Abstract
Reviewed by George González, Monmouth University, USA
A certain meme floating around the Internet bemoans the fact that America has elected a President who once boasted about sexually assaulting women and whose (first!) replacement communications director bragged that, unlike Trump’s chief strategist, he was not trying to auto-fellate himself (no doubt, Trump and Scaramucci put it all much more crudely). Juxtaposing their pronouncements, the meme suggests that the overall message is incontrovertibly clear: “locker room talk” is the new normal within this White House; a grotesque and violent masculinity underwrites the very life of Trumpism. In reality, Trump can easily seem to embody the dark apotheosis of many things at once in addition to unchecked patriarchy—white nationalism, kleopotratic capitalism, the reach of the brand form, the Reality TV industry, American anti-intellectualism, and even the superficiality of depthless postmodern aesthetics. Whether and how Trump fits the above bill can depend on where one stands, an important point to which I will return towards the end of this review.
According to the sociologists Lauren Langman and George Lundskow, “today, an exploitative, life-thwarting version of American social character, a product and legacy of centuries past, ascendant to the elite pinnacles, dominates much of the politics, economics, and culture in the United States” (11). The central feature of their argument is a psychodynamic socio-historical mapping of American social character. Professing an allegiance to the Frankfurt School and its synthesis of Weber, Marx, and Freud, Langman and Lundskow argue that it is imperative for criticism to engage the “underlying motives” and “emotionally anchored collective values, myths and fantasies” (xxiv) which psychically enable social and political life. Most basically, they define social character as the most pervasive constellations of available virtues, values, and social identities. Social character sets the “limits or parameters of choices and most people remain within these limits” (256).
In short, Langman and Lundskow argue that the dominant characteristics of American social character continue to reflect traditional national values. Importantly for the purposes of their argument, these normative characteristics draw from deep histories that situate them in-line with those of the contemporary American political right: an authoritarian “phallic-aggressive masculinity” (39), a religiously inflected sense of American exceptionalism which is tied up in the racial fantasies of white nationalism (63–103), a potentially contradictory entwined valuation of individuality and submission (50), and a tendency to engage in “motivated reasoning” (157) that is quick to dismiss information, data, and analysis that contradicts already held ideas.
Much of the monograph is devoted to outlining the deep histories which the authors argue have shaped and given rise to the sedimented psychic well-springs of the aforementioned American social character, which in their analysis operates much like a Weberian ideal type. Langman and Lundskow pursue their historical analysis by way of four related conceptual reference points: God, Guns, Gold, and Glory. These markers allow them to weave together a synthetic discussion of American religious history, race, gender, economics, and militarism. This discussion is held in place by a psychological framework the authors impose from without: (1) Individualism vs. Collectivism; (2) Moralism vs. Pragmatism; (3) Toughness vs. Compassion (26–40). It is the case, they claim, that social actors across American history have often found themselves ambivalently caught between these sets of polarities. While the first term in all three dyads has traditionally been dominant (leading to an “Authoritarian Dominance-Destructive Orientation” (50), they hold American social character and its contributing histories provide evidence for attendant tensions which can be exploited.
I will very briefly summarize the histories which Langman and Lundskow outline with respect to American religion (chapter 2) and American business (chapter 3), although the same kind of analysis could be applied to the chapters on gender (chapter 4) and race (chapter 5).
Regarding American religion, the authors reiterate Weber’s original thesis and observe in the colonies of New England a form of Christian piety which created a soupy mix of salvation anxiety and economic opportunity (68). Ascetic Protestantism paved the way for the secularizing forces of science and capitalism and the rise of individualism (83). The Puritans brought to New England an understanding of themselves as God’s Chosen People, whom God had delivered to the Promised Land in a new Exodus (63). Whereas the English middle-classes settled New England, “ScotsIrish settled Appalachia and came from oppressed groups suffering under English domination” (65). In partial response to the topography of the land and religious differences (they contend that the region is indebted to more “ecstatic” Christianities such as Methodism, Pentecostalism, and Baptist churches (72)), “mountain culture” from “Vermont to Appalachia,” especially when compared to New England, is characterized by toughness, “hand-shakes rather than contracts,” passionate celebrations, and looser gender roles (73). Continuing, the Midwest, settled by Scandinavians, Dutch, and Germans developed a comparatively egalitarian and pragmatic society. For its part, the American South was settled by feudal lords from France, Spain, and England and, as such, the culture of the American South emphasized autonomy and subservience, racial hierarchy, religion as social adhesive, and patrimonial work (77–81).
Langman and Lundskow cover the whole of American religious history from its founding to the Civil Rights Era and up to the current moment in roughly forty pages. Southern religious history receives five pages of treatment. This invites a myriad of questions and observations. I will hone in on two. First, given the coarseness of the history that is outlined, the importance of the institution of chattel slavery to the story they wish to tell and the religious and cultural contributions of African-Americans, Native-Americans, Latinx communities, Asian-Americans, Catholics, Jews, and women, among others, to American life are minimized if not fully obscured in the name of “left” critique. Moreover, the messiness and historical contestations within conservative white Protestant Christianity are also ironed out in the process. Second point: if what Langman and Lundskow hope to do is contour and shape the “ideal type” of American religious history (boil it down to its sociological “least common denominator,” as it were), they would have to work dialectically, from the inside out, continuously testing and refining their scholarly abstraction against the details of local histories—a careful and exacting procedure that is missing from their already rather lengthy monograph.
