THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
Are Americans headed toward a civil war? We’ve already had one, so we know it’s within the realm of possibility. In fact, by one reckoning, the English speakers have had two other civil wars in the last four centuries, spaced out every hundred or so years. Is there some sort of deep cycle at work here? With, er, implications for our own troubled times?
Such questions are brought to mind by a book published back in 1998, Kevin Phillips’ The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America. That volume connects three conflicts, the impacts of which were felt strongly on both sides of the Atlantic: the English Civil War of the 17th century, the American Revolution of the 18th century, and the American Civil War of the 19th century.
Phillips, who died in 2023, was not an academic, which might explain why he could have a scholarly turn of mind and a keen eye for contemporary significance. Early in his career, he was a Republican politico, albeit one with lots of facts and figures. The book that made him famous as a wunderkind, The Emerging Republican Majority (1969), carefully traced, among other things, the partisan impact of the U.S. Civil War, even as it prophesied that the old Confederacy, once the citadel of the Democratic Party, would be the hub of the new GOP. He similarly foresaw that the Lincoln Republicanism of, say, Vermont would give way to Democratic liberalism. Yet while Phillips was a Tory at heart, he was anything but a Republican triumphalist; in later decades he steadily critiqued the New Right (going back a few New Rights ago), Reaganomics, Newt Gingrich, and the Two Bushes.
Yet whether it was voting patterns of German-Americans in the Midwest or the financial flows of Wall Street, Phillips always wrote with ethnographic knowingness. The Cousins’ Wars sprawls over 700 pages, delighting in detail. For example, he dwells on the continuities between East Anglia (the font of Puritanism, where Oliver Cromwell was born) and Massachusetts (the Puritan capital in North America, home of, to name one revolutionary descendant of Puritans, John Adams).
Writes Phillips: “The long, wide public greens of Suffolk, Essex, and Hertfordshire—especially notable examples remain in Writtle and Matching, Essex, and Long Melford, Suffolk—were transferred to New England en masse,” to sister-towns across the Atlantic such as Braintree, Groton, Ipswich—and, of course, Cambridge.
Yet if Phillips is good at itemizing the trees, he’s also skilled at overviewing the forest. His larger woodsy argument is that the conflicts of Anglo-America across those centuries followed certain key themes: city vs. country, smugglers vs. tariff collectors, insider economic interests vs. outsiders, and, perhaps most or all, the fervor of faith. Writes Phillips of earlier eras: “Religion shaped the principal texture of men’s minds.”
Such assertions might seem to put a cap on the contemporary relevance of Phillips’ work. After all, these days, in both the U.S. and the U.K., it can’t be said that Christian religion is the main texture. The decay of Mainline Protestantism is well-documented; less known is the decline of the Southern Baptists. Nearly a third of Americans don’t keep even the pretense of religious attendance. As sage observers have noted, the hardcore MAGA movement is not particularly attached to a church. That’s how an obviously secular figure such as Donald Trump can ride high with the right. Yet over on the left, can anyone say that Barack Obama was any less secular? As for Joe Biden, he takes “cafeteria Catholic” to its à la carte extreme, making all-out support for abortion a centerpiece of his reelection campaign.
Meanwhile, Rishi Sunak, the prime minister of Great Britain, is a Hindu who took the oath of office with his hand on the Bhagavad Gita. So much for the Test Act.
Yet Phillips, who spent his career making sly appraisals and keen parallels, would have a ready answer to this irreligion conundrum. Over the last two or so centuries, religion has been transmuted into new textures of ideology, including communism, fascism, environmentalism, and feminism. From ballot boxes to battlefields, these new creeds have been fighting faiths. Hence the wit of the wordplay “Great Awokening.”
We can see this in the lineage of Puritanism, which morphed into Congregationalism and then into the United Church of Christ—which is now, of course, fully woke. To be sure, the ethnicity of Massachusetts and New England has changed enormously over the centuries; Albion’s seed is now the minority. Still, the people of the Bay State retain their Emersonian energy, forever scanning the horizon for things to either abolish or improve. It helps that on a per capita basis, Massachusetts is the richest state in the union; affluence enables one to climb high on Maslow’s pyramid, all the better to look down.
The spirit of high-minded meddlesomeness animates readers of The Boston Globe and The Harvard Crimson. It’s interesting to recall that, back in 1636, Harvard was founded to train Puritan preachers; today, Christianity is long gone, and the campus still fills with passionate intensity. According to a 2024 repressiveness rating compiled by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, “Harvard University obtained the lowest score possible, 0.00, and is the only school with an ‘Abysmal’ speech climate rating.” The original Puritans—Winthrop, Cotton, and Mather—would be horrified at what Harvardian crusaders are doing today, but they might at least honor the zeal with which they are doing it.
As Phillips writes, history is not made by class, it’s made by clash. That is, the conflict of one group against another, which can include rich against rich and poor against poor. Just as the Puritans mostly fought the Cavaliers (the forces of Charles I in England, the forces of Robert E. Lee in Virginia), so now the secularized New Englanders, broadened out to Yankees and other denizens of Democratic blue dots, find themselves in conflict with the Republican red zones.
On the other side of the blue-red divide, contending beliefs flourish, and the reds are duly energized. Committed Christians, evangelical and Catholic, have hardly disappeared amidst the MAGA, and they have all joined together in the GOP. There they have been joined, like it or not, by a smattering of alt-right sectaries, including Three Percenters, Oath Keepers, Groypers, and Pepe the Froggers. Just one thing unites this motley crew: antipathy to Blue.
