The Deep and Discomforting Point of Populism (and Socialism, and Certain Sorts of Conservatism Too)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Over the weekend, a friend of mine shared an article which had joined in the Hillary Clinton-Bernie Sanders fight, a fight which may come to an end tomorrow in New Hampshire, but probably won't. The title of the piece is "Bernie Sanders Doesn't Know Diddly-Squat About Wall Street" (a claim which, from the author's limited perspective, is undoubtedly true), and it acknowledges the truth of great many of the critiques of Wall Street's behavior over the past decade which are being made by both the Clinton and Sanders camps. But the article's overall critical aim is clear:

It is unconscionable that Wall Street’s compensation system continues to reward bankers, traders, and executives to take big risks with other people’s money in hopes of getting big year-end bonuses...But Sanders never talks about the compensation system on Wall Street. In fact, he rarely mentions anything concrete at all. Instead, he dwells on bizarre and nebulous notions such as imposing “a tax on Wall Street speculation”....The candidate’s website does not really flesh out the idea, other than to say that the tax “will reduce risky and unproductive high-speed trading and other forms of Wall Street speculation.” If one goes back to a bill that Sanders introduced in the Senate last May, there is slightly more meat on these bones; still, the proposed legislation seems to have very little to do with actually taxing “Wall Street speculation” and more to do with taxing every trading transaction--the buying and selling of stocks and bonds and derivatives--that Wall Street and hedge funds engage in. This, of course, makes no sense whatsoever--why tax the very behavior the system depends upon?

In other words, there are clearly bad actors on Wall Street, so why on earth would someone want to burden the whole system of Wall Street, as opposed to doing something to simply target those bad actors? The idea that Wall Street itself--or at least the high-end, high-speed, huge-money, over-financialized skewing of it over the past few decades--might be the problem here simply never crosses the author's mind.

Let me expand on this somewhat discomforting point a little--discomforting because honest populists and socialists (and Sanders, though a career politician, is at least a little more honest than most) know that we are all far more affected by Wall Street practices than we'd like to admit. Indeed, we are all so affected by (and implicated in, and dependent upon) it that excavating the actual moral ideal at work in nearly all actually populist and socialist--as opposed to liberal egalitarian and redistributive--ideas is difficult, even though almost anyone who really thinks about it knows the point is there. Our profound inarticulateness over this point is owed, I think, to the fact that most modern leftism is bereft of the moral language which once animated anti-capitalist arguments generally, and thus those who advocate it--as Sanders does, however inconsistently--find it difficult to say what, on some deep and inchoate level, they clearly want to say. It is a point that, to their perverse credit, clear-eyed libertarian, propertarian, and other Lockean thinkers often recognize and put at the front in their attacks on actually socialistic ideas; some of them really delight in mocking their opponents for it, and those opponents fulminate usually rather hopelessly, because they believe in what they're saying but they're not entirely sure just what they're saying actually means.

What point am I getting at here? To be curt, it's simply this: "why tax the very behavior the system depends upon," you ask? Easy. Because us populists and leftists and other vaguely socialistic types actually don't like the system we're all affected by, dependent upon, and implicated in, and consequently want it to do less of what it does. A financial transaction tax may have a variety of revenue-raising and redistributive pluses and minuses, but from a genuine populist/socialist perspective its greatest effect will probably be to simply make it at least slightly less likely that something we don't like will be done. Both populism and socialism (and local traditionalism or distributism or what-have-you) can refer to a huge range of economic possibilities, but in the post-WWII, post-Cold War, globalized world, they both--whether their proponents realize it or not--basically mean the same thing: the elite generation and manipulation and moving around financial wealth has gone far enough. There ought to be less of it.

What would it mean for the Wall Street system (or, again, mainly the one which has emerged over the past generation or so) itself to see less activity? For taking on risk and collaterizing debt themselves to be seen as a less attractive means of generating capital? Well, as the article correctly points out, it would mean less absolute wealth would be generated overall (but that would also mean less inequality). It would mean investment would be less incentivized (but so would less ruinous speculation). It would mean less capital mobility (but that would also mean less community disruption). Thoughtful and compassionate liberals of all sorts, if they can be led to see clearly what exactly is being argued about here (which is not easily done), are rightly bemused or even infuriated by this idea: I mean, if you can tame the system so as to retain its advantages and generate enough surplus to pay for social programs that ameliorate its structural harms, why on earth would you want to do something that actually burdens the system itself? From Keynes to Krugman (though, to be fair, Krugman was once more willing to give a financial transaction tax some consideration) all these smart folk just look at the socialists, populists, and localists, confused and weirded out by such proposals. And since the language of sustainability and labor and community and other collective moral goods has mostly been in the ash heap for the past century, responding in any way which is actually comprehensible isn't very easy.

That lack of comprehension is a function of our times, of course. A century ago, the moral and communitarian--that is, the conservative (or as I prefer to call it, the "left conservative"--case against socially disruptive, collectively disempowering, but admittedly damn productive capitalist growth was pretty obvious, though by no means broadly accepted. William Jennings Bryan, the most nationally prominent spokesperson for this kind of more democratic, less banker and investor-friendly, more producer-oriented (and thus, inevitably, more localist and agrarian than urban and industrialist) vision of market economics, ran for the presidency--and lost--three times. The parallels between Bryan and Sanders are interesting, to say the least--among others, you can see in the complicated squabbles over whether Sanders counts as a "real" socialist the same sort of disputes over whether Bryan, in accepting the Democratic party's nomination in 1896, was selling out the Populist cause. And, of course, there's the argument that if Sanders actually manages the ridiculously unlikely feat of snatching the nomination away from Clinton, that he'd both be soundly defeated and will have forced class-conscious real changes into the Democratic party, as Bryan's nomination in 1896 (and 1900, and 1908), helped make it possible for progressives like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win the party's support later on. But mostly, I think, those similarities are overshadowed by a major difference: Bryan, and all sorts of other populists and socialists (and even some actual traditionalists) a century ago, could recognize that certain types of, and certain amounts of, capitalist growth were just socially bad, however many individuals such transactions may financially reward. Bad because they create inequality and division; bad because they encourage radical individualism and cultural fragmentation; bad because, well, to be frank, the whole Christian tradition has mostly opposed them. And while Sanders has shown himself more than capable of quoting scripture and popes when it suits him, he lacks the civil religion substance that could give the form of his anti-capitalist democratic socialism some real, populist, moral weight.

