Response to George Gonzalez

This response pertains to the review of our book, God Guns Gold and Glory—American Character and its Discontents, reviewed in this journal by George Gonzalez. Our response contends that the “review” is not really a critical reflection on our book, but something more like a dismissal. In essence, Gonzalez says that this is not the book he would have written; he wants to present his own thoughts, not critique ours.

To begin, Gonzalez does not seem to understand the book. Instead, he chooses various points arbitrarily, for example, to upbraid our remarks about Donald Trump and his supporters. But the book is decidedly not about Donald Trump, although he does appear as an example from time to time. Trump and other historical figures and events serve as real-life examples. In this way, we discuss the sociohistorical forces that have shaped what we call “social character,” a central explanatory concept for Erich Fromm, which consists of the most typical, even if not the predominant character structure of a society, and includes a person’s motives, values, defenses, ways of acting and seeing the world which are not only well adapted to a particular economic system and culture, but unconsciously motivated to spontaneously do what the economic system and other social codes demand that a person do. Without repeating the argument we make in the book, we are not at all “devoted to outlining the deep histories” as Gonzalez seems to believe, but rather, we build a narrative of particular historical trends that valorize God, Guns, Gold, and Glory as both material and psychological rewards that produce a particular standard of living, political ideologies, and also reinforce particular social character types. Likewise, the book is not at all about “ideal types” or attempting to reduce history “…to its sociological “least common denominator, as it were.” Our book argues the exact opposite, in fact, that particular—not “deep” or “ideal types”—drive American social character. To emphasize, Gonzalez completely misses the point: the book is about real types that appear in particular times and places (measured in the empirical literature we cite) and which shape subsequent people, events, and character types; it is not about ideal types.

Among all the facets of American history and character, we focus on the authoritarian types and their dialectical resistances in particular. We attempt no universal or complete representation of history, nor any totalized theoretical explanation of motivation and identity. This flagrant misunderstanding prevents Gonzalez from discerning the difference between historical narrative as empirical evidence, from his unrestrained desire to deliver his own totalizing assertions, such as:

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 puts it, to an “impossible wrestling with alien concepts until we make them legibly human, again.” (Gonzalez, 2017; 331)

To understand ideology? All the myriad manifestations? We claim no ability to achieve such a grand mission (nor understand banally how that would be relevant). Gonzalez clearly wants to “articulate” his own views (and we encourage him to write his own book) but we wonder how his personal diatribes are relevant to our book? We must confess that we’re not sure what most of his diatribes mean (such as the one above), regardless of their alleged relevance.

Gonzalez also serves up a generous helping of his own favorite references that he thinks we should have used but did not. While we cannot speak to the merit of all of his favorites, suffice to say that Lundskow reviewed two of them (Hochschild, 2016; Kruse, 2015) for the Logos journal and found both of them either or both dumbfoundedly punch-drunk conceptually and simply wrong factually.

It is important to mention that our book was written before the election and our discussions of Trump were generally less concerned with him as an individual than as an exemplar of the themes that we have indicated. Namely, as Bellah argued, the Protestant work ethic early on achieved a degree of autonomy separate from the Protestant religions, and as it became a hard-working secular individualism, it eroded the sense of early community that people like John Winthrop extolled. As history further unfolded, work as moral regeneration became a phallic aggressive masculine character type in which violence became a kind of “work” and a new moral regeneration to achieve any desired goal and solve any problem. Wielded in the home against women and children, against workers, and against anyone in the public and international spheres who opposed dominant US interests, the American “hero” in the family, in business, in culture, and in politics has used aggressive violence to suppress intellectual thought and sensitive emotions. This elevated the authoritarian character type (and the related Social Dominator) to positions of leadership and worldly success and justified and rewarded all manner of tough individualists, economic exploitation, and state military aggression with wealth and public acclaim. The exploitation and wars were and are real, not some abstract ideal-type.

De Tocqueville already noted the pursuit of wealth as a central moral aspiration in the 1820s, and whatever else we might say about Trump, his pursuit of wealth (and fame), by whatever means possible—meaning staying out of jail—exemplifies that quality of America. Finally, and again as de Tocqueville noted, Americans had a very high opinion of themselves and their budding democracy and affluence that would eventually become known as American exceptionalism, part and parcel of America’s civil religion. But one of the themes that we noted especially in our discussion of the economy is that the consequence of what we have discussed has been a decline of America’s power over the past several years. As most readers of journals like this know, whether we look at healthcare, mortality, life satisfaction, crime rates, technological innovations, the US has generally moved from number one among advanced industrial countries to the middle or bottom. Trump’s call to “make” America great again taps into this awareness of American decline which for his supporters—who embrace a white, male, Christian privilege as identical with American greatness—expresses the loss of this heretofore privileged identity through moments like the anger in Charlottesville that Gonzalez mentions. How ironic that in his rush to condemn our use of vernacular language and his own call to make them “legibly human again,” Gonzalez seems to share Trump’s view that there were some very, very good Nazis at the rally also. Let’s not call all of them bad names, after all. Following the argument in our book, running over defenseless counter-demonstrators in Charlottesville with a car is exactly the kind of redemptive phallic aggression that makes an authoritarian Nazi feel good about life.

But as we pointed out, people like Trump did not invent these feelings, but he was able to tap into the reservoir of anger, hatred, and ressentiment deeply rooted in American history. At this point, it should also be noted that while our framework is clearly rooted in the traditions of the Frankfurt School, Gonzalez generally fails to note that unlike the retreat to gloom, doom and despair that characterizes much of contemporary Critical Theory, we see the transformations taking place in America today, whether greater inclusion of minorities, growing acceptance of gay rights/marriage, the normalization and erosion of shame/guilt over sexuality, and other more inclusive and egalitarian views, as genuine social progress and indicative of the rise of a progressive social character. We see millennials and allies from earlier generations embracing major social change towards different trends in US culture manifested in calls for Medicare for all, wealth redistribution, sustainable energy, and an end to wars for power and resources.

In conclusion, we wish Gonzalez had something to say about the reality of our book beyond his own imaginings.