affected both races….By assigning specifically to slaves the manual work considered degrading, the slave-owning aristocrats degraded that work for everybody, black or white, who did it. By degrading the work, they degraded the workers….It became possible for people who could not escape hard manual labor to despise themselves for doing it, and, from that, possible to despise the land that required it of them. Thus the set of values and attitudes by which the Old South aristocrats placed themselves above the fundamental work of the world in their time, values and attitudes meant to define the superiority of a class, instituted a (so far) illimitable cycle of degradations. It degraded the fundamental work itself, in both status and quality. It degraded everybody, black and white, who did that work. And inevitably—provided that the workers consented to the aristocratic values and attitudes—it degraded the land on which the work was done….

In his argument with Calhoun, Adams was speaking in affirmation of the value to the country and to democracy of “the plain freemen who labor for subsistence,” presumably on their own farms or in their own shops. Calhoun, speaking self-consciously as an aristocrat and in defense of his class and its values, divides human life and work into the permanent grades of higher and lower. (He clearly could have granted no standing to Jefferson’s “aristocracy of talent and virtue,” with which Adams might have concurred, though he did not like Jefferson.) Perhaps the greatest irony of our history so far is that in our public life we have favored and democratized Calhoun’s values and pointedly disfavored Adams’s….We all, black and white together, want to be John C. Calhoun….

The superiority of Calhoun’s social class rested upon Negro slavery—which, if we understand slavery as the lack or the want of freedom, was only one kind of slavery…Consumers of industrial products participate in the industrial economy virtually as captives, because of their total dependence on the products, and because of their lack of responsibility for the quality of what they buy. The condition of industrial consumers is of a piece with the condition of industrial workers, who are captives of the “labor market” and their need for jobs, and who have no responsibility for the kind and quality of their products….Slavery did not begin with the capture and sale of African black people, and it did not end with their legal emancipation (pp. 298-300, 301-302, 374).

In retrospect, much of Berry’s meandering book is revealed as an explicit exploration of the many and perverse ways the “democratization” of Calhoun’s aristocratic prejudices have deeply warped American social and economic life. In his view (and mine as well), without consistently prioritizing a participatory, democratic, egalitarian respect for work--including both those who do the work, and the land upon which they do it--one will be invariably left with a divisive competition to separate oneself from manual labor, and a greedy desire to impose on those you have separated yourself from to make sure they continue to do it for you. While there have occasionally been successful efforts to arrange and maintain the environments within with such work can flourish throughout American history, Berry mourns how rare they have been. Rather than the ideal of seeking common membership in a particular context of work—the “American Dream” of “economic democracy,” of “self-sufficiency based upon ownership of a family farm or ‘forty acres and a mule’ or a small store or a small shop” (p. 98)—we have a public realm that “is not, except in the most remote and theoretical sense, a membership…. It is nobody’s home … the realm of extremely powerful, wealthy, childish, and badly spoiled adult humans typified by Mr. Trump, his allies, and his rivals” (p. 136). Why this Calhounian triumph, in Berry’s view? Well, at one point he observes that human beings are “most at peace with one another when they are reasonably prosperous” (p. 87). That might seem a brief and materialist aside, but it is echoed in dozens of similar asides throughout the book, when he remarks on the fecundity of well-respected land, on how even oppressed populations (including the slaves of the American South) could find some degree of independence through the natural provisions that wise observers could obtain from said land, and so forth. When one reflects upon the common resources that lay at the heart of prosperity, and how capitalist expansion throughout history consistently begins with robbing the people of those common resources, economic explanations emerge as a framework for understanding how all the divisive and racist prejudices which Berry is exploring take root.

