Monthly Archives: June 2023

Changes in Biblical Studies as Harbinger of Larger Changes

Here is a quick thought. Sometimes changes in society seem to happen quickly. But typically that is because changes have been going on for a very long time, if mostly unseen or unacknowledged. It’s hard to notice such changes, though, until they hit a breaking point and suddenly spill out all at once.

The past few decades, we’ve seen the rise of independent and secular Biblical studies and religious studies. In particular, we’re thinking of the scholarship on syncretism, mythicism, and astro-theology. It’s had growing popularity, ironically built on the Protestant principle that everyone should study the Bible for themselves.

A quickly increasing number of present leading scholars have come around to this kind of non-literalist understanding or religious texts. That is significant when one considers that the majority of them got into this field, specifically Biblical studies, in the first place because they were originally Christians, often fundamentalists, literalists, and apologists.

Take Robert M. Price as an example. He wanted to study the Bible in order to become a better apologist, in order to defend the faith, win converts, and save souls. But it was precisely that study, in giving him encyclopedic knowledge of the ancient world, that deconverted him and led him to atheism.

Even then, he held onto some of the theological baggage of his prior faith, such as historicism (i.e., Jesus was a historical figure). Eventually, that too would be lost and he admitted he was wrong, followed by his writing a book on mythicism and astrotheology. Although other Biblical studies popularizers like Bart D. Ehrman still cling to this last vestige of orthodoxy, if he is slowly moving away from it.

This more critical approach is now becoming mainstream and so a threat to the Pharisaical powers that be. It’s partly due to the opening of public debate on scholarship caused by the democratizing force of the internet, specifically through social media, discussion forums, and Youtube. Conservative Bible schools no longer have a monopoly of gatekeeping what knowledge the public sees.

Yet this field of scholarship didn’t just appear out of nowhere, despite it being suppressed for centuries. All the way at the beginning of Christianity, Justin Martyr was confronted by the pagan parallels to Christian mythology and admitted they were real, but apologetically rationalized them away: the Devil did it!

It’s been an open secret ever since. But the theocratic power and violent oppression of the Catholic Church and later Protestant Churches meant anyone who stated it openly would be censored and likely killed. That only began to change during the early modern revolutionary period when Enlightenment thought challenged numerous orthodoxies, helped along by the moveable type printing press.

Already by the 1700s, some influential intellectuals and writers were arguing for Christianity as mythology. And it began to more widely take hold in the early 1800s. But there was such a counter-revolutionary backlash, with state-sanctioned suppression and authoritarian social control, that this emerging thought almost entirely disappeared from respectable scholarship and public awareness for the next two centuries.

It’s fascinating. Not only how slow change happens, even in the case where the evidence is evidentially overwhelming and rationally undeniable. It indicates something deeper about society, a Zeitgeist that takes hold, even as it’s being denied. Human mentality itself had to change to make new understandings comprehensible and compelling to more people. Then nothing could stop it.

It’s not easy to discern patterns across vast evidence from numerous cultures, religions, and texts. In the case of mythicism and astro-theology, it requires high levels of critical thinking skills and abstract thought, not to mention vast knowledge, often including familiarity with multiple ancient languages. These new scholars are operating at an intellectual level that is rare, though maybe becoming more common as average education level and IQ rises (Flynn Effect).

Social science shows that liberal-mindedness is itself defined by fluid intelligence, cognitive flexibility, cognitive complexity, perspective shifting, ambiguity tolerance, etc. This is why liberal politics and liberal-mindedness, and hence liberal Biblical studies, has increased in society simultaneous with the spread of literacy, education, and neurocognitive development; along with rapid growth of scientific research and technological advancement. We are living in a resultant Renaissance period.

Biblical studies, being the most regressive and stunted field of scholarship, might be the greatest harbinger of change for the very reason it’s been the most resistant to change in being the most hierarchically controlled. Once we see believers-turned-atheists becoming leading scholars in Biblical studies, it indicates there is something going on that is shaking our civilization at it’s foundation.

