Minority Report: Update on the Christian Left

In the Sunday NYTimes Book Review, David R. Swartz's new book, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism is reviewed by Molly Worthen (who will be a member of a panel at the S-USIH conference in a month).  Overall, Worthen finds much to praise about Swartz's book, not least that it is one of the few books to ask what happened to the religious left following the Vietnam War.  Readers of this blog know I am interested in this question as well and having ordered Swartz's book look forward to seeing how he addresses it.

Of particular interest to the ongoing discussion over Andrew's forthcoming book on the culture wars is where the evangelical left found itself.  According to Worthen, Swartz provides valuable discussions of the internal disputes that fractured the evangelical left (politics of identity as well as theology) and the political platform of the Democratic Party which made support of abortion rights a difficult position for Christians on the left to accept.  Certainly Christian Left leaders such as Jim Wallis and a few American Catholic bishops and priests devised a strategy that used the "consistent ethic of life" as a rallying call.  But then, as Andrew will probably tell us, such theological consistency was no match for culture war issues that pitted the dire warnings from the left against apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of the American family, American freedom, and American education that came from the right.

Worthen takes issue with Swartz's claim that actions by the Evangelical Left both pushed Christians into the conservative movement AND provided a strategy that conservatives used to solidify support for their culture war positions.  As many folks have written and debated here, such strategies came from a plethora of sources: the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, William F. Buckley's minions, and the cold war.  Worthen insists that (as Swartz also intimates) the "evangelical left was too divided...to offer a competing grand narrative that would resonate with ordinary evangelicals and transform scattered sympathetic student gatherings into a national movement."  In other words, "the evangelical left was a casualty of the radical polarization of American politics after 1970s."

What I find somewhat confounding as an intellectual problem is what happened to religion in the radical polarization of American politics.  In a way, both left and right accepted the message in the sign above--they both believed that Vietnam, Watergate, and the drift of the cold war in the late 1970s presaged a day of reckoning for Americans.  The two sides differed (so I argue in God and War) over their theological interpretation of the United States.  Wallis and others on the Christian Left appeared to advocate a post-American era (the title of the first magazine he published); this was not merely a counter exceptionalist narrative but an scathing critique of the foundations of the nation itself.  The Christian Right also believed the nation was in peril, but were more than willing to defend it and find a great deal of righteousness is the foundations of America itself.  On this point, Richard John Neuhaus's reflections on asking fellow clergy to sign the Hartford Appeal are instructive--the upshot was that he began to see a growing schism among clergy between those who believed the nation could be saved and those who seemed to believe it was hopeless and lost.  One can see this conflict in sharp relief in the days just before the First Gulf War when Wallis went to the Middle East to stop the war, and Neuhaus wrote a long editorial in the Wall Street Journal defending it.  The bottom line was this: the right would defend going to war for the nation; the left believed killing in the name of the nation perpetuated a tragedy made evident in Vietnam.  For me, this is where the culture wars literally bled into real war.

Oscar Handlin (1915-2011) and the Emergent Culture Wars

This weekend, I heard that Oscar Handlin had passed away last week at the age of 95.  Handlin seems to be nearly universally celebrated online. In addition to admiring obituaries in the New York Times and the Boston Globe, bloggers from left to right are singing Handlin's praises.

And rightly so.  Handlin virtually invented the field of immigration history in the 1950s.  His history of American immigration, The Uprooted, won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize in history and helped solidify the mid-century notion that the U.S. was essentially a nation of immigrants.

Especially in the first half of his career, Handlin also distinguished himself as a public intellectual, writing numerous book reviews in general circulation publications, signing an ACLU-organized petition of scholars demanding that the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) cease operations, and, perhaps most significantly, playing an important role in the great immigration reforms of the mid-1960s.*

But my first impression of Oscar Handlin was very different. I first heard of Handlin when I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in 1982.  And though he was known as a great historian (though I didn't really appreciate his achievement at the time), he had more recently made himself famous as a culture warrior (though we wouldn't have used that expression at the time).

In many ways, Handlin's political journey was typical of many Cold War liberals of his generation.  Although Handlin was a civil libertarian and a supporter of opening the gates to new immigrants, he was also a staunch supporter of the Vietnam War.  In December, 1967, as public opinion began to turn against the War, Handlin was one of fourteen scholars who co-wrote a report for the Freedom House Public Affairs Institute arguing that disaster would strike if the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam.** 

And it was Handlin's continuing sense that the Vietnam War should have been won, and that the anti-war movement constituted a threat not only to freedom around the world but to the proper functioning of representative government at home, that led to his move to the right over the next two decades. 