None of which is relevant to the author of the article in question, because there's no indication that he's cognizant of these questions of morality, community, and sustainability either. And let's give Sanders some credit: if you actually believe (as I do) that our market economy ought to be informed by, and even regulated by, greater collective concerns and democratic controls and moral limits than contemporary capitalism tolerates, than Sanders anti-Wall Street talk at least partakes of the shape of the reforms we need. And at the level of the presidency--or, more realistically, at the level of the kind of highly symbolic exchanges over political possibilities which a presidential nomination contest makes possible--being able to get clear on just what the (admittedly somewhat discomforting) point and the shape of one's differing economic visions are is no small blessing at all.

Thoughts on Kuttner's (and Obama's) Peril

Back in September our local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America met, as we do every month, to talk about a book or an essay or two that we've all read (or attempted to). That month the book was Robert Kuttner's A Presidency in Peril, and I wasn't able to be there (because I was doing this). Perhaps that's just as well, as the book focuses primarily on what Obama might have been able to do, but didn't, in regards to reforming Wall Street and restructuring our economy when he took office in 2008...an immensely important topic, to be sure, but the ins and outs of the highest levels of corrupt finance capitalism aren't something I want to spend a great deal of time reading about. But one chapter of the book focuses explicitly on the politics of health care reform, and there my interests are fully engaged. So herewith, though it's too late for our book group, some random thoughts:

Kuttner finished his manuscript and turned it into his publisher before the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became a reality in March of this year; in fact, the last act he has in that long, frustrating, convoluted drama is the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's U.S. Senate seat back in November. So his comments about health care reform are tied up in one of his larger claims--namely, that Obama unnecessarily created damaging political confusion by deciding to address health care reform immediately (in Kuttner's view, mistake #1), to rely upon the leadership of Congress (mistake #2), and to bring on board powerful health industry interests, like insurers and drug companies (mistake #3) (pp. 224-225). In Kuttner's view, what the people who elected Obama most wanted of him, and what the economic crises of 2008 and 2009 most clearly demanded of him, was comprehensive financial regulative reform, particularly one that reflected the populist frustration with failing and mismanaged banks which required expensive bailouts, and carried with it a punitive edge to appropriately identify and punish those responsible for that mismanagement and failure. Kuttner, in short, believes that pursuing the complex, multi-faceted issue of health care reform, and particularly the way it was pursued, invited all sorts of misunderstandings and mistakes, and dealing with such opened the door to compromises that both worsened the final law and made it ever-easier for its opponents to spin it as an irresponsible and unconstitutional socialist boondoggle. Perhaps his tone was colored by his suspicion that the election of Brown meant the complete end to the effort, but I suspect that even if he'd known that Obama and the Democrats would get a bill passed in the end, he'd still argue that the resulting law wasn't worth the cost.

What was the cost? For Kuttner, it was an opportunity to articulate a "progressive populism," a theme which he has recently made explicit in arguments in his own magazine, The American Prospect, particularly with those who believe that any kind of populist argument is an intellectual dead end. For Kuttner, while not entirely disagreeing with those who point to three-time presidential loser William Jennings Bryan as exemplifying "a know-nothing spasm of class resentment," believes that:

there are times when economic progress precisely requires displacing the malign influence of economic elites. What these broad-brush critiques [of Bryan] invariably miss is the fact that there is an ugly version of populism that scape-goats foreigners, blacks, Jews, homosexuals, and others, and a constructive one that correctly identifies powerful economic forces that are blocking reform. Bryan had elements of both. But Roosevelt and Truman offered a progressive brand of populism, which was successful politics as well as economics (p. 221).

Kuttner takes it as an article of faith that "when progressive reformers fail to address popular grievances, the right fills the gap"; for him, the rise of the Tea Parties, and indeed all the usual resentments one finds whenever individuals with progressive ideas win elections, come down to economic and class concerns that have to be addressed somehow, by someone: "if progressives don't tell a coherent story about the culpability of rapacious elites and work to restore some balance to the economy, right-wing populists are happy to supply the narrative" (pp. 212, 221). This is much to simplistic, to be simplistic about it. Yes, of course, there is something which gets labeled "populism" that associates the causes of socio-economic and cultural dislocations and frustrations--I think usually wrongly--with foreigners and untrustworthy Others, and there is another thing called "populism" which associates those same things--I think usually rightly--with the destructive effects of finance capitalism. But to suppose that "the people" have "grievances," and will take those grievances in one direction or another, depending on who sells them the most enraging story first, is condescending in the extreme.

I don't dissent for a moment from Kuttner's indictment of Obama's unreflective relationship with (even dependence upon) Wall Street experts and corporate industrial leaders. I don't expect him to be a Christian socialist and start criticizing people with great wealth (though I wouldn't mind it if he did), but I did expect him to recognize the need to pursue some truly genuine alternatives in how money is managed, how banks are regulated, and how medical costs are distributed in this country...and while the jury is still out on how many of the reforms which the past two very busy years have brought the country will ultimately function (assuming they do), the preliminary conclusion is obvious: Obama has not pushed populist reforms, but rather pretty mainstream, technocratic liberal changes, ones which accept the consequences of late-modern finance capitalism and mainly just hope to make it slightly easier for some otherwise usually excluded people to make the most of the economic opportunities which that system presents. I've said this before (multiple times, in fact), so I have no disagreements with Kuttner's presentation of the health care reform mess, correct?

Correct...but also incorrect. He correctly notes that the twilight struggle over a Medicare buy-in plan, or some other sort of public option, was the last real moment in which health care reform could have claimed to have been anything more than just a much-needed welfare program, and instead be something about putting health care collective into the hands of the people. Obama supported it, weakly, in principle. But he didn't strongly believe in it--and when Lieberman (for whom my contempt remains) "pronounced it a deal-breaker, in part because the liberals liked it so much and the insurance companies didn't" (p. 231), he was more than happy to see it go away, just so a bill could pass. (There has been some push-back on this story, but Kuttner's account of seems solid.) So, yes, Kuttner's right about the president's unwillingness to rally behind even the slightest serious populist policies while pushing health care reform. But Kuttner has little grasp of why those populist policies are what they are. "Populism," for him, is the poor-vs.-the rich, and really not much else. This is why he is capable of looking at Bryan and seeing in him half good-populist, half bad-populist. But Bryan is, in fact, an exponent of a far more comprehensive appreciation of what it means to stand with "the people" then Kuttner can imagine.

