Pointless video post – ‘بندر لندن’ by عجم

Iranian-British roots band Ajam عجم has so far only put out one full-length album, Raghse Mardooneh رقص مردونه, but it’s a high-quality one all the same! This one was recommended to me by Dr. Amir Azarvan over at Amirica. It is a strange mix of folk, beat and hip-hop elements that, to be honest, took some time to grow on me; but grow on me it did. This one - written about the police of London, or so I would imagine (I have only just begun learning Persian) - is a particularly contagious earworm. Happy listening, gentle readers!

Appealing to the wrong dystopian author

The recent high-profile altercation between two Yale staff and a handful of Yale students has unfortunately brought in all the usual suspects in the American nattering class (Friedersdorf, Chait, Goldberg, Drezner, Hinderaker, etc.) into a discussion of ‘political correctness’, ‘free speech’, ‘illiberal leftism’ and the rest of it. As usual, the focus seems squarely aimed in all the wrong places. One way in which this is done is that several commentators (including Chez Pazienza and Brendan O’Neill) and have taken to describing the students’ position as Orwellian. When used in this way, what they mean is that their position is reminiscent of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

But that’s not anywhere close to the right analogy. What Orwell was describing was a totalitarian state which uses total surveillance and the manipulation, simplification and artificial restructuring of language to make people afraid of, and psychologically incapable of, behaving or thinking in a way that the state does not approve. If anything, the inappropriate descriptions of the issues at stake Yale are in fact more Orwellian than the actions of the students themselves. Twitter and YouTube have made it so that Big Brother is always watching you, and your every action in a public space (and in some private spaces) is instantly made available for the scrutiny of the masses, of the media and of the State. And the repeated restructuring of Yale campus politics into a national rubric that opposes two abstract political concepts, ‘political correctness’ against ‘free speech’, impoverishes a discussion that requires greater depth. The behaviour of the American nattering classes reflects much more directly the themes of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Allow me to be clear. I am just such an illiberal leftist as some among these self-appointed champions of an abstract principle of ‘free speech’ decry. I hold that measures of censorship or curtailment of absolute free expression, in the right circumstances and as long as it is done for the right reasons, can be completely justified. But on those grounds – again, at the risk of engaging in the same kind of Orwellian judgement of a situation to which only the Twitter-YouTube Panopticon grants me access – I cannot endorse or approve at all the kind of behaviour evinced by the Yale students who confronted Dr. Nicholas Christakis on campus. The shrieking and hectoring of the student in question strikes me as rude, selfish and self-absorbed. But more to the point, the reasoning is profoundly hostile to the aims of any properly-oriented censorship! The university is clearly expected, not to educate into truth or to encourage self-reflection in the Socratic sense, but to provide ‘comfort’ and a ‘safe space’ for the students. To provide a surrogate ‘home’ to the students. Striving for truth is not the end goal, but instead a perpetual hedonistic puerilism, and a surrogate society which takes the place of the natural family.

O brave new world, that has such people in ‘t!

Yes, I am arguing that the dystopia we’re staring into is less what Orwell imagined, but rather more along the lines of what Huxley did. The devaluation of natural parenthood; the pursuit of sex and other materialistic distractions for purely hedonistic reasons; the use of education not to prime youth for the pursuit of any kind of transcendent truth in adulthood, but rather to condition students to function, purely ‘technically’, in pre-allocated social roles. This dystopia is what underwrites the demands for the creation of ‘safe spaces’, in which the flight from pain and emotional distress is given priority over self-reflection and inquiry. What is frightening about the Yale students’ demands is not that they hold the reins of state power (yet), or that they have any control over the way in which information is gathered or disseminated to the public, but rather that they exemplify the hive mindset hinted at by Huxley, violently intolerant of anything which disturbs their ‘comfort’.