Handlin's political reputation at the time I arrived at college was based in part on his recent publication of The Distortion of America (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1981), a book which repeated Handlin's arguments for the Vietnam War, accused recent American intellectuals of anti-Americanism and "neutralism," and enthusiastically repeated the charges that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn had leveled against this country in his 1978 Harvard Commencement speech.   In many ways the book echoed the themes sounded by Handlin's near-contemporaries among the first generation of neoconservatives.

And yet Handlin wasn't really a neoconservative. While neoconservatives in the late 1970s and early 1980s spent as much time on domestic affairs--the unintended consequences of the welfare state, opposition to school busing, and the like--as they did on foreign relations, The Distortion of America is focused on foreign policy.  And the book was strangely stuck in the past.  Cobbled together from shorter pieces that Handlin had published earlier, Distortion's source material was overwhelmingly from the 1960s.  And though Handlin was hardly alone in remaining focused on Vietnam in the early 1980s (the decade brought us Rambo, after all), the case for the disaster of American defeat in Vietnam was, if anything, less coherent in 1981 than it had been in 1967.

Although widely reviewed, Distortion was not widely admired.  M.E. Bradford in The National Review gave it something resembling a positive review, agreeing with Handlin on his critique of the recent trahisons des clercs, but suggesting that Handlin, in retaining his Cold War liberal views, failed to grasp that liberalism itself had created the monster he wrote against:  "The way not to have Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and John Anderson [three politicians that Handlin singles out for criticism] is not to have Franklin Delano Roosevelt," wrote Bradford.***

Other reviewers were less kind. James Neuchterlein in the New York Times, noted that "this is one of those books whose cause is better than its argument."  "Even for those inclined to accept the author's assumptions of national decline," wrote Norman Graebner in the Journal of American History, "there are other ways of interpreting the trends in recent years."  "Polemical in tone, long on assertion, and short on new argument or convincing analysis," concluded Choice.****

Oscar Handlin would continue to be at least a fellow-traveler of academic conservatism over the course of the 1980s. In 1988, Handlin, alongside other former Sixties liberals like John Silber, would become a founding member of the conservative National Association of Scholars, one of the signature campus organizations of the culture wars.*****

And yet, unlike his student and Harvard colleague Stephan Thernstrom, Handlin never became a leading member of the new academic right.  Indeed, I'm not even sure if he ever considered himself a conservative.

Perhaps Handlin was a few years too old to really make the neoconservative journey and say "I used to consider myself a liberal, but thanks to the anti-war movement, I'm outraged by AFDC!"******

And perhaps The Distortion of America just hit the shelves a few years too early to take advantage of the culture war publishing boom of the mid-to-late 1980s.*******

At the end of the day, it is fitting that the remembrances of Handlin have largely focused on the first half of his career while largely passing over its second half.  Just as Charles Beard is better remembered as a founder of progressive historiography than as a Pearl Harbor truther, Handlin's proper place in the history of our discipline--and our country--is as an interpreter of the immigrant experience and its meaning for this nation.

Nevertheless, his journey into the nascent culture wars is a fascinating instance of what the experience of the Sixties did to many liberals of his generation.

_______________________
* On the anti-HUAC petition, see "250 Teachers Hit House Comittee," New York Times, March 20, 1961.

** "14 Scholars Warn A Vietnam Means Bigger War," New York Times, December 20, 1967.  Freedom House was an interventionist organization originally founded by Dorothy Thompson and others in 1941 as a counterweight to Hitler's propaganda operations. More on Freedom House can be found here.

*** M.E. Bradford, "The Nightmare of Oscar Handlin," The National Review, May 14, 1982.

**** All of these quotes can be found in Book Review Digest. Hey...it's a blog post!

***** Joseph Berger, "Scholars Attack Campus Radicals," New York Times, November 15, 1988. For an interesting account of Silber's early career as a leading liberal on the UT Austin campus, see Doug Rossinow's The Politics of Authenticity.


****** With apologies to Michael Bérubé.

******* The Distortion of America was reissued in a revised edition in 1996, which was probably a bit too late to take full advantage of the culture war boom...though it would have arrived just as the neoconservatives were beginning to focus more thoroughly on foreign policy. Unfortunately, my library doesn't have a copy of this version.  It seems to have been less extensively reviewed.

