The Puritan covenant II: anti-modernism and the "Contract with America."

For better or worse, the ascendancy of the Republican Party in the congressional elections of 1994 represents the victory of a conservative, anti-modernist mentality that has deep historical roots in the American experience. Rather than accept the modernist propensity to understand human behavior within its cultural context, the anti-modernist mentality extols the truth of an autonomous self informed by Christianity and faithful to antebellum republican ideals of gentility, prudence, and virtue. Essentially whiggish in outlook, the anti-modernists rebel against what they view as the corruption of society by an entrenched secular elite that has rejected both the absolute truth of revealed religion and the legacy of republican idealism. In their view, the new Democratic elites have substituted moral relativism and group consensus for the autonomy of self. Right and wrong are therefore not the natural consequences of individual choice predicated upon some absolute standard but simply irrelevant standards when applied to behaviors over which the individual may have no control. The anti-modernists charge that, under these conditions, the individual is dehumanized, conceived as a bundle of quasi-autonomous reactions and reflexes dependent upon the social and biological impulses of society and independent of personal choice. Individual moral responsibility is thus eliminated by the modernists in favor of impersonal social forces.

It is this sort of thinking, the current Republican majority insists, that places the United States at risk and is responsible for our so-called moral decline. As George Will, the conservative writer and television commentator, aptly put it on "This Week with David Brinkley": "Sixty years ago, unemployment was believed to cause disruptive behavior. Today we know disruptive behavior precedes unemployment. The great issue is to change and modify behavior" (March 26, 1995).

Thus, the struggle between the forces of modernism and anti-modernism concerns the nature and source of personal responsibility and how it is transformed into public policy. As the conservative faction within the Republican Party would have it, liberals within the Democratic Party have clearly accepted a modernist thesis, and for the past 60 years - if not from the Progressive era - they have attempted to frame public discourse and policy in such a manner as to convince society of the correctness of their ideological views. For many conservative Republicans, the consequences of this have been the "tyranny" of the "socialist" welfare state and the degeneration of the American Experiment bequeathed to posterity by the founding fathers. Left unchecked, the modernist approach will inevitably destroy our civilization.

The origins of modernism are often traced to the Gilded Age - a term derived in 1873 from a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Then, as now, the glitter of progress and civilization went hand in hand with human misery and deprivation on a widespread scale. That age gave birth to the great progressive reform movements, which recognized the profound social and economic dislocations unleashed by laissez, faire capitalism and rapid industrialism and sought to ameliorate them. The Progressive movement as a whole was an attempt to save capitalism, reform society, and embark on a "search for order," to quote the title of Robert H. Wiebe's classic monograph.

For modernists, the key to a better society lay in the promise of science. Modernist thinkers accepted the essential Darwinian insight that humans were fully integrated into natural history: like all other earth forms, humans were part of a natural process of evolutionary development that could be investigated and understood by means of the scientific method. Super-naturalism was excluded from this process and so too was descent by design. Thus humankind was set free from any supernatural origins and placed squarely within the material realm of nature. As Darwin put it in The Descent of Man:

The main conclusion here arrived at, and now held by many naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man is descended from some less highly organized form. The grounds upon which this conclusion rests will never be shaken, for the close similarity between man and the lower animals in embryonic development, as well as in the numerable points of structure and constitution . . . are facts which cannot be disputed. They have long been known, but until recently they have told us nothing with respect to the origin of man. Now when viewed by the light of our knowledge of the whole organic world, their meaning is unmistakable. The greatest principle of evolution stands up clear and firm. . . . He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation.

But if humans were liberated from divine descent, were they not constrained by biological determinism and thereby absolved of any moral responsibility? The world of science was ambivalent - but not silent - on this issue. For the most part, a permeable dividing line was established separating the supernatural world of religion from the world of natural science; if God had any influence, it was in the sense of the proverbial clockmaker who wound nature up and let it run its course. What mattered most to the modernists was the process of human progress, inspired by and in agreement with the laws of nature and independent of divine intervention. As Lester Ward argued in Dynamic Sociology:

The problem is, to guide these vast and acknowledged forces in a progressive instead of a non-progressive direction. To do this, something analogous to these past non,progressive systems must be established. There must be a set of principles, doctrines, or arguments which, as a creed, the world shall give in its adhesion. These principles must be true, and be founded on the natural, and not false as in previous systems founded on the supernatural. The fundamental principle or first article of this new creed is, that all progress is the result of the utilization of the materials and the forces which exist in nature.