More a propos to the discussion, though, is not the environment of the university. We subsist in a culture where individual, consumer preferences reign over all else – over concrete ties to place or to history or to family, for example. If I may paraphrase and slightly elaborate on Jacob Levy’s point for a moment: on the basis of consumer preference, we engage in self-segregation by race, by class and by ‘culture’. This self-segregation is perpetuated by our choices in city and neighbourhood planning, as well as by our consumer choices. Within the news media we listen to, only a very narrow band of opinion and personal views are tolerated – again, all in the name of consumer preference. We medicate children in an attempt to get them to conform to a technical model of public education that treats knowledge as a consumer commodity and teaching as something akin to retail. Still more to the point, we have raised them in a cultural environment wherein marriage is considered a contract-relationship, and wherein divorce can occur over even minor disagreements. And somehow we act surprised when these children, raised in such environments, have difficulty brooking or countenancing disagreement themselves… some self-awareness of where responsibility lies in this equation seems called-for.

The Iranian principle in Rustaveli’s epic

Tariel, Avtandil and Pridon

Man in the Panther’s Skin (ვეფხისტყაოსანი Vefxistyaosani) is a marvellous work of literature, Georgia’s national epic poem, composed during the reign of Holy Right-Believing Tamar, Empress of Georgia, by the poet Shota Rustaveli. Even in the English translation by Marjory S. Waldrop, some portion of the original poem’s power and depth shines through; the tales of love between Avtandil and Tinatin, and between Tariel and Nestan-Darejan, would be moving enough in any language. Western readers can understand easily enough the martial ideals, those of knight-errantry and courtly love, at play in Man in the Panther’s Skin. But the cultural context of the entire work is in fact Iranian; as Shota Rustaveli himself notes, his is a ‘Persian tale, now done into Georgian’ (Vefxistyaosani 16). In fact, it is typical of the reign of Holy Right-Believing Tamar – herself more than half-Ossetian; who used for herself the Persian Imperial title ‘Shahanshah’; whose second marriage and love-match was to her Ossetian general and distant cousin, David Soslan; and whose most trusted nobles, the brothers Mkhargrdzeli, were Christian Kurds – that the cultural output of Georgia’s Golden Age of political independence should be Parsophil in the strongest possible degree.

Georgia has had a long and amiable contact with the Alans (Ossetians), a Christianised Iranian people, manifested both in Tamar’s heritage and her choice of husband. Its on-and-off imperial-tributary relationship with Iran stretches all the way back to the Achaemenid and Arsacid dynasties and all the way forward to the Qajars. This history gives it a prime vantage point at the edge of the Iranian mir, the world of Greater Iran. The Iranian principle hinted at by Aleksey Khomyakov, the Oriental civilisational principle of spiritual and creative freedom, the preference for poetry and song, is exemplified firstly by the fact that it is an epic poem in the tradition of Abolqasem Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh that crowns Georgia’s Golden Age. But further than that, the Iranian principle is manifested in the poem itself, in its character and in its moral outlook.

Rustaveli’s continued use of celestial metaphors for each of his main characters – the knights Tariel and Avtandil, and their respective lovers Nestan-Darejan and Tinatin – is the first hint. Many times they are referred to as ‘sun’ and ‘moon’; at other times they are described in the language of ‘rose’ and ‘nightingale’, or likened to various precious stones. Another such hint is the all-important value that each of the characters places on the spoken word – an oath unbreakable even to the point of death. Tariel swears himself to Nestan-Darejan, and after she is engaged to the Khwarazmshah has to prove his oath to her in the bloodiest possible way. Likewise Avtandil, who swears a brotherly pact with Tariel, absconds from the court of his king Rostevan in order to fulfil his oath, even though doing so certainly means alienating the king and possibly never seeing Tinatin again. The tragic potentials of the oaths sworn by the lovers in this epic are what drive the story; an audience steeped in Iranian cultural expectations would have seen the spiritual struggles as much an integral part of Tariel’s and Avtandil’s heroism as their feats of physical and martial prowess.

But there is even in these unbreakable bonds, a joy that surpasses and eclipses the entire realm of necessity. As Tariel exclaims to Avtandil toward the end of the poem, ‘I greatly hate too much fear, respect and ceremony in a friend, I hate unbroken sternness, gloominess, majesty; if one be a hearty friend let him tend towards me!’ (Vefxistyaosani 1464) In matters of love no less, Rustaveli condemns necessity and champions a spiritual freedom: Nestan-Darejan’s choosing Tariel as her husband is something Rustaveli celebrates without reservation, and the rebellion she inspired in Tariel against her parents’ intention to marry her to a Khwarazmian Turk is ultimately cast in a heroic light.

