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Originally Posted by goofyballer
Details on Elizabeth's relationship to all this? Don't know much about her and from my brief Wikipedia-ing it appears she died ~50 years before the English Civil War.
Quick background:
- Henry VIII breach with the Catholic church in 1533
- Mary later ascends to throne, reinstates Catholicism in 1553, sets about persecuting Protestants. Lots of chaos in this period.
- Mainland Europe is beset with more or less the same problems in reordering social and political norms in the face of an evolving world -- what are known now collectively as the
wars of religion: the Schmalkaldic War, the Cologne War, the
French Wars of Religion and then later the Thirty Years War plague the continent from the 1530s to the 1640s
The English Civil War breaks out in the 1640s but at the
end of time period when hostilities between the rest of Europe raged.
The question then is: why did England start out on the path of reformation and the eventual violence between Catholic and Protestants that defined Europe for a century -- see the Marion persecutions and the chaos that followed -- but how were they able to fade that? How did England stay relatively peaceful during the last half of the 16th century and into the first half of the 17th century while the rest of Europe bloodied itself over sectarian violence, when a lot of the same social forces (e.g., a nascent Protestant movement versus an entrenched mostly Catholic aristocracy) were present in England too?
The answer is the
Elizabethean Religious Settlement which -- while it did reinstate a Protestant church in England -- allowed for a wide range of freedoms for Catholics. Rather than seek to eradicate them, she sought accommodation and compromise. And that status quo held into the beginning of the Stuart Kings.
What it did was merely delay and forestall the bloodshed. I want to be clear I am not arguing that the English Civil War was fated and unavoidable and that the Reformation had to play out to some bloody end, but I think you can blame Elizabeth and later James and Charles for not doing enough to change the facts on the ground -- that is, while the law made accommodations and English royalty professed toleration for Catholics and sought religious harmony and to move the political space away from the conflicts, most of the people beyond the elites didn't internalize that norm.
So when the English Civil War starts, but especially later, when it gets really violent -- lots of people are confused how it came to that. What is everyone killing each other for? And remember a core point here is that England is relatively ascendant in Europe in this time. The economy is doing well. There had been political stability in England for as long as anyone had been alive, they were frankly in far better shape and far more politically organized than the rest of Europe. So this was not 1930s Weimar or even 1850s America where you can see the writing on the wall. It wasn't like that at all. Contemporaries didn't see it coming. See modern polite society's "GDP OK, unemployment OK, woah the ****, you guys want to tear the system down?" posture of Brexit and Trump phenomenon critics today.
Going further, it is fair to say the genesis is in found in high ideals and the role of Parliament. At least at the level of leadership. So the war wasn't borne out of religious motivations.
But when the Civil War broke out into the masses and huge amounts of violence and chaos erupted (5% of the population died!), what the common people were fighting about was religious toleration and accommodation, they dgaf about what Parliament was up to, they had a century of unresolved conflicts and bad blood between Catholics and Protestants building and many wanted violent retribution.
If you want to go deep here, I recommend
England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640-1642. The claim is that while conventional heuristics suggest stability, England in the immediate years before the war was in a state of cultural disarray and the sources are hundreds of years in the making. The emerging 'popular press' (used loosely) even had a large moral panic about crime in English streets that puzzled authorities at the time because they thought it was far more imagined than real. No one could quite pinpoint all the crime and chaos in 1640s England that the people felt was quite real. Anyone who heard Trump describe America as a dystopian hell-hole of chaos and fear to the cheers and nods while crime remains at an all time low might see a parallel here.
Anyway, the argument is basically that what the Elizabethan Religious Settlement had done is swept the religious tensions aside for a few generations, to remove it from the political sphere, but the tensions never went away. The elites moved on and started fighting about other stuff but normal people never embraced toleration and accommodation.
I'm not suggesting we're on the verge of a violent civil war but I think the parallels are manifest. You have elites who have come to terms with Civil Rights Era changes in society now 50 years old and largely sought to eradicate it from the political sphere. I know that sounds almost laughable now, but remember the old joke was the GOP riled up voters with dogwhistles and went to hard to the rim on tax cuts and deregulation. None of them wanted to disturb immigration too much, no one wanted to go back and re-litigate the Civil Rights Era and return to Jim Crow at the elite level.
