22 February 2020
There have been two substitutions. One is democracy with capitalism and the other is the United States of America with Christianity. The former has been made by almost everyone without notice or recognition of the consequences; the latter has been made on the right of the political spectrum and is a “be careful what you wish for” happening.
The first: The replacement of Democracy with Capitalism:
When: sometime in the 1980’s Presidents of the United States began using Capitalism interchangeably with American Democracy. This began as a statement of contrast with the Soviet Union, with “Communism” in its vaguely defined and vaguely understood propaganda form. The US being the most powerful economy in the world and two generations (Post WWII) having been told that American Democracy created that great economy–there is little leap to the interchange and thus to the replacement.
Why: an easy step to take if one loses what democracy actually is and, at the same time, what has made America great. Democracy is a hard-won consideration of all the people through voting. It goes back thousands of years in its origins. Some examples are the Code of Hammurabi ca. 1750 BC where all the citizens were considered in a set of laws; through the Greeks (Cleisthenes, ca. 508 BC) where landowners had a vote; through the Magna Carta, 15 June 1215, which roughly created the British Parliamentary system; the Mayflower Compact of 11 November 1620 which created the first government of the new world, into the United States Constitution, a unique document in its day. A good deal of bloodshed has been the result of beginning democracies and of holding them. The English civil wars, the American revolution, the French revolution, to name but a few famous ones, and countless others which could include the union movement and the civil rights movement. As Benjamin Franklin is said to have stated at the end of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 when asked what government we got, “A Republic, if you can keep it” is an indication that democracies take work. He knew how fragile this could be and history has proven him correct. (A Republic is a type of democratic system where the people are represented by elected bodies.) Democracy has been under creation for over two thousand years. We now take it for granted because we have not been told of its hard-fought success or its fragility.
The concept of capitalism to explain Why is America Great is a result of oversimplification and misattribution. The economy of the United States at its founding was not, at least very little, centered around capitalism. It was agrarian. The industrial revolution (an example of Capitalism, if you will) is said to have come to America after the constitution was ratified (ca. 1790 by Samuel Slater). It had begun in the late 1700’s in Europe and Britain. Keep in mind, Europe was made up of monarchies, some with parliaments and some without. One can have capitalism without reference to democracy. North America has other advantages: the diversity of climate, all in a temperate zone; the diversity of raw materials; the multitude of rivers and lakes for easy navigation and transport of goods; the relative lack of inhabitants (ninety percent of the indigenous population had died previous to the Mayflower’s sailing; the result of European diseases brought by small fishing and hunting parties and the Spanish conquest). The lack of foreign invasions which devastates economies for generations. Finally, the influx of immigrants with diverse new ideas, strong work ethics, the need for a voice through democratic systems.
Consequences: would any of this substitution have happened without WWI and WWII devastating the world’s economies while the US became the greatest industrial nation in the world? At the end of WWI, the US had more industrial production that the next four nations combined and at the end of WWII it was even more. The substitution is easy to make at the end of the second world war. “We” had “saved the world for democracy” and used the most powerful industrial machine ever to accomplish it. The arrogance was incredible and understandable. Every people want to think great things about themselves. Democracy had done this–the message oversimplified for school children and the media. The substitution becomes self-serving for capitalism. It is an easy step for businesses to argue for no regulation if one couches the idea of regulation in the guise of “limiting America” or “limiting Democracy”. Then add the Soviet Union and communism into the contrast. Never mind their military and economy were always less than the US; never mind the Soviets manipulated governments around the world for their own ends as the US did for their corporations; Never mind the next generation having the “American Dream” increasingly out of reach and the loss (lessening) of democracy as a result of the unfettering of capitalism.
You cannot plug and play democracy as history has amply demonstrated. I have a co-worker who is Romanian. She got her engineering degree, this being the only degree that would guarantee her a job in the Soviet influenced system of the day, then the Romanian revolution happened. She said to me, “I stayed in the country for twelve years waiting for democracy to happen, but it never did” so she moved to Canada. When the US exchanges capitalism for democracy several things go wrong: one, the people you are “helping” do not understand what Franklin said; two, the government of the US tend to put in a system and then leave it to itself—a result of the misunderstanding that capitalism is self-destructive without regulation and that democracy is to be unfettered because it is just capitalism; three, interference in other country’s road to democracy gives a false sense of hope that is quickly disappointed and the result, like most revolutions, is to go back to the system replaced but worse—see the history of the French revolution; four, exploitation by aggressive companies or internal oligarchs; five, oligarchs controlling the political system leads to laws for capitalism and less democracy.
