The Alt-Right Confronts Louis Hartz

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America.

It seems like an appropriate time. A friend sent me a copy to read and review last fall. Since then, President Trump won the 2016 election. Just yesterday, I posted a video here in which Jason Jorjani proclaimed “the Alt-Right is unequivocally opposed to liberal democracy.”

Louis Hartz famously argued in 1955 that the United States was so dominated by the liberal tradition that non-liberal challengers could never take root here:

“CONSERVATIVES dominate American politics because there is no conservative tradition in American political thought. Liberals are powerless because all Americans are liberals. Americans argue with each other so virulently because there is so little about which they disagree. They elect presidents from distinguished families because they detest aristocracies. Their society is so secure that they feel constantly under attack. The more isolationist their instincts, the more likely they are to view themselves as saviors of the world.

It takes a love of paradox to appreciate the work of Louis Hartz, whose pathbreaking book, “The Liberal Tradition in America,” is celebrating its 50th birthday. An Ohio-born and Nebraska-raised Jew who spent his entire professional life at Harvard, Hartz received instant recognition for his book, which won the American Political Science Association’s Woodrow Wilson Prize in 1956. Hartz influenced scholarship dealing with national identity, the role of the United States in the world and the idea of “American exceptionalism.” …

The rise of President Trump and the Alt-Right has been a major blow to the Hartzian paradigm:

“Trump’s effect on writing a syllabus has been to make this political controversy even more poignant. This is because for the last 50 years, most political-science professors have relied on what has become a standard framework. It comes from Louis Hartz, a Harvard professor, whose famous thesis states that both the left and the right in the United States are dominated by what he dubbed the “liberal tradition” (“liberal” in the older sense of the word and not as the opposite of “conservative”). The liberal tradition is an ideology that affirms individual rights, due process of law, and a separation of powers in government. Hartz believed this tradition was so ingrained in American culture that there had never really been a need for a distinct liberal party or movement but simply what he called “the American Way of Life.” On this view, ideological conflict in the United States has primarily been an intramural quarrel among conservative liberals, centrist liberals, and liberal liberals.

The dominance of the Hartzian paradigm is evident in the way the top textbooks in American politics (used to teach literally thousands of undergraduates every year) uniformly omit any extended analysis of fascism, communism, or any other non-liberal ideology. This omission was certainly standard practice among political scientists who taught introduction to American politics courses at Berkeley. What it allowed professors to do was paint the full ideological spectrum in the U.S. using the same brush. Everyone in America was more or less on the same side. No harsh lines needed to be drawn. Of course, whether intended or not, this assumption implied a kind of liberal triumphalism. Other ideologies could be ignored because all American roads led to one final destination—liberalism. …

The lesson of all this is that the rise of Trump has shattered the Hartzian illusion that American politics is one big, happy, liberal tradition with occasional family spats. Professors of American politics will need to venture much further afield if they are to properly map the actual contours of American ideology.”

There is a grain of truth to this.

In light of all that has transpired over the past two years, I am going to be reviewing the book soon. You could say it is a look back into the sunny optimism of mid-20th century American liberalism. By 1955, Jews had clawed their way into the American elite and were at the historical apex of their power. This elite was about to embark on a bold experiment to remake America in their image. A central ideological tenant of this experiment was the notion that America is an “idea” open to everyone.

Interestingly, Professor Hartz argues in The Liberal Tradition that Americans were born free. We didn’t become “free” on account of the ideology of the Declaration of Independence and American Revolution. Traditionally, the American colonies had been left to their own devices. When the British began to consolidate and centralize the Empire after the expulsion of the French from North America, Americans revolted because this was perceived as an affront to their own traditions. In this sense, I completely agree and it is a critical point that has been lost on later generations.

In the 18th century, the American colonists were already “the freest people in the world.” The ideology of the Enlightenment was grafted on to the American historical experience with lacked feudalism. Jefferson and others borrowed from the Enlightenment notions of their day to justify the American Revolution. In such a way, the rights of Englishmen, as understood in the colonies, was universalized to become “the rights of man.” Rather than shaking off a distant and meddlesome government because of specific grievances like the Proclamation of 1763 and the Intolerable Acts, the American Revolution became an expression of liberal ideology. It became about grand notions that spoke to “mankind” rather than a revolt that had been motivated by the calculated self interest of the colonists.