Yet the implications of a thoroughly "natural" humankind - one devoid of any teleological purpose - were deeply disturbing. Not unlike the function that reason had as a replacement for God for some philosophes, for some scientists the processes of nature became infused with purpose: if not explicitly divine, then certainly tending toward a future state of perfect and social harmony. But unlike the direct moral relationship which connected humankind with the divine in a God-centered universe, the relationship between humankind and nature's "morality" was extremely complicated and thus ambiguous. In an evolutionary universe, there was no monocausal moral agent but, rather, a plethora of agents, each dependent upon another and not necessarily in any discernible pattern. Under these conditions, individual moral responsibility appeared problematic, if not nonexistent. Thus, rather than point an accusing finger at the individual, it was easier and actually more consistent with the new science to take an organic view of humankind and attempt to decipher its collective social, political, cultural, economic, and moral development. Within this context, individuals could be judged upon the basis of whether or not they contributed to or detracted from the general movement of the entire population at any particular point in time and within any particular culture and civilization.

Such was the case with Herbert Spencer, who saw the cosmos as evolving from the simple to the complex. In a similar and complementary process, Spencer continued, societies developed from the simple to the complex and are characterized by increasing interdependency. As Spencer put it in his essay "Society Conditioned by Evolution" (reprinted in Harold Vanderpool's Darwin and Darwinism: Revolutionary Insights Concerning Man, Nature, Religion, and Society): "Mutual dependence of parts is that which initiates and guides organization of every kind." The more evolved a culture was, the more distinct and structured were its "social aggregates." Spencer continued:

From the small unformed social aggregates thus characterized, the process is toward social aggregates of increased size, the parts of which acquire unlikenesses that become ever greater, more definite, and more multitudinous. The units of the society as it evolves fall into different orders of activities, determined by differences in their local conditions or their individual powers; and there slowly result permanent social structures, of which the primary ones become decided while they are being complicated by secondary ones, growing in their turns decided, and so on.

Social aggregates were, in turn, composed of individuals whose behavior could be modified by the environment. To ensure the continued evolutionary development of society, human behavior needed to be studied in accordance with the laws of society so that behavior could be modified if errant. Like the evolution of society, human evolution was goal-oriented and would culminate (save for bad environmental factors) in altruism and morality, which would then fold into the cosmic evolutionary process which aimed at equilibrium and "omnipresent death," followed by a cyclical repetition of the whole process once again.

Yet if Spencer and his American and British followers could use science to argue for a future in which moral sentiment was included in the evolutionary process, others who engaged in the modernist debate were less sure, at least with respect to the whole of humanity. Rather than see universal evolutionary progress, these people saw biological degeneration. As Darwin had suggested, natural selection left residual organisms unable to adapt to their environment. That they were not responsible for their condition was a reasonable assumption inasmuch as their degenerate status was a "devolutionary" biological principle over which the individual had no control; thus, one was not held responsible for one's behavior even if disruptive of the social order. But if the evolutionary progress of the species was not to be threatened, then the degenerate elements of society must be eliminated, especially since degeneracy might be inadvertently spread throughout the whole population. Were there any chance that this might occur, humankind would be doomed to collective imbecility and eventual extinction.

