America 3.0

The prominence which I have given to the preliminary history contained in this volume is due to a deep and growing conviction that the history of the Norman Conquest, and indeed all later English history also, is constantly misunderstood through a fatal habit of beginning the study of English history with the Norman Conquest itself. A confused and unhappy nomenclature hinders many people from realizing that Englishmen before 1066 were the same people as Englishmen after 1066. They thus fail to perceive that the Norman Conquest, instead of wiping out the race, the laws, or the language which existed before it, did but communicate to us a certain foreign infusion in all three branches, which was speedily absorbed and assimilated into the preexisting mass. We cannot understand the Norman Conquest of England without knowing something of the history both of Englishmen and of Normans before they met in arms on the hills of Sussex.

The History of the Norman Conquest of England: Its Causes and its Results, Volume 1, Edward Augustus Freeman (1867).

Freeman is a classic example of the strengths and weaknesses of the Victorian writers on these subjects. He is extremely learned and astute about the history, and about the continuity of institutions. However, his world view is marred by a blunt and vicious racism which is shocking even from someone who is expecting the worst from the Victorians. I have found the soldier Garnet Wolseley, for example, to be less racist than the scholar Freeman. In other words, then as now, it is often the case that the practical man of affairs was a wiser and better person as far as his dealings with ordinary people of all types than the theorist and the intellectual. Freeman is great, and is a treasure trove of knowledge, but embedded in his thought is the belief that it is “race” or “blood” rather than culture which makes the English and their daughter communities what they are. In this he is mistaken, and he should probably have realized it at the time. Use with care.

There’s a long history of literary reflection on what makes America and Americans distinctive in the world, from Crevecoeur’s What Is an American (1781) and Franklin’s Information to Those Who Would Remove to America (1782), through Tocqueville of course, and up to the present day (indeed, antecedents of this tradition can be found in, say, Voltaire’s Letters on the English in 1733). While your humble webmaster was updating the website of The Monadnock Press last night, he found yet another of these literary reflections, George Santayana’s English Liberty in America. Here are the first few paragraphs…

The straits of Dover, which one may sometimes see across, have sufficed so to isolate England that it has never moved quite in step with the rest of Europe in politics, morals, or art. No wonder that the Atlantic Ocean, although it has favoured a mixed emigration and cheap intercourse, should have cut off America so effectually that all the people there, even those of Latin origin, have become curiously different from any kind of European. In vain are they reputed to have the same religions or to speak the same languages as their cousins in the old world; everything has changed its accent, spirit, and value. Flora and fauna have been intoxicated by that untouched soil and fresh tonic air, and by those vast spaces; in spite of their hereditary differences of species they have all acquired the same crude savour and defiant aspect. In comparison with their European prototypes they seem tough, meagre, bold, and ugly. In the United States, apart from the fact that most of the early colonists belonged to an exceptional type of Englishman, the scale and speed of life have made everything strangely un-English. There is cheeriness instead of doggedness, confidence instead of circumspection; there is a desire to quizz and to dazzle rather than a fear of being mistaken or of being shocked; there is a pervasive cordiality, exaggeration, and farcical humour; and in the presence of the Englishman, when by chance he turns up or is thought of, there is an invincible impatience and irritation that his point of view should be so fixed, his mind so literal, and the freight he carries so excessive (when you are sailing in ballast yourself), and that he should seem to take so little notice of changes in the wind to which you are nervously sensitive.

Nevertheless there is one gift or habit, native to England, that has not only been preserved in America unchanged, but has found there a more favourable atmosphere in which to manifest its true nature — I mean the spirit of free co-operation. The root of it is free individuality, which is deeply seated in the English inner man; there is an indomitable instinct or mind in him which he perpetually consults and reveres, slow and embarrassed as his expression of it may be. But this free individuality in the Englishman is crossed and biased by a large residue of social servitude. The church and the aristocracy, entanglement in custom and privilege, mistrust and bitterness about particular grievances, warp the inner man and enlist him against his interests in alien causes; the straits of Dover were too narrow, the shadow of a hostile continent was too oppressive, the English sod was soaked with too many dews and cut by too many hedges, for each individual, being quite master of himself, to confront every other individual without fear or prejudice, and to unite with him in the free pursuit of whatever aims they might find that they had in common. Yet this slow co-operation of free men, this liberty in democracy — the only sort that America possesses or believes in — is wholly English in its personal basis, its reserve, its tenacity, its empiricism, its public spirit, and its assurance of its own rightness; and it deserves to be called English always, to whatever countries it may spread.

