AMERICANS VS TRUMPIST (profanity alert):

eNDING hISTORY:

Let's move on to the last of your books on the Middle Ages, Medieval Market Morality by James Davis. What story does this book tell?

This is the only book from the period that I actually work on. I chose this one because the 14th century is an absolutely intriguing time of cataclysmic change. By picking the topic of market morality, James Davis gives us something which engages all those really huge shifts, but gives us a very different perspective on them, and one which shows the ways in which contemporaries weren't only subject to these shifts, but how they engaged their own subjectivity. They're constantly reflecting on the implications of commercialization and rapidly shifting social structures for themselves as moral beings and for their own sense of what it might mean to be a member of a community.

The story of the book quite simply is that it's period when things are changing very dramatically, and he's interested in thinking about the ways in which moral systems were developed to deal with economic changes.

Are we talking about things like the difficulty of running an international commercial system without charging interest on loans, that sort of thing? Is it about the tension between the religious prohibitions on some sorts of activity and practical requirements to breach those requirements in order to make these new emerging systems work?

That's the backstory, or the broader canvas of what he's doing. But his focus is at a more local level. It's about England, and he looks more at humbler kinds of trade. He's interested in bakers, butchers and brewsters and the kinds of trade that went on in local markets. But the conceptual backdrop for that is the broader canvas of theological anxiety about price and lending at interest that you mentioned.

Talking about 'market morality' suggests a morality rooted in the process of the exchange of goods and services. Is he making the point that the morality was changing as a result of the way that commerce was changing? Or is it more about the imposition of things like the 'just price', in other words trying to control the market and fit the exchange of goods and services into a pre-existing moral structure that governs how we should interact with each other?

It's probably a bit of both, probably slightly more the latter. Chronologically, he's doing two things. On the one hand, there's a sense that markets are developing so rapidly that moral, theological and legal ways of thinking about them need to catch up, with a real acknowledgement that the market economy is crucial to the common good more generally. And on the other hand, there is indeed a sense that theological moral thinking about concepts like just price rendered commerce really problematic. What concerns them most, though, is trickery and deception.

Does it tell a story about the relationship between government and commerce as well?

It does, and part of the story is about the relationship between legal regulation and moralizing ways of thinking about it. He finds interesting disjunctions between the two, or at least a sort of slight lag between the two. For example, the assizes are a set of legal regulations about quality and quantity and this sort of thing, but very often, in practice, they seem to be used effectively as a kind of licensing system for brewers and bakers. Whereas the moral standards that might be applied tended to produce much more stringent ways of thinking about the limits to which people should be exploiting what they get up to.

Fundamentally, the point is that over the course the 14th century, there's a real growing awareness that markets are a good thing. At least that's what they reckon. But, at the same time, there's a great deal of anxiety that it can so easily go wrong and that there are moral theological tensions there. So, the book's about the working out of that lapse between the two.

NO ONE'S GOING TO SCARBOROUGH FAIR:

WHICH BEGS THE QUESTION...:

[S]ince his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men--the most reliable component of Donald Trump's base--support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president's inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump's working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity--why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.

I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage. (My father's best friend got the Silver Star for wiping out a German machine-gun nest in Europe, and I never heard a word about it until after the man's funeral.) They admire and value the understated swagger, the rock-solid confidence, and the quiet reserve of such cultural heroes as John Wayne's Green Beret Colonel Mike Kirby and Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo (also, as it turns out, a former Green Beret.)

They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as "toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors." But I didn't need an expert study to tell me this; they are men like my late father and his friends, who understood that a man's word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day's work for a day's wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned. They shoulder most burdens in silence--perhaps to an unhealthy degree--and know that there is honor in making an honest living and raising a family.

Not every working-class male voted for Trump, and not all of them have these traits, of course. And I do not present these beliefs and attitudes as uniformly virtuous in themselves. Some of these traditional masculine virtues have a dark side: Toughness and dominance become bullying and abuse; self-reliance becomes isolation; silence becomes internalized rage. Rather, I am noting that courage, honesty, respect, an economy of words, a bit of modesty, and a willingness to take responsibility are all virtues prized by the self-identified class of hard-working men, the stand-up guys, among whom I was raised.

And yet, many of these same men expect none of those characteristics from Trump, who is a vain, cowardly, lying, vulgar, jabbering blowhard. Put another way, as a question I have asked many of the men I know: Is Trump a man your father and grandfather would have respected?