Many modernists were threatened by the social changes they witnessed and often experienced. Skeptical of God, afraid of social chaos, and fearful of the consequences of the decline of individual autonomy and its legitimacy (to which they themselves had contributed), these people were unable to cope with the loss of a seemingly stable world. And unstable it was, from economic recession and depression to labor upheavals and all manner of feminist challenges to the dominant male cultural norms. Even the "natural" affinity of a man for a woman and the "procreative instinct" which allegedly supported this most profound of relationships was under attack by the recent "discovery" of the homosexual orientation by Richard von Kraft-Ebbing in Vienna and now propounded by numerous American men of science. Unwilling or unable to see past their fears, "reactionary" modernists had nothing to fall back on except vague pronouncements concerning the biological degeneration of a civilization spinning out of control. Even if they had been inclined to seek refuge in the notion of sin, this option was nearly closed. For over a generation, liberal theologians, attempting to make religion more rational and accessible to the "liberal" modernist, had linked religion with science and evolution and, in the process, had relegated evil, sin, and salvation to the superstitious past of medievalism.

For the reactionary modernists, the present was painful indeed. Unfortunately for them, degeneration appeared rife, as evidenced by the swelling numbers of the allegedly debased or criminal classes. During the period of rapid industrialization at the end of the late nineteenth century, the number of alleged degenerates continued to grow at an alarming rate that could not be contained. As Howard Crosby noted in his article "The Dangerous Classes" (North American Review, 1883):

It has been our habit to look for national disaster from the lower strata of society. We fear the ignorance and vice of the masses. We see the appalling instances of recklessness and brutal violence in the haunts of infamy, as they are recorded in the daily press, and naturally conclude that this element of evil only needs growth - such growth as the rum-shop and a bribed police will promote - in order to overthrow the existing order and carry desolation through the land. The reasoning is just. We have seen in our own country what a power for evil these debased classes are, in the riots of 1877. New York City saw these wild forces at work in 1863. History will ever point, as to one of her most conspicuous pages, to the Reign of Terror in bleeding France, where the fierce passions of men who were nearest the brute made havoc with all that was beautiful, or orderly, or good.

The sheer numbers of these dangerous "near-brutes" were perceived as a threat to evolutionary progress, yet as "degenerates" they could not be held personally responsible for their condition. William Noyes described the problem in his 1887 article "The Criminal Type" in the Journal of Social Science:

With the struggle for existence, and (let us hope) with the "survival of the fittest" we are all familiar; but there is also another struggle going on in our midst, with far different results, the chief of which is the Survival of the Unfittest, and it is the question of the criminal as a distinct type of human species. . . .

Absent salvation, the only solution available to the reactionary modernist was to be found in the new science of eugenics. If heredity was the vehicle through which degeneration manifested itself, it could also be the vehicle through which degeneration was vanquished. Such was the position of Charles Benedict Davenport, a founder of the American eugenics movement, who wrote in his 1911 book Heredity in Relation to Eugenics:

The eugenical standpoint is that of the agriculturist who, while recognizing the values of culture, believes that permanent advance is to be made only by securing the best "blood." Man is an organism - an animal; and the laws of improvement of corn and of race horses hold true for him also. Unless people accept this simple truth and let it influence marriage selection, human progress will cease.... Eugenics has reference to offspring. The success of a marriage from the standpoint of eugenics is measured by the number of disease-resistant, cultivable offspring that come from it.

Because degenerates were unable to recognize their responsibility to prevent race suicide, the state had to intervene in order to accomplish what the degenerate could not; thus, forced sterilization was to be the moral responsibility of any humanitarian society. As W. Duncan McKim argued in his 1900 book Heredity and Human Progress, in extreme cases even death was justified in order to preserve the true altruism of the race:

Finally, through his degeneracy, the weakling is at war with himself, for lacking that balance of functions which is the essential characteristic of the so-called normal man. His physical and mental powers clash together in perpetual discord, whereby these are often induced by day disquietude and pain, and by night torturing dreams, until his life is made an almost unceasing misery. We have reason to believe then, quite apart from any thought of advantage to the race, that it is well for the very weak when their abnormally burdensome life comes to an end. The test of social worth will enable us to judge fairly well as to the degree of weakness at which society should draw the line and refuse its support. It being evident to our best judgment that the child before us gives no prospect whatever of advantage to society, and that there is an emphatic promise of misery to the poor little being itself and of injury to society, I maintain that it is our duty to the child, to ourselves, and to all posterity, that we extinguish painlessly this unfortunate life, and so fulfill the law of a far-sighted and kindly altruism.