And we might be seeing that still. Maybe Trump's gestalt is just that idea super-charged -- racism for the masses, governance for the elites. We'll see.
But the results almost don't matter. The question here is how norms are constructed and how the masses react to them. I think the parallels here are that much of elite discourse and much of our past imagined political consensus assume far, far too many elite and cosmopolitan social norms around racial, religious and gender egalitarianism were actually embedded in the collective conscious. But they weren't.
That's why liberals and polite society are in freak out mode now. Psychologists call it the
false consensus effect:
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whereby people tend to overestimate the extent to which their opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are normal and typical of those of others (i.e., that others also think the same way that they do).[1] This cognitive bias tends to lead to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, a "false consensus".
Our current situation has the hallmarks of the English Civil War where leadership, even contemporary historians today can still mistake all the causes of the animosity. Royalty, the courtiers, the elites all assumed religious toleration and accommodation and peaceful co-existence was the norm and so the feelings of chaos and intense hatred Protestant England had for Catholics, the Irish, etc. and vice versa was perplexing.
I feel like our elites and political discourse suffer from the same problems. Our elites have largely embraced more socially egalitarian norms, as has our popular culture, if not our language itself (consider the fretting about 'political correctness' and all the right-wing snark about how to describe people and things is ever-changing and upsetting for them).
But just because elites and large parts of our cultural production have embraced certain norms doesn't mean most people did. And we are still so enamored with our false consensus that startlingly few save literally like Breitbart and snarky late night comedians and liberals on the internet are engaging with the empirical reality that just because the laws, elite consensus, and a lot of our institutions have embraced de jure if not de facto egalitarian postures -- it sure as **** doesn't mean actual people did. We can all say the Civil Rights Era is 50 years in the past and everyone has moved on, this is just economic insecurity, it's just a reaction to jobs and trade -- and you can get a lot of people to buy into that because humans are good at recognizing causes in the immediate past, less good at determining them the farther into the past they recede. A retrograde campaign of racial resentment in 1972 would have made all the sense in the world. In 2016 it causes befuddlement. But only if you imagine the elite consensus filtered out of the coast and the halls of power down to the people in that time, an understandable idea particularly since tons of mass media culture assumes just that. But I think the moment you dispense of that notion then none of this is that confusing at all. Just assume the Civil Rights Era victories changed the law, changed TV and movies, changed how our institutions are ordered, and I'll even grant changed many hearts and minds. But many still remain unmoved and unconvinced of any of their values and want the world re-ordered back to the way they thought it was.
So you have a two-fold tension that is subtly but importantly different. One is that we have some serious disagreements about the role of minorities, women, immigrants, Muslims, etc. in society and correspondingly, of white people, and the proper ordering of status and wealth and the like. But that's almost banal, like we all get that.
The second, almost more insidious tension is that elite norms of social egalitarianism have achieved a false consensus, hence the perpetual and seemingly now generation long inability to "not understand" and "talk past" each other. I am out of good ideas for Democrats and maybe some shortcuts will work. But I think it's becoming increasingly clear -- see my post earlier about Santa and Jesus -- that liberals who care about those norms and embrace social justice have a long, long road ahead of them. When you think Santa, Jesus and Trump form some sort of triumvirate of Well-Ordered American power, I'm forced to take the right at their word that they are in fact genuinely confused and lost as to how to express themselves politically in a modern, chaotic world. That's not a natural, healthy political expression for adults but just like liberals struggle to understand the FreedomFriesNews meme generator guys, it's pretty clear they struggle to communicate with the rest of the world as well.
bobman is correct, 2024 is going to have a clown car full of mini-Trump demagogues riling up whites with the same stuff Nixon did. It's almost 50 years later and that narrative hasn't changed. There's going to have to be a moment where we do the hard thing and acknowledge getting elite, institutional and cultural mindshare and then letting time play out and do the rest may not just magically work after all (see chezlaw's post if you want the other side of this). Lasting, durable political changes are going to need to go back and assume no consensus exists that blacks, immigrants, gays, women, etc. have the full human value of a white guy and then proceed from that point. We can no longer assume that's true and demand redress. Gotta deal with the underlying assumptions first.
Last edited by DVaut1; 11-21-2016 at 06:12 AM.
