The original for this is David S. Landes'
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Chapter 22. The book is a splendid treatise on the rise of Europe, and why, and dovetails well with a reading of Jared Diamond's
Guns, Germs and Steel which, being more anthropology than history-based (albeit well-versed in both!) tends to get wider reading among the left.
In Chapter 22, Landes discusses the peculiar circumstances that led to Japan, in many ways the most alien of the world's culture to Europe, (check out Ruth Benedict's
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword if you need some substantiation for that claim), to becoming the first partner in the emerging global
civilization...to even making a play for taking the West's dominance for itself.
In my opinion, the Japanese were scarce more than three generations behind the Europeans in social and technological development at the time of first contact with the Portuguese, but were already in danger of sliding back into the stasis that had aborted several other promising pre-machine civilizations in the past (among them the Romans and the Chinese); contact, rather than shocking Japan into inaction, galvanized the course of technological progress, albeit with Cliff's Notes.
How ready were the Japanese? In 1543, a Portuguese sailing vessel was blown off course and made landfall at Tangeshima Island, where the local daimyo bought two muskets off the Portuguese and immediately ordered his swordsmith to fashion copies.
Through observation, trial and error, the Japanese were able to accomplish this, to the point that the islands were awash in rifles of Japanese manufacture by the year 1575, when 3,000 rifles at the Battle of Nagashino defeated a force of samurai at least three times more numerous.
Suffice to say that the Japanese elites profited from contact with Europe -- so long as it remained on their terms, giving them progressively superior means to obtain impeccably conservative ends (such as seizing and maintaining power) and did not upset the overall social order.
A similar thing happened in the Americas; American progressive ideas and inventiveness gave American conservatives the means to wrest control of North America away from Britain. Alas, you turn on and off revolution like a light-switch. As with the daimyos of 16th century Japan, the conservatives in America learned that they had a tiger by the tail, and would do their utmost to place back in the cage or, if uncontrollable, to kill.
So, we're going to re-write the Contact with Europe narrative a wee bit, shoehorn it into the American experience, just to see how credible the fit is to our good friends, the American reactionaries.
In this narrative, we're going to replace 'Japanese' with 'the [American] conservatives', and 'Europeans' with 'the [American] liberals'.
And thus it begins
In the early going, conservatives were eager learners from liberals because they held unlimited aspirations. Their mythology told of their being the place of the Second Coming of the Son of God, that America was to be the site of the Second Jerusalem, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. They thought of themselves as a people specially chosen, warrior-dominators with all of the Earth as their legitimate domain.
They had long been culturally subordinate to Europe, takers rather than givers, students rather than teachers. Their writing and culture were European, as was almost all of their literature. Almost all crafts, domestic and industrial, derived from Europe. Yet learning never made them feel smaller; on the contrary, they thought themselves inherently superior to the Europeans.
So, when the American conservatives first recognized the liberals among their own brethren, the imaginative, the creative, the purposeful and liberated individual minds set free to shape their own vision of a new world, they were quick, at first, to shrug and learn these new ways, as well.
And out of that early union between tradition and progress, much good was effected, including the birth of a new nation. Those who held status and wealth and prestige were now patriots and progressives, too...yet, they remained in their minds superior, in control of the situation. Many ex-Tories converted in droves to Patriots, and the trend continued apace.
The vogue for liberalism seem destined to sweep all. The new ideology had much success among local rulers, especially since it had given them their new domains, and even more among the marginal members of a hardy yet heavily-exploited population. One does not invoke the word freedom to a general audience insincerely, save at one's peril. These were classical conversion strategies: Gain buy-in from elites, then let them do the conversion work on your behalf, or advocate for the downtrodden (or the enslaved) by lending them moral and material support.
Many traditionalists became progressives out of conviction, setting aside brittle paradigms of life and faith in favor of transformative doctrines, of the empowerment of science and politics. Benjamin Franklin, perhaps a bit too loudly for his contemporaries, celebrated his self-induced liberation from the fold.
Progress, then, was a path not only to control over one's life, and the lives of others, but also over one's soul. It was a heady draught.