The origins of this mindset within the modernist tradition are complex and relate less to the tradition itself as to the economic and social changes the United States experienced around the turn of the century, as well as the perceived sense of powerlessness by the established elites to control events. On the whole, however, modernists were humanitarian optimists whose guiding principles were the reduction of suffering and the establishment of a just and liberal society free from the oppressions of the era as they understood them. While it is quite true that they were not always democrats or up to the task they had set for themselves, many could foresee a future of universal equality and social harmony. Their goals were essentially admirable and directed toward helping the socially marginalized as well as the elite establish a society not only free from want but also more in tune with the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps naively, modernism attempted to revive the promise of equality in an era of enormous disparity. Inclusiveness was the promise of the American Revolution; it was time to fulfill that pledge, and if republican virtue had proven less democratic than its adherents claimed, then certainly science would help overcome this deficiency, since no one was exempt from its imperatives. Such were the motivations behind all manner of social and political reforms of the era, from the late nineteenth-century women's movement and Hull House to the work of W. E. B. DuBois or Booker T. Washington.

Yet modernism, with its reactionary dark side and alleged reliance on universally valid principles of scientific materialism, came under harsh attack by the forces of anti-modernism, which took their inspiration from the colonial Puritan covenant. Inspired by John Calvin, the Puritan covenant was clearly elaborated in 1630 by John Winthrop and bears repeating:

Soe shall wee keepe the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his owne people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, soe that wee shall see much more of his wisdom power goodness and truth than formerly wee have beene acquainted with; wee shall finde that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when hee shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations; the lord make it like that of New England; for wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our god in this worke wee have undertaken and soe cause him to withdraw his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world....

God's covenant was absolute and was not to be usurped by fallen and dependent men and women. A century later, Jonathan Edwards could exhort his congregation to the wisdom of Winthrop's insight by rejecting the Enlightenment's emphasis upon human reason and natural law:

But in the renewing and sanctifying work of the Holy Ghost, those things are wrought in the soul that are above nature, and of which there is nothing of the like kind in the soul by nature; and they are caused to exist in the soul habitually, and according to such a stated constitution or law, that lays such a foundation for exercises in a continued course, as is called a principle of nature. Not only are remaining principles assisted to do their work more freely and fully, but those principles are restored that were utterly destroyed by the fall; and the mind thenceforward habitually exerts those acts that the dominion of sin had made it as wholly destitute of, as a dead body is of vital acts.

The anti-modernists accepted Edwards' and Winthrop's jeremiads as essential truths. For the most part, theirs was a God-centered universe in which fallen men and women were continuously tempted by evil. The sins of society were thus less a consequence of impersonal, evolutionary, and inter-dependent forces as much as they were the results of the human propensity to give in to temptation and sin. This was the human condition, and only God could help the individual overcome it. As the Reverend J. J. Fleharty explained in 1875:

Conversion and entire sanctification are the great remedies for social sin ... the world demands a religion that purifies man's moral nature, his whole being. Christ's religion does just this by "renewing us in righteousness," justification and regeneration, "and true holiness," sanctification. Many of the grossest of men and women have been converted, and wholly sanctified, and freed from all [desire] to commit social sin... anger, pride, the love of the world are removed from the heart. Man's moral being may be healed of all its maladies by the blood of Christ.

