 Alright, what's up everyone? It's Luke, another episode of Not Related. We got here, I'm not even going to tell you what the book is. I mean, you can look at the episode title, but just listen, listen to this. You hear that? You hear that thickness? That's the thickness of our book this episode. I'll talk about that in a second. First, I want to talk about why we're doing it. And that is, we live in a very special time. The post-war era after World War II was defined by a very sizable intellectual consensus in the West. And that is that we are moving towards a kind of ethical, racial, cultural universalism. People might not put it in that kind of words. Nowadays they call it globalism, right? It's the idea that we're moving to this inevitable end of history where we discard all of our quote-unquote superficial differences and we all become one people, standing around a fire, singing kumbaya, whatever you want to put it. Now, the book, now, as time has progressed, we have seen the rise not just of, you know, post-colonial studies on the left, but nationalist movements on the right all across the world nowadays. It's not just an isolated thing. It's really everywhere. Japan, India, the West, even sort of America. And we're seeing this rise of a reassertion of identity based on race or ethnicity or nation, however you define that. And I wanted to do an episode on this book because it really shows you how, although you might think you're red-pilled nowadays, you're only just starting to get into the rabbit hole. It's far deeper. That is, what defines cultural, ethnic identity is actually way deeper than what you might actually think. Now, this book, the title of this book is Albion Seed, Four British Folkways in America. It is by David Hackett Fisher. This was published in 1989. Now, it's not a political book. I gave sort of a political introduction. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do a study on this book. But the thesis of the book is as follows. That is, we often think of the United States as being maybe a country of British origin, maybe more generally of a European or maybe white origin. But Hackett Fisher, actually I don't think that's a double last name. I think it's just Fisher, but Fisher's argument is that really the core of the United States isn't really just one cultural group. The divisions are actually even deeper than that. His idea is that there are really four different Americas, four different cultural strands that come directly from Britain from different parts and create the United States as we know it. And they don't just create different cultural traditions that eat different food or something superficial like that, but that totally define the worldview, the religion, the way of looking at politics, everything about four ethnoculturally distinct entities in American history. And they're entities that people aren't often aware of, but they are very much there. So we're going to talk about that in this video. So as usual, I am Luke Smith. Luke at lukesmith.xyz. If you have any comments, send them to that email address. You can send donations to paypal.me-slash-Luke-M-Smith. That's M as in matriculate, matriculate. That's the first word that comes to my head that starts with M. Anyway, as always, we're going to go through, I think how I'm going to organize this episode. First, we're going to talk about the four different folkways, the four different groups that Fisher lays out as being defining American ethnocultural life. Then we're going to take a break. I'm going to read donations, comments from the previous episode. We got some interesting ones. And then afterwards, we're going to have, well, I'll put it this way, Fisher at the end of the book gives a reinterpretation of American history. Not a reinterpretation, but a, he shines a light on American history through these four ethnocultural distinctions. Well, not distinctions, but different groups. He shines light on American history in the light of those groups. And so after the break, we're going to run through his history with my own comments on America given these four different groups. Now let's go ahead and actually get into it. Maybe we should actually talk about, I've talked about these four different ethnocultural groups in the United States. What actually are they? Now, some of them have names in traditional descriptions, but some of them Fisher actually has to coin names for because although they exist as independent entities, people don't often have specific names for them. They haven't, despite the fact that they are very real, there's not a perfect word to cleave to all of them. But let's go through these four groups. I'll give a brief description. Then we'll go in depth in each four of these. Now, first off, one you've heard of, the first group is the Puritans. Now the Puritans are a theocratic religious group. They come from East Anglia in England and they move into what is now New England, right? So Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, you know, this kind of general area. And they are defined by, of course, extreme religious zeal and a kind of xenophobia to people who are not of that religious or ethnic persuasion. So they, I guess, have what you could call an ethno-state in New England for several hundred years. Now they are the basis in a lot of ways of the United States' intellectual culture. They found many universities, but they also have a distinct religious way of thinking that actually plays into their interpretation of education. But we'll go into that in specifics later on. So the first group is the Puritans. The second is what Fisher calls the planters. Now the planters originally in England were an aristocratic group. They were royalists in the English Civil War. They supported the crown. And they moved to what is now Virginia. Now they have a very particular culture that is, I guess, tied to their aristocracy. And we'll talk about that in a second. In many ways, they formed the basis of at least part of the American South, centered around Virginia. They were a group that, for example, had an underclass. They were aristocratically based. Their worldview was aristocratic. And they'd like, they brought over many indentured servants and later on slaves, slaves from Africa. And this, of course, is all part of their worldview. We'll talk about it in a second. So that's our second group. We have the Puritans, number one. We have the planters, number two. Planters are the royalists again. Number three is the Quakers. Now the Quakers, if you don't know, are a religious sect or the society of friends, is what they call themselves, I suppose. The Quakers are a religious group that come from different places, but mainly the North Midlands in Britain. So they come from the North Midlands. They are unlike the Puritans. Although they are very religious, they are not theocratic. They are much more accepting the people of different religious backgrounds or ethnic backgrounds. So they move into Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is their place. And they invite Quakers of other, from other places, from, for example, the Netherlands, Germany, stuff like this. And they also allow non-Quakers to move into the area. But the