Re: The Redeemer Nation

I hope every reader at LRC today carefully reads the important article by the Bionic Mosquito on The Redeemer Nation. This dangerous concept is one of the seminal themes in American history.

In the last decades of Murray N. Rothbard’s life, he developed an important interpretative framework in understanding this American history. This was prodded on by his careful study of the emerging “new political history” which was reinterpreting the dynamics of the ebb and flow of ethnocultural and ethnoreligious groups. This bold synthesis became the central focus of some of his greatest scholarly endeavors, particularly when it came to understanding progressivism as a secularized version of this postmillennial religious zeal.

I believe Rothbard provided the Rosetta Stone to understanding the orgins of the welfare state in America: the role of postmillennial Protestant pietistic intellectuals and activists born in the crucial decade surrounding the Civil War who, because of the seductive influence of the evolutionary naturalism of Darwinism, came of age increasingly secularized, but who did not forsake their faith in statism and elitist social control.

An excellent book which takes the reader on the panoramic journey in understanding how this central idea arose and its continuing impact on shaping our civilization today is The Puritan Origins of American Patriotismby George McKenna, professor emeritus, City College of the City University of New York.

 

11:49 pm on July 20, 2017