Informed by the ethos of New England Protestantism and republican idealism (often tinged with nativism and racism), the late-nineteenth-century anti-modernists considered themselves the exclusive cultural heirs of the American Revolution. Unlike their whig counterparts in Britain, who interpreted history through the rise and fall of great empires, American anti.modernists rejected the notion of national decline with respect to the United States. Unlike Europe, the United States was immune from the older historical processes by virtue of a special relationship to the creator. As Daniel L. Furber explained in an 1881 sermon, so long as this relationship was not replaced by scientific positivism, God's grace would provide a bountiful and prosperous future for all true believers:

So man was made for the supernatural truth; and he never discovers his true rank until he comes up out of the cave of mere naturalism into the sunlight of revelation. Conversing only with men and with visible things, he is content, for the most part, to remain as he is; but the entrance of God's word gives him an understanding of his capabilities, awakens his aspirations, ennobles his aims, increases his intellectual stature, expands his whole being. The mind employed on what is great becomes greater ... but let a grand end and aim of life come to possess a man, like that which Christianity proposes to him, and it arouses in him elements of power which before were unknown even to him....

The erroneous theories of the modernists were symptomatic of the evil which pervaded these difficult times. The anti-modernists rejected the interdependent self with its diluted sense of moral responsibility not only because it seemed to deny autonomy and the truths of Christianity but also because it cast doubt upon the uniqueness of the American experience. If the scientific principles of the modernist were universal, then they applied to the United States - a position opposed to the view that the United States was God's unique providence. The modernist implication was that we really are all equal, and that was inconsistent with the position that the anti-modernists held of themselves. Weary of democracy, suspicious of difference, and jealous of their power and prestige, the white middle-class Protestant elites clung tenaciously to their positions of economic, political, social, and cultural privilege even as the "dangerous classes" demanded more popular participation and the relaxation of cultural and social mores.

A catch-all phrase, the dangerous classes were those who rejected God, regardless of wealth or social status. Some were seduced by the science of Darwin or Spencer; others simply by their appetites. In either case, the development of the dangerous classes had negative consequences for the future of the United States. According to the anonymous author of "Certain Dangerous Tendencies in American Life" (the Atlantic Monthly, October 1878):

Many who are thus separating themselves from the churches are injured by the change ... they do not feel bound to resist temptation or deny appetite its gratifications. No new system or form of religious belief or life is taking the place of the old faith which has lost its power.... They have no ideas, principles, or beliefs in regard to human responsibility which exercise any considerable power of restraint upon their conduct when interest or appetite is involved. They feel no impulse to association with their neighbors for any kind of moral or religious culture. A few are inclined to propagate their negative notions and hostility to religion; the greater number are simply indifferent. Many of them have read the newspaper and magazine dilutions of the writings of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer, and have thus been strengthened in their opposition to old beliefs. They have too little aspiration and national feeling, and are giving themselves entirely to material interests.

Beyond their apathy and materialism, the dangerous classes threatened to destabilize society itself by their desire to overthrow the existing order in favor of something new, unrestrained by the civilizing influences of religion:

They would like to see the existing organization and institutions of society displaced and think it would be a great gain to stop trying to patch up the old systems of religion and law, and begin anew. They see no great difficulty in the attempt to establish an entirely new organization of society, with all necessary institutions, machinery, and activities, and believe that it could be done at once, with immense advantage to the people, if only the priests and the money power were put down. They have a kind of rage against churches and all the organized activities of Christianity.... Their nearest approach to adoration is their belief in the omnipresence of a free platform; that is, of a mass-meeting of believers in the sovereignty of the individual, with absolutely no restrictions as to the direction or extent of the discussions.

Disdainful of the whole panoply of modernist theories of society and human behavior, the anti-modernists at heart subscribed to an exceptionalist ideology which withdrew the United States from secular history and subjected it instead to the Christian millennium modified by the "possibility of perpetual life." Unlike the countries of the Old World, the United States - by virtue of its Christian heritage, republican idealism, and constitutionalism - was situated to overcome the degenerate forces that historically have dragged down other great civilizations. But for the presence of ungodly scientific positivism, the United States would be able to fulfill its historic destiny as outlined by John Winthrop in 1630. Contrary to the misinformed secularists, the United States was never subject to the same rules as the positivists would have one believe; by rejecting moral responsibility and the autonomy of the individual, America had placed itself on the path of certain collapse. Order, authority, and moral responsibility had to be restored, and this would be accomplished only when citizens returned to their god-fearing roots.