For you Culture Wars folks

"The Conscience of Television," a Ted Talk by TV executive Lauren Zalzanick

Culture Wars in Other Countries (Metaphorical and Real)

A couple weeks ago, this image was making its way around the left of the blogosphere (a larger version can be seen here). Hendrik Hertzberg got the ball rolling when he posted it on his New Yorker blog. Identifying it as a political cartoon by Adalbert Volck that "went viral during the 1862 midterm campaign," Hertzberg compared its attacks on Lincoln to current rightwing attacks on Obama. Matt Yglesias followed up the next day on ThinkProgress with a bit more analysis, noting that the Republicans received "a bit of a shellacking" in those midterm elections and arguing that

the evident similarities between aspects of political rhetoric today and 150 years ago highlights the extent to which the values-and-temperament debate between conservative nationalism and progressive cosmopolitanism is ultimately much more fundamental than the passing controversies over tax rates economic regulation. The basic anxieties provoked by threats to existing status hierarchies haven’t changed, nor have the rhetorical tools of countermobilization.

The following day, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon echoed Yglesias:

This is the sort of thing that makes claims that Tea Partiers are either some new phenomenon or that they have a specific, policy-based gripe with Obama even more comical. It’s all culture war, all the time.

In fact, Hertzberg, Yglesias, and Marcotte have subtly misidentified this interesting image. It comes not from the election year of 1862, but rather from 1863. Adalbert Volck was a Bavarian-born, Baltimore dentist who, like a lot of his fellow white Marylanders, sympathized with the Confederacy. In 1863, using the pseudonym "V. Blada," he published a portfolio of thirty prints, collectively entitled Confederate War Etchings, of which the image in question, called "Worship of the North," was the first. Twenty-nine of the thirty prints (the last has apparently been lost) are available for viewing online as part of the Library of Congress's American Memory project.*

It's important that this cartoon comes from 1863 and not 1862 because its context was not a political campaign at all, but rather the Civil War itself (though of course, the War was the central political issue in the 1862 and 1864 campaigns). Interestingly, neither Hertzberg, nor Yglesias, nor Marcotte mentions the Civil War. Though American politics may feature "all culture war, all the time," it's certainly not (literally) all civil war, all the time. It is important that the context for this image was something much more wrenching and violent than an election campaign...though noting that arguably makes any similarities we might identify between it and current political rhetoric even more striking. When we see similarities between Volck's attacks on Lincoln and contemporary conservative attacks on Obama, perhaps we shouldn't see something as abstract as Yglesias's "basic anxieties provoked by threats to existing status hierarchies" or even Marcotte's American conservatives as eternal culture warriors, but rather the enduring legacy of the Civil War in American political culture and rhetoric.

But of course, we're not the only country with culture wars. Volck's homeland of Germany, after all, gave us the term "culture war" (Kulturkampf). And Germany is currently having a little culture war of its own.

This past summer, Thilo Sarrazin, an SPD politician and Bundesbank official published a book entitled Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany Does Itself In: How we are putting our country at risk).  Sarrazin's book argues that his country's growing Muslim population constitutes a social and cultural threat, especially in light of the very low birthrate among ethnic Germans.  Sarrazin's argument that Germany's Muslims are both unassimilable and genetically less intelligent than ethnic Germans caused a scandal in Germany.

In many ways, Sarrazin resembles the right-wing populists who can be found throughout Europe these days, from Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to Barbara Rosenkranz in Austria. But while the book's tendentious arguments may be old hat in Europe, they obviously strike a particular nerve in Germany, whose post-war national identity was based on a self-conscious rejection of such arguments.  Unsurprisingly the German political and intellectual establishment has nearly universally condemned the book.  Sarrazin was pressured to resign his Bundesbank post.  And though many Germans initially took comfort in the absence of any political party that might empower Sarrazin's views in Germany, the sheer popularity of the book quickly made clear that, even without such a party, many Germans embraced Sarrazin's views. Although endorsing the book remained taboo, politicians soon began "demanding that the political elite cease ignoring the fact that many in Germany support Sarrazin," according to Der Spiegel.


There are obviously many interesting aspects of the Sarrazin affair, what it reveals about, and how it may change, post-war German politics.  But I'm blogging about it because of an interesting comment by David Goodhart in his recent review of the book for the British journal Prospect (h/t Arts & Letters Daily):

Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany. And nowhere has public policy been more influenced by a 1960s generation, post-national, society-is-to-blame kind of liberalism. Yet this “official” liberalism has never reflected the way people live and think, even in the German chattering classes. When I lived in the country, 20 years ago, it felt far more socially conservative than the similar circles I had come from in London.