It doesn’t take much digging to discover 18th century America was shot through with non-liberalism. It wasn’t very liberal to persecute the loyalists and drive them out of the country. It wasn’t very liberal to fight the Indians. Slavery wasn’t very liberal. The status of women wasn’t very liberal. There was the reality of existing practices, some of which dovetailed with liberalism like the smugglers in Boston who wanted to conduct their own trade policy, and then were was a new fashionable liberal ideology. In reality, it was the British and their Indian allies who were fighting for the rights of racial minorities in the conflict.

After the American Revolution, the British had to deal with the problem of all the American slaves who had revolted and fought for the Crown in the conflict. Many of them had ended up in Britain while others had been evacuated to Nova Scotia. The British ultimately dealt with the problem by founding the colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa which was the British counterpart of Liberia. I’ve written here in the past about how both Sierra Leone and Liberia turned out.

Anyway, I will have more to say about this later. Since liberal democracy has become so intertwined with American national identity, I might write a series of articles about the subject.

Note: Have you ever heard of “Operation No Living Thing” in Freetown in Sierra Leone? It says a lot about the universal aspirations of liberal doctrine.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

10 Comments

  1. Cool review. For the last 100 years, there might be some accuracy to the claim that (almost all politics was just different flavors of liberalism. As to no conservative tradition, apparently the Jew Hartz never heard of the Confederacy. (Actually, I am sure the little Jew boy knew abut it and purposely ignored it). Even the more liberal among the Founders, like Thomas Jefferson, were far right conservative by 2017 American standards.
    https://putnamlibertynotes.wordpress.com/

  2. “In the U.S., less than a century of full-blown democracy has resulted in steadily increasing moral degeneration, family and social disintegration, and cultural decay in the form of continually rising divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, and crime. As a result of an ever-expanding list of nondiscrimination__” affirmative action”–laws and nondiscriminatory, multicultural, egalitarian immigration policies, every nook and cranny of American society is affected by government management and forced integration; accordingly, social strife and racial, ethnic, and moral-cultural tension and hostility have increased dramatically.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe DEMOCRACY–THE GOD THAT FAILED

  3. It strikes me that in the early days of the republic americans developed a peculiar defintion of freedom based on their geographical opportunities. They saw it as open ended and unlimited in its possibilities. They ran from the constraining limits of europe which were both spiritual, intellectual and material. When confronted with open land to be claimed they encouraged this unlimited freedom because they saw the land as an endless resource that could never be conquered and opened up all possibilities. They had no underpinning philosophy because they did not need one. They were so busy dealing with wilderness that there was no room to consider the crazy crap like feminism, marxism, etc. The matter of developing culture and limits were not importantt when their were trees to fell and mountains to cross. Today we are approaching limits that the founders never saw.

    We may actually be again in the same position that europe was in when the early settlers left. We are now facing the same limitations that drove our forefathers out of europe but unlike europe we have no social structure and no culture to fall back upon with which to manage…we need now an entirely new way to move forward. The very notion of freedom that was evolved then developed and theirs and our openness is what is killing us today…..how we manage this may determine whether we survive or not as a true nation. We need a new understanding of freedom and probably need to move from Rights to Duties now…..

      • Probably so but i sometimes side with the peasants and sense that they had some good reason for running from the europe they left behind and even reason in their comprehension of freedom and equality and rights. It just could not last under present circumstances…we have allowed a distortion to enter our minds.

        One of the problems it seems to me is that the concepts of the founders have been taken out of the social context in which they were conceived and thus we have lost the original meaning. The idea of equality for instance has gone way outside the original conception. The idea of immigration as well is way beyond the orginal intention.

        We need to regain the earlier understanding of things and reconstruct the meaning of ideas in terms of their actual intent. Possibly then we could better realize the truth behind the countries origins and make better sense of where we are today and how we got here.

        I am not in a position to know the answer since i have limited knowledge of enlightenment philosophers but i can certainly see the concerns represented in any path forward….the founders had a pretty good approach with their notion of republicanism, somehow we sidetracked and got way off into democracy and its failures are for sure surfacing during my lifetime. Even so their balance of powers approach has somehow managed to find all three powers in a very corrupted state today.

        We need a national discussion again on who we are and what we will preserve….or just divide ourselves up on the basis of shared ideas. But who is actually making the distinctions anymore and putting forward the ideas by which we can reorganize….everything is nothing but predisposition and emotion….tradition seems lost, religion is failing, ideology is deeply flawed, philosophy is looked down upon and science is running fullspeed into uncharted and probably very dangerous places….we have reached the logical extreme of our assumptions….we are unbalanced and on a crash course with natural reality.

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