To the extent that the present-day conservative movement rejects the modernist mindset, it reflects these anti-modernist concerns of the late nineteenth century. Wrapped in the American flag and supported by moral precepts derived from New England Protestantism, the conservative movement has devised a political strategy intended to restore the notion of American exceptionalism and to stop society's backward slide into barbaric degeneration and moral relativism. To accomplish these ends, the Republican Party has promulgated a "Contract with America" through which the conservative faction hopes to correct our current ills:

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body we propose not just to change its policies, but even more important, to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their elected representatives....

This years election offers the chance, after four decades of one-party control, to bring to the House a new majority that will transform the way Congress works. That historical change would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the publics money. It can be the beginning of a Congress that respects and values and shares the faith of the American family.

Like Lincoln, our first Republican president, we intend to act "with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." To restore accountability to Congress. To end its cycle of scandal and disgrace. To make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves.

Billed as the central document of the Republican "revolution," the contract is deeply concerned with the twin issues of order and authority that loomed so large for the late-nineteenth-century anti-modernists. Like its predecessor, today's conservative movement condemns what it perceives as an attack upon moral responsibility, American exceptionalism, and "traditional values" - all of which are informed by God. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has been quite clear on this. Speaking to a New York Times reporter in the November 2, 1994, issue, he stated:

We have to recognize that American exceptionalism is very real, that American civilization is the most unique civilization in history, that we bring more people of more ethnic backgrounds together to pursue happiness with greater opportunity than any civilization in the history of the world. And we just don't say that anymore. Let me be candid. Haitians have more to learn from Americans than Americans have to learn from Haitians. The same is true of Bosnia. As far as I'm concerned, this counterculture notion, this politically correct notion that "Oh, gee, we shouldn't make any value judgments," that's silly. The Declaration of Independence is a value judgment. It says we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Well, if you think of that, it's the most radical statement of humanness in history.

It says each of you is endowed by God. Not by bureaucracy, not by the state, not by government, not by the liberals, not by bureaucracy, not by lawyers; by God. And therefore, by the way, when you rape somebody, you're raping somebody who's been endowed by God. If you kill some. body, you're killing somebody who's been endowed by God. That's why this whole sense of safety is at the center of the American experience. But so is a sense of work. If you're not working, you are wasting something which has been endowed. So we've got to go back, I think, and have the moral courage to say: "Yeah, we're going to teach people to be American. We're going to teach people the values of work. We're going to teach people to be American. We're going to teach people the value of commitment to human opportunity."

The contract thus has one overriding rhetorical goal: the reestablishment of individual moral responsibility, through which American civilization may yet be saved from ungodly scientific positivism. As Gingrich argues (quoted in Quotations from Speaker Newt: The Little Red, White, and Blue Book of the Republican Revolution, edited by Amy and Peter Bernstein, 1995):

We have six thousand years of written historical experience in the Judeo-Christian tradition. We know that rules work. We know that learning, study, working, saving and commitment are vital. That is why Republicans would replace welfare with work, that is why Republicans would cut taxes to favor families and to encourage work, savings, and job creation. As President Reagan said, we are more concerned with your destination than your origin. But the Democrats want to force individuals into groups, establish quotas and limit your future based on your genetic past.

To achieve its goal, the contract proposes 10 specific pieces of legislation, including a balanced-budget amendment, a term-limits bill, welfare reform, increased military spending, "loser pays" legal reform, "unfunded mandates" reform, and a capital-gains tax cut. But more important than these various provisions is the contract's fundamental premise. According to its most basic assumptions, no government can ever be an active agent of liberation; indeed, government is quite clearly an agent of repressive dependency. According to Speaker Gingrich:

Those of us who want to save the inner city see every person in the inner city as a citizen, fully empowered, fully strengthened. The welfare state sees them as a client, weak, helpless, a victim, somebody who can only survive if the bureaucracy takes care of them and nurtures them.