Goodhart's observation is, I think, entirely fair. And the recent experience of the German intellectual and cultural elite with the public reception of Sarrazin's book is further evidence of Goodhart's point.**

This vast divide between elite and popular opinion raises an interesting issue: why hasn't Germany experienced a more pronounced populist backlash against the 60s generation and their intellectual heirs? Especially given the taboos surrounding a political discourse that targets ethnic Others in Germany, the German cultural and intellectual elite, which is quite clearly out-of-step with large bits of the German populace would seem an obvious object of political ire.***  And, as we know, in the United States, the equivalent of those official Sixties liberals, despite never achieving the kind of hegemonic position that they have in Germany, have been a constant political target for almost half a century.

All of this suggests to me that there's a lot of work to be done in comparative culture wars.

__________________________________________________
* More information about Adalbert Volck and his Confederate War Etchings can be found on the websites of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library and the New-York Historical Society, both of which house Volck materials. A question for any 19th-century historians out there: was Volck a Forty-Eighter? He apparently arrived in this country that year. If so, his support of the Confederacy seems unusual to me. We all know about Forty-Eighters like Carl Shurz who fought on the Union side. Were there many Confederate Forty-Eighters?

** Though Goodhart is, I think, ultimately far too kind to Sarrazin (whom he depicts as hardheaded and sensible...and, as a member of the center-left, a very desirable alternative to the emergence of an actual German version of Geert Wilders).

*** Certainly there has been plenty of German criticism of German "official liberalism."  See, for example, Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall)--most famous on the interwebs for spawning the Hitler Meme.  Hirschbiegel saw his film as an attempt to "get beyond guilt," and intended it as a criticism of Sixties generation's views of the past. For their part, 68ers like Wim Wenders lambasted the film for humanizing Hitler.  This was, in many ways, a kind of aftershock of the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, one of whose key players, Joachim Fest, provided much of the material for Downfall.  But the Historikerstreit, as well as Downfall and the reactions to it, were cultural/intellectual debates largely taking place within the German intelligentsia.  Neither of them received any formal expression in electoral politics, as far as I know.  (On the politics of Downfall, see David Bathrick, "Whose Hi/story Is It? The U.S. Reception of Downfall," New German Critique 102, Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall 2007")

Culture Wars in Other Countries (Metaphorical and Real)

A couple weeks ago, this image was making its way around the left of the blogosphere (a larger version can be seen here). Hendrik Hertzberg got the ball rolling when he posted it on his New Yorker blog. Identifying it as a political cartoon by Adalbert Volck that "went viral during the 1862 midterm campaign," Hertzberg compared its attacks on Lincoln to current rightwing attacks on Obama. Matt Yglesias followed up the next day on ThinkProgress with a bit more analysis, noting that the Republicans received "a bit of a shellacking" in those midterm elections and arguing that

the evident similarities between aspects of political rhetoric today and 150 years ago highlights the extent to which the values-and-temperament debate between conservative nationalism and progressive cosmopolitanism is ultimately much more fundamental than the passing controversies over tax rates economic regulation. The basic anxieties provoked by threats to existing status hierarchies haven’t changed, nor have the rhetorical tools of countermobilization.

The following day, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon echoed Yglesias:

This is the sort of thing that makes claims that Tea Partiers are either some new phenomenon or that they have a specific, policy-based gripe with Obama even more comical. It’s all culture war, all the time.

In fact, Hertzberg, Yglesias, and Marcotte have subtly misidentified this interesting image. It comes not from the election year of 1862, but rather from 1863. Adalbert Volck was a Bavarian-born, Baltimore dentist who, like a lot of his fellow white Marylanders, sympathized with the Confederacy. In 1863, using the pseudonym "V. Blada," he published a portfolio of thirty prints, collectively entitled Confederate War Etchings, of which the image in question, called "Worship of the North," was the first. Twenty-nine of the thirty prints (the last has apparently been lost) are available for viewing online as part of the Library of Congress's American Memory project.*

It's important that this cartoon comes from 1863 and not 1862 because its context was not a political campaign at all, but rather the Civil War itself (though of course, the War was the central political issue in the 1862 and 1864 campaigns). Interestingly, neither Hertzberg, nor Yglesias, nor Marcotte mentions the Civil War. Though American politics may feature "all culture war, all the time," it's certainly not (literally) all civil war, all the time. It is important that the context for this image was something much more wrenching and violent than an election campaign...though noting that arguably makes any similarities we might identify between it and current political rhetoric even more striking. When we see similarities between Volck's attacks on Lincoln and contemporary conservative attacks on Obama, perhaps we shouldn't see something as abstract as Yglesias's "basic anxieties provoked by threats to existing status hierarchies" or even Marcotte's American conservatives as eternal culture warriors, but rather the enduring legacy of the Civil War in American political culture and rhetoric.