However, in plain keeping with the Iranian civilisational principle as described by Khomyakov, Rustaveli is also clear: spiritual freedom does not entail libertinism, levelling or political democracy. Rustaveli has a natural inclination toward a strong and vigorous monarchy, impressing on the reader the virtues of Rostevan and Tinatin as ideal monarchs, characterised by generosity and fair dealing with those they rule. Rustaveli’s inclination is hierarchical and anti-bourgeois. The passionate heroism of the nobility (in Avtandil and Tariel) and the steadfast honour of the labouring classes (in Avtandil’s servant Shermadin) are both cast in a favourable light; however, the representatives of the capitalistic merchant class (Usen in particular) are regularly depicted as cowardly, drunken, greedy, lascivious and false-to-oaths. Usen’s wife Patman, though, proves herself capable of heroism on multiple occasions, on behalf of Nestan-Darejan, a fellow woman in distress and captivity.

Rustaveli is sometimes cited as a ‘humanist’, though this would entail a parallel with Renaissance-era Italy that is wholly unwarranted and out-of-tune with his cultural, moral and religious commitments. It is still somewhat anachronistic, but probably closer to truth, to claim Rustaveli as a neo-Platonist and as a personalist, concerned as he is with the spiritual lives of his characters. Yet even this does not entirely capture the close kinship either in form or in substance that Rustaveli’s work has with the Persian poetic tradition, and casts Rustaveli unwitting into the role of a Western-facing writer – which, as might be discerned from his subject matter, is far too simplistic a role for such a talented and sensitive poet. Greater attention ought to be paid to the transmission of Parsophil ideals in Holy Georgia’s most celebrated author.

Blessed Martyr Elias (Fondaminsky)

Four Martyrs: UL, S. Maria (Skobtsova); UR, S. Demetrius (Klepenin);
LL, S. Elias (Fondaminsky); LR, S. George (Skobtsov)

Blessed Martyr Elias (Fondaminsky), honoured on the New Calendar today, also known under the nom de guerre of Bunakov, was a close associate and co-martyr of Righteous Martyr Maria (Skobtsova) of Paris, her family and the Paris circle through which she operated the Orthodox Action social charity. A Jew by birth, he was drawn by his ill-fated elder brother Matthew into the same vein of revolutionary politics that Mother Maria was, and felt the same attachment to the narodnichestvo of the Social Revolutionary Party that Mother Maria had, soon becoming one of its leaders. Elias wed his childhood friend, Emily Gavronskiy, in 1903, whose inclinations toward Orthodox Christianity almost certainly influenced him later in his life. In 1906, however, he found himself fleeing - as many left-wing intellectuals of that era did - to France, where he joined the circle of Orthodox activists, clerics and philosophers that included Archimandrite Lev (Gillet), Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, Nicolas Berdyaev and the notorious terrorist-turned-counter-revolutionary Boris Savinkov. He returned to Russia in 1917, barely escaped capture by the Bolsheviks, and took part in the conference at Iași to overthrow the Bolsheviks.

However, in spite of his disillusionment with revolutionary politics, Elias never gave up his commitment to radical politics nor his social service to the poor and disenfranchised. He saw a hope for Russia’s national salvation in what Constantine Skorkin calls, in his brief essay The saintly Eser, an ‘original synthesis of Christianity, socialism and autocracy’. (God bless all such syntheses! Solzhenitsyn’s was just another such, as was that of Saint John of Kronstadt, as was that, albeit in a more amorphous form, of the Slavophils he followed. And not for nothing was Official Nationality founded on a similar three-legged stool!) Maria Skobtsova came to Paris in 1923 with her husband and children and soon immersed herself in charitable work and in the Paris community of Russian émigrés and exiles; she soon befriended Elias Fondaminsky, who shared her politics and religious convictions. Of them their mutual friend Theodore Pianov said: ‘It is difficult to say who had the greater influence on whom, Mother Maria on him or him on Mother Maria.’ He played an active role in the founding of Maria Skobtsova’s Orthodox Action, though the declining health of his wife toward the end of the 1920’s, and her death in 1935, prevented him from doing much active social work.