Left to oneself, the republican ideals of religiosity, thrift, hard work, prudence, honesty, and personal integrity will develop - but not so long as government usurps these functions. And as Gingrich has made plain, it is not the role of the government to "take care of" or "nurture" anyone. Perhaps, he suggests, this ought to be accomplished by public opprobrium and moral leadership:

I think moral force matters; I think in a free society it matters at least as much as the law does. And I think it's amazing how people will respond to leadership when it is clear and has self-confidence. A society which gets up and says, every day, "The work ethic is good, you ought to do your home, work, it's necessary to work to be a full citizen" sends a signal. A society which gets up every day and says, "Gee, if you're too drunk and you don't feel like it, you've had a bad weekend, why really trouble yourself?" sends a signal. Now, the signal matters.

[In England] they reduced the number of children born out of wedlock almost by 50 percent. They did it by reestablishing values, by moral leadership, and by being willing to look people in the face and say, "You should be ashamed when you get drunk in public; you ought to be ashamed if you're a drug addict."

For Gingrich, as for the Republican conservative movement, the origin of the current "moral crisis" facing the United States is the countercultural movement of the 1960s and its trashing of values associated with American exceptionalism:

Until the mid-1960s, there was an explicit long-term commitment to creating character. It was the work ethic; it was honesty, right and wrong. It was not harming others. It was being vigilant in the defense of liberty.... We spent a generation in the counterculture laughing at McGuffy Readers and laughing at Parson Weem's vision of Washington.

Yet it is not sufficient merely to claim that the counterculture trashed the old order; Gingrich and his allies also must claim that this countercultural "nihilism" has taken root in mainstream society and in the government itself. Thus, the attacks on Bill Clinton, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Public Radio, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are suggestive of the belief that American society has been taken over by countercultural "McGovernite" elites with their destructive emphasis upon secularism, universalism, and multiculturalism, to the detriment of republican idealism and Christianity. In their stead, Gingrich offers personal responsibility informed by the god of the Puritan covenant as the single most critical component for "renewing American civilization":

The Puritans had a deeply personal sense of commitment and connection to God. They believed that life mattered, that it was real and vital, and it was real and vital because it was a life lived for God. And the intensity of the Puritan experience is at the heart of the American cultural tradition.

It is this definition of American culture that drives the "Contract with America" and lurks behind the rejection of welfare, gun control, minimum wage, gay/lesbian rights, health-care reform, social spending, and tax increases. The specific components of the contract are held up as vehicles to undo the evils of almost 60-plus years of creeping socialism and ungodliness. However, the supporters of the contract and of the conservative movement have also demonstrated their ability to abandon their theories of personal responsibility in favor of the very scientific positivism they claim to reject. On the one hand, they would agree with the Reverend J. J. Fleharty, who in 1875 observed:

It is the duty of parents to guard well the morals of their children. They should instruct them on this subject faithfully and carefully, and superintend their social education until they are fully prepared to resist the most powerful temptation. Ignorance is not bliss when purity is thereby endangered.

On the other hand, they would also agree with Herbert Spencer, who argued in 1882:

If anyone denies that children bear likeness to their progenitors in character and capacity - if he holds that men whose parents and grandparents were habitual criminals, have tendencies as good as those of men whose parents and grandparents were industrious and upright, he may consistently hold that it matters not from what families in a society the successive generations descend. But whoever does not espouse so insane a proposition, must admit that social arrangements which retard the multiplication of the mentally best, and facilitate the multiplication of the mentally worst, must be extremely injurious.

For if the unworthy are helped to increase, by shielding them from the mortality which their unworthiness would naturally entail, the effect is to pro. duce, generation after generation, a greater unworthiness.

Yet while Speaker Gingrich exhorts the "welfare queen" to espouse republican ideals, his "welfare reform" package is in part informed by Charles Murray and Richard Hernnstein's book The Bell Curve, which resurrects the late-nineteenth-century reactionary modernist hereditarian arguments about behavior. As New York Times reporter Jason dePerle summed up in his October 9, 1994, article on Murray: "Smart people intermarrying will produce smart children; the disadvantaged will pass down their intractable handicaps; and the gap between the classes will grow." According to Murray, the only solution to the problem of the underclass is to cut them off from the public dole and allow a genetic aristocracy to rise to its natural level, thereby allowing people "of different abilities to live with dignity."