The second substitution—Replacing the United States of America with Christianity:
This is not actually a substitution but an association with overtones of origin, as in, Christianity created the United States and made it great. When, ca. 1979, Jerry Falwell started his campaign against Jimmy Carter for his interview with Playboy during his 1976 election campaign. Falwell started the Moral Majority which led to the realization by politicians that the Christian right could be a motivated voting bloc for the republican party. Soon there was a growing cable television presence, TV evangelist became powerful, not to mention rich, off the collective nature of their rhetoric. The ‘us’ versus ‘them’ ideas brought followers. Followers brought money. Politicians exploited both.
Why: politicians realized that Christians could be a voting bloc for conservatives and later for republican conservatives. The messages could be distilled to simple good or evil messages. A persecution idea entered North American Christianity in the 1980’s. The TV evangelists got rich and powerful and their message, in terms of societal voting ideas, simplified for the short attention span of the cable TV audience. Anti-abortion, anti-gay, and pro-prayer in schools (the latter included on campus Christian study groups and other forms of Christian gathering) were three issues pounded on with increasing bipolarity. With large blocs of white voters hearing the simplistic message and voting often for conservatives, other issues the parties entertained were not discussed or were ignored to hyper-focus on the three issues. We come again to the founding myths of the United States as preached by TV evangelists. All the founders believed in God though they had different forms of practice and different ideas about how God worked, directly or indirectly, in the world. Since America was great and was founded by “Christians” therefore Christianity made America great. Questionable logic at best but easy to preach for a TV evangelist. Add to this: persecution ideas; three issue political thought; TV riches; political associations with the powerful and you get some serious consequences.
Consequences: Christianity is not a democracy. Many bad things have been done in the name of God. Democracy does not need Christianity or a belief in God to function. The history of Christianity shows, and the founders of the US knew, that making Christianity or any religion required, or state sanctioned, turns out bad. One of the worst things to happen to Christianity was the conversion of Constantine; many were burned at the stake in England for being Protestant and then for being Catholic; German history is rife with Lutherans killing Catholics and vice versa—and then there is the universal killing of Jews by all in the name of God. When TV, or what I call, ‘Public Christianity’ became so visible through Cable television and then the conservative republican movement the Bible was lost as its foundation guide.
When a religion is distilled to three issues and those oversimplified with ‘us’ versus ‘them’ rhetoric it leads to the destruction of democracy and destroys the religion in the sight of others. The irony here is the effect this movement is having to recreate the fifteen century Catholic church that has been despised and railed against by generations of protestants, by the very people and their predecessors who are leading it down the current path. The path requires huge blind spots in Christian standards. The path leads inevitably to dictatorships partly because God is a dictator, the structure of Christianity is hierarchical, the bible proscribes thoughts and ideas. The movement that claims to have created the constitution of the United States is on a road to the constitution’s destruction in the name of God. But they may possibly get abortion banned and gay rights overturned but will they wonder what the society looks and acts like when it is over? Will they realise these issues are a hyper focused distillation of the complex society in which the United States has thrived? Will they become the catholic church of the fifteenth century, and will there be a renaissance that destroys the oversimplified?
To sum up: America is a democratic system. The economy has benefited from that and several other things as well. One does not have to have capitalism to have a democracy. Having a democracy is not a matter of implementing economic rules and regulations or eliminating them, it is a hard-won implementation of the changing of the population’s attitudes and creating systems and controls to allow the voices of the people to be heard and acted upon. It only exists and functions as a system of checks and balances, not only in congresses or parliaments, but also the courts, the military, and the attitudes of the people. Democracy is created from within–protesting, fighting, and sacrificing. It is not a function of how many McDonalds one allows.
Christianity is not democratic, ultimately God decides. The idea of establishing Christianity as the official, or even tacitly official, religion in America will destroy its effectiveness as a faith system while destroying democracy at the same time. One can for a time appear to control the thoughts and actions of the people. The Catholic Church did for almost a thousand years but at what cost in human life, views toward God, the use and abuse of the doctrines and ideas of the bible? Christianity is best when it is meeting in the catacombs and showing the doctrines of the bible through living rather than proscribing them through the law. The temptation is great but beware of what you wish for.
Hark 