The core of Bryan’s arguments in the 1890s and early 1900s was form of “producerism.” He advocated policies which would privilege farmers and local manufacturers; his defense of the culture of the working man (and, yes, that did mean he had a specific gender and, to a lesser degree, racial picture of who that "working man" was) was all bound up with the defense and empowerment of small, mostly self-sustaining communities which such working people could be a part of. His condemnation of monopolies and trusts, his desire to regulate the railroads--all that and more was grounded in his conviction that real autonomy and equality depended upon a socio-economic structure in which the power over loans, prices, wages and currency was kept in local and public hands, rather than concentrated in private (and therefore invariably distant and elite) ones. This reveals the essentially conservative element of populist arguments--and the way in which a populist like Bryan, in combining what Kuttner calls both the good and the bad forms of populism, was in fact being as true to the complicated needs and hopes of majority of people. Ordinary people--in which I include myself, and probably most of those who read this as well--are by and large not happy with their livelihoods, and the productive heart of their communities, being taken away from them by decisions made by distant political and corporate elites; they would prefer to conserve their way of life against the ravages of distant, privileged others. This concern for conserving locality, and demanding collective reforms to make it possible--the demand for public ownership of the railroads in the 19th century, and the hope for a truly public guarantee of health care in the 21st--was arguably somewhat lost in the Democratic party which Byran briefly led throughout the 20th century; in the hands of the Progressives and New Dealers, Bryan's moralistic crusades against railroads and banks became procedural, concerned with regulating the heights of finance capitalism, rather than chopping them down and redistributing them.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Byran’s populist concern with agrarian virtues and producerist communities would have been streamlined into a top-down, welfare-based, bureaucratic proceduralism evenutally, and thus easy for thinkers like Kuttner to recast his rhetoric into a divisible populism, one side of which--the "angry" or "conservative" side of it--can be set aside, leaving the good, "liberal" side of it untouched. But even in saying that, it remains that not all proceduralism is automatically individualistic, abstracting people from the traditions of their local community. For example Social Security, in some ways the classic redistributive program, has in its liberal way done more than practically any other government or non-governmental program to make it possible for many more elderly people to continue to own their own homes after retirement, a key element in protecting the ongoing integrity of residential neighborhoods, which is certainly both a conservative and populist aim all its own. Similarly, it is a real possibility and hope that the Affordable Care Act (assuming the numerous incoherencies and injustices which its funding streams depend upon can be hammered out), though relying upon private insurers, will nonetheless serve as the foundation for the public and egalitarian transformation of health care in the United States. Kuttner is right to call for Obama to recognize what his agenda, in failing to be fully populist, is missing out on. But for his part, he needs to recognize that socially just and egalitarian policies need to respect the whole, communitarian populist insight, not just the one supposedly resolvable with a check.

Radicalism and Republicanism in Kansas

My apologies for yet another long delay in blogging. April was busy--too busy--and May was hardly less so; it seemed that just as the semester ended and I got a break from all these new committee responsibilities I'm adjusting to, that a bunch of new stuff was thrown at me, via home and church. I really need to organize my time better. But then, I've been saying that for years, haven't I? Oh well; on with the summer. We're not going to be traveling until August this time around, so hopefully (there's always a "hopefully," right?) there won't be the sort of interruption in my blogging as has been common in summers past. But we'll see.

As usual, I start back up with a long post. About a month ago Sunflower Community Action, a citizens and neighborhood organizing group here in Wichita, asked me if I'd be interested in contributing to a workshop on Kansas culture and politics by lecturing a bit on Kansas's radical past. I was happy for the chance to put all that I'd been teaching and blogging and talking about for the past several months into lecture form, and I'm including the result below, pretty much in its entirety. Hopefully some of you will find it interesting, as well as relevant to the ongoing arguments about populism on the prairie--and elsewhere--today.


Radical and Republican Legacies in Kansas Politics

John Steuart Curry was a talented artist, born in Kansas in 1897 but educated in New York City and Paris, who was caught up by--but who also benefited from and strategically promoted--the rush of interest in "Regionalism" in the 1930s. Curry had perhaps the most ambiguous relationship with his home state of any of the "Regionalist Triumvirate": while Thomas Benton Hart and Grant Wood were pretty thoroughly and solidly products of and committed to Missouri and Iowa, respectively, Curry came back to Kansas only reluctantly, and his defining work of art involving Kansas--the mural "Tragic Prelude," painted on the east corridor of the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka--was by no means embraced by the Kansas public or its politicians. "Prelude," with its towering figure of John Brown, armed with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, bestriding a scene of violence, danger, and conflict, was reproduced in Life in 1939; it was a sensation, but also the last straw for some who disliked Curry's emphasis on Kansas's bloody and radical beginnings. Refusing to support Curry's request that some marble slabs be moved to accommodate his work on the uncompleted murals, Kansas lawmakers essentially shut down his larger vision for the Capitol; Curry then left his existing paintings unfinished and unsigned. He died in 1946, but the figure of John Brown--a wild-eyed Colossus--remains.

In some ways it is fitting that John Brown is still there, unfinished, looking down on Kansas lawmakers, because John Brown's legacy for Kansas is similarly unfinished and unclear. Brown is hardly a central, or even a particularly important, figure in the historical record of the state--yet his legacy is an enormously important factor in Kansas having become both at one time the most radical, but also for much of its history the most Republican, state in the union.

The history of Kansas of concern here is the one which began with the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The pressure was building for Congress to open up the remaining unorganized land from the Louisiana Purchase for settlement, but southern politicians did not want to open up any new land to potential statehood that would fall under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, which forbade slavery north of the 36th parallel. This was a difficult position for Democrats like Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who wanted to maintain the support of those who wished to open up and move into the western territories, but couldn't afford to antagonize voters and powerbrokers in the South. The solution, of course, was the gutting of the Missouri Compromise and the establishment of "popular sovereignty"--or "squatter sovereignty" as some preferred to call it--as the principle under which the territories of Kansas and Nebraska would decide if they would become slave or free states. This move, perhaps more than any other development in the 1850s, radicalized abolitionist opposition to slavery and forced moderate Democrats to choose sides, with Douglas himself becoming a general champion of the state-sovereignty approach to slavery and the South beginning its long-lasting role as crucial to Democratic electoral plans. (In 1852, the Democrats had won all but two of the northern states; in Congressional elections two years later though, they lost all but two, thus setting the stage for the subsequent identification of the Democrats with the South, agitation and rebellion.)

In May of 1854 there were fewer than 800 permanent white settlers living in the Kansas territory--indeed, besides those stationed at Ft. Leavenworth, those traveling the Santa Fe Trail to California, and various Methodist and Quaker missionaries, the population of Kansas was then almost wholly indigenous. But within nine months the number residents of European descent had increased by a factor of ten. Pro- and anti-slavery forces pored into Kansas, determined to put down roots and shape a state government either supportive of or opposed to slavery. For Missourians, the "Border Ruffians" and "Self-Defensives" who would cross over into Kansas, stake claims or briefly vote or harass other settlers, and then retreat back across the state line, it was a matter of protecting their "rights" as slave owners and their economic position: as mostly small farmers with few slaves, without the power of the plantation system that existed in the Deep South to back them up (and thus maintain social control), the existence of a free state next door was profoundly threatening. And they quickly, and rightly, deduced that this would not be any "ordinary" free state; the possibility of winning an electoral battle against the "Slave Power" on the ground was enormously appealing to many New England abolitionists, and the battle for Kansas became a huge fundraising and recruitment opportunity. Organizations like the New England Emigrant Aid Company helped move--and arm with rifles and other equipment--hundreds of settlers, setting the stage for numerous early conflicts that only escalated as time went by. Most early Kansas communities became quickly identified as havens for either pro- or anti-slavery settlers--Atchison being one of the former, Lawrence one of the latter--allowing for literal political lines to be drawn almost from the start.