But of course, we're not the only country with culture wars. Volck's homeland of Germany, after all, gave us the term "culture war" (Kulturkampf). And Germany is currently having a little culture war of its own.

This past summer, Thilo Sarrazin, an SPD politician and Bundesbank official published a book entitled Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab: Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen (Germany Does Itself In: How we are putting our country at risk).  Sarrazin's book argues that his country's growing Muslim population constitutes a social and cultural threat, especially in light of the very low birthrate among ethnic Germans.  Sarrazin's argument that Germany's Muslims are both unassimilable and genetically less intelligent than ethnic Germans caused a scandal in Germany.

In many ways, Sarrazin resembles the right-wing populists who can be found throughout Europe these days, from Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to Barbara Rosenkranz in Austria. But while the book's tendentious arguments may be old hat in Europe, they obviously strike a particular nerve in Germany, whose post-war national identity was based on a self-conscious rejection of such arguments.  Unsurprisingly the German political and intellectual establishment has nearly universally condemned the book.  Sarrazin was pressured to resign his Bundesbank post.  And though many Germans initially took comfort in the absence of any political party that might empower Sarrazin's views in Germany, the sheer popularity of the book quickly made clear that, even without such a party, many Germans embraced Sarrazin's views. Although endorsing the book remained taboo, politicians soon began "demanding that the political elite cease ignoring the fact that many in Germany support Sarrazin," according to Der Spiegel.


There are obviously many interesting aspects of the Sarrazin affair, what it reveals about, and how it may change, post-war German politics.  But I'm blogging about it because of an interesting comment by David Goodhart in his recent review of the book for the British journal Prospect (h/t Arts & Letters Daily):

Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany. And nowhere has public policy been more influenced by a 1960s generation, post-national, society-is-to-blame kind of liberalism. Yet this “official” liberalism has never reflected the way people live and think, even in the German chattering classes. When I lived in the country, 20 years ago, it felt far more socially conservative than the similar circles I had come from in London.

Goodhart's observation is, I think, entirely fair. And the recent experience of the German intellectual and cultural elite with the public reception of Sarrazin's book is further evidence of Goodhart's point.**

This vast divide between elite and popular opinion raises an interesting issue: why hasn't Germany experienced a more pronounced populist backlash against the 60s generation and their intellectual heirs? Especially given the taboos surrounding a political discourse that targets ethnic Others in Germany, the German cultural and intellectual elite, which is quite clearly out-of-step with large bits of the German populace would seem an obvious object of political ire.***  And, as we know, in the United States, the equivalent of those official Sixties liberals, despite never achieving the kind of hegemonic position that they have in Germany, have been a constant political target for almost half a century.

All of this suggests to me that there's a lot of work to be done in comparative culture wars.

__________________________________________________
* More information about Adalbert Volck and his Confederate War Etchings can be found on the websites of Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library and the New-York Historical Society, both of which house Volck materials. A question for any 19th-century historians out there: was Volck a Forty-Eighter? He apparently arrived in this country that year. If so, his support of the Confederacy seems unusual to me. We all know about Forty-Eighters like Carl Shurz who fought on the Union side. Were there many Confederate Forty-Eighters?

** Though Goodhart is, I think, ultimately far too kind to Sarrazin (whom he depicts as hardheaded and sensible...and, as a member of the center-left, a very desirable alternative to the emergence of an actual German version of Geert Wilders).

*** Certainly there has been plenty of German criticism of German "official liberalism."  See, for example, Oliver Hirschbiegel's 2004 film Der Untergang (Downfall)--most famous on the interwebs for spawning the Hitler Meme.  Hirschbiegel saw his film as an attempt to "get beyond guilt," and intended it as a criticism of Sixties generation's views of the past. For their part, 68ers like Wim Wenders lambasted the film for humanizing Hitler.  This was, in many ways, a kind of aftershock of the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, one of whose key players, Joachim Fest, provided much of the material for Downfall.  But the Historikerstreit, as well as Downfall and the reactions to it, were cultural/intellectual debates largely taking place within the German intelligentsia.  Neither of them received any formal expression in electoral politics, as far as I know.  (On the politics of Downfall, see David Bathrick, "Whose Hi/story Is It? The U.S. Reception of Downfall," New German Critique 102, Vol. 34, No. 3, Fall 2007")