2 - Other foundings: civic republicanism and white supremacy

Summary

The Lockean and Hartzian vision of North America as the primordial land of liberalism makes for a rapturous story. Yet as a historical narrative, it is no less mythological than the story of Romulus being suckled at the teat of a she-wolf. For better or worse, since before its founding, North America has been the site of clashing and rivalrous ideologies.

This chapter looks at two non-liberal maps that were present well before 1776. The first is a communal and participatory form of democracy – civic republicanism – that continues to inspire heterodox politics on both the left and the right. The second is a hierarchical racial politics – White supremacy – that erected several caste systems domestically and wove itself into later fascist movements across the globe. Both of these ideologies continue to mix and blend in complex ways with other maps, including not only liberalism but also conservatism, nationalism, ecologism, and more. To fail to decode their symbols is to remain blind to the persistent ideological multiplicity of contemporary life.

THE FREEDOM OF CITIES

Civic republicanism might at first blush appear as an obscure ideological map whose territories have been heard of by only a few academics. But in truth, although a relatively small political tradition, civic republicanism has exercised an outsized influence in part by hybridizing with larger movements led by classical liberals, Greens, conservatives and socialists. It has left its mark, for example, on front-porch conservatives wishing to devolve power onto locality, as well as heterodox socialists who reject statism and wish for a democracy inspired by the Greek polis.

In North America, this ideology first took root in the Puritan townships of New England, with their fierce sense of independent self-rule. As the great theorist of civic republicanism – the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville – put it in Democracy in America: “I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who landed on those shores”. Unlike natural-rights liberalism, civic republicans ascribe freedom not primarily to autonomous individuals but to the entire community and specifically cities. Such freedom is a cooperative accomplishment and not a natural, individualistic given.