Relax Middle Western Man, We Got This

Talcott Parsons on the New Right

I have always imagined there exists a class of people who are in possession of a wholistic picture of the world and its affairs, with immense self-control and measured wisdom, and who take responsibility for our country in a way that I never could, in the way a parent might take responsibility for a child. This is my version of the delusion that somewhere in the antechambers of power, adults are in the room. I often wonder how these adults might receive this corner of the internet, assuming it thinks of us at all.

While reading a collection on the radical right compiled by Daniel Bell, I came across a 1955 article entitled “Social Strains in America” by Talcott Parsons evincing just such a perspective. I don’t seek out Talcott Parsons articles, by the way. They find me, perhaps for good reason, while I’m minding my own business and sifting through the philosophical and historical ephemera that pique my own myopic interests.

We first met Parsons on this substack through his curious article on Negro citizenship, which I analyzed here. We learned from that post that although Parsons was as old-stock Puritan as one can get, he didn’t join the coastal power centers of the WASP aristocracy until after his professional career in academia had begun. He was instead born in flyover country and brought up in the Social Gospel movement, the checkered history of which I touched upon in this article on Bellah.

In analyzing McCarthyism, Parsons applies the clinical and sober attitude of a moderate and paternalistic elite to the re-emergence of the populist “right” (Parsons refrains from classifying McCarthyism as either liberal or conservative) to identify the trend’s sociological roots and propose a solution for the country.

Parsons attempts to show how a mixture of psychological, economic, and related social factors produce specific responses to internal-national and external-international strains, which he classifies as necessary growing pains for the country. It is Parsons’s classification of these strains as necessary or essential that marks him as a member of the policy-making elite.

The external strain is America’s emergence as a global power. While he makes a few passing negative remarks on the history of American isolationism, he frames the American foreign policy situation as one of forced obligation. Although we tried to disarm after WW2, we were forced to re-arm and take on a nebulous obligation of managing what amounts to a global empire. Military technology has made geographic isolation untenable, and the power vacuum left by WW2 has morally obligated America to take a leading role in global government.

The internal strains are multifarious but revolve around the – again, necessary -- expansion of government control over the private sphere. Parsons signals his commitment to New Deal internationalism when he implies that the problems of monopoly capitalism, speculative banking, and class stratification necessitated extensive government intervention in the economy to forestall collapse.

Together, these strains come into conflict with “the inertia of those elements of our social structure which are most resistant to necessary change.” The elements are the traditional dominance of free enterprise over government, which manifested in the form of businessmen leading communities, America’s tradition of occupational independence and individualism (as opposed to kin-based identity), and the social conservatism of recent immigrant communities and independent farmers.

These elements come into conflict with the “higher strata of society” where the “primary burden of responsibility must fall.” Parsons notes that these strains have eroded the power of business leadership and stratified it among professional politicians, urban political machines, labor leaders, intellectuals, lawyers, and people with an “aristocratic tinge” from “Eastern cities,” like FDR. Parsons laments that this leadership situation has not “crystalized” to a point where political leadership can be centralized.

The business leadership that is disgruntled by the strain described above is mostly centered upon “new men” from the “Middle West.” These new men harbor a siege mentality and believe that they have had to fight with coastal elites, especially the Eastern elite, for economic dominance. Parsons describes this elite:

A further feature of the structure of American society is intimately related to the residual strains left by recent social changes. There is a continuing tendency for earlier economic developments to leave a “precipitate” of upper groups, the position of whose members is founded in the achievements of their ancestors, in this case relatively recent ones. By historical necessity these groups are strongest in the older parts of the country. Hence the cities of the Eastern seaboard have tended to develop groups that are the closes approach we have – though still very different from their European equivalent – to an aristocracy. They have generally originated in business interests, but have taken on a form somewhat similar to the mercantile aristocracies of some earlier European societies, such as the Hanseatic cities.

This aristocracy is not resented just because of their power but also for their unique cultural traits, which Parsons describes variously in terms of “social snobbery,” “bohemianism,” “internationalism,” and other traits that are “sources of uneasiness to traditional morality.” Further, both the business and agrarian interests harbor feelings of insecurity because they had to be bailed out by these Eastern elites during the Great Depression.

These elites are also the focal point of resentment for lower class populism, which traditionally despises Wall Street, banking, and railway magnates, and which focuses upon localism, independence, and isolationism. Further, because the Midwest is a stronghold of European immigration, a lingering resentment of WASP snobbery pushes the sentiment of assimilated immigrants in the region toward populism.

Simultaneously, these groups are mostly patriotic (he excludes extreme American nationalists as unpatriotic because they shirk the “necessary obligation” of America’s international role), which means they value loyalty.

The mixture of interests underlying McCarthyism resist accepting “the obligations of our situation,” meaning our international role and the necessity of massive Federal intrusion into the private sphere.

