Relax Southern Western Man, We Got This

The John Birch Society and American Global Government Sociology

In Relax Middle Western Man, We Got This, I summarized Talcott Parsons’s sociological analysis of the McCarthyite movement, which I found in an anthology on the New Right. It turns out that the same anthology includes Parsons’s 1962 postscript to his 1955 article.

In the postscript, Parsons performs a post-mortem on McCarthyism and introduces other factions of the “New Right” for analysis. He reiterates in general that the New Right is basically a rear guard action against “necessary” socioeconomic change (think gamers resisting the corporatization and universalization of their beloved franchises):

[T]he “right” is the protest against the fact that American society is changing, and against the direction of change. The United States is a society that has been evolving toward increasing complexities and scale of its organization and functions; a greater concentration of population and activities in complex communities; increasing responsibility in the world political system; and a higher order of technology, knowledge, sophistication, and the like.

Parsons employs some perplexing, perhaps psychologically revelatory, analogies to explain McCarthyism. He first likens McCarthyism to a flash-in-the-pan reaction to a financial crisis, which causes a temporary run on the banks and therewith a tendency away from abstract deposit exchanges in a credit system toward cumulatively more “elementary” monetary transactions that ultimately make it impossible to maintain the credit system. The end-point of such a reaction is the destruction of the value of currency and the re-emergence of barter, payment using valuable metals, and so forth.

By analogy, McCarthyism was a “deflationary spiral” that repudiated the “credit” of the ordinary level of commitment of citizens to the national interest, “which in a pluralistic society is virtually never total,” demanding instead that no other commitment could conceivably compete with what McCarthyites called “loyalty” to the government. The financial crisis was of course the various changes and “Communism” Parsons described in his 1955 article and which I summarized here.

McCarthyites were those with moral and material vested interests in limiting government (Middle Western businessmen, lower class left- and right-wing populists, and descendants of white ethnic immigrants) and its victims were those who had taken responsibility for meeting the necessary obligations of the changing American situation (mostly the Eastern Bohemian Elite). Here Parsons raises another analogy to the humble civil servant known as the banker:

This is perhaps analogous to the banker who, having taken the responsibility for lending “other people’s money” is then, by populistic demand, subjected to the most rigorous checking, so that even any minor loss through error of judgment comes to be attributed to his bad faith.

The John Birch Society

The New Right, of which McCarthyism was a part, is united by a “substratum” of individualism and anti-Communism, beyond which the various sects part ideological ways. Parsons introduces the John Birch Society as an influential instantiation of the New Right.

I’m not well-versed in Bircherism. I do know they were fiercely anti-Communist and saw Communist conspiracies literally everywhere. For Birchers, John and Allan Dulles were Communists; Eisenhower was a Communist; Dominant Church leadership were Communist etc. To this anti-Communism was wedded a traditionalist individualism which Parsons derisively describes in terms of the prioritization of everything “infantile” and “little,” which I take to mean the local, parochial, small business, kin-networks, and related antiquated institutions that are threatened by the expansion of Federal power.

Returning to his financial analogy, Parsons describes Bircherism as a deflationary movement in the sense that its reaction to the crisis of necessary changes drives people toward more primitive forms of exchange or existence. Whereas McCarthyism demanded that such pluralistic interests be wholly subordinated to centralized state loyalty, the Birchers called for a magnification of lesser pluralistic loyalties.

The individualism of the Birchers is unrealistic because it “romanticizes” America’s “earlier lack of involvement in the complex world of power relations, when America could be left to work out its own destiny.”

This condescending characterization leads the Eastern Bohemian Parsons to another regional analysis. Bircherism is a “Southwestern” phenomenon, in contrast with the McCarthyism of the Middle West, with Texas bridging the two factions. It is in flyover country where Americans still “cherish the illusion” of an open frontier and a self-sufficient household that is undifferentiated relative to the households of more modern cities.

Recall that for Parsons, modernization is the process of differentiation, meaning aspects of an individual are differentiated from him, including his religion, kin group, and importantly in this context, his labor or self-sufficiency. The frontier man retains undifferentiated self-sufficiency, whereas the modern man is dependent upon a complex network of institutions, individuals, and supply chains to meet his needs.

In an apologetic overture to the New Right he is criticizing, Parsons stresses that his sociological model sees this process of differentiation as a form of individualism (as articulated by Durkheim), albeit one that concedes the necessary expansion and intervention of government in private life as individuals continue to be differentiated from parochial and forced ascriptive ties.

Differentiation liberates the human individual from the constraints of all parochial obligations, but at the price of government expansion. In this sense the modern man is liberated from the obligations of the frontier man and can more fully exercise his individuality. Parsons might say that the modern individual is free to cook breakfast in the morning, do office work during the day, attend mass in the evening, troll about politics on twitter after dinner, without ever becoming a cook, a bureaucrat, subject of the Church, or professional content-creator.

Some Observations on the Contemporary Situation

As in the previous entry, I wonder again here if there’s such a confident, holistic Parsonsian perspective circulating among policymakers today. That is, I wonder whether the Parsons perspective in some sense persists as a guiding vision for the country.