The omnipresence in America of this spirit of co-operation, responsibility, and growth is very remarkable. Far from being neutralised by American dash and bravura, or lost in the opposite instincts of so many alien races, it seems to be adopted at once in the most mixed circles and in the most novel predicaments. In America social servitude is reduced to a minimum; in fact we may almost say that it is reduced to subjecting children to their mothers and to a common public education, agencies that are absolutely indispensable to produce the individual and enable him to exercise his personal initiative effectually; for after all, whatever metaphysical egotism may say, one cannot vote to be created. But once created, weaned, and taught to read and write, the young American can easily shoulder his knapsack and choose his own way in the world. He is as yet very little trammelled by want of opportunity, and he has no roots to speak of in place, class, or religion. Where individuality is so free, co-operation, when it is justified, can be all the more quick and hearty. Everywhere co-operation is taken for granted, as something that no one would be so mean or so short-sighted as to refuse. Together with the will to work and to prosper, it is of the essence of Americanism, and is accepted as such by all the unkempt polyglot peoples that turn to the new world with the pathetic but manly purpose of beginning life on a new principle. Every political body, every public meeting, every club, or college, or athletic team, is full of it. Out it comes whenever there is an accident in the street or a division in a church, or a great unexpected emergency like the late war. The general instinct is to run and help, to assume direction, to pull through somehow by mutual adaptation, and by seizing on the readiest practical measures and working compromises. Each man joins in and gives a helping hand, without a preconceived plan or a prior motive. Even the leader, when he is a natural leader and not a professional, has nothing up his sleeve to force on the rest, in their obvious good-will and mental blankness. All meet in a genuine spirit of consultation, eager to persuade but ready to be persuaded, with a cheery confidence in their average ability, when a point comes up and is clearly put before them, to decide it for the time being, and to move on. It is implicitly agreed, in every case, that disputed questions shall be put to a vote, and that the minority will loyally acquiesce in the decision of the majority and build henceforth upon it, without a thought of ever retracting it.

Such a way of proceeding seems in America a matter of course, because it is bred in the bone, or imposed by that permeating social contagion which is so irresistible in a natural democracy. But if we consider human nature at large and the practice of most nations, we shall see that it is a very rare, wonderful, and unstable convention. It implies a rather unimaginative optimistic assumption that at bottom all men’s interests are similar and compatible, and a rather heroic public spirit — such that no special interest, in so far as it has to be overruled, shall rebel and try to maintain itself absolutely. In America hitherto these conditions happen to have been actually fulfilled in an unusual measure. Interests have been very similar — to exploit business opportunities and organise public services useful to all; and these similar interests have been also compatible and harmonious. A neighbour, even a competitor, where the field is so large and so little pre-empted, has more often proved a resource than a danger. The rich have helped the public more than they have fleeced it, and they have been emulated more than hated or served by the enterprising poor. To abolish millionaires would have been to dash one’s own hopes. The most opposite systems of religion and education could look smilingly upon one another’s prosperity, because the country could afford these superficial luxuries, having a constitutional religion and education of its own, which everybody drank in unconsciously and which assured the moral cohesion of the people. Impulses of reason and kindness, which are potential in all men, under such circumstances can become effective; people can help one another with no great sacrifice to themselves, and minorities can dismiss their special plans without sorrow, and cheerfully follow the crowd down another road. It was because life in America was naturally more co-operative and more plastic than in England that the spirit of English liberty, which demands co-operation and plasticity, could appear there more boldly and universally than it ever did at home.

Americans are often a mystery even to themselves, and a large part of the mission of America 3.0 is a greater self-understanding. While that work will be based on the latest historical research, older essays of the kind mentioned here can provide useful insights, too. If you know of similar writings, please do let us know.

–Peter Saint-Andre, webmaster

One huge problem we have in America is that the millions of people who are struggling to start or grow businesses, or go solo through self-employment, have no voice. The people who talk and write — the chattering classes — do that for a living. The people who live off the public teat are often talkers and writers, and thus dominate the conversation. The major business guys are in bed with the government or have a lot to lose, so they lie low. The big middle band of actual and potential self-starters and wealth-creators is inarticulate and it needs someone to speak for it, and to learn to speak for itself.

The regulatory state is structured to punish and thwart solo workers, self employment, small businesses, and start ups. The regulatory state has several missions. Expanding its power is one. Moving resources to its clients is another. Insulating its clients from possible threats — incumbent protection — is another.  The very thing which will allow us to dig out of this recession is what our government is structured to prevent.

This has to change.

–Lexington Green

Cross-posted at ChicagoBoyz.

I just spent some money on more books about the Saxons, who lived in England and ruled it prior to the Norman conquest of 1066.  I am working on a part of the book where I talk about the Saxons.  I had to ask myself this question before I clicked on the purchase button: Why should we care about the Saxons?

We care about all this old stuff simply to show how deeply rooted our culture is, and the institutions that have grown up on that basis. This means that very basic changes in how we do things, what we want, what our aspirations and life-plans and life-goals are going to be, are simply not going to happen. As a result, we have certain strong points as a culture and we should be playing to those strong points. So it is not a matter of establishing whether people actually thought that much about the Magna Carta in the centuries before Lord Coke, or whether we have unimpeachable evidence that the Saxons lived in single family homes (though in both cases I believe the answer is yes). The point is the continuity over the centuries, with changes being bounded by these basic Anglospheric impulses. The point is not antiquarianism, as much as your authors are in fact antiquarians, but to show the incredible depth of this continuity.

The further point is that America 2.0 was a partial detour away from some of these things, with a constant pushback by ordinary people who wanted autonomy, their own homes, their own businesses, middle class respectability, mobility, etc.