Similar problems arise as above when the authors attempt to summarize American business history in sixty or so pages. Langman and Lundskow argue within their discussion of American religion that ascetic Protestantism lives on in contemporary business culture through the latter’s “business customs, bland suits and humorless focus on task, of time-clock regimentation and conventional homogeneity” (84). Their observation elides important changes in the post-industrial culture of work described by, among others, Bethany Moreton (2009), who suggests that the service economy confounds oft-assumed distinctions between the bread and the roses, work and meaning, and body and soul. From that general platform, the authors enter into their account of American capitalism and business history. Not only is Moreton?s history of the intersections between late twentieth century post-industrial service work and evangelical Christianity missing but the author?s fail to engage Kevin Kruse?s (2015) history of the post-New Deal capitalist project of sanctifying business under the banner of American Christianity (2015), do not address the role which “progressive spirituality” has played in the growth and development of the New Economy especially in Silicon Valley (see, for example, Carrette and King, 2005; LoRusso, 2017; Martin, 2014), and do not engage the kind of ethnographic detail (for example, see Ho, 2009; Zaloom, 2010, among others) which would mitigate the coarse conclusions Langman and Lundskow make regarding the “narcissism” of the elite financial actors and (following Chris Hedges) the “vile, morally bankrupt oligarchic class” (112).
To recommend micro analysis at this juncture is not a ruse to forestall a robust critique of capitalism or to provide cover for class warfare but rather to suggest that understanding the operations of power requires more nuance than abstracted psychoanalytic categories and insults can provide. For example, does it not matter that a great many of the actors who helped bring ruin to globalized economy in 2007 understood themselves according to the markers of efficiency rather than selfishness and villainy? More on this general point to come. In the end, the chapter attempts to cover too much ground to do either the histories themselves or the monograph’s overall thesis much service: the rise of neoliberalism is covered in three pages, the financialization of the global economy in three pages, and the Great Recession in two pages, give or take. A promising discussion of an emerging “marketing character” (112) and the turn to modes of “pseudo cooperation” and a business culture of “fake personas” (121) is aborted by a lack of analytical and historical consideration of the industrial Weberian paradigm that is most clearly operative in the monograph. Finally, the insistence throughout the whole of the monograph that the culture of individuality must be resisted is challenged by missing accounts of contemporary American capitalism’s networked form (for example, see Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007) and the suggestion that we now effectively live as digitally mediated “interviduals” (see Conley, 2010).
Central to the overall argument of God, Guns, Gold, and Glory: American Character and its Discontents is the authors’ underlying conviction that, “the authoritarian moralists, the departure (of which) from the stage of world history is clearly marked” (255) are doomed by the demands of social adaptation. Turning to Eric Fromm’s social psychology, the authors suggest that the normative, authoritarian, white nationalist “phallic-aggressive” masculinity that is their target throughout the monograph is endangered by the fact that the very traits which once propelled development (at tragic cost) are no longer capable of helping the American experiment continue its advance into history. At the time of the writing of this review, the news is rife with talk of President Trump potentially tweeting us into Nuclear Holocaust. There is something startling and arresting about Langman and Lundskow’s bold suggestion, indeed. At the same time, the critical edge of the monograph’s psychoanalytic perspective is dulled by suggestions such as this one offered early on in the monograph: that the political logic of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and the attraction of American voters to them can be attributed—at least in part—to Puritan childrearing practices and the “strict father” morality it imparted (24). As a historiographical observation, this is a tenuous connection to propose, at best.
In the place of what has hereto been the normative characteristics of American social character, the authors suggest that we will witness a situation of “return of the repressed” (also discussed under the umbrella of “progressive regression” (284)) in which “progressive” historical values of cooperation, collective agency, and tolerant pluralism, crystalized by the specter of the Paris Commune of 1871, reemerge as particularly adaptive. This dialectical historical “return” of progressive values will, in part, come in the form of revitalized unions, cooperatives, and mutual aid societies (296). Something to be lauded, the authors offer up the Spanish political party, Podemos and the Spanish collective, Mondragon (306) as concrete examples of the form positive social change will take. According to the authors, the millennial generation, which has less traditional social values and faces harsh conditions of economic precarity, is poised at the vanguard of world history. Importantly, the authors position millennials in contrast to the New Atheists as proponents of progressive “religion” and the quest for meaning which will have significant roles to play in social change and the life of social movements (103).