It doesn’t necessarily or likely mean the end of religion. And it certainly doesn’t mean a loss of the spiritual, moral, and philosophical impulse underlying religion. Such an impulse has never been limited to right-wing reactionaries, much less primarily found among theocrats. What we are seeing now is really no different than what has long created a schism between the priestly class and the prophets, mystics, and religious dissenters.

When listening to the new crop of scientists turned public intellectuals (e.g., Neil deGrasse Tyson), what one hears is a kind of open-minded awe and curiosity that is far from common among present religious leaders. Most modern Westerners, including most Christians, no longer look to ancient Holy Texts to primarily explain the world around them, nor to seek understanding about society and human nature.

The religious right is, in a sense, correct that the left-wing is making science and scholarship into a religion. Or rather leftists refuse to leave their brain at the door when thinking about traditionally religious and religious-adjacent topics. It’s not necessarily an attack on religion, though. But it does mean the kind of religion that has ruled human society and the human psyche for the past couple millennia is finally coming to a close.

On the other hand, even as the category of ‘Religious Nones’ is growing the fastest, many of these people nonetheless retain a strong sense of faith and/or spirituality, or else general openness to the unknown. Interestingly, some studies show that those who’ve had spiritual or supernatural experiences are less likely to attend church. Religion and spirituality, as many have argued, aren’t the same thing — that is no minor point.

Like scholarship, spirituality is about knowing, discerning, and experiencing something for oneself. That is what is changing, the way people approach their lives. The role of the citizen-scholar and the citizen-scientist, having become an ideal during the American and French Revolutions, has spread out to the larger population. We modern Westerners are less likely to merely submit to authority without question. We are entering the age of the citizen-seeker.

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6/21/23 – Often after finishing a post, we worry about not communicating well or somehow not getting people’s attention, not hooking them quickly into what is so fascinating and important, even when or especially when it feels profound to us. That is particularly true when getting no response of likes or comments, as was the case with this post and the two before it. One thing of concern is that we might be perceived as negative, even when to our minds we are being neutral or even positive.

Our writing here is such a case. We see the change in Biblical studies and religious studies as a good thing, and we don’t see it as an attack on anyone. But we’re not sure how many others can see what we see and how we see it. We have a tendency of noticing things that, to others, don’t seem real or relevant or something. Our way of thinking — our emphasis and focus and framing — can be divergent, sometimes to the point of idiosyncratic or just entirely off the radar of the mainstream mind and conventional concerns.

It might simply be outside of the realm of imagination and comprehension for the average person to discern why a particular academic field, of which few think much about, would be an indicator of anything greater than personal interest or, worse still, intellectual masturbation. To most people, it’s an obscure and arcane field of study, disconnected from daily life and real world problems. That is precisely the issue, though. Such an attitude itself is a result of this world-shaking change, since such an attitude would’ve been far less common in the past.

The changes have been so profound in utterly transforming the world around us that, for that very reason, it’s hard for most people to notice anything happened. It’s like the ground shifting under your feet, but as you’re standing on the ground everything and everyone shifted along with the ground. So, as long as you’re looking down at the ground, instead of looking up at the sky, you wouldn’t necessarily know anything had happened — just a momentary tremor that is quickly forgotten again. Or it’s like looking down at the ripple on the shoreline without looking out to the horizon where a tsunami could be seen approaching.

What we’d like to further clarify is that this is not an attack on religion, religiosity, and the religious. We were raised in Christianity, if a hyper-liberal variation. And so we have only positive personal experience of our own religious upbringing. Having not been traumatized by fundamentalism, we never reacted by being polarized into atheism, materialism, and scientism. Our own religiosity has been more informed by a spiritual sense of self and world, not particularly limited to any overly confining and exclusionary dogma. If anything, what we’re doing here is revealing and defending the true and worthy impulse that gets lost under the dross.

A main point we made is that this isn’t a change merely happening outside of religion or to religion but also and most importantly within religion itself. It’s transforming the religious and their sense of religiosity. One could argue that, fundamentally, that impulse behind religion is the same as the impulse behind science. Even fundamentalism ends up being a product of the scientific revolution, as Karen Armstrong argues in pointing out fundamentalist literalism (e.g., pseudo-scientific Creationism) didn’t exist prior to the Enlightenment. It’s a single larger change, but that it’s seen in Biblical studies as well is extremely telling.

