The testimony of Barone confirms the argument of this book: that the United States already had by 1900 the institutional framework to empower people to acquire the skills and the culture they need to thrive in its cities.  It didn’t require the welfare state, and it didn’t require squadrons of policy experts to help the poor navigate the road to the middle class.  The immigrants had the tools they needed and they were eager to use them.  On the other hand, the well-intentioned efforts of the enthusiasts of the welfare state actually hindered people in their advance to competence in the city by encouraging them to retain their peasant, pre-industrial culture rather than modify it, in the grand American tradition, and adjust to the realities of life in the city.  The welfare state gave them material sufficiency, as Fogel celebrates, but stripped them of the opportunity to forge for themselves a workable culture that could sustain them and lead them to competence and success.  Thus many indices of social disease, of violence, family breakdown, and the like, all worsened between 1900 and 2000.  Crime, juvenile delinquency were said to be driven by the “root cause” of poverty and the rage sparked by oppression.  Unfortunately, when the burdens of material want and oppression were reduced, crime rates went up.  Maybe the root cause of crime is not poverty, but something else.  At last, in The Fourth Great Awakening, a liberal was ready to grasp this nettle. 

Fogel takes up the themes that conservatives have developed: culture, character, and response to incentives.  To talk of a maldistribution of vital spiritual resources as he does is to say, using center-left policy-speak, that character matters.  Fogel recognizes that culture and values are an essential ingredient of success in modern society, and his book is an attempt to imagine how that agenda could be reconciled with the progressive vision of an egalitarian society, what we have characterized as “green communitarian.”  But he is unable to free himself from the hold of the paternal state.  The welfare state will continue, only now it will concentrate on eliminating spiritual inequality rather than material inequality.  The new egalitarian state will still empower the government and the “other-directed” New York intellectuals of Riesman’s Lonely Crowd with the supervision of society.  Like Plato’s guardians or Huxley’s controller, they will direct the lower orders with paternal wisdom.  And the irony is that American liberals, the champions for a century of the separation of church and state, the triumphant differentiation of the City of Man and the City of God retreat, in defeat, to a reactionary recombination of spiritual and political power, hankering like Osama bin Laden after a return to ancient glories in which divine and temporal powers were combined in a single Caliph and all the messy politics of the modern era were avoided by divinely inspired commands from the throne.

The attempt by Fogel and others to attempt to rescue their movement is understandable although, according to his own theory, they ought to allow it to die out as a spent political movement that arose out of the Third Great Awakening of 1900.  They are responding to the political realignment that has followed upon the Fourth Great Awakening and that has put their egalitarian program in jeopardy as new spiritual needs and new political forces have reduced their authority and prestige. But all their special pleading and sophisticated analysis doesn’t alter the fact that the United States already has the institutions it needed for unlettered immigrants to find the road to the middle class.  It had them in 1900, and after the egalitarians wrecked them with their too-powerful government, it took another spiritual outburst to put the United States back on track.  The Reagan revolution and the Bush presidency are merely the political consequence of that spiritual outburst, the working out of a spiritual movement in political reform to clear and restore the road to the middle class.

But the Fourth Great Awakening was not just an outburst of enthusiastic Protestantism, and the United States is not just a nation of red proletarians struggling to get into the middle class.  What about all the people who are already middle class, as 95 percent of Americans consider themselves to be?   What about the Beats of the 1950s, the New Left and the flower children of the Sixties, and the New Agers and the postmodernists of the 1980s and 1990s?

The Spiral Dynamics perspective makes sense of the other outbursts of the Fourth Great Awakening.  It interprets the spiritual outbursts of the present era as the consequence of people struggling to achieve a transition from one consciousness level to another.  People experiencing the red/blue transition are attracted to enthusiastic Protestantism.  Young professional people negotiating the blue/orange transition in London are attracted to the Brompton Oratory or to the Alpha Course, while similar young Americans are attracted to the success ethic of Norman Vincent Peale or Stephen R. Covey and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People or the burgeoning suburban mega-churches.  Educated women who want to transcend blue convention and become orange creative artists are attracted to the books and seminars of Julia Cameron and Sonia Choquette.  Scions of wealthy families find themselves on the cusp between orange and green, and are attracted to environmentalism, organic agriculture, NGO activism, and anti-discrimination, searching for a genuine democracy of sharing and caring instead of the vision quest of the creative ego. 

Political thinkers and leaders understand that they must develop a politics that responds to the spiritual outburst in its rich diversity.  Tony Blair in Britain developed a politics to center the Labour Party on “Middle Britain,” the people “not privileged or deprived… but struggling to get by” (Gould 1999 p3) that Labour forgot for a century as they appealed exclusively to the working class and the chattering class.  He also declared that Britain needs more entrepreneurs.  Braving a storm of controversy, he sent his son to a religious school, the London Oratory.  He reduced the Conservative Party to railing about the betrayal of the pound and the perils of immigration.  In the United States George W. Bush, recognizing that Republicans are losing well-paid, well-educated college graduates to the Democrats, first tried to extend the Republican party from its blue/orange base to a green universalism with his “compassionate conservatism” and then, in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, he moved to occupy red and purple territory, as the powerful commander-in-chief of the American tribe, and blue territory as the representative of good versus evil, while still maintaining green territory by insisting on the universality of the United States—it was not in a war with Islam, but only with terrorists.

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©2005 Christopher Chantrill