Before I conclude with some more general observations, as a religious studies reader, I have some questions about the authors’ general approach to “religion.” First, as is similarly problematic with Freud’s theory of religion and society, is it really the case that we can treat individual and social developmental frameworks equally such that we can speak of the “return of the repressed” with respect to societies? Second, the authors write that, “despite the clear historical record against a unity of religion and State, most conservatives still insist, without any evidence, that the founding fathers were devout Christians and that America and its constitution were based on Christian principles” (217). That strikes me as a bit of reductive wishful thinking given the theological interests of framers like Madison in protecting freedom of conscience and mitigating against religious establishment (see Thiemann, 1996). We need not whitewash this history when promoting the constitutionally mandated cause of religious pluralism (including spaces for forms of humanism, agnosticism, and Atheism) and religious non-Establishment. Third, there is an operative functionalist Durkheimian account of religion as providing the “idealized values of the community” (99) that is unacknowledged but which can be theoretically, historically, and empirically challenged. Fourth, the authors replay a version of the old distinction between deinstitutionalized “spirituality” and institutional, phallic “religion,” an account which is not only historically depthless (see, for example, Schmidt, 2005) but can play right into the hands of New Age Capitalism (see Bender, 2010; Carrette and King, 2005; Lau, 2000; Lofton, 2011; LoRusso, 2017; Martin, 2014).
In the end, the most jarring elements of monograph are its moments of bold and too often insulting polemics. On the more “run of the mill” end, the authors advance a dupe theory of what they refer to as “values voters” (255), who do not see how they are manipulated by economic elites. More colorful examples of authorial distancing include referring to former Minnesota congresswoman, Michele Bachman, as “bat shit crazy” (xxv), parroting right wing dismissals of “wussy intellectuals” (203), and rhetorically shouting at the authoritarian Republicans who are the primary target of the critique not to “write when you get there” (255)—arrive at the desert dead end of historical oblivion, that is. Employing this kind of tone, it is clear that the audience of the monograph is decidedly not the voters across the economic spectrum, who voted Donald Trump into office for reasons that clearly have something to do with the psychic life of conservative American exceptionalism that so intrigues the authors. This is because, in the end, Langman and Lundskow believe that, “American social character has internalized the values, beliefs, and most of all the mythologies of American exceptionalism and except for a few progressive academics and social activists, most Americans basically support American exceptionalism and regard the United States as a benevolent force in the world” (224). They understand the task of the intellectual as one of unmasking hegemony for the masses, so that they might be liberated (272). In essence, the book is a call to arms for fellow would-be organic intellectuals (organics) to see themselves and their strategic social position reflected in the mirror of its pages and, in response to this kind of recognition, to heed the call to wage a “war of position.”
Langman and Lundskow’s critical sociologist stands above the fray and apart from society, doing the necessary work of peeling away the veil of ignorance for the masses. The problem with this stance is what it has always been: intellectuals and activists are no less shaped by power and the structuring structures than anyone else. Indeed, as Bourdieu made clear for sociology (and across a panoply of disciplines), academics embody and reproduce a habitus which surreptitiously reproduces cultural inequalities. In addition to the problem with assuming that the intellectual can stake out a privileged position apart or at a distance from hegemony, we must ask whether essentializing the motivations of the persons one hopes to “liberate” (or those of persons anathematized as political enemies, for that matter) is the most effective strategy with which to pay heed to Marx’s dictum that philosophy has hereto simply interpreted the world and must, instead, work to change it (11th Thesis on Feuerbach). Attempting to understand ideology (a first step in any attempt to change the state of affairs that does not involve bludgeoning one’s opponents—a position I articulate with both greater trepidation and urgency following the events in Charlottesville, VA) would seem to require us to dispense with the smug certitudes of “offended distance” and lead us, instead, as Kathryn Lofton (2017) puts it, to an “impossible wrestling with alien concepts until we make them legibly human, again”. Langman and Lundskow’s world is too populated by caricatures and categories rather than people and its language is too mired in ad hominum critique to remain properly human (rather than abstracted). As Jan Rehmann (2013) suggests, “a theory of ideology begins at the moment when its social genesis, functional necessity and efficacy becomes the object of reflection” (5–6). Arlie Hochschild (2016) suggests that we all have “deep stories” that frame how we experience the world and has demonstrated by example how understanding the life of Trumpism requires the embodied and multifaceted work of encounter. As a dialectical matter, we can both unequivocally condemn racism, patriarchy, and class oppression as moral evils and yet risk the safety of our own retreats and horizons in order to better comprehend them intersubjectively in historical and human terms.
Langman and Lundskow’s interests in the psychic dimensions of ideology are exceedingly welcome. However, whereas Hochschild’s ethnography contributes to our empirical understanding (in Lofton’s terms) of the living textures of contemporary rightwing America, Langman and Lundskow’s study digs the trenches between camps even deeper. There can be something emotionally compelling about such a move and there is no doubt that they identify some broad social realities that are quite real and exceedingly pressing. Rather than get bogged down by a Frommian account of social adaptation and the psychic dimensions of historical contradiction, the contribution of God, Guns, Gold, and Glory: American Character and its Discontents would have been magnified if the authors had pursued a localized and more fully empirical psychoanalytic treatment and content analysis of the contemporary American sociopolitical landscape.