-- James Morone
LRB Smut-Finder General by Colin Kidd reviwing Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History by James Morone
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n18/kidd01_.html
[....]
"Morone knows that American historians and political scientists have shed considerable light on this underside of American political culture. He cites, for example, Richard Hofstadter's definition of anti-Catholicism as the pornography of the Puritan. However, Morone diverges sharply from works such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab's The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (1970) and David Bennett's The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (1988), which identify a persistent crackpot fringe on the margins of American politics. Instead, Morone contends that the hardliners have shaped some of the central features of the American state.
"Similarly, while historians have pointed to the Puritan origins of American politics, they connect these with a progressively secular dilution of New England religiosity as it enters the liberal mainstream. The Puritan notion of the 'covenant', for example, appears to provide a model for the contract theory of government, though the latter is denuded of the former's connection with the divine. But Morone argues that Puritan influences are much more profound and direct than most historians acknowledge. Relocating the Puritan ancestors from folksy Thanksgiving remembrance to a place of honour (or dishonour) as the principal begetters of the American way of doing politics, he proposes that Puritan ideals loom large behind the 'zero-tolerance' version of liberalism. The Puritans first conjured up the notion of America as a redeemer nation with a sacred mission, popularised the jeremiad - a sermon of complaint against backsliding and declension - which would become in time 'a kind of American anthem', and set precedents for the harsh treatment of demonic otherness. The Puritans confronted their own axis of evil - Quakers, Indians, antinomians, witches - and established an American pattern of waging external war as 'an idealistic moral crusade against a satanic foe' and of purging domestic society of heretics and 'scary, hidden subversives' when these threatened the community's divine vocation. Moreover, the classic Puritan jeremiad of 1679 anticipated generations of complaints against 'permissive parents and their pampered kids' with its lament about 'defects as to family government'."
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-- Shane
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