Despite more than three centuries of upheaval and breakneck change, America remains one of the most rigid and religious societies in the developed world. There have been powerful religious influences in American history, both in favor of stasis and of comprehensive reform. Strong religious ideas were on both sides of the New England Schism, the English Civil War, the Revolution, slavery, the American Civil War, the struggle over corporate power in the Gilded Age, the Progressive reforms and Prohibition, the turmoil surrounding the Depression, American involvement in The War, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, Watergate, Abortion, and finally the endless series of skirmishes over domestic policy known as the “Culture War” over the last 35 years. Again and again, Orthodox and Heterodox versions of human purpose clash over policy.
The two sides in these disputes often seem like they are speaking two languages that use the same words. Freedom, Democracy, Respect, and Authority seem to beckon from both sides of the disputes over slavery, civil rights, or the environment. Like Shaw said of Britain and America, we seem to be “two countries separated by a common language.” The most important factor in the insolubility of these fights seems to be the impression, on both sides, that the other side lack respect for the most basic values. The orthodox factions are accused of lacking reverence for the undeniable fact, to Heterodoxists, that we are all part of an indivisible system of living systems. There can be no separation of my interests and yours or of us and them. Zero Sum games are impossible.
The Role of Authority in American Political Thought
To the Orthodox, this is a dangerous illusion. There is a range of sources of Orthodox ideas from the frankly irreligious to the most committed fundamentalist scriptural literalists. The common thread is the recognition of the necessity of power and authority. To the Orthodox, rigid authority is necessary for the most basic social functions. Orthodox thinkers are influenced by Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature as the war of all against all. Human societies are prone to the most violent upheavals and bloody atrocities. Humans are disloyal, untrustworthy, and riven with uncontrolled drives that render them functionally insane. Only the constant threat of force keeps ordinary people in line.
The more tightly bound a community is by commonalities in ethnicity, religion, class, and profession, the more likely it is to survive these upheavals. From this view, the civil rights revolution was at best missing the point and at worst represented nothing less than a deliberate assault on the cohesion of American society. By threatening that sense of reverence other ethnic groups were supposed to feel for the WASP core of American society, the Movement fragmented society and destroyed the cohesion necessary to survive in a hostile and unforgiving world. This is why the Right has consistently refused to believe that the leaders of the Movement were not witting or unwitting agents of Moscow.
Reverence, awe and fear are the cohesive forces in society. By maintaining fear of the State, wealth, men, or Whites, the continual strife of human life can be contained. Maintaining this state of fear sometimes requires force, but the alternative is the Hobbesian state of nature where meaningful human life is impossible, so virtually any sacrifice is justified.
External Reverence
In more settled times, reverence for external authority figures becomes an indispensable tool for social cohesion. Ultimately, God, Jehovah, or Allah would be the object of reverence for religiously-committed orthodoxists. For their more secular counterparts, the object of external reverence might be a (conservative) President, the Constitution, American power in the world, or in extreme forms, force itself. Regardless of the specifics, the source of authority must be external to the rest of society. It cannot be embodied within the people, collectively or singly. In the Orthodox view, all people are orthodoxists at heart and share their view that only the overwhelming power of an external force can capture the allegiance of the community. All other claims to legitimacy are invalid on their face.
In this paradigm, the use of power is a virtue regardless of its end. Limits upon power threaten the vitality of civilization. Private or public power may be revered depending on the interests of the individual apologist, but concentrated power is a common value of the Right, even if it comes wrapped in Libertarian language.
Movements that usurp centralized spiritual, political, or economic power in favor of decentralized power are seen as dangerous and beside the point. By placing power out of reach of the vast majority of Americans, Orthodoxists can preserve social order in a number of ways. By minimizing the footprint of power, the pace of social change can be limited. By moving power out of sight, it can be a nebulous ideal that promotes obedience and deference rather than functioning as an engine of conflict. By removing power from the community, its imperfections can be masked. By hiding the petty disputes and insecurities at the heart of conflicts over power, external authority can be portrayed as impersonal and godlike, thus preserving its legitimacy. Decentralizing movements are therefore a threat to social cohesion and are tantamount to treason. This helps explain why civil rights and labor movements have been attacked as Communist regardless of the political orientation of their leadership.
External Reverence and Power
In contemporary America, the most common objects of external reverence are an imperial President, God, or a powerful and wealthy CEO. God is an archetype of power who may serve as a template for other holders of unlimited puissance. Churches are protected from external interference in any number of ways, and the most entrepreneurial and evangelical among them are the most likely to preach submission to god-like power as a socio-cultural ideal. In recent decades, churches that promote this view have been far more successful than those that focus on the ethical obligation of the believer to the physical and emotional well-being of other humans. This helps to explain the consistent policy successes of orthodoxists, regardless of changes in party power.
In this mindset, ethics diminished in importance. The perceptible consequences of human action are ignored in favor of the overwhelming importance of submission to external authority. In modern American history, the focus has been on sexual morality. Flouting of God’s plan to marry and reproduce in favor of fleeting pleasure is seen as ultimate insult to ultimate authority. The preference for the trivial over the monumental is a threat to the cohesion of society and to the Kingdom. The most egregious form of offense, of course, is homosexuality, but orthodoxists have defended the remnants of laws that prohibit non-reproductive sexual acts regardless of sexual orientation.
