The Next Realignment by Frank J. DiStefano

Author:Frank J. DiStefano
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633885097
Publisher: Prometheus Books

American culture rocks back and forth like a pendulum between pragmatic eras and moralistic ones. Sometimes America is a practical country focused on negotiating over interests, policies, and results—concrete things people can horse trade and thereby compromise over. Other times, America is a messianic country obsessed with moral crusades over questions of right and wrong. Sometimes Americans care most about breadbasket issues of stability and prosperity. Other times Americans eagerly sacrifice practical concerns to make America more just and more fair, eager to burn old institutions down in the hope of building better ones from the ashes. Back and forth it goes about once or twice a century. These repeating eruptions of moralism are called great awakenings, and they're one of the most important and least discussed phenomena of American culture and politics.

When the awakening spirit strikes America, it sparks a lightning strike of major reform that affects everything. Americans who once believed the nation's most important task was to uphold good order and provide for everyone's needs suddenly cast off such pragmatic concerns, convinced the nation must be urgently reformed and uplifted. Awakenings trigger great religious revivals. They create bursts of charity and volunteerism. They trigger new interest in spiritualism. Most important, nearly every great cause in American history traces back to an awakening. The abolition of slavery. Women's suffrage. Temperance. Public schooling. The ban of child labor. Antipoverty activism. Anticorruption and good government efforts. Health safety laws. Great awakenings are the hidden driver behind many of the greatest social and cultural reform movements in the history of America. Yet few of us know, or are taught, much about this undisputedly important force running through America's culture and politics. It's a tragedy because we live in an awakening era now, one that has shaken the foundation of the Fifth Party System since the 1960s—and is helping to drive the next realignment to come.

AMERICA'S CYCLE OF GREAT AWAKENINGS

America's great awakenings are wholly uncontroversial textbook history. Many American children learn all about them in school, albeit from a corner of their textbook, tucked in the back, which they study and soon forget. Despite their well-documented importance to the history of America, great awakenings don't really make it into America's national narrative. They're often pigeonholed as simply “religious history” ancillary to the course of national events. America's first three great awakenings did indeed spark important Christian revival movements, ones that transformed the country's religious landscape and brought Christian activists into politics as they swept across the nation. These awakenings were also, however, a great deal more. They were great national moral revivals, ones in which Americans both secular and religious plunged into crusades for reform—a national moral spirit that many Americans naturally channeled through their Christian beliefs. Each time this awakening spirit arose in a new generation, it changed people's priorities. It created new social and political issues. It seeped deeply into every nook of the culture and overwhelmed everything.

The original Great Awakening struck America in the middle of the 1700s and ran through to the American Revolution's dawn.

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