It must be noted, however, that as the decade progressed the lure of land was at least as important as the struggle over slavery; fully a third of Kansas's white residents by 1860 had come from the Midwest, not New England or Missouri (or points further south). This is not to say that they had no interest in the partisan battles over slavery, only that their interest in it was not a direct moral or economic one. This was the decade when the Republican party emerged as a national alternative to the Whigs, and the Republican slogan of "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" must be understood for what it truly was. The Republican opposition to the expansion of slavery was not grounded in a deeply abolitionist sentiment, though many Republican leaders did hate slavery; mostly, their opposition was grounded in the belief that slavery was a corrupting social system, which placed too much power in the hands of non-working slave owners and plantation masters, thus undermining the freedom of the white wage-earner or proprietor--an independent man with dignity and a family to support (such patriotic and patriarchal rhetoric was important)--to expand his property, advance economically, and control his own destiny politically. For early Kansas politicians like James Lane, opposition to slavery had nothing to do with sympathy for slaves and African-Americans; on the contrary, part of the reason why Lane opposed slavery in Kansas was because he wanted to keep Kansas entirely white. Such racial animosity clearly did not typify the Republican party as a whole, of course, but it captures a major part of the thinking of early Kansas settlers. The problem was not, for the most part, the degradations and discrimination suffered by people of African descent in a society which tolerated slavery; rather, it was the inequality and indecency embodied by a system which denied the fruits of liberty to ordinary independent freeholders (who theoretically could have been of any race, but who in the rhetoric and thought of most of America's voters were clearly white).

But then came John Brown--and not just Brown, but the revolution in partisan thinking about slavery he represented. Brown was born in Connecticut in 1800, and was a zealous Christian, deeply influenced by the language and power of the Old Testament and committed to the abolitionist cause. Unlike many abolitionists, however, he was also personally devoted to the cause of racial equality. He firmly denounced those who opposed slavery yet promoted racial separationism, and once was expelled from a church in Ohio for inviting an African-American family to attend with and sit in the pew beside his own. A wanderer without roots or much economic success in life, it was perhaps inevitable that he would be drawn to the struggle in "Bleeding Kansas." One of his sons came first, settling in Franklin County in early 1855, and was immediately caught up in the formation of antislavery militias, designed to defend free-state settlements and protect their representatives in the territorial government. (This protection was much needed; in the chaotic early months of Kansas's settlement, the rule of law was minimal at best, and fraud, intimidation, and mob action was common.) In a letter, Brown's son complained that the free-state settlers were sorely lacking in any kind of military organization, and this inspired Brown himself to relocate--leaving behind his wife, a new baby, and a host of debts and lawsuits--in the fall of that year. Within weeks, the Browns were in the thick of the conflict. In December of 1855, John Brown joined others in turning Lawrence into an armed camp, in preparation for an expected attack upon the free-state legislators living in the town by a group of intoxicated Missourians gathered along the banks of the Wakarusa River--the so-called "Wakarusa War." In this case, Marx's dictum was reversed, as the farce preceded the tragedy: while in December the territorial governor has been able to broker a deal to get the aimless yet angry mob to disperse, six months later Lawrence truly was attacked--by an organized force with artillery, no less--and the residents and legislators living there fled for their lives.

John Brown was infuriated that he had been too late to fight in the "Siege of Lawrence," and dismissed Republican free-state leaders like Charles Robinson as a "perfect old woman" who was "more talk than cider." Brown's cider, by contrast, was fiery and pure. On May 24, Brown led for of his sons and three other men on a mission to the nearby proslavery settlement of Pottawatomie, where they dragged five men--none of whom owned slaves or had participated in the attack on Lawrence--from their homes and hacked them to death with broadswords. In later years, Brown would be coy about whether or not he had directly killed any man that night; in an early formulation of terrorist language which has become unfortunately familiar to us all, Brown rather insisted that he had done God's work that night, and that the deaths of those men--however it happened--did not displease him, the servant of the Almighty, in the least.

Brown stayed in Kansas only a little while longer; he was a wanted man, a guerrilla fighter, whose reputation--for violence and visionary leadership--increased with every week and month and year he was able to elude capture and outfight those sent after him. He and his loyal troops participated in what some historians consider to be the first organized military encounter of the Civil War in June of 1856. He fled the territory after troops were sent to destroy the free-state settlement of Osawatomie where he had been hiding, returned a couple of times after freeing slaves in Missouri and leading them through Kansas on their way north, but by 1859 was gone for good. His path took him, as everyone knows, to Harper's Ferry and death by hanging. But in Kansas, his legacy remained. Most importantly, the way he was celebrated and condemned throughout the nation for his implacable hatred of slavery and commitment to racial justice and the overthrowing of "Slave Power" was seared into the self-understanding of Kansans. As the years went by and the Civil War was fought, the battle between the north and south seemed in Kansas almost a continuation of the vicious, personal, neighbor-against-neighbor conflict that its residents had seen and had contributed to throughout the 1850s. (Which in many cases it actually was; the fighting between Missouri and Kansas during the Civil War years was particularly localized and bloody.) With the success of the free-state forces in Kansas, and then the success of the Union forces across the country, Kansans had reason to believe that they been more deeply committed to the struggle over slavery than any other state, and that belief had real political consequences.

For one thing, it made the Republican party absolutely dominant in the state. So many Union veterans settled in Kansas that it came for a time to be known as the "Soldier State," and these veterans almost to a man voted as they had shot--that is, they voted for the party of Lincoln, and against the traitorous Democrats. Waving the "bloody shirt," accusing the Democratic party of being in sympathy to slavery and treason, was commonplace throughout America in the 1870s and 1880s, but nowhere more than in Kansas. In the first fifty years of Kansas's statehood, there was only one Democratic governor, and that aberration was corrected after a single term in office. Moreover, the memory of the Bleeding Kansas era, and the impact of John Brown's revolutionary commitments, had made Kansas Republicans somewhat radical; in their proposed state constitutions in 1858 and 1859, they not only outlawed slavery (which made it into the final version), but also advanced a measure to protect the rights and votes of blacks and women (which did not, but not for lack of trying). Following the war, Kansas Republicans moved even more rapidly than those Radical Republicans in Congress did in their fervor to punish the South and fulfill what they took to be President Lincoln's dream; the state of Kansas held a referendum of providing African-Americans with the vote in 1867, before the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was even ratified.

