If and when popular majorities produce outcomes the rulers don’t like, their devotion to “democracy” instantly evaporates. Judges, administrative state agencies, private companies—whichever is most able in the moment to overturn the will of unruly voters—will intervene to restore ruling class diktats. On the other hand, when voters can be counted on to vote the right way, then voting becomes the necessary and sufficient step for sanctifying any political outcome. It doesn’t even matter where the votes (or voters) come from, so long as they vote the right way. The fact that they vote the right way is sufficient to justify and even ennoble their participation in “our democracy.”
Blues perpetually outvoting Reds and ruling unopposed: this, and only this, is what “democracy” means today.
Anton endorses secessionist movements, such as the attempt by the Reds of western Maryland to secede from the People’s Republic. My thoughts:
1. If Amanda Ripley’s term “conflict entrepreneur” were to appear in a dictionary, Michael Anton’s picture would be next to it.
2. For nearly 15 years, I have been endorsing secession. See the widely-unread, and ridiculously high-priced Unchecked and Unbalanced.
3. I also have endorsed “virtual” polities, so that I could continue to live in the geographical area of the People’s Republic but choose government services from elsewhere. Balaji Srinivasan’s networked state.
I think that the best scenario for the United States is one in which the Progressive Puritans choose to worship their religion among themselves without trying to impose it on others. But I don’t know how to get from here to there. What happened to the original Puritans that they didn’t end up as hard to live with as today’s version?
“What happened to the original Puritans that they didn’t end up as hard to live with as today’s version?”
400 years ago, it was easier to move away from noodges. See Williams, Roger.
“Right now, at least half of Red America feels trapped in an abusive marriage, endlessly told they’re worthless, racist, and evil—but also that under no circumstances may they even broach the topic of leaving. Stay and take your deserved punishment is Blue America’s constant message to Red”
My thoughts precisely…they hate us, but want to endlessly control and regulate us.
“See the widely-unread, and ridiculously high-priced Unchecked and Unbalanced.”
Fact check: still priced very high, even after 11+ years since publication.
Fortunately, there was a podcast on said book that is still very reasonably priced:
http://www.econtalk.org/kling-on-knowledge-power-and-unchecked-and-unbalanced/
One can worship one’s religion among one-selves when it claims to be mostly about the supernatural, but not when it claims to be only about the natural.
My impression of history is that the Puritans and their cultural descendants were always intolerant and hard to live with from the very beginning (indeed, why they had worn out their welcome in Britain and had gone to Holland) and obnoxiously pushy in imposing their views just as much as they could manage given their capabilities and reach. This is Hazony’s sense of ‘imperialism’. This seems to be the almost uniform impression of every non-Puritan who saw them close-up and wrote about the experience, and continued even after they stopped being Puritans.
In Royster’s Civil War book The Destructive War, he provides an anecdote from 1864 about an American explaining the war to an inquiring foreign traveler as, “It’s the conquest of America by Massachusetts.”
All those impositions are the point, and perceived as the compulsory moral equivalents of the abolition of slavery: you can’t just “live and let live” and tolerate the violation of universal human rights by evil, greedy, exploiter / oppressor bigots when you can do something about it.
Mr. Kling, the original Puritans simply ARE the wok-ists of today (with some leavening admixture of Quaker, Methodist, etc.). The intellectual geneaology has been traced by numerous scholars, for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
And they did not get easier to deal with – they conquered first America and then the world, both of which they now rule.
Harvard and Yale were founded as Puritan religious institutions. Princeton was founded as a Presbyterian religious institution which AFAIK is pretty similar. And yes, they have led the woke movement of today.
Not all of them; my ancestry is part Puritan Pilgrims, and I’m pretty pro-Trump, anti-woke.
As for how Puritans acted.
There is a statue of Anne Hutchinson in front of the Massachusetts State House.
From Wikipedia: “Anne Hutchinson (July 1591 – August 1643) was a Puritan spiritual advisor, religious reformer, and an important participant in the Antinomian Controversy which shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Her strong religious convictions were at odds with the established Puritan clergy in the Boston area and her popularity and charisma helped create a theological schism that threatened to destroy the Puritans’ religious community in New England. She was eventually tried and convicted, then banished from the colony with many of her supporters.”
There is also a statue of Mary Dyer.
From Wikipedia: “Mary Dyer (c. 1611 – 1 June 1660) was an English and colonial American Puritan turned Quaker who was hanged in Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, for repeatedly defying a Puritan law banning Quakers from the colony. She is one of the four executed Quakers known as the Boston martyrs.”