I also wonder whether his model of the New Right retains validity today. I think these two questions are connected.

I wrote up an autistic description of the numerous interests that constitute the 21st-century New Right but chose to omit it out of pity for my readers. My description concluded that while there is some overlap with Parsons’s moral and material interests that make up his New Right, there are far more interests at play today.

What is salient for this post, at least for me, is the nature of the change that compels New Right reaction.

Recall that for Parsons, the evolution of the economy necessitated expansive government intervention in the private sphere, and the demands of foreign policy required America to take a greater role in global affairs. He doesn’t explain why this is the case, but I think we can divine a reason beyond mere pragmatism by looking at his New Dealers R the Real Individualists argument sketched above.

To justify his claim that the expansion of individualism is only possible with the expansion of government, Parsons invokes an excessively prolix and circuitous argument from Emile Durkheim that I greatly regret looking up. If you want to torture yourself, the argument, such as it is, is found in Chapter 7 of Book I of The Division of Labor in Society by Emile Durkheim.

Durkheim’s argument is developed against the methodological individualism of Herbert Spencer and basically says that the individualism of advanced modern societies is only possible through group regulation, not individual contract as the libertarian-utilitarian Spencer claims. These regulations prevent Parsons’s “differentiation process” from developing into hypercapitalistic competition on the one hand and hyperspecialized isolation on the other (Durkheim uses the example of excessive specialization in science isolating researchers from each other’s ideas). In short, without government regulation, individualism collapses.

Parsons’s differentiation process, which is a good thing, creates problems that require the intervention of a centralized coercive regulatory body, which is also a good thing. And thus true individual liberation necessitates the individual’s submission to expansive government regulation of the private sphere.

This argument also works for Parsons’s globalism. The differentiation process additionally entails differentiation of the individual from national identity and citizenship, which in the end means the deprecation of national sovereignty in favor of a global order that guarantees the autonomy of the individual against the excesses of national parochialism.

This brings us back to the primary pain point of the 21st-century New Right: globalism. Globalism today means forced socioeconomic integration with the world in the forms of forced integration of American and foreign labor populations, and forced business competition with foreign markets not beholden to American regulatory obligations.

Another problem with globalism is that forced integration interferes with the dominance of traditional domestic cultures and morals, which reduces the social capital of communities that depend upon domestic cultures and morals for stability.

The cultural strain with globalism creates a thematic bridge to other cultural concerns of the New Right, especially those of Christians and other socially conservative groups, but also more secular concerns. Here we see issues like abortion, gay liberation, transgenderism, and public education, but also issues like diversity, civil rights, and the erosion of social capital that contributes to social pandemics like the opioid crisis in Appalachia. Reactions to progressive change causing Parsonsian strain under these categories are not necessarily connected to globalism (for example, many evangelical Christians are globalists).

The sexual, gender, and racial identitarian liberation movements would of course be deemed necessary by Parsons, because they strive to liberate individuals from parochial, ascriptive status inferiority.

The anomie of Appalachia would be deemed a strain caused by the necessary social and foreign policy changes compelled by this process; and the strain would of course justify further government expansion and intervention in the private sphere.

A modern holistic perspective

Thus Parsons’s model, albeit simple in comparison to the diversity and complexity of the material and moral interests of the 21st-century New Right, can be used to delegitimize the demands of the 21st-century New Right in the same way that Parsons uses the model to delegitimize the demands of the New Right of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

What might this model look like in the hands of a practical, decision-making ruling elite that takes responsibility for guiding America through the strains caused by necessary change? I think one example can be found in a 1992 Time Magazine article by former Bill Clinton deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott. I’ll analyze the article below in terms of the Parsonsian model and then advance some basic criticisms.

Writing in the immediate wake of the first end of history, Talbott’s article overflows with globalist enthusiasm that a contemporary government leader would never express in pubic today (for reasons we’ll explore in a follow-up article).

Talbott begins with his ambitious one-world thesis:

In fact, I'll bet that within the next hundred years (I'm giving the world time for setbacks and myself time to be out of the betting game, just in case I lose this one), nationhood as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. A phrase briefly fashionable in the mid-20th century -- "citizen of the world" -- will have assumed real meaning by the end of the 21st.

To justify this bet, Talbott adduces a sociological model of human history. Humans began as parochial, cave-dwelling savages but quickly expanded through immoral conquest of other groups. This conquest set the stage for cosmopolitanism and internationalism, which played out over several millennia through a refinement process that saw man move from empires, to fiefs, to ethno-nationalist nation-states, and finally to cosmopolitan nation-states. Throughout this process, man’s capacity for cruelty and destruction was refined and amplified, culminating in the megacides of the 20th century, but also in the creation of technologies and opportunities that make a global government both possible and necessary:

The main goal driving the process of political expansion and consolidation was conquest. The big absorbed the small, the strong the weak. National might made international right. Such a world was in a more or less constant state of war…

Empires were a powerful force for obliterating natural and demographic barriers and forging connections among far-flung parts of the world. The British left their system of civil service in India, Kenya and Guyana, while the Spaniards, Portuguese and French spread Roman Catholicism to almost every continent.