Having followed these kinds of fields for decades, we are able to notice the dramatic contrast from what came before. It’s not limited to mythicism and astro-theology having previously been dismissed by Biblical scholars to their now being increasingly entertained and embraced, quickly shifting consensus opinion about what is plausible and probable. The issue is that, in the process, this is altering religious attitude and experience for scholars and non-scholars alike, the impact being the greatest on the general public, in fact, because of influences like the Zeitgeist film that was an imperfect defense but a powerful influence.

Our focus here, though, was on scholars. But the fact that most Biblical scholars start off as Christians, typically fundamentalists, makes it so mind-blowing how intensive Biblical study itself ends up as one of the leading causes of deconversion. Think of an entirely different field of study, that of linguistics (The Power of Language Learning). The former evangelical Daniel Everett studied linguistics in order to go on a mission to convert the heathenish natives. But the Piraha’s language and culture was such a defiant challenge to apologetics that, instead of saving souls, he lost his own faith. As with the Piraha language, academic scholarship and scientific study is also a language that undermines fundamentalism.

This reshapes the very perception of and relationship to religion. In Biblical studies, many of the former fundy scholars, though, talk of their continuing respect and admiration of the religious texts themselves. One scholar, for example, said his study of the Gospel of Mark, in sussing out the parallels to Homeric narrative, led him to have a deeper appreciation of Christian values, such that he retains his Christian identity as an atheist. Similarly, a popular minister and writer like Tom Harpur, in being exposed to mythicism, didn’t have a crisis of faith at all but simply shifted toward a more gnostic, mystic, and Jungian inspiration of a Cosmic Christ. That is hardly an attack on Christianity, considering it arguably adheres closer to original Christianity, in terms of the neoplatonic influence of the Alexandrian Jews.

The threat that right-wing fundies feel is not external but internal, is not primarily from atheists and agnostics but from liberal-mindedness ever creeping further into the Christian population, even to the point that the average person on the right is more liberal than the average liberal was a century ago (e.g., majority support of same sex marriage). The present form of fundamentalism is the walking wounded, likely not to survive as a mainstream phenomenon outside of this century. But Christianity itself and religion in general will continue to adapt and transform as it has continually done for millennia. This will likely mean, as a global civilization, we’ll further move away from religiosity of the book (i.e., literalist dogma of orthodoxy) to religiosity of spiritual experience and practice.

Is this second part of explanation more effective than the original posted text? It’s maybe hard for many Americans, in particular, to sense what a dramatic change this has been. For any generation older than Zoomers, that is to say most of the population, they grew up in a world where mythicism and astro-theology were still taboo and largely unknown in mainstream Biblical studies, media, and politics. Though far more intellectually valid and evidentially supported than fundamentalist apologetics that dominated, this centuries-old area of scholarship was almost completely censored out of any public awareness, strengthened by the simultaneous suppression and silencing of the leftist moral majority.

It was a total shut down of free thought that took hold during the oppressive and propagandistic Cold War. We are only beginning to see the results of that once frozen mentality slowly thawing. What we are living through right now is a revolution of the mind, maybe not unlike what preceded the American Revolution. As even the conservative John Adams understood, revolutions of the mind prepare the way for revolutions of society and politics, as tectonic pressure creates the condition for earthquakes that realign tectonic plates, sometimes utterly reconfiguring the landscape or at least often toppling the largest of human constructions. After the dust settles, what will be left standing and, in response to what fell, what will we rebuild in its place?

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The History of Mythicism
by D.M. Murdock/Acharya S

Union Boss Collusion With Elite Controlled Politics

It’s no accident that, at the height of American labor organizing and unionization (during the brief period of American social democracy), not only was the labor movement more radically leftist but also aligned with independent third parties and leftist-run media outlets, both locally and internationally. Since labor declined, the major US labor unions have become extensions of, not challenges to, corporate capitalism and party machines. This resulted from an internal labor conflict, between left and right wings of the labor movement, that ended with the defeat of combative unionism (revolutionary unionism, class struggle unionism, rank-and-file unionism, social unionism, etc) and the victory of business unionism or mainstream unionism that, in lacking leftist solidarity, has been easily blown about by the fickle winds of the neoliberal DNC elite caught in the sails of labor liberalism. Though to be fair, an earlier generation of labor liberals had been more open to radical leftism and some hope that it might one day return (Andrew Battista, The Revival of Labor Liberalism), a dream of a left-liberal alliance that could be inspiring, if far from present socio-political realities.