I might observe that Quaker William Penn’s Philadelphia did not hang Puritans.
And then there is Roger Williams.
Again from Wikipedia: “Roger Williams (c. 21 December 1603 – between 27 January and 15 March 1683) was a Puritan minister, theologian, and author who founded Providence Plantations, which became the Colony of Rhode Island and later the U.S. state of Rhode Island. He was a staunch advocate for religious freedom, separation of church and state, and fair dealings with Native Americans. Williams was expelled by the Puritan leaders from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for spreading “new and dangerous ideas,” and established Providence Plantations in 1636 as a refuge offering what he termed “liberty of conscience.” ”
Finally, we should not forget the Salem witch trials from February 1692 to May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and at least five people died in jail.
Cancel culture is nothing new to extremist political Calvinism. In those days, when you were cancelled, you stayed canceled.
Calvinism has mutated. It used to be a blend of religion and politics in old Boston. The religion has faded, but the attitudes remain. The entire fury is in politics. The old doctrines remain: original sin, man’s inherent depravity, rejection, the new for salvation solely through faith, predestination, the need for public confession, public corporal punishment, conformity. You can see the old fanatical Calvinism in anti-racism trainings and climate change fanaticism.
Learning about the original Puritans (including the Roundheads and the Glorious Revolution) is important for the current moment.
Consider also studying the Unitarian crisis in the UK and Massachusetts.
The comments here about exiles are relevant, and the question of intellectual genealogy.
I think most of the comments miss ASK’s question “What happened to the original Puritans that they didn’t end up as hard to live with as today’s version?”
What happened is that they were eventually mocked and shamed for their behavior. The Witch Trials ended in 1693, and by late 1696, both officials and private persons and churches were publicly asking for forgiveness for their roles and setting aside or even compensating victims.
I’d argue for the same now. Loudly and continually point out the irrationality of and harm caused by the cancel crowd.
I don’t agree on the history: they quashed the witch trials on their own. Witchphoia was not widespread: half of all witch trials in America were in the one season in Salem. They correctly noticed the danger. Too much driven by women for their taste, for one thing.
The Soviet culture of denunciation is a better model. It ends up as a way to upgrade your job or your apartment.
As for now, I don’t think you are going to surpass them in loudness. The problem is a lack of power within institutions; the solution is to build that power in the existing institutions, or maybe in new ones. Good luck!
Not every foot soldier needs to be paid in hard script, but the organizers and influencers do. There is just so much money in shaking down square America. I can’t imagine them letting us secede.
A desire for Equity is a desire for Equity in your house!
Actually it’s more Maoist than Soviet. The Soviets were proud of their cultural heritage in the 19th century and earlier. Only the Maoists sought to erase history and redo culture from the ground up.
The woke left will never ever concede or ask for forgiveness. Any apologies for last summer’s riots or the massive crime spike? Exactly! Best case scenario is that they are marginalized and asked to politely stay quiet by the centrist left.
After hearing Murray Rothbard’s description of the radical pietists of the mid-19th century (see the trope of the fiery abolitionist preacher), with some other insights into the Puritans, I’ve come to think that Nathanial Hawthorne was using the Puritans but commenting on the radical pietists that occupied the country at the time west of Boston. The real Damn Yankees of the Civil War. These radical pietists evolved into the late 19th century Progressives, who had a split in the 1910/20 period with the Evangelicals sticking with Christianity, but a segment taking up Marxism as their religion, worshiping the state, our modern Progressives. The fight between these factions eventually pushed the Evangelicals to discount the state intervention, but the Progressives continue to double down.
Rothbard expounds on the origins of the radical pietists in this lecture from the early 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ndkCvHGj4&t=1106s
But he gave a good summary in this introduction to a book by Lysander Spooner.
“Briefly, the pietist tends to hold that to be truly religious, a person must experience an emotional conversion; the convert, in what has been called “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” has a direct relationship to God or to Jesus. The liturgical, on the other hand, is interested in either doctrinal belief or the following of prescribed church ritual as the key to salvation.
“Now, it might seem as if the pietistic emphasis on the individual might lead to a political individualism, to the belief that the State may not interfere in each individual’s moral choices and actions. In seventeenth-century pietism, it often meant just that. But by the nineteenth century, unfortunately, such was not the case. Most pietists took the following view: since we can’t gauge an individual’s morality by his following rituals or even by his professed adherence to creed, we must watch his actions and see if he is really moral.