Given the opportunity to flee for a third time, this time from the advance of the Nazis in 1941, he chose to stay and share the fate of his fellow Jews. This choice meant a life of poverty and eventually his death. Lay theologian George Fedotov remarked about this choice: ‘In his last days he wished to live with the Christians and die with the Jews’; Mother Maria, herself within three years to be arrested and sent to a saint’s reward together with her son and her spiritual father Demetrius Klepenin, said of him: ‘It is out of dough like this that saints are made’. Elias was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Compiègne, where he accepted Orthodox baptism among the prisoners; after this he was sent to Auschwitz and there martyred at the hands of the Nazis.

Blessed Elias, witness for Christ Our Lord amongst the poor and the downtrodden, pray to God for us!

Many thanks to Jim Forest of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship and to Constantine Skorkin!

FOLLOW-UP:

Some of my other blog-posts about Saint Ilya Fondaminsky, his thought and his writings can be found here:

• Bunakov, Russian social thought and the Eurasian way
• The response of the awakened East

Zoroastrian distributists

I just happened upon the most remarkable website!

Holos means the Whole. Chrestian comes from a Greek word meaning ‘useful to’. Holochrestianism is about ‘being useful to the whole’ or ‘serving the common good’.

By Democracy we mean that political influence is widely distributed. We believe power should be shared among a large number of people. Nevertheless we also believe that power should be wielded by those most able and inclined to wield it to good effect. This implies both that people need to work at developing the ability to be good political actors and that not everybody will have the same abilities or should wield the same amount of power.

All of which I am in favour of, naturally, from a political point of view. But wait, there appears to be more...

Holochrestian Democracy is not just a way of running a society but also a project to create the conditions that a Good Order of Society be achieved – in other words primarily the creation of the Holochrestian Demos. This process is one that could happen from the grassroots upwards with many individuals working to build little ‘droplets’ of the Holochrestian Demos. Each droplet being a small cluster of people orientating themselves to the task at hand, growing the strength of their association, strengthening their mutual bond of trust, discovering and developing the group culture and modes of action and greater resilience in adversity. Then educating and developing themselves to serve the wider common good with greater commitment to the goal of a well-ordered society, greater enlightenment to reality and greater capability of useful action.

Such a process is one that will be or will at least look similar to the growth of a religious movement. In the first instance it is up to each leader of each droplet to decide on his own religion. Nevertheless the chances are that they will find assistance within the long-standing religious traditions such as Jesuchristianity and Mithraism.

This blog promotes Mithraism (or Zoroastrianism) as our preferred religious tradition while recognising the huge contribution that Christians have made and continue to make. In particular we recognise the value of the Christian Social Teachings also known as the Catholic Social Teachings which are largely based on a natural law approach and are relatively accessible to non-Christians. We also see a lot of common ground between our Holochrestian Democracy movement and the older Christian Democracy movement.

Modern Zoroastrians, finding common ground with localism, Christian democracy and distributism? Sounds like a particularly awesome idea! The website features several articles authored by Chesterton expert Dale Ahlquist. And this view in the Zoroastrian community is apparently one with no small amount of backing elsewhere. Ervad Marzban J Hathiram of the Parsi website Frashogard has posted a touching obituary to one of India’s great advocates of local organic farming, the lately-departed Bhaskar Save, celebrating his fight ‘against corporate cronyism and the machinations of pharma and agro multinationals’. Sounds like as good a fight as any!

Зеленый-коллективистический-охранительный христианский персонализм Солженицына

I just finished reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Letter to the Soviet Leaders. As with everything Solzhenitsyn writes, it is truly a pleasant surprise, and he reminded me much more strongly of Wendell Berry or Edward Abbey than anyone else, or of the Chinese Confucian philosopher Jiang Qing. In common with the last, his primary outlook is a conservatism that is informed at the deepest possible level by an ecological conviction, a profound and abiding suspicion that his beloved country is despoiling and destroying itself through its ideological commitments to endless economic growth, to limitless technological mastery and to a spiritually-deadening consumerism. His detestation of the Soviet system is primarily a detestation of its ideology, and the way in which that ideology is poisoning ‘the soil and the waters and all of Russian nature’ – as well as the human ecologies of the family and of the society.