Business unionism, in having grown cozy within capitalist realism, is modeled on the hierarchical and bureaucratic structure of corporatocratic big biz and plutocratic cronyism. There is the rub. It’s not only a failure of organization and strategy but also of morality and radical imagination. Those in power listen to money, no matter where that money comes from. The labor aristocracy, who hobnob with plutocratic and corporate elites, are the ones who control the money spigot of labor unions, not the dues-paying members from which the money comes. That is why there is decades of history, as outlined by leftists, of union leadership betraying or undermining the best interests of workers. It’s similar to the reason corporate-funded-and-aligned US politicians are disconnected from their own constituents, not realizing or pretending to not know how far left is the American public. Those political elites use the wealth and resources of the public, the people they’re supposedly representing, to harm the interests of the public. Such is how corruption operates in the US, across party lines, in the public and private sectors, among both corporate and union leadership.

Union bosses, Congressional politicians, or any other category of the wealthy and/or powerful will act according to plutocratic and corporatocratic incentives that are built into the entire socioeconomic order when plutocratic and corporate interests own and control the economic system, political system, deep state (i.e., permanent bureaucracy that is unelected, bipartisan, and continues across administrations without democratic transparency, oversight, and accountability), major institutions, mainstream media, platforms of speech, and various other levers of power, control, manipulation, and influence. In a society that is soft fascist or inverted totalitarian, or some combination of the two, even unions become co-opted by the same corporate interests. It’s the same process by which happens corporate capture of regulatory agencies. The supposed solution becomes part of the problem.

This is precisely the kind of corruption that is absolute and undeniable proof of this being a banana republic. Actual functioning democracy, in countries like the Scandinavian social democracies, have legal protections against such corruption such as limiting or entirely eliminating big money and dark money in politics that otherwise operates as legalized bribery. But the reason we don’t see such democratic and progressive reforms in the US is because most major politicians at present realize that, if we ever did get democracy, they’d never again win another election and would be permanently removed from power. The currently ruling union big wigs surely likewise understand they’d lose position and power if unions operated democratically where majority vote and active participation determined decision-making.

American corporate capitalism, as capitalist realism run by legalized and organized crime syndicates (i.e., transnational corporations), is corrupt. And we are forced to admit that labor unions are inseparable from the moral failure of that economic system. Unions donating money to the Democratic Party doesn’t change that. Political democracy is only possible when there is a democratic economy and democratic culture, an entire democratic society in all areas and at all levels. Unions, as they’ve been captured and co-opted, are constrained by the corrupt system itself. Early labor organizing, instead, challenged and defied the corrupt system, even to the point of illegal strikes and armed resistance, not by asking permission from the corporate elites and corporatocratic politicians. But present American unions operate within the legal system created by the very crony capitalists and monied interests that theoretically they are supposed to be protecting their members against.

Of course, the problem of unions is relative. The main concentration of wealth and power (corporations, the capitalist ownership class, federal government, politicians, party machines, etc) are vastly more corrupt than the worst labor union. But labor unions are so weak and compromised as to have no autonomous power in acting independently of that corrupt power structure. So, it’s not really to blame unions per se, and certainly not to dismiss labor organizing. But it is to suggest that, as long as labor unions operate within anti-democratic systems and are beholden to anti-democratic elites, they will inevitably act according to and promote corruption by default. Then after corrupting union leadership, the corrupt corporate management and crony politicians use labor unions as a scapegoat. Still, it’s less about the unions being directly corrupt than being complicit in the larger corrupt society, if it’s basically the same difference.

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This post is an answer in response to some comments at an r/AskALiberal subreddit discussion thread: Was 2000 a “stolen election”? It’s somewhat frustrating how little defense there is of democracy on the pseudo-liberal ‘Left’. But our thoughts above were an articulation about a specific problem that has plagued mainstream partisan politics. And there is a personal context for our criticalness.