But not only did Kansas Republicans' radicalism move more quickly than the national version did, it lasted longer. The energy and influence of the Radical Republicans in Washington DC was soon spent; by the late 1870s Reconstruction in the South came to an end, and the white power structure of the former Confederacy immediately began to re-assert itself, overwhelmingly through the Democratic party. With the "Solid South" completely lost to them, the Republican party needed to shore up its own majorities, and it increasingly found these in the rising corporate, trading, and banking interests of the cities of northeastern and upper midwestern states. In time the national Republican party, and state Republican party establishments throughout the country, shed much of the aspiration hopes of Lincoln, to say nothing of the crusading demands of Brown; the Republican party as the party of entrepreneurs and businessmen and the upper-class was born. Obviously, there were Republicans who were unhappy with this; hence the Mugwumps, who spurned the Republican party of the 1880s and embraced Grover Cleveland, a Democrat for president. Kansas Republicans were even more divided, as the apparent corruption and increasing complacency of what was once an intense and even revolutionary movement in American politics seemed a rebuke to all that they had identified themselves as over the previous 30 years. There were numerous split-off groups amongst the Kansas Republicans, with variously titled Liberal Republicans of Independent Republicans contesting items in the party's official platform throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The arrival of large numbers of African-Americans kept this struggle, the struggle to keep the Republican party faithful to the principles of conflict from which it had emerged, very much in the minds of Kansans. The "Exodusters," lured to Kansas by the promise of cheap land and the hope of settling in that state where the blessed John Brown had begun his war for equality, confronted and tested the good intentions of Kansas Republicans; the state's black population went from under 1000 in 1860, to over 15,000 in 1870, to three times that in 1880, and at least a dozen all-black communities were established throughout the state. As the years went by, as conditions for farmers worsened in the age of centralized monopolies and tight credit, as Jim Crow laws and a racial backlash in the form of the Ku Klux Klan strengthened their grip through the country, the Kansas Republican leadership had more cause and more opportunity to lead than was the case perhaps anywhere else in the nation.

Kansas Republicans did not wholly fail the test--but the did not wholly pass it either. In terms of racial politics, there were notable successes: for example, the Republican legislature for several years acquiesced to the request from the NAACP to ban the hideously racist film Birth of a Nation in Kansas, all while the movie was a sensation elsewhere. But in time, the radical element of Kansas Republicanism was superseded by something else: the appropriation by the Republican party of the new moderate, small-town, "middle-class" voice of America, so expertly embodied by William Allen White, a newspaper editor and eventual Republican mouthpiece for the nation from Emporia. By the turn of the century, the transformation of the U.S. from an mostly self-sufficient and localized, agrarian and rural society to a mostly specialized and national, industrial and urban society was nearly completion. The deep conceptual heart of the old call for "free soil, free labor, and free men" could have been source of resistance to the emergence of an interconnected and corporatized capitalist state, and a demand for real economic democracy, but instead it was adapted--as Lincoln himself had done some clever adapting of what America supposedly stood for in his Gettysburg Address--into a call for conserving small-town virtues and (white, Protestant) ways of life in the midst of a world where economic sovereignty and political power was being rapidly, and perhaps inevitably, concentrated in the hands of educated and cosmopolitan elites. Thus was the Kansas Republican party, like White himself, slowly transformed into a perfect vehicle for the "modern" and moderate--yet nostalgic and homey, always mindful of the bourgeois ways of the small prairie town--policies of the Progressive Republicans. Racially, Kansas had what it considered to be a mild and reasonable amount of segregation (Republican lawmakers in the 1950s would complain about how a court case which began in Topeka led to Brown v. Board of Education, saying that it was unfair that Kansas's sort of segregation should be associated with the presumably much different sort that existed in the Deep South); the need for more collective, affirmative actions to bring real social equality to blacks was something they never considered. Economically, the Kansas Republican party was flexible enough to respond to the Populist challenges of the 1890s and 1900s, returning from severe and surprising electoral defeats with proposals for change in the regulation of railroads and banks that got them returned to power in short order. (The fact that the Populists, through William Jennings Bryan, were from 1896 on closely associated with the Democrats made all the easier, of course, for Kansas Republicans to attack them as traitors in disguise.) White lambasted the Populists as wild-eyed fools and uneducated bumpkins, yet he fought the Klan with Brownesque fervor, and happily endorsed much of the Populist platform once it was moderated and modernized by Republicans like Robert LaFollette--to say nothing of Democrats like FDR. In these ways, White exemplifies the way John Brown's radical, egalitarian legacy long influenced the Republican party he helped make dominant in Kansas, but was also, in time, almost completely sublimated within it.

I say "almost completely sublimated," not entirely. For one doesn't have to look any further than to the innumerable analyses of "Red America" and rise of the "Christian Right" and so forth, all so well--if often profoundly inaccurately--realized by Thomas Frank in his bestselling screed What's the Matter with Kansas?, to realize that Kansas's almost unique mix of radical moralism and conservative populism is still present, lurking somewhere beneath the surface. Of course, the political surface itself has almost wholly changed; the issues which characterized the search for economic sovereignty and racial justice a century or more ago have been, in Kansas at least, almost definitively buried by the transforming effects of World War II and modern farming technology on the one hand, and numerous Supreme Court decisions and civil rights movements of the 50s and 60s on the other. And meanwhile, a host of moral and social issues--abortion most prominently--that never would have occurred to the free-staters and Exodusters and Populists of yore now define much of the political landscape.

So perhaps John Brown's legacy, the ideals and tensions which his radical, violent, visionary actions bequeathed to Kansas and the Republican party which embraced his memory (at first devotedly, in time reluctantly), is really and truly on its way out. Over the past decade, after all, the progressive and conservative factions of the Kansas Republican party have torn each other apart, so much so that Democrats nationally are looking at Kansas--and our rising star of a governor, Kathleen Sebelius--as a state of serious opportunity for them for the first time since...well, maybe for the first time ever. Craig Miner ends his wonderful history of the Sunflower State by claiming that Kansas has resisted homogenization as long and as successfully as any other state in the country (in no small part because its intense past became so entwined with its institutional memory), but that now becoming "like the nations" is unavoidable. Will ordinary, nonpopulist, nonprogressive, just straightforward Republican (and Democratic) politics therefore be our future?

For my part, I'll keep my eyes on that unfinished, unsigned mural of John Brown, watching with burning eyes the passing scene, and wait.