UNION FOLLOWS:

Nullification was a challenging concept, but Calhoun was an extraordinarily gifted thinker.  Even skipping some of the intricacies of his arguments, the underpinnings remain resonant, at a time when so many of us are questioning the exercise of government power. Calhoun worried about majority domination in a republican form of government. Invariably, in Calhoun's thinking, once a group (or aligned groups) gained power, they would exploit their position to reward themselves at the expense of the minority.  Obviously, Calhoun wasn't the first to recognize this; the Founders themselves had concerns. But experience had told him that the aspirational virtue expressed in Madison's Federalist 10--a conviction that diversity of interests and opinions would create a dynamic that would foster compromise--had not been achieved. 

The answer to Majority Tyranny was either nullification or what Calhoun called a "concurrent majority," requiring each interest (each state) to consent to legislation. To modern eyes, it seems wildly impractical,  but, at a time when the world was far less complex, and many people thought of themselves as state citizens as well, it had some appeal.   

Yet, there was a core incongruity in Calhoun's argument, which even he tacitly acknowledged: If you considered the Constitution a contract (as many citizens did, in the Lockean sense of the word), didn't the states (including South Carolina, the eighth state to ratify) agree on behalf of themselves and their citizens to be bound by laws that were passed by Congress and signed by the President? The Tariff might very well be abominable, but it's a law, and if you don't like the law, use the mechanisms in place (such as Amendment or Supreme Court review) to change it.

Calhoun had an exquisitely wrought answer for this: That wasn't the nature of the contract. The Constitution did not give final "sovereign" authority to determine what was Constitutional to any branch or branches of government, including the Supreme Court. Final authority would have had to have been specifically expressed as such in the document, and it was not. In the absence of an enumerated power, the authority remained with the states, and not as a majority of states, but each individual one. Calhoun considered several approaches, but settled on an elegant one: It is the people--the governed-who are the supreme arbiters over that to which they have given their consent. Consent once given is not consent for all time. The governed may withhold their consent and seek to change the terms of the contract (or any piece of legislation) when they wish, through the mechanism of a state convention. This was the way citizens preserved their rights.

Calhoun was somewhat clairvoyant in his concerns. He grasped that the power to determine, with finality, whether a law is Constitutional, was also a power to shape the law itself. Even the Supreme Court could be controlled by a malevolent majority. This is why, from his perspective, ultimate sovereignty must reside with the governed.

What Calhoun did not address adequately was the practical effect of Nullification. The power to say no turned majoritarianism on its head--to maintain a Union, the many must always yield to the few. While Calhoun professed to be a Nationalist (whether for political reasons or out of belief is not clear) he was, in fact, advocating for a policy that made it impossible for a union of states to be anything more than a casual confederation.  

As radical as this idea seems, it first gave strength to the Unionists in South Carolina by supplying them with an intellectual construct for their position. That allowed them to beat back the radicals who wanted more aggressive action (like secession). But it also contained the seeds of its own destruction because of its inherent instability. Nullification wasn't reform; it was, in practice, a call for revolution from 50 years of government under the Constitution. Even those sympathetic to South Carolina on the specific issue of Tariffs (or, both tacitly and explicitly, slavery) recognized that there was no national consensus for it. 

Discussion in Congress was heated, and, in late December 1829, Senator Samuel Foot (CT) lit a match by introducing a resolution calling for an inquiry into limiting the sale of public lands in what was then the Southwest. Over the course of the next few months, nearly half the Senators weighed in, several multiple times, and on many more issues than land. The speeches became public spectacles; the galleries were filled; and, as an added touch of drama, Calhoun attended in his (then) role as Vice President and President of the Senate. The emotional climax was the debate between Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina and Webster. Hayne gave a good account of himself but stumbled a bit on nullification when he declared that the state legislature, rather than a state convention, could nullify a Federal law.  Webster pounced. On January 26, 1830, he rose and, over two days, carefully dissected the internal inconsistencies of Haynes's argument. Then Daniel Webster did a Daniel Webster:

When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union...Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured...but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land...Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!

The gallery, the entire Chamber, stayed silent as Webster resumed his seat. He had accomplished an extraordinary feat. With one burst of eloquence, he had yanked the discussion from Calhoun's astringent intellectualism into something deeper and more emotional, a pride of place and country. Nullification was a coldblooded political tactic. Webster drew people to a higher calling.