Three charges he levels at the Soviet ideology: firstly, that it is barrelling toward a needless and catastrophic war with China (one which by God’s grace never happened!); secondly, that it is pursuing a model of industry which is harming Russia’s natural environment while leaving vast swathes of Siberia underdeveloped; thirdly, that it is wasting the talents and the spiritual character of its people, particularly its women and children, in useless and degrading endeavours. And above all these charges he issues a much broader attack on the Soviet ideology, and the way in which it blankets all inquiries in a thick miasma of lies. Solzhenitsyn doesn’t have a problem – and indeed, he takes considerable pains given the polemical thrust of his Letter to make clear that he doesn’t have a problem – either with collective farming or with an authoritarian mode of government. He merely insists, true to the Slavophil roots of his ideas, on the older forms of collectivism, some voluntary (the village, the town) and some less-so (the family). He even champions the original intent of the local soviet, and asks that they be given the authority which they had been promised from the start.

If this Letter is on one side a broadside against Soviet overreach, against the ideological make-the-world-anew zeal which dumps toxic industrial and nuclear wastes into Russia’s lakes and rivers whilst fomenting revolution abroad, on the other side it is a patriotic call for the Russian town and the Russian village. It is a conservationist plea for the Russia whose towns were ‘made for people, horses, dogs—and streetcars too… humane, friendly, cosy places, where the air was always clean, which were snow-clad in winter and in spring redolent with garden-smells’. Rather than being merely a jeremiad against Soviet authoritarianism, it is also a plea for the elder Russia, whose ‘authoritarian order possessed a strong moral foundation’, that of ‘Christian Orthodoxy’. Over and against the Soviet emphasis on regimenting the lives of its women and children, Solzhenitsyn desires to liberate women from the degradations of the workplace, and children from the regimentation of an inhumane school system which, not allowing any room for personality in the child, also allows no room for the natural respect which schoolteachers are rightly due.

The attentive reader will be struck by the twin edges of his thrusts. There is ample reason for the West to have begun to distrust Solzhenitsyn, because practically all of the critiques he levelled first and most powerfully against the Soviets, could indeed be turned again and levelled against the modern West. Solzhenitsyn’s Letter makes only this explicit reference to the West: that in losing a war to North Vietnam, it has lost its confidence and moral courage, and has ‘grown weak and effete’. But forty years later, with the Soviet Union gone and one sole superpower left standing victorious, what part of the Ideology Solzhenitsyn decries, what part of the faith in Progress, can we not own? True, we are not Marxist. But do we not risk war with China over ideological differences? Do we not neglect our own countryside and spend our efforts in shipping arms and revolution abroad? Do we not choke our air with emissions and befoul our waters with the byproducts of fracking? Do we not make dual-earner households a necessity of the family’s economic survival? Do we not invade every home with television, laden with lies and propaganda?

The economic and political elites of the West all but disowned Solzhenitsyn because he would not fall in line with the dogmas of democratic capitalism. But now it is more necessary than ever to listen and to heed his green, cooperativist, conservationist and Christian personalist epistle to his homeland.

Does North American cultural history provide for a ‘third option’?

Cross-posted from Front Porch Republic and Solidarity Hall:

Having read several books on American history recently, including Colin Woodard’s book American Nations, itself based partly on David Hackett Fischer’s four-nation thesis in Albion’s Seed and sociologist William Graham Sumner’s thesis on American Folkways, there are several particularly interesting directions which open themselves up for discussion. Woodard’s treatment of American history as a series of ethno-national conflicts within and beneath the governments on the American continent is intriguing and in some ways highly appealing, particularly for those of us who value culture and those institutions which lie outside and under our current corporate-consumerist climate and partisan politics. Some of us may even want to nod along understandingly at Woodard’s invocation of ‘deep-seated preferences and attitudes’. At the same time, though, Woodard has an interest in tying his thesis directly into an analysis of American politics that never really quite translates, and as a result masks several blind spots.

