“What is America? Do we have a culture...I ponder these things.”
I sit up drinking a beer every once in a while listening to Rusty do his search monologues. As someone who guests on his podcast this is helpful, because unlike others who monologue, Rusty asks and wonders and muses rather than pontificates. Another aspect that is useful is that Rusty works from respected secondary sources, books I have not read, that many interested in American history have read, and find themselves wrestling with the ghosts left undeclared in the subtext.
For instance, I was contacted recently by an agent for a legit historian who wishes to interview me about my Plantation America research, but must do this off the record, for, if it was discovered that he consulted me he could lose his funding. Ghosts and specters haunt our American myth with whispers and threats.
Rusty muses introspectively on the characters of the various proto-Americans:
What was really up with the Puritans, the Quakers, the Scotch-Irish Appalachians and the Cavaliers?
Were there more proto-American strands than these iconic types?
Was their ever a hope for the American yeoman class so recently fallen under political and media attack?
How did the Appalachian strand express itself beyond the geographic bounds of its American genesis?
Rusty starts with an expression that the economic underpinnings of America were stronger than the religious ones. He does so with the most fascinating caveat I have heard when speaking of such storied origins as the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock, when he reminds us that a leader with a few hundred members of a break away protestant denomination moving to wild territory to begin a utopian society, would today be declared a dangerous cult leader.
Rusty begins to sharpen his musing at the end, wondering at the American trajectory.
I would suggest that those of us interested in answering these questions for ourselves consider the career of one of our truest founding fathers, James Oglethorpe, whose biography is annotated in detail on my Patreon page.
Explore Plantation America at Patreon:
link › patreon.com/jameslafond
I would also suggest an examination of the life of three yeoman from his age: Peter Williamson, James Johnson and Phinehas Stevens, men who did not exceed the rank of captain and fought in a war more formative to the American character than the Revolution, as our perspective is that of generals and leading statesmen and begins in 1776, 160 years into the American origins story. I would buttress this with the work of Hinton Rowan Helper from 1857: the Impending Crises of the South.
Thanks, Rusty, for a Friday night's muse.
American Nations
Albion Seed
I'm reading a book, just started, I bet you would like as it is on this sort of thing.
Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson - Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (2012)
Just reading the first 40 or so pages he's laying out his ideas. He notes the difference between the Spanish and English in the new world. The Spanish set up an old world plantation, forced labor the whole works. The English tried mightily to do the same but...there was no gold. The only thing of value was food and crops and if you tired to force growing this the productivity fell to nothing.
from the book,"... It was Smith[the guy who ran Jamestown] who was the first to realize that the model of colonization that had worked so well for Cortés and Pizarro simply would not work in North America. The underlying circumstances were just too
different. Smith noted that, unlike the Aztecs and Incas, the peoples of
Virginia did not have gold. Indeed, he noted in his diary, “Victuals you
must know is all their wealth.”..."
They even set up a governor(fake king) with a bunch of nobles who owned large land tracts and then planted them with settlers but with the only thing valuable being land forcing them to work it was problematic when there was so much free land. As you've said they would run off any chance they got.
from the book,"...Just as the attempt to impose draconian rule in Virginia failed, so
did the plans for the same type of institutions in Maryland and Carolina. The reasons were similar. In all cases it proved to be impossible
to force settlers into a rigid hierarchical society, because there were
simply too many options open to them in the New World. Instead,
they had to be provided with incentives for them to want to work..."
So what he is setting up here is an explanation of the differences between free countries, not that the US is anymore, and Oligarchies.
There was some discussion on how screwed up the Oligarch model is on Anonymous Conservatives site. Someone commented that there was so damn much money to be made in the US but they were screwing the whole thing up by constantly trying to control everyone. I had a bit of a minor epiphany that Black ghettos are the same way. Everyone is constantly trying to dominate and screw the other person. The thugs want to steal and batter everyone and the politicians are doing the same while needing the thugs to get elected and the whole thing spirals down into a huge ghetto fuck up. The whole of the US is becoming a Black ghetto, [not that Blacks are in charge]. The bad part is no one is making any money. I read something somewhere where a economics guy for a class or paper or something somehow convinced drug dealers in the ghetto to go over the economics of their situation and he found that the majority of them were making not much or less than minimum wage. If there was not massive thuggery and they got an average shitty construction job they could make much better money and not end up in jail which doesn't pay at all.