We were a dues-paying member of the AFSCME union for almost a quarter century. But we lost faith in AFSCME when they officially backed plutocratic, corporatocratic, and neoliberal Hillary Clinton in 2016. This was a betrayal of AFSCME members, most having supported Bernie Sanders for president. If a union doesn’t represent union members, then who do they represent when they throw their weight behind the monied interests of a capitalist political machine? What are the dues paying for and where is the money going?

The commenter that brought on our response said that AFSCME had no other choice than to fall in line, presumably under the threat of the powers that be. It was the same response, interestingly, as other commenters gave for Gore’s conceding the stolen election, that he had no choice. That kind of rationalization sounds awfully like the capitalist realism of Margaret Thatcher, that There Is No Alternative (TINA). Such apathetic fear, cynicism, defeatism, or fatalism is what has long fueled the lesser evilism that, with every election, inevitably and predictably worsens political evil.

By the way, AFSCME, in our local government workplace, has almost no effective power at present in having willingly given up the right to strike. Unsurprisingly, all that we describe here and much else has corresponded with a weakening and decline of the the labor Left and rest of the Left with it. Below are more than a few resources to explain what has gone wrong and what were the other alternatives, the other choices that were denied, suppressed, erased, and forgotten. There is always another choice. As one anti-Nazi freedom fighter once said, when the oppressors only offer two choices, always pick the third option.

An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism
by Kim Moody

U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, The Promise of Revival from Below
by Kim Moody

Breaking the Impasse: Electoral Politics, Mass Action, and the New Socialist Movement in the United States
by Kim Moody

Ramparts of Resistance: How Workers Lost Their Power and How to Get it Back
by Sheila Cohen

Reviving the Strike
by Joe Burns

Strike Back
by Joe Burns

Class Struggle Unionism
by Joe Burns

We Are the Union: Democratic Unionism and Dissent at Boeing
by Dana L. Cloud

Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise Hardcover
by Robert Fitch

Solidarity for Sale: Corruption in Labor Unions
by Steve Inskeep

Labor: Mind Your Assumptions
interview with Joe Burns by Stephan Kimmerle

We Need a Labor Movement Willing to Challenge the Status Quo
interview of Joe Burns by Truthout’s Left Voice

Author Joe Burns wants you to take a more radical, militant ‘Class Struggle’ approach to labor organizing
by Guy Oron

Class Struggle Unionism: A Specter to Haunt the Billionaire Class
by Alex Riccio

The return of the fighting union
by Robert Ovetz

How can we build class struggle unionism?
by Peter Hogarth

What Is Class Struggle Unionism?
by Jason Koslowski

When Labor Fought for Civil Rights
by Rich Yeselson

To Win Social Justice, We Must Win the Class War
by Susan Rosenthal

Unions, Democrats, and Working-Class Interests
by John Russo

Labor on the Ropes
by Traven Leyshon

To Renew Working-Class Resistance, the Labor Movement Must Be Democratized
by Bryan Evans, Carlo Fanelli, Leo Panitch, & Donald Swartz

To Deepen Democracy, Give Workers More Say
by Desmond Serrette

Anarchism and the American Labor Movement
by Jeff Stein

Marxism, unions, and class struggle
by Sharon Smith

Beyond Labor Liberalism Towards Building Class Struggle Unionism
by Ken Nash & Mimi Rosenberg

Two Conceptions of Unionism
by Jon Bekken

Business Unionism vs. Revolutionary Unionism
by Dave Neal

Why Does the Union Bureaucracy Exist?
by Tom Wetzel

A “New Labor Movement” in the Shell of the Old?
by Jeremy Brecher & Tim Costello

Labour in Need of Revolutionary Vision
by Jim Selby

Now More than Ever, the Working Class Needs Independent, Democratic Unions
by James Dennis Hoff & Luigi Morris

The Rank and File Strategy
by Kim Moody

The Rank-and-File Strategy is Political
by Jeremy Gong

Answering the Bosses’ Lies About Unions
from Socialist Alternative

The American Utopia of Social Democracy

Utopia literally means ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’, something that doesn’t exist. That is to say it can’t be found in the here and now. But it doesn’t necessarily mean it never can or will exist, or even that it never existed in the past. As far as that goes, neither does it indicate that it isn’t real somewhere else at the present time. The implication, though, is that it’s somehow impossible, at least in this society or under these conditions.