The analysis of the nations themselves is easy enough to understand, and even defensible enough; the characterisations are compelling and in large part intuitive to the American imagination, even if, perhaps, a few of the particulars may be quibbled over. But part of the problem is that there are political currents on the governmental level which need to be explained in terms other than the ones he gives. Woodard expresses in the most vehement and polemical terms his hostility to the idea, for example, that there is anything in her Loyalist history which distinguishes Canadian from American society – and holds up instead the idea that Canadian society is better explained by a different configuration of dominant cultural-national strands (those of Midland America, New France and Yankeedom) than the coalitional confrontation that prevails in her southern neighbour (between Yankeedom and the Deep South). It’s a just-so story: the fact that it ‘just so’ happens to mesh perfectly with his thesis seems, well, a trifle suspect.

Woodard still has to confront that Canada does have a Loyalist history, and that that history still has some pull over the Canadian imagination, though that pull has been declining over the past thirty-five years or so. There is an ideal of peace, order and good government in Canada which is in some ways profoundly conservative, yet which opens itself up to considerations of social embeddedness and common good that have largely been the stock-and-trade of the political left. There has been, in short, a red Tory political option in Canada which gets relatively short shrift here. If we imagine, as Woodard does, that the ideological priorities of modern progressivism can be explained by a national-cultural alliance led by Yankeedom, and that those of modern movement conservatism are the result of an alliance led by the Deep South – what then explains this historical strand in Canadian politics?

Woodard states explicitly that the Loyalist emigration (mostly from the Midlands and from New Netherland) was motivated primarily by economic and political necessity, as well as by a British policy incentive of cheap land in Upper Canada to new settlers. Furthermore, he argues that the Loyalists lacked cultural cohesion – which seems to be something of a contradiction. One of the distinguishing marks of Midland culture is its pluralism, after all. Another tack he takes is the division between ‘true’ and ‘late’ Loyalists: this also doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny unless one subscribes to the myth that all the ‘true’ Loyalists were wealthy, since it seems the mark of the ‘late’ Loyalist was his poverty. The explanation of a Canadian national consciousness is never made particularly clear, and the answer to that question is begged. Is the red Tory option a natural cultural outgrowth, a political expression of Midland preferences and ideals? Is it something imposed from above, a kind of alien ideological conformity imprinted by the British Crown and an elite eager to retain its transatlantic ties? Or is it something else entirely?

Allow me to disclose some of my personal biases here. Reading Woodard’s book, I could not help but identify keenly with the postulated Midland culture. My cultural priorities have been shaped by the peace church tradition. I was brought up in a Mennonite church, alongside children of Midland expats from Goshen. Additionally, my paternal family tree partakes heavily of Quaker and immigrant radicalism. It would be personally gratifying, in a ‘nationalistic’ sense, to think that the Midland identity is robust enough to support its own, ‘third-option’ political programme. And I think there is some support for that idea. But the proposition of a ‘third option’ arising from the Midland folkway can’t be simply assumed for vanity’s sake, or for the sake of proving (or disproving) a thesis of cultural distinctiveness that undercuts national borders. This is how Woodard describes the Midlands:

Arguably the most ‘American’ of the nations… founded by English Quakers, who welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate, even apathetic.

There are elements of this that might explain some aspects of the red Tory ideal. The suspicion of ideology has always been a hallmark of the high Toryism from which many red Tory thinkers and statesmen from Sir John A. MacDonald onward have drunk deep. And the sympathy with which some red Tories have embraced non-Marxist ‘left’ economic theories like distributism and social credit might indicate a certain affinity with the communitarian utopianism of the English Quakers. And one might even argue that the red Tory affinity for government presence in the national life has been relatively selective, though the markedly unenthusiastic response of Ron Dart to the use of the term ‘red Toryism’ by Phillip Blond would indicate that Canadian conservatives have historically been more amenable to government interventions in economic life than even their British conservative counterparts have been, let alone their American ones.