“From there the pietists concluded that it was everyone’s moral duty to his own salvation to see to it that his fellow men as well as himself are kept out of temptation’s path. That is, it was supposed to be the State’s business to enforce compulsory morality, to create the proper moral climate for maximizing salvation. In short, instead of an individualist, the pietist now tended to become a pest, a busybody, a moral watchdog for his fellow man, and a compulsory moralist using the State to outlaw “vice” as well as crime.”
https://mises.org/library/lysander-spooner-libertarian-pietist
However, the Quakers were likewise all-in on emotional conversion and individual’s direct experience with divinity. That very thing kept them away from authoritarianism. So you’ll have to look elsewhere for causality.
Arnold dislikes “conflict entrepreneurs,” as if people could be judged for their activities without regard to the merits. When important values are in jeopardy, we need so-called conflict entrepreneurs to to mobilize their defense.
Yeah, but certain people dial it up to 11 on every issue always telling you you’re not angry enough. That’s what he is talking about. It’s not like Arnold doesn’t argue passionately for the issues he thinks are most important. That’s why he has a blog in the first place.
Surely there are 100 or more ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ on the left for every Michael Anton. But he gets to be the named example here.
Our host is just virtue signaling. Let him do what he needs to do given whatever baggage that Anton might have.
The article itself was very reasonable, but I’ve got no clue on Anton’s history.
One of the reasons that I love this blog is our host’s heterodox takes on the issues. Some days he challenges me and on other days he affirms me. This is exactly what I am here seeking.
Perhaps one additional benefit of work from home jobs will be greater ability of those who are sufficiently dissatisfied with the politics of their home state to move to another.
Anton strikes me as honest and sincere. I can’t find anything to fault despite feeling compelled to try, being a member of the choir to which he is preaching.
I‘ve long admired Unchecked and Unbalanced . Don’t remember what I paid but it was worth every penny. Probably bought it used. Sorry Arnold. Not to cheat you out of any royalties, but at the moment there is a used copy a available for about $10 at the site where I am doing most of my book buying these days: https://m.alibris.com/Unchecked-and-Unbalanced-How-the-Discrepancy-Between-Knowledge-and-Power-Caused-the-Financial-Crisis-and-Threatens-Democracy-Arnold-Kling/book/29655264?matches=8
There’s an example from very recent history to take into account: The zealots at Facebook.
Up until a week ago Facebook’s censors were imposing on everyone the requirement to pretend in public that it’s just one of those baffling coincidences that the world’s most extensive collection of horseshoe bat coronaviruses is, bizarrely enough, located in Wuhan.
If it was a coincidence, which it definitely was for a year and a half according to our authoritarian enforcers at Facebook, then I take a lot of pleasure in pointing out that this was a ludicrous, ridiculous, pretty much impossible to believe coincidence, Facebook be damned.
The bullies and the Puritans and the Inquisitors at Facebook obligated a couple billion Facebook users to keep shtum on the alternative possibility that the horseshoe bat coronavirus experts of Wuhan were in any way connected to the horseshoe bat coronavirus in Wuhan. Up until they didn’t.
And I’m going to treat that as a reason for hope.
They imposed this silence, and then they stopped. Critical thinking was suspended and a dark age descended and for a year-and-a-half everyone was supposed to ignore the obvious.
And maybe what happened is that the CCP went too far, and their refusal to co-operate with the WHO investigation, and their moronic suggestion that “frozen food” is what we should really be looking into, was too much. Because there is such a thing as too much.
There is a limit to how unhelpful and how unforthcoming the government of China can be before people start to push back and start speaking honestly.
And maybe in a future scenario it’ll come about that mob justice won’t be as powerful and as intimidating as it is right now. Maybe in the future due process will be something that college presidents and American presidents care about. Maybe people will speak up for the scientific method and for knowledge and for transparency and for treating the tactics of violent intimidation, arson, smashing windows, murder, this stuff won’t be acceptable forever. Maybe the burden of proof will shift back to the accusers instead of the accused. Maybe there will come a time when claims are discussed and debated and argued-for instead of just enforced.
Today’s “Progressive Puritans” have already been imposing their ideology onto others. They’ve marched through the institutions, and captured them: the universities, the media, K-12 districts, the corporations. They’ve bullied out those that disagree.
In theory, Kling agrees that progressives shouldn’t do this, and shouldn’t have the power to do this, but they did it anyway. Kling uses his harshest language against critics like Anton.
I agree with Kling on the principal of “virtual secession” and the right of “exit” over “voice”. At a practical level Kling doesn’t support any kind of conflict necessary to get those rights, and seems to prefer the status quo of the Progressive Puritans stripping away rights from their opponents and fully imposing their ideology.