#the Ultramontan conservative

[elparra]

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[flagellant]

Hey, I was just wondering, how conservative are Catholic churches in general in the US? Like, just your every day St Stephen's in Sleepyville, Nowhere?

Cus it occured to me that, certainly in Birmingham UK, I am fairly free to assume a Catholic church will be relatively liberal so long as it doesn't advertise a time for Latin mass or say anything about pre Vatican II on its message board. Most churches seem to have an "were not preaching against it if we just don't preach about it" attitude to the most controversial issues.

For example, when we had a priest come over from Ireland to complete his seminary training the first sermon he gave was on the sin of all extra marital relations and he was very quickly taken aside by the parish priest and told not to do it again. Likewise when we had to read the letter from the bishop decrying the legalisation of gay marriage my church and most churches I know had a real hard time finding someone willing to read it.

And I guess on some level I've just assumed that's the same the world over; that the hierarchs and some ultramontane churches are gonna be super cringe about their Catholicism but the majority of churches are just quietly ignoring all that and getting on with the business of being a good parish church. And I guess I'm just beginning to really grok onto the idea that that might not be the case?

Not really the case for most, sadly. The best way I can describe the average congregation in America is "Politely extremely conservative". As in, they usually don't want to host sermons on the sins of extramarital sex, or how all gays are going to Hell...but they all still believe it, and they're not challenging anything. I remember when US federal marriage equality was instituted, that very same Sunday I went to mass, and our bishop had written up a letter to explain how nothing was going to change etc.

[judica-me]

I know it’s fashionable among a certain segment of politically conservative and traditionally minded online Catholics to be one step short of open rebellion against the Pope and the Bishops.

But I guess I’m just too old and too ultramontane to be a revolutionary now. 

[nickyfantastic]

On the social composition of the Republican Party before Reagan

For most of this century, the presidential level of the Republican Party has been dominated by its so-called ‘Eastern Establishment’ or—as conservatives have called it since 1940—the ‘Liberal Eastern Establishment’. The historic power of this wing corresponds to its social composition: encompassing most of the ‘Boston-Wall Street’ network of finance capital with the exception of German-Jewish banking capital (traditionally Democratic). Between McKinley and Hoover, the economic and politically hegemonic instance within this bloc—and, thus, for US capitalism as a whole—was the power of the great investment banks and, above all, the House of Morgan. The investment banks had been the chief conduits of the European capital that helped finance the US industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, and they used their financial might to carry out a vast restructuring of the American economy between 1898 and 1902. What they created might be described as an unorganized corporate capitalism based on the control of the investment banks over a spectrum of infrastructural and industrial monopolies. Although the sweeping trustification carried out by Morgan was a precondition for mass production, the inherently rentier character of investment bank dominance (which extorted monopoly rents and speculative profits from the most technologically advanced industries via control of money, utility costs, railway rates, and certain inputs) was a positive fetter on the emergence of a ‘Fordist’ regime of intensive accumulation. Although some capitalists in the advanced sectors supported the Democratic Party (Henry Ford in the early years), most rallied behind the Rockefeller-Standard Oil forces in the Republican Party. Self-financed by oil profits, the Rockefeller empire had escaped financial control by the investment banks and, as the second largest capital group in America, was well-positioned to lead the attack on Morgan power. Ironically, it was the Democratic New Deal landslide in 1932 that created the conditions for both the economic and political recomposition of the Republican core fraction.

First, a series of sweeping reforms (Glass-Steagall Act of 1935, Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, Chandler Act of 1935, etc.) dismantled investment bank control over capital markets, railroads, utilities and communications (ATT escaped Morgan domination in 1940). This removed the chief obstacle to the hegemony of the most advanced industrial corporations and, later, their associated commercial banks. Secondly, the seven main capital groups, which in 1938 controlled two-thirds of the assets of the 200 largest corporations, became increasingly integrated via a labyrinthian network of interlocking directorships and shareholdings, creating a more unified material ‘general interest’ between the groups. Thirdly, with the coming of the Second World War, core capital definitively abandoned its protectionist swaddling clothes for imperial robes. The reconstruction of international free trade within an American imperium became its overriding goal. Roosevelt’s policies of a bipartisan war cabinet and corporate control within the state structures of the war economy firmly established the basis for postwar continuity of core dominance—regardless of the party in power—in the strategic Cabinet positions controlling foreign policy, defense and the macro-economy. Fourthly, the re-organization of power within the core capitalist bloc cleared the way for the political accommodation of weak versions of collective bargaining and welfare expenditure. Thus in 1940, the ‘Eastern Establishment’ raised a liberal flag with the nomination of Wendell Willkie in a deliberate attempt to win over part of the urban New Deal electorate (farmers had already returned to the Republican fold in 1938). For the next quarter-century, all Republican presidential candidates (Dewey, Eisenhower, Nixon in 1960) adhered to the core program of corporate internationalism and critical toleration of New Deal reforms.

The first mass current in American politics to self-consciously call itself the ‘Right’ was the loosely knit opposition wing of the Republican Party that emerged in 1938 under the leadership of Senator Taft of Ohio. Its financial nucleus was a constellation of protectionist Midwestern banking and industrial interests (including the lords of ‘little steel’) who were ultramontane in their loyalty to McKinleyism and fanatical in their opposition to both the New Deal and liberal-internationalist Republicanism. This peripheral capitalist bloc also attracted support from the flotsam and jetsam connected to the old rentier strata, as well as from the shopkeepers of a myriad small-town ‘Main Streets’ who had little use for the federal government and even less for Eastern bankers. Its distinctive resonance was its blending of anti-Rooseveltian intransigence with a fierce nationalism—frequently misnamed ‘isolationism’—that urged the pursuit of Manifest Destiny in the Caribbean and Pacific, while rejecting American involvement in European intrigues. Taft’s unceasing criticism of the hated ‘Eastern Establishment’ and American aid for Britain also gave him a purchase upon those German immigrant constituencies of Wisconsin and the upper Midwest that had formerly supported La Follette Progressivism. Taft exploited this mid-continental power base to become Senate leader and to gain control of the Republican National Committee, but the presidential nomination eluded him. Despite his support from the party ‘regulars’, Taft’s presidential drives were sabotaged four times between 1940 and 1952 by shrewd injections of Eastern money and the defection of right-wing allies.

Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream