Work in Progress: Claes G. Ryn's America the Virtuous

(Since I never got around to blogging my notes on Strauss's _Natural Right and History_, and I think Ryn's work even more worthy of being blogged than Strauss, this will be an unfinished review until I get it done, hopefully before the book is due back at the library)

In his recent book America the Virtuous Catholic University professor Claes G. Ryn makes the alarming case that for many of the ideals held by traditional
Americans, there's a revolutionary interpretation of that ideal. Consciously or not, the new revolutionaries, whom Ryn calls neo-Jacobins, are using new meanings cloaked in old terms to achieve their goals. The old ideals Ryn mentions are those like virtue, democracy, liberty, and the free market. For example, Virtue for Old
America(to use Rumsfeld's taxonomy) meant things like humility, self-restraint, and love of neighbor. For "New America," virtue means things like loving the oppressed of the world(without ever doing too much about the lonely poor guy down the block), believing that the principles of democratic capitalism will save them, and
supporting sending the US State Department and DOD all over the world to spread belief in abstract American principles.


Further, Old America thought democracy meant constitutional, decentralized government and loyalty to all the little platoons of life, like family, church, the rotary club, and the town hall--all of which helped cultivate the virtues necessary for living freely. New America thinks of democracy as "plebiscitary," the expression of atomized and decultured individuals who care about their rights, the
Federal government as defender of those rights, and not much else. They also think democracy the best form of government under any circumstances, regardless of the "unwritten constitution" of the people who have to live and govern under that democracy.

Here's an analysis of how the "free market" can be interpreted in a revolutionary way, from Ryn's chapter titled "Jacobin Capitalism":

"It should be carefully noted that there is a sense in which a free market would become a reality only if the movement of goods and services were wholly unrestricted, unfettered not only by "external," legal, or institutional checks but by "inner" restraints, such as the inhibitions and tastes of civilized persons.
A Rousseauistic, Jacobin desire to destroy traditional moral and cultural restraints and corresponding sociopolitical structures can thus be said to aid in the creation of a truly free market. It is not far-fetched but entirely consistent to be a moral, intellectual, and cultural radical and a strong proponent of the free market--by a
certain definition of "free market."" (p. 147)

This reveals a whole new meaning to the slogan of the libertarian magazine Reason, "Free minds and free markets." And in fact the motivation for a particular implementation of the free market is precisely to unleash "gales of creative destruction," clearing away the accumulated detrius of culture. This is a rather Marxist understanding of capitalism, and I worry that this is precisely the
capitalism that many ex-Trotskyite neocons are working hard to advocate and to implement around the world, having by and large successfully implemented it here at home.

Ryn's work also made me more conscious of the debate surrounding exactly what America is. He makes the case that the rebellion which separated the American Colonies from British rule was in fact a "War of Independence" and not really revolutionary at all. He claims that the war was arguably counterrevolutionary, and insists on calling those who established the Federal government "Framers" and not "Founders." He doesn't explicitly say why, but his word choice is presumably because "founders" has the connotation of making something new, and in Ryn's view the states' governments pretty much continued on as they used to do. Moreover, the
American Constitution itself is more a continuation, rather than a break with, the Anglo-Saxon and European legal tradition.