When one is living in an oppressive society, almost every optimistic alternative seems like a utopia, along with any kind of positive reform or change. And in a sense, they are correct in that, of course, a better society obviously doesn’t exist here and now. If you live in a banana republic like the United States and every day you go to work in the authoritarian and hierarchical bureaucracy of a transnational corporation or something along those lines within capitalist realism, even the most basic of real democracy (i.e., self-governance) — direct participation in, influence over, and control of all aspects of one’s life (society, culture, education, media, economics, politics, etc) — is so utopian as to be barely imaginable.

American reactionaries assume (or pretend to believe) and so argue, conveniently biased by the just world hypothesis, that some combination of social Darwinism, plutocracy, kleptocracy, soft fascism, police statism, military imperialism, and inverted totalitarianism is the best of all possible worlds. They take their interpellated ideological abstractions and reify them as an inevitable ideological realism, simply the way the world is. Then they build a totalizing identity politics upon it, conflating it with human nature and so suppressing all awareness of actual human nature. All of this is bundled together and pushed hard by corporate propaganda, until the population is indoctrinated into despair, apathy, and mindlessness.

Just suck it up, all you snowflakes! Any ideological ideal or system that challenges this fatalistic cynicism is utopianism disconnected from reality as it is. It’s doomed from the start; or if it succeeds in gaining power, it will lead to horrific ends. This is the old, repetitive, and tiresome reactionary rhetoric of perversity, futility, and jeopardy; as outlined by Albert O. Hirschman in his book The Rhetoric of Reaction. It’s how the Burkean moral imagination hobbles radical imagination.

Accordingly, in this iron prison logic of this psychosis, even something as basic as social democracy, where all citizens are taken care of, is not possible here. It may be possible in Nordic and Scandinavian countries or in Japan, the reactionary will grudgingly admit. But they’ll add, with world weariness of hard-earned pessimistic realism, that it’s only because those are small countries with homogeneous populations. The United States is not such a country. Sure, there is a kernel of truth there, but it’s overblown, and ultimately dishonest.

All of those other nation-states, not that far back in history, were riven by warring conflict of regional divides and ethnic tribalism. Their present perceived stability, unity, and homogeneity developed out of past conflict, violence, and diversity. This included centuries and millennia of invasions, conquering, and border changes, along with mass waves of immigrants and refugees. Ethno-nationalist identities are fairly recent inventions (e.g., the Italian state was founded in 1861, at a time when most ‘Italians’ didn’t speak the Italian language, much less identify as ‘Italian’). When ethno-nationalism was first enforced on Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the populations clung to local identities of family, kin, and community. It led to a rampant disease that was called ‘nostalgia’, a soul sickness which led conscripted soldiers to sometimes waste away from what at the time was considered a physical illness with its own medical etiology (e.g., brain inflammation).

It wasn’t until the world war era that most Westerners finally came around to more fully identifying with the nation-state. Likewise, patriotism was transformed over time, once having meant proto-leftist solidarity with the people as articulated in the Country Party tradition, and only later being co-opted by reactionaries as a defense of blind allegiance to authoritarian nation-statism. These are some of the many ways that the very foundation of modern reactionary conservatism was built upon the graveyard of traditionalism, the bones of our ancestors made to pantomime reactionary fantasies of a revisionist and anachronistic past, a demented morality play.

It’s interesting to read a supposed utopian story like Island, Aldous Huxley’s last novel, having been published shortly before his death in 1963. When you get at the heart of the society described, it’s basically nothing more than some mix of Anti-Federalism and Radical Whiggism (an ideological tradition passed down from the Country Party), along with social democracy, democratic socialism, and municipal socialism (i.e., sewer socialism), as based on some form of more direct democratic and local self-governance. It also has a thin veneer of anarchist idealism, strangely mixed with the patriotic monarchism in the British imaginary.

