America’s soon-to-be-celebrated 250-year history can be summarized in two simple words: promise and betrayal. After the promising start as a Second Eden, it betrayed itself twice, first with capitalism and then with Trumpism. By submitting to capitalism, America betrayed its promise of equality; by adopting Trumpism, America betrayed its promise of freedom. With equality lost to capitalism and freedom to Trumpism, once-Edenic America is now living out its last days in modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, where everyone is waiting to turn into pillars of gold.
First, the Promise: The promise of America was made by its first settlers, the Puritans, who brought with them a wholly new type of society and people. Alexis De Tocqueville famously observed that it is impossible to comprehend America without recognizing “the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores.”
What was the Puritan destiny for the New World? It was nothing less than a free nation, destined for greatness and fame. They promised God that his commandments would be fulfilled. Thus began the saga of the Great American Nation — a “New Israel,” a “New Jerusalem,” inhabited by the “New Israelites” — the perfect, boundless nation that only God could bestow. America was the Promised Land of milk and honey gifted by the Lord’s special blessings on his chosen people.
Puritan preacher John Winthrop pledged: “Says the Lord: That I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel [and] they will be my people.” Jonathan Edwards, who often preached in Northampton, echoed Winthrop: “[In this new land] God has created heaven and earth [where] the work is honorable, sustained by most honorable men.” To Samuel Langdon, their destiny was clear: “RISE! RISE to fame among all nations, as a wise and understanding people! Political life and earth are set before you: Be a free, numerous, well ordered, and happy people!” (caps original)
The Puritans’ promise was carried into the post-1776 new republic which harnessed the Puritan’s religious fervor into a free, secularized democratic republic. The Constitution replaced the Commandments, and God’s blessings on Puritans blossomed into a politically free and economically equal self-governing nation. It is frontier America’s original form in which Providence, individual freedom and honest labor came together to create a “Perfect Union.” Here, Thomas Jefferson’s politics and Adam Smith’s economics were harmonized and, here, the Jeffersonian founders envisioned history’s first true perfect democracy of liberty and justice for all. Puritans planted the seed and the American Republic harvested its first fruit. The Perfect Union lasted for the first 100 years of the Republic.
America committed its first Betrayal when it welcomed the capitalist system into its Garden of Eden following the end of the Civil War. Capitalism’s entry into America’s Eden coincided with the close of open land, the beginning of industrialization (thus ending the independent farming era in America), and the destruction of the Perfect Union by Mammon, history’s first true money-god.
In its pure form, capitalism is an every-man-for-himself system where the winner gets everything and the loser gets nothing. Although it claims its lineage from Jefferson’s frontier-liberal America, the end-result is quite anti-Jeffersonian and anti-liberal. (Jeffersonianism is now designated as “Classic Liberalism”). But capitalism, with its consumer freedom and frequent spectacles of wealth, appealed to Americans who valued rugged individualism. Inevitably, winner-take-all entrepreneurialism led to a society of the few who owned everything and the majority who struggled as wage earners. Along the way, the Democratic Party had quietly become the party of Wall Street capitalism, while claiming to be the friend of the common workers, especially those who are non-white. In it, the American majority, both white and non-white, mostly worked as servants to the affluent, lived on fantasy and drugs, and died lonely and poor.
Between the Civil War and World War II, roughly over the span of a century, capitalism, American style, was solidified as the nation’s unquestioned ruling system, in which America’s soul was openly owned by Mammon and all its rivals — Christianity and Soviet Communism — vanquished thereafter. Global consumer capitalism became the world’s dominant order and America’s unquestionable creed.
Then, something quite natural, even logical, happened to capitalism’s triumph: it changed its character from healthy production to killing consumption. American consumers, now well fed and clothed, demanded mental pleasure — a life of always-on amusement and fun. Consumer capitalism, ever ready armed with its advanced technology and psychology, obliged: Following cable TV’s thousands of outlets, the internet offered millions of choices for every taste and demand: Since the dying days of Rome, the world had never seen such frenzy of pleasure pursuits.
Now, the stage for the second (political) Betrayal was set for Trump’s grand entrance. People who are in daily hourly communion with such concentrated pleasure cannot retain their humanity very long: Like opium addicts, sooner or later, pleasure-addicts go insane. To Trump’s delight, American consumers, especially whites, did go insane: Liberal Democrats had promised the hitherto-neglected-and-dispossessed every possible experiment in freedom that it forgot to watch its white majorit y who had grown feeling neglected, disoriented and angry.
These lost Americans cried to heaven for someone who would save them from the curses of liberal equality and freedom that had driven them insane. Donald Trump, ever the favorite of the moment, responded: “Here I am.”
But, along with Trump, came the warning from heaven via its prophet Samuel Langdon: “If you pursue (your promise), your prosperity is sure; but if not, distress and ruin will overtake you.”
For sure, the prophecy was fulfilled as capitalist distress and Trumpist ruin did overtake America.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.