The Social Psychology of McCarthyism

Parsons observes that neither individuals nor societies can undergo major structural changes “without the likelihood of producing a considerable element of “irrational” behavior.” During such situations,

There will tend to be conspicuous distortions of the patterns of value and of the normal beliefs about the facts of situations. These distorted beliefs and promptings to irrational action will also tend to be heavily weighted with emotion, to be “overdetermined” as the psychologists say…

[T]here will tend to be high levels of anxiety and aggression, focused on what rightly or wrongly are felt to be the sources of strain and difficulty. On the positive side there will tend to be wishful patterns of belief with a strong “regressive” flavor, whose chief function is to wish away the disturbing situation and establish a situation in phantasy where “everything will be all right,” preferably as it was before the disturbing situation came about. Very generally then the psychological formula tends to prescribe a set of beliefs that certain specific, symbolic agencies are responsible for the present state of distress; they have “arbitrarily” upset a satisfactory state of affairs. If only they could be eliminated the trouble would disappear and a satisfactory state restored. The role of this type of mechanism in primitive magic is quite well known.

Thus, McCarthyism is neither a class phenomenon nor a movement with specific policy goals reflecting a specific liberal or conservative vested interest, but rather a symptom of anxiety, aggression, and anger exhibited by vested midwestern business interests and traditional lower-class leftist and conservative groups, the latter of which have historical connections to localism and isolationism. This mixture of interests divides business elites (between Midwest and East) and unites Midwestern business with the lower class, causing them to embrace a contradictory hodgepodge of patriotic, traditionalist, collectivist, and libertarian goals.

Parsons advances a sort of apologia in McCarthyite terms on behalf of America’s necessary obligations:

Underlying the concern for loyalty in general, and explaining a good deal of the reaction to it, is the ambivalence of our approach to the situation: The people in the most “exposed” positions are on the one hand pulled by patriotic motives toward fulfillment of the expectations inherent in the new situation; they want to “do their bit.” But at the same time their established attitudes and orientations resist fulfillment of the obligation. In the conflict of motives which ensues it is a natural consequence for the resistance to be displaced or projected on to other objects which function as scapegoats. In the present situation it is precisely those parts of our population where individualistic traditions are strongest that are placed under the greatest strain, and that produce the severest resistances to accepting the obligations of our situation. Such resistances, however, conflict with equally strong patriotic motives. In such a situation, when one’s own resistance to loyal acceptance of unpalatable obligations, such as paying high taxes, are particularly strong, it is easy to impute disloyal intentions to others.

The Function of Communism

McCarthyism runs with these conflicting positions and emotions and focuses upon a primitive symbol called “Communism,” which manifests externally as the Soviet Threat and internally as the threat of totalitarian Communist subversion of traditional American values, including individualism and business independence. The symbol of Communism bridges the inconsistent demands of patriotic loyalty on the one hand and hostility to the New Deal and American liberalism on the other.

While Parsons agrees that Soviet Communism is a legitimate external threat and concedes that Communists successfully infiltrated and subverted American institutions in the ‘30s, he points to the unpopularity of Communism in electoral politics and its failure to control labor movements to assuage McCarthyite anxieties.

In addition to reflecting the strains described above, Parsons further diagnoses McCarthyite loyalty policing as a function of superficial similarity between the enlightenment universalism of Marxism and American liberal universalism. Since Communism is an avowed external threat, and has been an internal threat, and since these threats reflect the strains imposed upon the McCarthyite coalition by non-Marxist liberal policies, the McCarthyite sees Communism in America fulfilling its necessary obligations through liberal policy.

Parsons notes that this paranoia has extended normal patriotic suspicions about Communist party members to intellectuals, labor leaders, the Democratic Party, and even the “Protestant clergy.” Parsons is especially concerned, however, that this erroneous paranoia is affecting men and institutions with “responsibility in the international field.”

Parsons points to Dean Acheson, who “represents symbolically those Eastern and vested interests, against whom antagonism has existed among the new men of the Middle West and the populist movement, including the descendants of recent immigrants,” and who was closely connected to General Marshall. Parsons says that this hostility shows just how primitive and symbolic McCarthyism is. Both Acheson and Marshall were associated with the conservative, anti-New Deal wings of the Democratic party, and yet they have received accusations of Communist disloyalty simply by virtue of symbolic association.

Parsons is further concerned that his own Harvard has been brought under this primitive symbolic hostility,

Similarly, among American universities Harvard has been particularly identified as educating a social elite, the members of which are thought of as “just the type,” in their striped trousers and morning coats, to sell out the country to the social snobs of European capitals. It is the combination of aristocratic associations – through the Boston Brahmins – and a kind of urban bohemian sophistication along with its devotion to intellectual and cultural values, including precisely its high intellectual standards, which makes Harvard a vulnerable symbol in this context.