Ian Angus’s The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism is a short and dense book, one which lays out in close detail both the centuries-old tradition of commons-based agriculture through most of human history (Angus’s research is explicitly focused on the development of expansionist capitalism in England, the United Kingdom, and its imperial territories, but it is clear that similar data patterns can be found around world), and the way that tradition came to an end. Many are at least vaguely familiar with the story of the “enclosure movement”—the repeated, and always expanding, efforts by aristocrats and early capitalists from the Middle Ages through the 18^th century to dispossess the peasants who farmed, hunted and gathered in, and provisioned their families and villages from the streams, forests, and fields that they may have had any nominal ownership of, but by centuries-old common law had access to. Leveling woods to establish fenced in sheep pastures, leveling homes to oblige those who lived there to hire themselves out as laborers in cities—the sociological and economic consequences of the history of enclosures have been debated (and, depressingly often, defended) for centuries, with Angus’s Marxist analysis being just the latest contribution of the argument (though an excellent one). I strongly doubt that Berry and Angus are at all aware of each others’ writings; yet, Angus’s argument about the centrality of dispossession to understanding the roots of imperialism and slavery enables me to see their work as complementing each other in a small but essential way.

In a way, it’s not a Marxist argument at all, but one that goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his Second Discourse: all the pathologies of division and competition which plague humankind, according to him, begin with “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, said to himself, This is mine." But Rousseau’s philosophical jeremiad against economic inequality and private property is hardly a rigorous argument—and it certainly isn’t Berry’s, or Angus’s (or even, when you think about it, Marx’s either, as he was far more concerned with bringing to an end exploitation than he was with imposing any kind of propertyless economic sameness; he and Friedrich Engels explicitly stated in The Communist Manifesto that it was property employed in the process of bourgeois production, not personal property, which they were targeting). What Marx, and Angus’s use of Marx’s analytic framework, actually provides in this context is simply an understanding that dispossession—using competitive acquisition, whether legal or financial or military, to end the common access to landed resources which communities had for millennia learned (and sometimes, in some places, still do learn) to share and shepherd together—was and remains at the heart of creating the economic disruptions upon which plantation slavery in the American South, and so many other forms of economic imperialism today, were and are maintained. Angus’s quotes Marx, who in this light sounds downright Berryesque (though, unfortunately, not nearly as lyrical):

Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to an ever decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil….Capitalist production, therefore only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker (pp. 186-187).

Marx’s opinion about agriculture’s place in his vision of the historical inevitability of a workers' revolution is complicated. It is easy to assume that the above passage is merely descriptive of what he saw as an economically determined process, but there are also notes and letters from Marx (which Angus quotes at length) which reveal that Marx himself recognized the social power of the cooperative relations which existed among farmers and other small-holders, where the mutually sustaining and shared commons had not yet been absorbed in the name of elite profit. This, obviously, open up the possibility for a socialist conception of property and community that is leans in a more localist, republican, or anarchist direction, and decidedly away from the Marxist-Leninist assumption that overcoming capitalism can only be achieved through forcing workers--dictatorially, in necessary--down the path of industrial socialization.

But either way, seeing in Marx’s observations above a parallel to Berry’s concern about how economic competition introduces class distinctions, which in turn introduce a contempt for the economically poor or legally enslaved who are obliged to engage in manual labor on the land, and thus result in a degradation of all landed work as well as the land itself, isn’t difficult. Hence, my original description of The Need to Be Whole as a leftist lament. The kind of respectful and cooperative and forgiving communities of work and fair membership that Berry locates in the civil religion of America, as well as within the Christian vision, were (and still are being) undermined, with depressing rare exceptions, by the legacy of labor degradation and slavery, America’s original sin. That legacy was most prominently and destructively embodied in the chattel slavery of the American South, but it is tragically more accurately reflected in the acquisitive stifling—both at the beginning of the American experiment and today--of the “land need,” the “sensible need for independence” which common resources provide, a need expressed by “early settlers and freed slaves” alike, and which is felt today by anyone who wishes, as they search the want-ads and punch the clock, “not to be a starvling, a pauper, a scrounger, an underling, a peon, a slave” (p. 365). For us all to be economically free and respected by our fellow human beings, free of prejudices that stigmatize and separate us from one another and from the land and from the labor of our own hands, and for there thus to be no truly poor among us—what could be more leftist than that?