And the yet further point is that America 3.0 is shaping up to even further get us back onto the track we have been on for all these centuries, while taking best advantage
of all the new technology which is coming along. Your authors want to encourage and facilitate that because it is the most natural fit with the deepest roots of American culture, and thus the most realistic path to the continued success of the American experiment.

– Lexington Green

The representative systems which sprang up as a part of the constitutional machinery of the several provincial states founded by English settlers upon American soil were in no proper sense the result of imitation. Like the states themselves of which they were a part, they were the predestined product of a natural process of reproduction. The constitutional history of these provincial states does not begin with the landing of the English in America in the seventeenth century, but with the landing of the English in Britain in the fifth.  The English emigrants who founded upon the eastern coast of what is now the United States a group of colonial commonwealths brought with them in their blood and bone, and in a matured form, that peculiar system of political organization which had been slowly developing in the mother country for centuries. They brought with them ready made the language, the law, the institutions of the old land to be modified and adapted to the changed conditions of the new. The settlements made by the English colonists in America in the seventeenth century were in all material particulars substantial reproductions of the English settlements made in Britain in the fifth. In both instances the settlers crossed the sea in ships in small companies, and in both lands they grouped themselves together in distinct and practically independent self-governing communities.

Hannis Taylor, The Origin and Growth of the English Constitution, an Historical Treatise, In Which Is Drawn Out, By The Light Of The Most Recent Researches, The Gradual Development Of The English Constitutional System, And The Growth Out Of That System Of The Federal Republic Of The United States, in Two Volumes (1899)

Your authors base many of their insights on a wide reading of contemporary and historical materials. We thought that readers might be interested in the Inventory of Sources (PDF) that we use to keep track of these many books, articles, and websites. Enjoy!

James C. Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Challenge (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), and Michael J. Lotus (who blogs at Chicagoboyz.net as “Lexington Green”), are proud to announce the signing of a contract with Encounter Books of New York to publish their forthcoming book America 3.0.

America 3.0 gives readers the real historical foundations of our liberty, free enterprise, and family life.  Based on a new understanding of our past, and on little known modern scholarship, America 3.0 offers long-term strategies to restore and strengthen American liberty, prosperity and security in the years ahead.

America 3.0 shows that our country was founded as a decentralized federation of communities, dominated by landowner-farmers, and based on a unique type of Anglo-American nuclear family.  This was America 1.0, as the Founders established it.  The Industrial Revolution brought progress, opportunity and undreamed-of mobility.  But, it also pushed the majority of American families into a new, urban, industrial life along with millions of unassimilated immigrants. After the Civil War, new problems of public health, crime, public order, and labor unrest, on top of the issues of Reconstruction, taxed the old Constitution.  Americans looked for new solutions to new problems, giving rise to Progressivism, the ancestor of modern liberalism.

America 3.0 shows that liberal-progressive solutions to the challenges of America 2.0 relieved some problems, and kicked others down the road.  But they also led to an overly powerful state and to an overly intrusive bureaucracy.  This was the beginning of America 2.0, the America we grew up with, which dominated the Twentieth Century.

America 3.0 argues that the liberal-progressive or “Blue State” social model has reached its natural limits.  Even as it continues to try to expand, it is now dying out before our eyes.   We are  now living in the closing years of the 20th Century “legacy state.”  Even so, it has taken the shock of the current Great Recession to make people see the need for change.  As a result, more and more Americans are calling for a return to our founding principles.  Freedom and individualism are on the rise after a century-long detour.

America 3.0 shows that our current problems can be and must be transcended with a transition to a new America 3.0, based on modern technology, decentralized communities, and self-reliant families, and a reassertion of fiscal responsibility, Constitutionally limited government and free market economics.   Ironically the future America 3.0 will in many ways be closer to the original vision of the Founders than the fading America 2.0.

America 3.0 gives readers an accurate, and hopeful, assessment of our current crisis.  It also spotlights the powerful forces arrayed in opposition to the needed reform.  These groups include ideological leftists in media and the academy, politically connected businesses, and the public employees unions.  However, as powerful as these groups are, they have become vulnerable as the external conditions change.  A correct understanding of our history and culture, which America 3.0 provides, shows their opposition will be futile.  The new, pro-freedom, mass political movement, which is aligned with the true needs and desires of Americans, is going to succeed.

America 3.0 provides readers a program of specific “maximalist” proposals to reform our government and liberate our economy.  America 3.0 shows readers that these reforms are consistent with our fundamental culture, and with our Constitution, and will make Americans freer and more prosperous in the years ahead.

America 3.0 provides a “software upgrade” for the Tea Party and for all activists on the Conservative and Libertarian Right.  It provides readers with historical evidence and intellectual coherence, to channel the energy and enthusiasm of the rising mass political movement to renew America.

America 3.0 shows that our capacity for regeneration is greater than most people realize.  Predictions of our doom are deeply mistaken.  We are now living just before the dawn of America’s greatest days.  Within a generation, positive changes beyond what we can currently imagine will have taken place.  That is the America 3.0 we are going to build together.