To underscore how Communism functions merely as a symbol and not a coherent concern for McCarthyites, he argues that McCarthyism is itself disloyal and not truly focused upon Communism. For example, by collapsing their internal anxieties about government intervention with their loyalty concerns about Communism, they attribute high tax policy to Communist disloyalty in deference to an extreme conception of individual and economic liberty that America never embodied. In so doing, they eschew the patriotic demands of our necessary obligations, like funding our expansive military to oppose Communism.

Parsons also points to how McCarthyites expressed little concern over the racial emancipation being promoted by the Supreme Court, whose justices they otherwise maligned as an instrument of Communist subversion. He also notes the absence of the anti-Semitism traditionally connected to anti-Communism in Europe. These points are intended to shore up his conclusion that McCarthyism is not a coherent movement with a consistent ideology.

Parsons uses German National Socialism as a related example, pointing to how Hitler’s movement was itself an incoherent mélange of traditional hostility to commerce on the one hand and Bolshevik totalitarianism on the other. The symbol of the “Jew” bridged these anti-capitalist and anti-communist concerns, according to Parsons.

Parsons’s Ideal Regime

Parsons believes that the exigencies of reality have created necessary obligations for the American nation, fulfillment of which is hampered by internal and external strains that are producing hostile phenomena like McCarthyism. The general solution, for Parsons, can only be sought through government, which means giving the government even more power over the economy.

To do this, we must ensure that people trust the government “more fully.” Specifically, the people who have “assumed responsibility for leadership in meeting the exigencies of the new situation” (mostly the Eastern bohemian aristocrats who bailed out Midwestern business and the world during WW2) must be trusted and not unfairly blamed for Communism or whatever symbol the Middle West and immigrant masses have chosen to bring their morass of grievances under.

In contrast with the uncrystallized and plural nature of American leadership Parsons describes above, Parsons hopes for a unified leadership, beginning with business leaders overcoming the McCarthyite split of their vested interests and accepting the new enhanced role of government in the economy. From there “a politically leading stratum must be made up of a combination of business and nonbusiness elements.” Business leaders can no longer monopolize communal leadership because “so varied now are the national elements which make a legitimate claim to be represented.” In other words, special non-business interests like professional, ethnic and religious groups must be able to lead the country.

For Parsons this would be a “political elite” comprised of “politicians” who specialized “in the management of public opinion” and “administrators” with specialization in civil and military service. To overcome the McCarthyite conflict, Parsons’s political elite must be in close alliance with “cultural elements” like universities and churches.

This sounds a lot like an intentional version of Moldbug’s “Cathedral” or Jouvenal’s “Power.” Indeed, Parsons never justifies but simply takes as given the necessity of the obligations for the Federal Government to intervene in the economy and take on the role of a global power, so that his essay in effect sounds like a circular rationalization for the expansion of power, or like Fukuyama’s recent article, a justification for the status quo. Lingering in the background is a class of Eastern bohemian aristocrats who take responsibility for the country in a way that simple midwestern businessmen and European immigrant-descendants will never understand.

My sense that Parsons is being sincere and simultaneously justifying the arbitrary power of a group is reinforced by his reference to non-business interest leadership. This leads us back to his Negro citizenship article. An America Parsons champions for abandoning the atavistic kin-based organization of Europe is now embracing kin-based political leadership through convoluted rationalizations that equate kin group interests with the interests of the leadership strata that takes responsibility for addressing the exigencies.

A Few Observations

I have yet to encounter such a holistic diagnosis of the alt-right or Trump. Instead we see isolated discipline-level analyses of psychological impulses like inferiority and insecurity, or economic analyses focusing on the upper middle class. I’m sure there’s a more holistic book or article somewhere, but I wonder whether it takes as charitable and paternalistic a tone as Parsons. In other words, I wonder if there is anyone left who takes responsibility for the country in such a way that they can understand its upheavals holistically as routine clinical issues and not personal threats posted by an absolutely evil enemy.

If there is anything like a coherent Parsons-style elite perspective in America, I imagine it might view Trump and the dissident right in the same manner: as a confused reaction to necessary social changes coming from a plurality of socioeconomic groups (tech billionaires, melting pot whites) that don’t understand the situation holistically because they don’t feel responsible for their country in the way that the people who own it do.

However, it seems like the only part of the country capable of advancing something approaching this argument is the foreign policy establishment. Because of its specialization, it skews everything toward the responsibility for maintaining “The Order” to which John McCain alluded in Rex Tillerson’s confirmation hearing, which means it subordinates the problems caused by internal strains to external exigencies. It doesn’t matter to the foreign policy establishment whether they lead a country of chemically castrated social isolates controlled by a Chinese-style system of social surveillance and control, or a country of vital and engaged citizens who fully embody America’s values and its civil religious mission.

It seems like the responsibility-taking social strata has abdicated its domestic responsibility. Perhaps the social strata no longer exists.