In political matters, the ultimate value is submission to the practically unlimited power of an Imperial President. The political Right, consistent allies of orthodoxy, has its own mythology about the meaning of the Constitution that persists in its appeal despite the paucity of support in the text. Regardless of copious evidence that the document was intended to limit concentrations of power in favor of competing centers, conservatives insist that the phrase “commander in chief” embodies limitless executive power in all matters except domestic social programs, which are mostly opposed. The fact that limits on executive power are not considered dangerous during Democratic administrations is not evidence of inconsistency. Democrats are seen as outside the cult of power, filled with naive and dangerous ideas of interdependence and the solubility of conflict that, in conservative minds, threaten the foundation of social order and render them unfit for political office.
The appeal of the Imperial Presidency is inextricably linked to the attachment to force as the ultimate political value. The role of the State is the preparation for and prosecution of war. The promulgation of threats is either a reason or excuse for the rush to war, but in either case, war is seen as having a value of its own. By promoting the values of the cult of power and the danger of external threats, continual war increases the cohesion of society and negates the appeal of heterodoxic values. Adversity in war serves this function, but defeat is unthinkable as it would threaten to discredit the values that motivate it. Therefore, the actual threat and power of the enemy places the function of war at jeopardy. This impetus draws the State into war with a series of weak states and non-state actors. These wars with tribal forces generate their own cycles of vengeance and counter-vengeance which explain much of the violence and disorder that characterize much of the last decade. Orthodoxists value these wars precisely for their tribal nature, knowing that despite their use of ideological and historicist language to promote these conflicts, the effect they have on American society is to tribalize those classes that comprise or sympathise with the warriors. By removing any stance between support for Us and for Them, these meaningless tribal conflicts promote the power totemism of orthodoxy and prevent the reemergence of heterodox values in mainstream thought.
The remaining form of revered power is the power of the modern Corporation. Large corporations employ many Americans, particularly in the politically vital suburbs. They dominate the American economy and culture. They supply most of the money for research and development and they make and sell the products and services which form the texture of modern life.
Most important for our purposes, however, is the role that corporations play as the primary contemporary practitioners of the art of Propaganda. American business has been using Psychology to convince Americans to buy things they don’t need since soon after the First World War. Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, pioneered the use of subconscious appeals to tie specific products to primal drives. In doing so, he was applying techniques he helped to develop while serving in the Office of Public Information during the First World War.
Before these developments, advertising was focused on the promotion of necessities by their functional virtues. This placed sharp limits on sales and on growth. Besides being a threat to the profits of corporations and the wealth of their shareholders, this was touted as a threat to the social order. By limiting economic growth, this focus on necessities tended to decentralize power and posed the danger of individual and community independence at a time that America was becoming a world power. By helping to nationalize the economy and channel economic and cultural energies toward consumption, an economy based on the manufacture of desire would enforce political conformity and permit the gradual identification of political and economic power.
Commercial propaganda increased in power as the means used to disseminate it became more evocative and less social. Newspaper chains began the process, followed by movies, radio, television, and the Internet. Each technological innovation has produced a leap in immediacy and versatility, giving the practitioners of propaganda more tools to manipulate the emotions of consumers, convincing them that this or that consumer product will fulfill some primal drive, be it sex or belonging or even love. Without these tools, and the economic growth they make possible, the corporate-state order would collapse. Our currency, financial markets, and socio-economic hierarchy are structured to rely on year-on-year growth and large profits that a necessity-based economy can not provide.
Of course, the content that media companies have created to sell these advertisements to consumers have become important components of economic growth in their own right. Movies and television in particular create a vivid cultural space where the primacy of desire and pleasure are promulgated and celebrated. While some products may seem to corrode social cohesion and order, the overall effect is to reinforce the habit of passively accepting the judgements of others and standardizing aesthetics and ethics. By distracting Americans with fictional worlds and manufactured values, mass media serve an important function in diverting individual energy to the ends of economic and political interests allied with the orthodoxy.
Conflicts and Contradictions Within Orthodoxy
Modern American orthodoxy and its institutional allies form a vast complex of interconnected systems that defies easy explanation. There are many mechanisms, however, that tend to support common purpose. By sharing values of power and order, the Orthodoxy ensures that conflicts about legitimacy do not threaten the prevailing order.
The most obvious contradiction within the Orthodox ranks is the alliance of the movement with Libertarian political thinkers. Modern American Libertarianism is, however, a bizarrely specific creed. Only public power is seen as a threat to political liberties, and prominent Libertarians and Quasi-Libertarians seem chiefly concerned with those measures which threaten corporate control over the economy, wasting little time examining such trivial phenomena as the enormous National Security state. In this way, Libertarianism has been effectively harnessed to the broader objectives of the Orthodox bloc even if individual Libertarians may object more to the characterization than the reality.
The hedonistic message of corporate mass media would seem to conflict with Orthodox political and spiritual values, but again this is deceptive. By channeling individualistic impulses into conformist channels, a repeat of the upheavals of the late sixties can be averted. Identity is diverted from action to belongings and appearance. Dissent is thus defanged, proceeding no further than the Billboard charts. The permissive message of media provides a handy fundraising tool for Orthodox political and religious organizations while the pro-corporate values embedded in the heart of the movement ensure that media power is never effectively challenged. The result is a neat symbiosis that provides a steady flow of power to elites.
In all, the cohesion of the Orthodox bloc is the most remarkable achievement in modern politics. There can be little doubt that this cohesion is largely engineered by the corporate elites who have funded the various arms of the movement and who have benefitted so remarkably from its ascent to power over the last 40 years.
Next, we will examine the opposition.