Back to Bryan (Left Conservatism Returns)

A couple of months ago I had an e-mail exchange with Caleb Stegall, he of the late, great New Pantagruel, over William Jennings Bryan, and what his example does or does not teach us about how to preserve or construct a genuinely conservative/agrarian but also a populist/egalitarian social order. He was responding to this paper of mine, and I promised him that I'd blog some more about the issue soon. That paper was given at an Association of Political Theory meeting back in November, along with scholars like Patrick Deneen, and I promised them I'd follow up on my blog regarding some of what my paper said then too. And, even earlier, back when I wrote my post on "left conservatism," I said there was something more to say about the connection between the kind of perspective I was advocating and the American experience with populism and progressivism. So consider this post an attempt to fulfill all three promises.

I am, as readers of this blog know, a pretty big fan of William Jennings Bryan, though my appreciation of him is admittedly selective, admiring some aspects of his politics and his style and greatly disliking others. But the basic problem which Bryan poses to people like Caleb is not, for the most part, at least so far as I can tell, one that has to do with any of the specific positions he took throughout his career. The early Bryan of the 1890s and 1900s was an advocate of producerism, of the working man with a family to support and a small, mostly self-sustaining community to be a part of; bimetallism, his opposition to monopolies and trusts, his desire to regulate the railroads--all of that and more was grounded in his conviction that real autonomy and equality depended upon a socio-economic structure in which the power over loans, prices, wages and currency was to kept in public hands, rather than concentrated in private ones. And the moralistic thread which ran through all his arguments, becoming ever more explicit as times and society and demographics changed in the 1910s and 20s, was itself drawn clearly from a respect for and commitment to the localized Protestant Christian (and white) cultures and audiences that he campaigned successfully amongst and long preached to throughout the American South, Midwest, and Great Plains. No populist could seriously complain about any of that.

No, the problem posed by Bryan is not so much his principles, as what he believed his principles required in terms of political action. His moralistic egalitarianism became, over the years, a central component of the progressive liberalism of early the 20th-century Democrats (and to a lesser extent Republicans too), thus contributing to or at least not proposing any real alternative to the centralizing social and economic policies of Democrats Woodrow Wilson and later Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Caleb put it to me, "I cannot accept [Bryan's] progressive liberalism, and in fact believe that this was Byran and the late-19th C. populists greatest failure/mistake."

Caleb's not alone; plenty of Kansas and Nebraska populists felt the same way. They were convinced that the "fusion" of 1896 with the Democrats was not just the end of their movement, but the first step towards the ultimate betrayal of its ideals. I'm no major fan of "progressive liberalism" myself, at least not in its final form. However, I think it is only fair to recognize the early Progressives and New Dealers as proposing solutions to real problems, and not just stealing rhetoric from the Populist Party for the sake of advancing their own agenda in the face of rapacious capitalism. Bryan was an imperfect vessel for making populism viable in cities, amongst non-Protestants, outside the Great Plains, but the attempt to make populist policies viable in such contexts had to made, regardless. The roots of the Great Plains populists' inability to come up with wholly sustainable and defendable alternative to the emerging corporate/capitalist order go deep into the basic structures of "opportunity" in the American order. This means, to me at least, that an achievable populism will have to be one that is sufficiently nationalized so as to be able to interact with that order.

Consider the absolute centrality of fears about the railroad trusts to the great majority of populist complaints. Why were the railroads, and the way they unfairly scaled freight charges, and pitted city against city throughout the Great Plains, such a motivating factor in the votes and concerns of so many farmers? Obviously, because a great many farmers were already in the process, by the 1890s, of choosing and/or being forced to adapt to a less self-sufficient, more cash-driven economy. They weren't an enemy of railroads; they wanted to make the railroads work for them. The same thing can be said about the huge role which paranoia over the money supply, and the demand for bimetallism, had in the Populist and People's parties: why was free silver such a vote getter? Because lots of farmers, rather than building their own farms and homes over the years from scratch through collective efforts, were themselves immigrants to the Great Plains, lured by opportunity, and consequently mortgaged up to their hilts. The very platforms that the Populist party adopted over the 1890s, and the producerist principles Bryan advocated, revealed the deep tension felt by farmers and other small-town folk who were actively trying to realize their personal economic and social vision in the midst of an already nationalizing environment.

Now, none of this is to say that the "progressive" fusion represented by Bryan was the only or best possible route to that preserving and constructing that vision. But I respect and accept progressive liberalism, and the New Deal which came later, as at least containing within itself the possibility of such a route, and it is Bryan for whom we have to thank for that.

But leaving aside such thanks...why, despite his best efforts, might Bryan nonetheless be a poor guide to any kind of serious thinking regarding populism today? What's the deep flaw that prevented his solutions, and the solutions of the party he shaped, from really doing what farmers hoped it would do? (That it did a lot to keep small farmers and small towns afloat is indisputable; that it also did a lot of damage all its own along the way is something that thoughtful agrarians have been aware of ever since I'll Take My Stand.) The way Caleb sees it, the real problem was--and is--methodological, or perhaps sociological (or both): "Byran’s populism is liberal because it is entirely procedural. This is the liberal flaw." That is, as I read his concerns, Bryan did not really respect the pre-existent world that he drew his ethics and religion from, however much he may have seemed to, because when it came time to fight on behalf of that world, he wanted to align larger, procedural forces on its behalf, as if it were something static just waiting for lift or an opportunity or a bestowal of new federal funding. This is, I think, a good point. Liberalism, at least in its later 2oth-century forms, has a real "best and the brightest" problem, a tendency to look almost anthropologically out upon the masses and try to figure out how to make them equal with those elites who have already survived and thrived within out socio-economic system. In other words, as Jeff Taylor (another fan of Bryan, though I think he places much too much of a libertarian spin on Bryan's policies) has argued, the liberalism of the post-Bryan Democratic party wasn't particularly Jeffersonian. The question is, to what degree did Bryan's moralistic progressive proposals create that result?

That the fusion liberalism of 1896, and the subsequent liberalism of the Progressives and New Dealers, was increasingly elitist and procedural (a fact that intellectuals like Richard Hofstadter gloried in, condemning the populist sentiments amongst early 20th-century reformers as an unfortunate ideological leftover), I understand and agree with. I also agree that, by the time proceduralism came to dominate liberal thinking, liberalism itself was all but unsalvageable, having committed itself wholly to "management" as conceived by already-well-positioned members of the "vital center." Such management is always, invariably, individualistic, conceived solely along lines connecting the specific, studied individual to those managers who take care of opposing economic and social forces of his or her behalf. Nothing populist there, I'll admit. But part of my point in the paper Caleb is commenting on was that Bryan's proceduralism (if you want to call it that) always presumed the existence of a non-individualistic, pre-existent historical/social/economic construct, the cultural substrate which grounds and subsumes all particular actions; this is the communal context which Rousseau--who plays a major role in my analysis of Bryan and Wendell Berry's respective approaches to democracy--refashioned for the modern world. (I say "refashioned" because there were, of course, plenty of thinkers, like Burke or de Maistre for example, who remained committed in different ways to some sort of conservative continuity into modernity, something that Rousseau assumed--rightly, I believe--was impossible.)