And from here the case for global government is “clinched”:

But it has taken the events in our own wondrous and terrible century to clinch the case for world government. With the advent of electricity, radio and air travel, the planet has become smaller than ever, its commercial life freer, its nations more interdependent and its conflicts bloodier. The price of settling international disputes by force was rapidly becoming too high for the victors, not to mention the vanquished. That conclusion should have been clear enough at the battle of the Somme in 1916; by the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945, it was unavoidable.

This can be interpreted as a specific instance of Parsons’s “modernization process” and other Durkheimian sociologies of the evolution of the division of labor and human social complexity.

What’s important here for Talbott is that the harsh conquests and oppressions were necessary preparatory acts for the establishment of the best of all possible political worlds: global government. Similarly, for Parsons, it is the harshness of the differentiation process – the strains it causes – which necessitates the expansion and perfection of government. Both versions of the argument are circular and essentially historicist: human immorality created opportunities and technologies for more extreme immoralities but also for the elimination of extreme immoralities.

Talbott aggressively embraces this circularity in the following rejoinder to critics of globalism:

Globalization has also contributed to the spread of terrorism, drug trafficking, AIDS and environmental degradation. But because those threats are more than any one nation can cope with on its own, they constitute an incentive for international cooperation.

This is the rationalization of a system that has already integrated itself and can’t imagine any other form of existence. It is as if a person were to say: sure, the integration of the body through the circulatory system facilitates the spread of pathogens and other harmful substances to other parts of the body, but these threats are more than any one part of the body can handle on its own. We need the circulatory system working in tandem with the immune system to protect the body.

But of course the human world is not a single, integrated biological organism, for if it were, Talbott wouldn’t need to publish his argument and promote the policy. Thus he is, like Parsons, a moralizer.

Indeed, Talbott’s argument isn’t just from necessity, for the conditions he claims necessitate world government could just as easily justify an equilibrium of large regional empires serving as checks upon each other’s aggression.

Talbott needs the moral element of Parsonsian individual liberation to justify a single world government. The differentiation process cannot admit of a plurality of absolutely sovereign nation-states:

The internal affairs of a nation used to be off limits to the world community. Now the principle of "humanitarian intervention" is gaining acceptance. A turning point came in April 1991, shortly after Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from Kuwait, when the U.N. Security Council authorized allied troops to assist starving Kurds in northern Iraq.

The differentiation process creates strains between individuals and their parochial authorities, including their nation. For example, as individuals are differentiated from the ascriptive roles prescribed by a Sunni Oil Monarchy or Arab Nationalist state, the resulting identitarian liberation movements cause strains and potentially violent reactions from the state, which require regulatory intervention from above to preserve the individuality of these people.

In a failed effort to head off the “McWorld” objections to this form of totalitarian homogenization, Talbott argues

[The nationalist resistance to globalization in places like Quebec] are the disputatious representatives of a larger, basically positive phenomenon: a devolution of power not only upward toward supranational bodies and outward toward commonwealths and common markets but also downward toward freer, more autonomous units of administration that permit distinct societies to preserve their cultural identities and govern themselves as much as possible. That American buzz word empowerment -- and the European one, subsidiarity -- is being defined locally, regionally and globally all at the same time.

The nationalist reactions to McWorld homogenization are already forms of globalism themselves:

National self-assertiveness in the West can be mighty ugly, especially in its more extreme Irish and Basque versions. But when Scots, Quebecois, Catalans and Bretons talk separatism, they are, in the main, actually renegotiating their ties to London, Ottawa, Madrid and Paris.

We know this is an empty sophistry. We already know from the Oil Monarch example above that the differentiation process that rationalizes one world government from a moral standpoint cannot permit meaningful cultural identities and self-governance.

But even if we eliminate this moral premise and rest the argument solely upon the pragmatic necessity of eliminating total war, because technology guarantees any war will cause global annihilation, we still can’t have the “cultural identities” and self-governance Talbott describes above. The reason we can’t is that outlawing war entails outlawing national sovereignty to the benefit of a global sovereign.

In a glaring instance of historical revisionism, Talbott conflates late-medieval and early-modern European international law with his motivations for seeking a global government:

From time to time the best minds wondered whether this wasn't a hell of a way to run a planet; perhaps national sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all. Dante in the 14th century, Erasmus in the 16th and Grotius in the 17th all envisioned international law as a means of overcoming the natural tendency of states to settle their differences by force.

In fact, what was achieved by these Europeans was a bracketing of war that premised the entire international order upon the fundamental national right to fight a duel to defend or promote the nation’s form of existence, regardless of how parochial or unjust the nation appeared in the eyes of the Church or other nations. This is why the territorial nation-state arose in the 17th century.

This means that while Early Modern Europeans also understood, like Talbott, that organized warfare was a horrific part of human existence at their time, they chose to preserve it instead of pursuing the utopian goal of outlawing it.

Was this decision a New Right reaction to the strains of modernization or was it indicative of a superior insight into human nature?