In his treatise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber posited a direct relationship between the religious ethic of the Puritan emigres who settled in Massachusetts and the economic prosperity that characterized the nation that, eventually, followed from that early venture. I won't try to do justice to Weber's argument; it's been fifty years, and although his book, like Emile Durkheim's Suicide, seemed to be found in every dormitory room and student apartment in Hyde Park during the Sixties, I no longer recall more than the bare bones.
Weber started with the notion of the Puritans that prosperity was a sign of the Lord's favor --that the doctrine of predestination, which said that everyone is born with an eternal future carved in stone, actually offered a way for us to find out what our particular fate would be. We couldn't change our destination, be it Heaven or Hell; but we could recognize its signs by reference to our station here on Earth: if you were honest, thrifty, and prosperous, that was a reliable sign that you were predestined for eternal glory.
According to Weber, the result was to encourage people to strive for the outward signs of the Lord's favor; and this striving produced a society of achievers, upstanding, moral citizens: capitalists, whose increasing prosperity would be evidence that they were of the Elect.
It was an ingenious theory, and it had the added bonus of providing a sort of imprimatur for rapacious capitalism: it was our destiny to be prosperous, because we were Chosen.
Americans have always gobbled up this notion. We are prosperous because we are virtuous because God has singled us out, as a nation, for glory, for election, for prosperity, for virtue. A circle, if you will, of endlessly ramifying justifications for being who we are. This sort of thinking has, over the generations, encompassed the often-asserted belief that the U.S. is a shining city on a hill; that we are the indispensable nation; that our destiny is manifest; that we are unique because we are uniquely good.
All those bromides have become the formulae of our national self-expression, found in the speeches of every politician and the unconscious, and un-selfconscious, beliefs of the average American. We are good. We are blessed by God, singled out because of our virtue.
And so, of course, if we do something, it must be good; it must be right, because it is we who do it. I have actually heard people say this.
And also, the typical American believes that what is true of us must also be true of himself, individually. We all believe this, deep in our hearts. Probably the typical Japanese or Canadian holds some species of similar belief; but for Americans it is close to a civic religion.
And, I suppose, it has probably produced some good: the melding of a real nation, after a lot of difficulty, based on some civic ideal rather than on common ethnicity or religion or race. At least, that's what we have always said about ourselves. But I detect a crack in that particular dike, and maybe more than a little water spilling out.
That ideal worked as long as we believed in the "we" part. Today, more and more, there are signs that what we are coming to believe is the "I" part: I am virtuous, and, okay, maybe those like me. But more and more "Americans" are not like me. They are not part of the Moral Majority; they are those people, they are unbelievers, they are (if they would permit abortions, as a matter of policy) killers of children, they are takers, they are socialists, haters of America, Kenyan Muslims.
I think we are creating tribes where we had none. And I think tribes are the enemy of stability and comity in a modern state, because the State typically no longer has an iron-fisted ruler (and, where it does, it also tends to be backward, strife-ridden, often vicious). A State, as we envision it, and as we celebrate our own, has to depend on common purpose; and common purpose is not found where one group regards another as irredeemably Other. So, while we still recite the old harmonious phrases like standard prayers in a liturgy long since rendered an empty formality, we do so either without conviction or (after Ruskin's Characteristics), in an effort to convince ourselves of what is no longer true.
So we now have tribes of fundamentalist Christians, many of whom seem to believe, and who broadcast that belief ever more loudly, that Others who do not accept the Jesus they adhere to, are lost; moreover, they are contaminating the virtuous. We have tribes of fundamentalist Jews, and Muslims, who view one another as worse than evil. We have tribes of Blue-Staters (I am one such) who believe that Republicans, or Evangelicals, or Southerners in general, are benighted and are to be ignored where possible. And of course each of these groups holds out exceptions for those who, although they may look like the Other, have some sort of redeeming feature.
We have a President who, although he is pretty conservative --certainly quite conservative if compared to, say, Richard Nixon--, is a Kenyan Socialist Muslim because, well, because he's a Democrat, at least in name (that's the reason that we allow to be voiced, anyway --many of us believe there's a more basic reason). And, for another tribe, that President is an appeaser of the Right, a timid half-stepper, a handmaid of big Money; but, after all, he's a Democrat, and for Gad's sake, he's Black. So we have to overlook the things we don't like. Notice that we are not overlooking what we don't like because it is outweighed by what we like, but primarily because of who he is. And for the other side, we don't like his ideas because they are his, not because of their substance.*
So here's where we appear to be going: Anyone who does not look and sound like us, is irretrievably foreign and not to be trusted, supported, or cooperated with. And we are carving up the "like us" definition into smaller and more rigidly-defined pieces. Several mainstream center-right politicians have had distinguished careers ended lately because of a single vote, or even because of no vote at all, but because of an insufficiently warlike attitude in Congress, or perhaps because of a compromising disposition or a willingness even just to befriend a member of the other party.
This is, for a democracy, the road to ruin. It makes normal governance impossible, because only one person can possibly have the right view, or policy: me. And there are over 500 of "me" in the U.S. Congress.
We are building walls around ourselves, in ever-smaller groups. And, like any gated community, those within those walls eventually forget what the rest of the world is even like. And the stories they tell themselves drift further and further from reality. Ultimately, there are small groups of the virtuous, ready to fight to the death against those who are not Elect. This is not the only recent import to the U.S. that ties us, ever more closely, to the politics of the Taliban.
*This attitude was expressed most forcefully by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, in their 2012 book It's Even Worse Than It Looks. In their introduction they describe the fate, in 2010, of a Senate resolution to create a bipartisan task force that would "fast-track" a procedure to resolve the so-called "debt problem." Ignoring the merits of the plan, it had broad bipartisan support. Until, that is, the President endorsed the idea. Once Obama indicated he was in favor, seven Republican co-sponsors voted against their own bill. So the resolution died, because even though it "carried" by a vote of 53-47, that is no longer enough in a Democracy. Like all Senate bills, these days, 60 votes are required for passage.