Bryan surely had no real philosophical grasp on the necessity of a lived context for resisting the long-term consequences of the secular liberal order. But he did know that everything he valued kind of presumed a world of Protestant farmers. (White ones, it must be said; Bryan's unwillingness to challenge the racism of the Bourbon Democrats, and even worse his apparent embrace of it later in his life, was his true greatest sin and failure.) Now it is true that this localized, dynamic, and not-easily-reducible Christian agrarian world was one that he was never truly part of, and in fact chose never to be fully a part of, being instead fully committed to a party and a religious ideology that admittedly often were agents of reduction. But isn't it plausible that Bryan never stopped campaigning, never abandoned the reductive and proceduralist methodologies of travel and communication and policy-making of the emerging progressive and liberal elite, never permanently grounded himself in the local knowledge of Nebraska or Kansas or elsewhere, because he knew that wasn't a context he internalize, but rather one he could only serve and thus help conserve for others, and for the nation as a whole? If so, then perhaps what we ought to wonder if it isn't the case that Bryanism, while not sufficient for populism on its own, nonetheless has its place--that given the actually existing world of desire and movement and opportunity that gives this nation (and, increasingly, this world) power over the preferably localized and placed individual, we need actors and policies and provisions on the state and national and even international level to secure places wherein individuals can build the communities they desire. To allow for such is, of course, to walk a tightrope: allowing for this conceptual option makes it easy to sometimes sound like a mere liberal "fan" of culture and community, which brings in the same condescending sociological temptation that Christopher Lasch rightly diagnosed in both the work of the Progressives and their later proceduralist critics like Hofstadter. But to not attempt to walk that tightrope, to not allow for the possibility that populist concerns can, sometimes, be expressed in centralized and procedural terms, is ultimately, I think to become contemptuous of one's fellow man, to hate them for shopping at Wal-Mart, or for not wanting to go all the way back to the Anti-Federalists, in essence. And no good post-Lincolnian American democrat--which Bryan plainly was--should do that.

A little bit more about what Rousseau has to contribute to this argument. As my old "left conservatism" post made clear, I think Rousseau's philosophy is what helps us see the tightrope: the delicate and often tragic line which marks out the path that people, for whom the historical socio-economic condition of today has robbed of a natural basis for community and equality, must walk if they are going to find equality as well as embeddedness in the present world. To hold to embeddedness only is to, I fear, engage in fetishism. "Conservatism" must be willing to continually create something new out of the old in the midst of the modern market and state. That something is, I admit, precarious. I suppose one could argue that Rousseau, in (I think) correctly diagnosing the problem (or at least one of them) with modernity, tried too hard to repair it; he conceived of a way of alienating oneself to a community that, while in theory it would produce that kind of equality of recognition that true populist democracy requires, in practice produces something even worse than alienated individuals: a whole community held together solely by the (often dictatorially expressed) will of all. Further, I suppose one could argue that those "willed communities" are themselves often obsessive, static creations, thoroughly ideological and thus without much substance of their own. They thus become easy marks for monied classes that want to sell them connections and concessions.

Is this the only kind of populism/communitarianism which Bryan's progressivism politics conserves the possibility of: a Potemkin community, living off gnostic aspirations, dependent upon elites who themselves want nothing to do with them? (Why am I thinking about Thomas Frank's description of Republican politicians and their evangelical supporters in the megachurches here?) Perhaps that is the case. But I'm not willing to say so. "Proceduralism" may be a dead-end liberal ideology, but not all liberal procedures partake of that ideology. Some are, I think, genuine attempts to address the passing/weakening of conservative verities in the liberal order. If every single liberal procedure always carries these elitist ideological assumptions along with it like a virus, then Wendell Berry is a sell-out for supporting the Burley Tobacco Program, or for praising the insight of that William Allen White, a turn-of-the-century Kansas progressive and "Middle American" Republican who came to support the New Deal, because, though he attacked the populist People's Party (an attack he later regretted) as well as William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s, he accepted throughout his career and tried to see implemented widely their original agrarian insight: that the wealth that really matters is one that can be generated and held by the productive arts of a community of working people.

Those communities are mostly gone now. If the ideals behind them are to be realized again, it certain won't be the government or a new progressive program which will recreate them--that will happen family by family, community by community, away from the rush to modern media and markets. But families and communities are no longer, if they ever were in our theoretically classless and mobile society, locked in one place, able to allow their dynamism who work them deeper into the land they occupy. To provide some security for those few who do try to lock themselves down for the sake of the future and more permanent things, some assistance will be needed. Bryan's kind of assistance--the moralistic, Jeffersonian, and even "conservative" or populist assistance which he weaved into the fabric of the contemporary liberal Democratic party--probably wasn't the best possible kind of assistance. But it was a noble effort, one that I, for one, would love to see the likes of again.

William Jennings Bryan and Being a Liberal Christian

Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University, has written a new biography of William Jennings Bryan, the great Christian reformer, orator, and populist leader of a century ago. I haven't read the book, which has only just been released, but I have read some short pieces by Kazin in which he talks about what Bryan's career and ideas can teach us about Christianity and progressive politics in America, both historically and today. In particular, there is this essay from Dissent, and this one from The American Prospect, the latter of which led to an interesting debate between Kazin and Kevin Mattson. All are worth reading.

A number of Kazin's claims in these pieces are particularly noteworthy. First, he argues that the apparent disunion today between "traditional" or "orthodox" Christian faith and liberal reforms only goes back a generation or two; in fact, the way Bryan used obvious scriptural imagery and argument to attack corporate greed and militarism and defend labor unions and public campaign financing was not only not unique, but in fact was common to the thinking and rhetoric of practically every populist or progressive politician well into the first-half of the 20th century. (And among black politicians and civil rights leaders, much longer than that.) Second, Kazin is convinced that, as much as he--a self-described "secular leftist"--is made somewhat uncomfortable by it, those on the left in America today will never enjoy influence again unless they can learn to "speak in unabashedly moral terms....[and] base their moral claims on one or another religious tradition." He has little patience for the "dishonest pandering of the last two Democratic nominees for president, who mouthed banalities about 'respecting people of faith' and asking 'What would Jesus do?' before switching into their standard stump speeches"--no, he insists, the marriage of religiosity and progressive politics (a marriage that was practically rock solid in white, Protestant American life before the intellectual and social transformations of the 1950s and 60s) has to go deeper than that:

For too long, progressives have hoped and demanded that governments solve the problems that beset our society--and complained when conservatives starve or eliminate programs that benefit millions. But in American history, popular movements, imbued with a revivalistic ethos, have been the surest way to pressure the state to do the right thing, consistently if not always effectively....Today, we need a moral equivalent of conservative religiosity, one that can inspire both believers and non-believers on the left to do the kind of smart, determined, often self-sacrificing work that the right receives from its adherents, in and out of presidential election years. As in 1906, such an alternative will draw, in part, on the language of the Bible and the supernatural beliefs of most Americans....The marriage between politics and piety in America has always been full of conflicts and misunderstandings. But it remains as strong as in Bryan's day and will probably endure as long as the nation itself. To deplore that fact only avoids the task of engaging it.

