Anglosphere

Heads up — Jim Bennett is going to be turning his blog, which was pretty much inactive, into a group blog, starting with a core group of interesting and knowledgeable people. I’ll be posting on there from time to time, on Anglospheric matters, once I get set up. I will also continue my contributions here on the Boyz. I’ll probably cross-post any substantial ones from there over here, anyway. Switching to a group blog will, I trust, get a steady level of posting going on Jim’s blog, on many fascinating issues. More news as all this develops.

Jim Bennett sent some comments about my earlier post about the Dutch influence in New York, which I pass along, slightly edited, with his permission.

… I have just read [Lex]’s post on Dutch New York, etc., which is good timing since I had picked up [Russell] Shorto’s book (Island at the Center of the World) for on the road reading. I’m about halfway through. I very much agree that New York City is sui generis, outside of Fischer‘s framework, as Fischer himself admits. I also agree that it is a freestanding major influence on the US. Incidentally, another good treatment on this theme is Joel Garreau’s Nine Nations of North America, which also treates NYC as an outlier.

I also agree that FDR was more Hudson Valley patroon than New England Yankee. I suspect some of the paternalism of the New Deal comes from landlord-tenant relations in the valley; it’s almost like a Tory Wet paternalistic attitude. These are entirely distinct cultures. The difference between the Hudson Valley Dutch and the Yankees (and the “no love lost” attitude between them) was also the basis for Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with its hilarious caricature of the New Englander Ichabod Crane. (As for Brom Bones, he would be perfectly at home today with a muscle car and a backwards-turned baseball cap.)

Although I have not finished the Shorto, I am continually annoyed by him. He acts as if William Penn and Roger Williams never existed. There are plenty of English-speaking sources of principled tolerance in colonial America. In fact, their tolerance was more principled than the Dutch, who were mostly tolerant out of opportunism, not that there’s anything wrong with that. And his treatment of the Puritans is simplistic. Shorto confuses Puritan and Victorian attitudes about sexuality. In fact most of Dutch tolerance as he discusses is boils down to religious indifference and toleration of prostitution. Has he never read a history of Virginia? Perhaps the latter is an example of toleration, but I suspect New England was less tolerant of prostitution primarily because women had some say in the running of the community there.

Shorto’s point about the singularity of New York and the importance of the Nieuw Amsterdam archives is right on target. But his lack of corresponding knowledge about the Anglo-American colonies renders his speculations of little value. Not only is he making an apples-to-oranges comparison, but he is using a sort of rude sketch of an apple to do it with.

What I also see is that the Dutch, unlike the English, had a great deal of trouble extending the self-governance of medieval constitutionalism to the New World, even though it existed quite healthily in the Netherlands itself. Compare this to the English experience, where just about every colony of settlement has some sort of assembly in short order. Perhaps this was because the English had a ready-made model of settler self-governing institutions dating from English emigration to Wales and Ireland. By the time they got to Virginia they were quite used to setting up counties and electing sheriffs and bailiffs. Whereas the Dutch tried to suppress settler self-governance both in America and in South Africa.

On the counterfactual question of what a Dutch-founded city would have looked like instead of French-founded New Orleans, Jim commented that “[a] Dutch New Orleans would probably have some of the flavor of Curacao. It would undoubtedly be better run than the current French version.”

Jim and I were both a little tough on Shorto. The book is good and interesting when he is talking about the founding era of Nieuw Amsterdam. It gets weak when he tries to project the story down the centuries to the present, a much more difficult task. The book’s merits are real, and the need for someone to do a full-blown, scholarly study of the influence of the Dutch settlement is highlighted by Shorto’s effort.

Alex Singleton & Co. are free-trading Anglospherical fellow-travelers and we wish them well. They also have an excellent blog. (And see their BlogAd on the left side of this page.)

So says the Telegraph, speaking about the Conservative Party. Any three American conservatives can give you four firmly held opinions on any topic; why do they think unanimity is possible, let alone desirable?

I have always loved Julie Burchill. There is nothing remotely like her mix of sentimental Bolshevism, working class cultural nostalgia, British patriotism and militarism, Judaeophilia, loathing of Germany and (usually) America, detestation of the British upper classes, personal libertinism combined with a hardnosed understanding of the consequences of such behavior, and her devotion to sixties-era British hipness and seventies punk rock. She is often wildly wrong, but always entertaining.

This recent piece on the upcoming UK election is nicely done. Ms. Burchill offers this beautiful passage about the impact of Margaret Thatcher, whom she depicts as a one-woman whirlwind of pent-up creative destruction:

[A]s some smart-aleck said, we must change or perish. And who should break our long postwar consensual slumber — not with a snog but with a short sharp smack around the head with a handbag and a cry of “Look smart!” — but the Iron Lady herself.

Mrs Thatcher meant, and still means, many things — some of which she is not yet aware of herself, as we are not. Only death brings proper perspective to the triumphs and failures of a political career; it is only with the blank look and full stop of death that that old truism “all political careers end in failure” stops being true. Only a terminally smug liberal would still write her off as an uptight bundle of Little Englandisms, seeking to preserve the old order, however hard she worked that look at first; voting for her was something akin to buying what one thought was a Vera Lynn record, getting it home and finding a Sex Pistols single inside.

She was just as much about revolution as reaction, and part of any revolution is destruction. Some of the things she destroyed seemed like a shame at the time, such as the old industries — though on balance, isn’t there anything good about the fact that thousands of young men who once simply because of who their fathers were would have been condemned to a life spent underground in the darkness, and an early death coughing up bits of lung, now won’t be? It’s interesting to note that while some middle and even upper-class people choose to go into “low” jobs — journalist, actor, sportsman, plumber — which pay well and/or are a good laugh, no one ever went out of their way to become a miner. “Dogs are bred to retrieve birds and Welshman to go down mines,” said some vile old-school Tory; not any more they’re not, thanks to Mrs T.

Her appetite for destruction was more often than not spot-on. Mrs Thatcher was hated by the old Tory establishment because she, more than any Labour leader, brought down the culture of deference, of knowing one’s place. This led to the very British cultural social comedy of left-wing poshos such as the Foots being outraged by the upstart, while outsiders who should on paper have been Labour voters recognised her as one of them.

One of my younger friends, a very angry, talented, Anglo-Punjabi man of profoundly working-class origin, remembers as a child crying inconsolably for days when Mrs Thatcher was unseated by her own party. It says it all that the Queen far preferred the company of the Labour Prime Ministers Wilson and Callaghan than she did the Conservative Thatcher; the Queen could smell the lack of respect on Mrs T, and it put her back up no end.

As to the current election, Ms. B. sees no hope of a “Mad Outsider” candidate akin to Thatcher. It won’t be Blair:

How weird is Blair? Not weird enough for me, though obviously too weird for some. I shall vote for him because he has banned foxhunting, and because he took us into a just war against a vile dictatorship; I’d be hoping for a few more of those during the next term, which I suppose makes me one weird woman voter, obsessed as we are meant to be with peace, childcare and fluffy bunnies. On the other hand, I find the current Labour cultural cringe towards Islam — to “make up” for the war, as if Saddam Hussein hadn’t single-handedly been responsible for the deaths of more Muslim people than the entire British and American armed forces put together! — extremely offensive, as a woman.

Hoping for a few more of those! I doubt it. Tony has had a political near-death experience as it is. But the sentiment is appreciated.