The Loyalist option was drummed out of existence in the Thirteen through force of arms, being displaced by the ideologies of Hamilton, Jefferson and (later) Jackson. But it is possible that some remnants, some fragments and echoes of the Loyalist idea have been carried within the Quaker and German immigrant culture that spread out in a narrow band to the west until it reached the Great Plains. The radical movement which encompassed the Greenback Party, the Farmers’ Alliance and the People’s Party, though by no means monarchical in any way, shape or form, still nevertheless carried about it more than a little of the old high-Tory moralism. It stood firmly on the idea that government should not be run for the benefit of the mercantile interests of the Northeast nor for the benefit of the plantation owners of the Southeast. Neither were they particularly bedazzled by the rugged individualist mythos of Andrew Jackson preferred in his native Appalachia, being attracted instead to cooperative self-help. They represented a true ‘third option’ in American politics.

The Greenback Party grew in the wake of the Civil War out of the theories put forward by New York City dry-goods merchant Edward Kellogg in his book Labour and Other Capital, and in various other venues under the anagrammatic pseudonym Godek Gardwell. But interestingly enough, enthusiasm for his monetary ideas was most ardent in places like Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania – exactly along the narrow belt which Woodard points to as the Western passage of expansion of the Midland ‘nation’. So much so, in fact, that using greenbacks – the paper currency that had been issued by the government, rather than by a private bank, during the Civil War – to forgive farmers’ debts to the banks, came to be called the ‘Ohio idea.’ The Greenback Party itself was founded in Indianapolis, and to an intriguing extent, it represented the old Loyalist alliance between New York City businessmen and Midland farmers. The two most visible proponents of Greenback theories in the 1870’s were native New York inventor Peter Cooper (no relation to yours truly) and congressman Samuel F. Cary of Cincinnati, Ohio.

After the Greenback Party collapsed in the 1880’s, Kellogg’s monetary ideas hopscotched into the nascent Farmers’ Alliance, which was busily making inroads amongst poor farmers of the Appalachian interior, who were then fleeing into Texas from permanent debt-servitude to the furnishing merchants of the coastal Deep South. Once again latching onto ideas of self-help through farmers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, they met with limited success – largely because vanishingly few commercial banks (North or South) would lend to them, seeing more profit in siding with the furnishing merchants. They began to understand that their livelihoods and their self-determination stood or fell on national economic and monetary policies which would discipline usurers large and small – and so the ideas of Kellogg and the veteran greenbackers of New York City, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana began to spread westward.

But Alliance Populism – though it took root solidly amongst poor whites and poor blacks both in the Deep South and throughout Appalachia toward the end of the 1880’s – retained a firm base of support in the West. The states which most reliably supported local Alliances, which sent itinerant lecturers into the Deep South to organise, and which stood by the comprehensive Omaha Platform of 1892 even as the People’s Party’s own statesmen were busy selling them out to the Democrats for short-term electoral gain, were North Dakota, Kansas and northern Texas – all of which are very notably represented in Woodard’s geographical description of the Midlands.

This strand of American history rather stands witness against Woodard’s description of the Midlands as quiescent, ‘moderate, even apathetic,’ and the holder of the key ‘swing vote,’ as though it could not be home to independent political ideas of its own! On the contrary, both the Quaker folkway and the achtundvierziger immigrants newly-transplanted from revolutionary central Europe gave articulation to a political tradition that was radical, populist and amenable neither to bland financial-corporate Yankee liberalism, nor to crassly avaricious oligarchical Deep Southern rapine. It certainly did not acquiesce quietly to the demands of the ‘progressive society.’ It is no accident at all, and certainly no surprise, that thinkers of a certain radical Tory persuasion in Britain – thinkers like G. K. Chesterton, A. J. Penty, A. R. Orage and Major C. H. Douglas – picked up on some of these ideas, and some of this anti-usury activism, that had gestated in the formerly-Loyalist regions of America. Naturally, they drew them up in specifically British forms. Further, it is no accident that half a generation later, on the plains frontier of the Canadian West, the ideas of Major Douglas would give rise to a relatively-successful social-credit movement. Domestically, in the state of Nebraska, the populist idea would find a full-throated advocate in the critical student of Marx and Freud, and brilliant historian, Christopher Lasch.

The utopian, radical Quaker potentials of Middle American society have unfortunately undergone something of a dormancy in recent years, just as the red Tory ideal has to our north. If at least part of Woodard’s thesis is correct, though, and American folkways are still present even under a homogenising globally-minded consumerism, then perhaps there is reason to hope that we haven’t yet heard the last of Midwestern populism.