For the new moralists of the twentieth century, politics can make strange bedfellows indeed. If appeals to God and moral responsibility fail to modify behavior, then the biology of scientific positivism may be harnessed to do the job. This is a situation that poses serious risks, as has been amply demonstrated in this century. Either way, the modern anti-modernists refuse to acknowledge the relationship between social environment and behavior and continue to marginalize the "less fortunate" as hereditary "freaks" or bad people. While hardly revolutionary, the basic assumptions which support the "Contract with America" contravene those assumptions that supported not only the Progressive movement but also the New Deal. In the face of the impending collapse of the capitalist system, New Dealers were keenly aware that interdependency was a hard, cold fact of modern industrial society and that it was the role of government to humanely acknowledge that interdependency, if only to save the very system itself under the rubric of "Reform, Relief, and Recovery."

Neglectful of these insights, the current conservative movement as expressed in the new Republican majority's "Contract with America" calls for a new American revolution to liberate the individual from government "dependency" and, in the process, return to the "legitimate" republican principles of the founders. In reality, however, the contract and its supporters have a different agenda: order and authority based upon the cultural hegemony of a relatively small elite informed by the late-eighteenth-century republican ideals of hard work, prudence, sobriety, and gentility, which derived from a white, middle-class, New England-based "aristocracy of merit." Any group which threatened this faction's sense of well-being and exceptionalism was shunned (for example, blacks, Irish, or Native Americans) just as is now occurring to immigrants, lesbians and gays, those on the welfare rolls, women, Native Americans, and other "multiculturals."

The modern anti-modernist conservative movement is thus actually both reactionary and novel: reactionary because of its origins in our distant past; novel because this is the end of the twentieth century, and our social problems are unique to our time period. Unwilling to grasp that many of our "modern" problems derive from population growth, limited natural resources, and structural change associated with economic dislocation and capital flight, the anti-modernists assert that the victims of "chaos" and dislocation are, in fact, its perpetrators. By reversing this causal link, the origins of discontent are disguised while the poor are marginalized and accused of moral irresponsibility or genetic degeneracy.

Here is the irony: the conservative movement's social Darwinism and anti-modernist discourse about less government, personal autonomy, and moral responsibility mask an intrusive social agenda which will be initiated under the rubrics of God, republican virtue, and states' rights and facilitated by federal legislation in support of a very narrow social, cultural, political, and economic elite. Rather than less government, we will have more - albeit not as a positive agent of constructive change for the whole population but, rather, as an instrument of the self. proclaimed New Lights. This modern Leviathan, contrary to that of the "discredited" Democratic ancien regime, will strive to enforce compliance to its anti-modernist and anti-democratic impulses. Freedom "to" will be replaced with freedom "from," and those who do not modify their behavior will be set adrift and left to die, cut off from civilization. This can be accomplished through incarceration or simply through marginalization, abandonment, and official "nonexistence" - the very conditions which gave birth to the Progressive movement and the social gospel in the first place.

By refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the modernist position of human interdependency, and by conflating change with chaos and God's displeasure, the anti-modernist agenda must necessarily miss its target. Simple assertions about "personal responsibility" and "individual initiatives" may be effective public discourse when selectively targeted, but they hardly provide an adequate foundation for national public policy. History may not actually repeat itself, but if anything was learned from the late nineteenth-century purity crusades it was that people do not choose marginalization; exhortations of self-help and moral responsibility mean nothing in an environment that destroys rather than heals. The forces of interdependency are too strong to be denied for any length of time, and sooner or later the anti-modernist impulse will collapse because of its inability to resolve social ills and prevent change. Although fear of change will in all likelihood never be eradicated, it need not be harnessed in support of the status quo ante but, rather, used as a tool for analyzing past mistakes and as a vehicle for future liberation.

Jay Hatheway teaches American history and government at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have previously appeared in the Humanist, the Journal of Contemporary History, and Zeta Magazine.