It was also a threatening venom to those who preferred to run things the old-fashioned way; and in time that current would reassert itself, for those who held power and those who coveted it from abject weakness were both frightened of the changes in their midst.
Traditionalist gnawed at the growing tolerance for liberal values, especially those challenging the literal text of the Bible (King James version, thank you very much), and suspected that the same revolutionary upheaval that gave birth to America could just as easily throw what good there was in the old ways into the ocean, as well. Such fears were enhanced by whispers and innuendoes that dangerous radicals were out to outlaw whole classes of property starting with slaveholding, and that this would not serve to free the former slave but trap the free wage-earner in even greater hardship. That there was a logical truth to this argument is less unsettling than that it was convincing.
Further, the acts of liberals in the 19th century proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that progressives intended to not only give freedom and dignity to MEN of property and distinction but to everyone, including (if rumor had it) the incredulous objectives of emancipation of African-Americans and suffrage for women. That wild-eyed prophets such as John Brown of Kansas were on the loose only raised matters to a head.
Well, the conservatives huffed. If that's what science and progress is all about, perhaps we need to up and put the brakes on that bidness.
On the one side was a vision of America as a place of universal opportunity and dignity, where any person was free to peacefully and lawfully move about, assemble and voice their opinions as they saw fit.
Then there was the conservative vision of America...you know, that place of earthly dominion and godly sanction, with betters and lessers and if the price of that Aristotelian paradise for the aristoi was status as helotes for the many, so be it, that would be God's Will.
Conservatives then girded up to challenge Progress at all turns, for their specific and exclusive vision of the America to come was threatened in all respects by the values of universal moral right, of enshrined individual human dignity, of the inalienable power to give, receive or contest a point of policy or personal opinion, and all things in-between.
It would start would the issue of slavery, would have seemed to have died with the demise of the Pernicious Institution, but no. The fundamental issue was control of perception of reality, if not its substance, for the conservatives by the late 1800s had learned enough of science to know its practical value...and the practical limits of the conservative narrative.
The tactics for eradicating the American liberal were manifold: Compel or cajole public abjuration of 'foolish' and 'mistaken' views, sometimes via religious conversion experiences, other times via show trials. Those who refused or backslid were imprisoned, their property and even their reputations confiscated. Those who aided liberals, or were denounced as associates of same, were vulnerable to these occasional quasi-pogroms which aimed to kill not bodies, but identities, something that the rise of mass media made possible.
Such ideological persecution was kept separate from trade relations at first, and for quite a long time the United States remained just that in substance if not in rhetoric, since there remained much profit in commerce between so-called Red and Blue states, but in time the acrimony between conservatives and progressives grew to the point that normal relations, even at the diluted level known among friendly foreign powers, was impossible; the two camps simply despised one another that much.
Thus began the commercial and cultural isolation of conservative America, as there was no other way to control perception of reality than to shut 'internationalists' and their agitprop out of decent, God-fearing states. Much of the coastal states' economies were driven by foreign trade, and what of it was not depended on manufactures that came from similarly-advanced economies -- in other words, other blue states. What remained was trade in primary goods -- foodstuffs, processed minerals, etc -- most of which could be received via global economies of scale from elsewhere at a lower price, regardless.
What was amazing is that the driver for this autarky was not Blue resentment of Red state badgering, but Red State xenophobia trumping Red State economic interests, even to the point of insolvency. The Red State faith was that the liberals, lacking conservative backbone, would fold like cheap suits...and in any instance, what tribute the Blues refused to pay could be extorted from them at gunpoint.
Having been handed their original power base by liberal thought and action, the American conservatives wanted to petrify the perception of reality as it existed in the 1770s, while enjoying all the appliances of the subsequent ages, ignorant of the implications of the knowledge behind such power, or the responsibilities that came with it. The conservatives had enough of progress; they wanted the old social order, to fix relations of social and political hierarchy --- or, as is more likely -- to prevent inheritors of the liberal tradition from developing the new modes of family and social order to accommodate the altered character of personal life in America; for everyone to wallow in alienation and discomfort, rather than to suffer more flexible and imaginative minds to move onward and upward.
Whew. That was a bit longer than I intended, but I was on a roll there. :)