In the end, other than being filtered through a Western fantasy of the East, Huxley’s vision of a utopian society is not far off from a number of present well-functioning Western social democracies, if the religious and sexual components are genuinely Eastern. This was actually far easier for a Westerner, particularly in the United States, to imagine when this novel was being written in the 1950s and when it came out in the early 1960s. Though British, Huxley spent the last part of his life in the United States and that had to have shaped his idealism, as that was one of the most idealistic periods in a country that was founded on idealism.

For example, by the 1950s, Milwaukee had a half century of near continuous governance by sewer socialists, both highly successful and highly acclaimed across the country, demonstrably proving that Americans were capable both self-governance and good governance. The popular tv series Happy Days was set in the last years of Milwaukee sewer socialism. There was good reason for why they were so happy, a rare case of genuine nostalgia, but sadly the very narratizing removed the ideological substance of that moral health and public good feeling. That ideological substance was similar to why the mood was so bright elsewhere in the country. The economy was booming and everything was looking up. It helped create a sense of public good, shared fate, and culture of trust.

At the time, McCarthyism was in retreat, progressive policies had lifted up much of the population, social safety nets caught many others from falling through the cracks, progressive taxation redistributed wealth from the super rich to the whole population, higher education was so heavily funded by the government as to be nearly free, inequality and poverty was shrinking as the middle class grew large, labor organizing and power was at its height, the Civil Rights movement was making great strides, numerous inspirational leaders were giving voice to hope, and a large left-wing populist movement was forming nationally.

Multiple presidents from both main parties pushed for and, in some cases nearly passed, what today would be called far left-wing and radically utopian: universal healthcare, universal basic income, etc. Across the entire population, there was a bipartisan sense of so much being possible, that freedom might finally be in the grasp of the American people, after centuries of elite control and oppression. Now something felt different, as old shibboleths were toppled in all directions. In numerous ways, the beginnings of an actual free society was established, even as so much more was held in promise.

Relevant to the discussion here, the 1950s was right in the middle of the American experiment of social democracy. It began to be built with the earlier Populist and Progressive reforms, from Theodore Roosevelt’s monopoly busting to the New Deal(s), Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society. By the 1940s, social democracy was fully established in its basic outline. And then it transformed American society over the following several decades, until being almost entirely dismantled in the 1980s and following (J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Toward Utopia; Ellen Schrecker, The Lost Promise; etc). Dismantled by the very generations that grew up in and benefited from that social democracy, thus in older age pulling the ladder up behind them; and then scapegoating later generations for American failure.

This is what makes the reactionary charge of utopianism so galling. The United States was the original Scandinavian-style social democracy. Reactionaries can only now call the hope for American social democracy a utopia because they were the ones who destroyed it. Yes, a social democracy no longer exists here and now. But the point is a social democracy did once exist and it is well within living memory. We once were seen worldwide as the leaders of freedom, a shining city on the hill that so many others aspired toward. Ironically, it was the world that Ronald Reagan grew up in and so shaped his optimistic personality. Reagan used progressive rhetoric to attack progressivism, while his neoliberal Reaganomics was the most utopian vision ever to be implemented in US history.

But Reagan was only able to appropriate that sense of hope for cynical purposes because public goodwill was already so well established in public opinion. A large part of the Progressive vision came about from an old streak of moral character in the American people, a continuation of the Spirit of ’76. After all, the first social democratic ideas were voiced by the revolutionary generation, such as Thomas Paine’s citizens dividend and Thomas Jefferson’s proposal to equalize the distribution of land. But later on in the 20th century, it also helped to have had the enemy of the Nazis and then the Stalinists, the former having made bigotry so distasteful and the latter having shamed Americans into living up to their own idealism. This gave the radical left leverage to create a more fair and just society.

Sadly, that world is largely gone. And the memory of it is quickly fading, if fortunately many on the left are trying to keep the flame alive. The point is the sense of loss, taken advantage of by dark personality demagogues in fueling the reactionary mind, is very much real. We Americans have lost something and we should be outraged at those who have done us wrong — the American Dream was stolen, not merely lost. But in acknowledging that, we should avoid the trap of revisionist history that seeks to erase the past as it once was. You want to make America great again? Well, in that case, good ol’ fashioned American social democracy would be a good place to start.