It should surprise no reader of this blog that I'm completely on board with this program. In particular, it's great to see someone like Kazin wrestle with the fact that one cannot separate the Bryan who attacked laissez-faire economics and defended populist farming policies in 1896, from the Bryan who supported Tennessee's effort to prosecute John Scopes in 1925 for teaching "any theory that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible"--in other words, for teaching evolution. If you were serious about the first, in Bryan's mind, then of course you had to be serious about the second: the cruelties of Social Darwinism and the reductiveness of evolutionary biology were both contradicted by scripture. As Kazin put it, speaking of Bryan and his supporters, "they could not conceive of a moral language that neglected the Bible or viewed it as no more than a captivating historical text." In other words, they were Bible-based Christians first, and liberals and populists and progressives second--or better, they were the latter because they were the former. The latter described how they interpreted and implemented their commitment to the Bible, and that label was important (because there were just as many Christians then as now who insisted the message of Christianity was otherwise--Pat Robertson today probably has a lot in common with the shamelessly wealth-praising preacher Russell "Acres of Diamonds" Conwell of Bryan's day)....but it was not their primary label. On the contrary, their social mores and political convictions were constrained and defined by the authority of the Biblical tradition. And if 20th-century American liberalism--as it continued down a path set by cynics and secularists like Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken--gradually became something which (again in Kazin's words), "harbor[ed] a nagging contempt for the God-fearing, the unhip, and the poorly educated"....well then, evangelical Christians of the heartland and liberal politics would have to part ways. Which, tragically, is exactly what has happened. (That's not the whole story, of course: it ignores the important role of race, and the failure--a tragic and terribly divisive one for liberal reform movements--of white evangelicals, including Bryan, to ever seriously address racism in America. But to ignore the "traditionalist" aspect of the story is just as limiting, something which Kazin's study of Bryan makes clear.)

This notion of authority, and the importance for anyone on the left who embraces or at least wants to makes use of the power of Christianity to acknowledge it, is something I've discussed before. This is one of the reasons I admire Hugo Schwyzer's writings so much; as he makes clear in a recent blog post, he is both saddened and frustrated by those Christians on the left who get so intimidated or angry at the "Christian Right" that they cannot be up front about (indeed sometimes deny or hide) their own commitment to the Christian faith. Hugo points the finger in the exactly right direction: at certain types of liberal Christians who--for numerous reasons well described by Kazin--have found themselves over the course of the past 50 years associating and agreeing more and more often with secularists (often well-heeled, well-educated ones), and who, because they don't want to offend their allies (and also often just because they want to distinguish themselves from those "Bible-thumpers" on the other side of the political aisle), have purposefully emptied their arguments of any serious appeal to religious tradition. He writes:

It's no wonder that the Christianity of the left seems so superficial! When was the last time any of us heard a sermon from Al Sharpton that was based on a rigorous explication of the New Testament? How often do we hear from Jesse Jackson how his relationship with Jesus leads him to take the stances he does? Whatever you think of Jerry [Falwell] and Pat [Robertson], they make an explicit connection between Scripture and politics; at best, leaders on the left do so obliquely and too often, they don't do it at all.

Hugo is engaging in a little hyperbole here, of course; as Kazin documents, in many African-American Protestant churches at least, the link between scriptural authority and progressive politics is alive and well. But that, of course, simply highlights the real struggle that people like Hugo and I are going to have with many of our fellow leftists when it comes to articulating a properly liberal Christian agenda....because truly insisting upon the defining power of one's Christianity means that the "liberal agenda" must be shaped in obedience to a prior, not-necessarily "liberal" religious faith. (Kazin points to the influential African-American Baptist minister Walter Fauntory, a man with impeccable progressive credentials, whose commitment to the authority of the Biblical text has led him to oppose efforts to legalize same-sex marriages, at the same time while he attacks those conservatives who use, in his view, arguments over gay marriage as a distraction from the sort of progressive social and economic imperatives dear to his Christian heart, as they were to Bryan's.) In my view, if one entirely equates liberalism with the expansive and distinctly modern philosophical vision of fully emancipated persons, then Christianity can't be liberal, since Christian doctrine--like any doctrine about the divine worth holding--asks the human self to submit to a higher order of things, to be bound to the rule of a community, to obey something other than individual interest. You can certainly be, as I see things, a "liberal Christian," in the same way that one can be a liberal communitarian or nationalist: that is, one can take up one's identity and use it and think about it in ways that respect modern notions of individual rights and needs. As far as that way of thinking goes, I'm happy to embrace the label "liberal Christian," and I assume Bryan would have done the same. But that is because we can see something about liberality and reform and populism and egalitarianism in the Christian tradition, to which we are obedient. To make those commitments mere supplements to what Kazin harshly but accurately called the "standard stump speeches" of contemporary liberalism, however earnestly felt, misunderstands the contextual source of faith's power in the first place.

None of this will be easy to make happen, of course--it wouldn't be easy even if all progressives were in agreement with myself and Schwyzer (and Kazin), and it certainly won't end disputes between various liberal Christians themselves. Bryan's reading of Christianity was hardly uncontested during even amongst those who sympathized with his positions, and it wouldn't be today either, as there are many ways in which one can speak of being "obedient" to Christianity above and beyond any given political ideology. Hugo's friendly, faithful arguments with other Christians over what obedience to a tradition means is one such example (clearly, he and Fauntory would disagree on at least some points!); our own dispute over what being "pro-life" truly requires is another. I easily can imagine that more than a few secular liberals cynically but perhaps truthfully observing that since the sort of "grace and humility" which Hugo rightly notes this kind of political and spiritual articulation requires is not much in evidence in America today, maybe trying to inject it into the left is just bad idea. I, however, tend to think that the example of Bryan teaches us that we Americans are and always will be hungry for such religious "injections." The Republican party has been the sole beneficiary of such for too long; I look forward to the Democrats slowly but surely overcoming their distaste for moral authority and tradition and debate, and perhaps making room for a "revivalistic ethos" once more.