Quakers have a very distinct diction and a very distinct lifestyle that actually affects a lot of the people that move into their area of hegemony. So they're less ethnically, or at least racially uniform, I guess in terms of genetics or something like that because they have some other groups moving in with them, but they still are a cultural unit. Now the fourth group is what Fisher calls the Borderers. Now the Borderers, you can think of them as being sort of the American cowboys, or at least that's what they become. And that's what they were in the Old World. Now the Borderers, they're called that way. Some people will call them the Scots-Irish, but Fisher argues that's not a very appropriate term because a lot of them have nothing to do with Ireland. They may have moved through it on their way to America. But they're called, he calls them the Borderers because they are people that come from the border area between Scotland and England. And they live in an area which in effect is anarchistic. That is, it's not necessarily in the control of England or Scotland and their cultural institutions and their way of life is defined by that anarchy. They become cowboys. They become independent. They become pioneers. And they are, you could think of them as sometimes being lower class people, although that's not always the case, but they are a rough and tumble people who originally move into Pennsylvania, but the Quakers who are a little iffy about them settle them gradually into Appalachia. They move into a lot of the American South. They move into Texas, Arizona, parts of even Southern California. And they are a very interesting group in themselves. So we're gonna talk first off of these four different groups in detail, not nearly as much detail as is in the book. Now I will go ahead and say, as a caveat, this book is enormous. As I said, a thousand pages. It is fantastic. If you have to write some kind of term paper, just get this book, open a random page and there will be enough to start on. You could have, there are just universes of information in this book. It is a real pleasure to read. You could literally just open this thing up anywhere and find something really interesting. It draws from so much. But I will just say as a caveat that my description of anything in this podcast is not nearly going to be as deep as the book itself. So if you're interested in any of this, pick this up at your library, buy it yourself. Just leaf through it, there is so much in it. It's just fantastic. Now let's go ahead and get into these four groups. The first one, again, is a group that you've probably heard of, the Puritans. Now the Puritans, when you take a class in American history, you're usually taught in one way or another that the Puritans are the origin point of all America. Now again, the thesis of the book is that that's not really the case. Puritans are actually a relatively insular group. Later on, they will expand out westward gradually into Ohio, into Minnesota. They'll be overrun by other groups. They will invite in other religiously similar groups. But at the beginning, the Puritans are a, I guess what you could describe in modern terms as an ethno-state, a religiously based ethno-state. But they were highly intolerant of other kinds of religious sex and they really didn't want any other kind of contact with other people. Now it's often construed that the Puritans came to the United States for religious freedom in the modern sense of the term. And that's not really accurate. They were seeking religious freedom for themselves, but that religious freedom ultimately meant a kind of theocracy. And that's what happened. For the really hundreds of years, New England was a kind of religious theocracy. And the culture of the Puritans is based on a kind of religious and moral consensus. Now this I think has changed over time. I think a lot nowadays you'll look at New England and fewer and fewer people up there are religious. But I think the moral overtones of it, of the Puritan culture really are still consistent. Now the Puritans were also behind some of the great, I guess, moral crusades of American history. Two of the major ones are of course the abolition of slavery and also the prohibition of alcohol. Non-Americans might not know for a period of, I don't know how many years actually, but it was totally illegal to sell or consume alcohol in the United States. Puritans were behind both of those movements, both alcohol and the prohibition of slavery as well. So they were behind a lot of these movements. So let's give a kind of a view of what Puritan culture was like. Now again, it was based on a kind of moral consensus and it was also part of that moral consensus was instructing young people and even older people in the religious traditions of the community. Now Puritans had the highest literacy rate of any other culture and that's because it was viewed as being very important to educate people, not just in reading per se, but reading for the express purpose of reading the Bible. And so for this reason, New England was home to many of the first Puritan schools and also universities. The educational culture of the United States in a lot of ways comes from this kind of Puritan moralism. It's important to educate people so that they can I guess reach the kind of moral consensus and they can read the Bible themselves, find the correct ethical judgments and understand the implicit mores of the society. So now education wasn't just something taught in schools. It was also Puritans were also very disciplinarian. I suppose you could think of them and they had this concept of breaking the will of children. Children who were raucous or children who were hard to control were really constrained in extreme ways, I suppose. They were punished sometimes severely. Sometimes they were, Fisher goes into the ways that sometimes they were even tied up or tied to certain things to make sure that they couldn't cause trouble. A Puritans in a lot of ways, the important thing in their religious tradition was breaking the sinful will of a child and making him I guess obedient to moral authority, the moral, the moral authority of the Bible or by extension the religious community. Now Puritans also were noted for not just, you know, getting rid of religious dissenters, be they Quakers, be they someone else. They of course also are famous for parts of American history like the Salem witch trials, which everyone is pretty familiar with. They, while this wasn't true of the other three cultures, Puritans were very worried about witchcraft, were very worried about the occult and of course would persecute those kind of practices or perceived practices with of course, even capital punishment. Now Puritans were also extremely self-disciplined. The image of Puritans in movies is almost like not even that bad. When you see Puritans miserably sitting in a, in the pews of a church and it's extremely cold and they're sitting there without any flinching or perceived pain or anything, that is the value of Puritans. It's to show, I guess, ambivalence, to pain, to sit there, take it. Suffering is a part of the religion. It's important, I guess, for people to put up with the suffering of the world. Now there's an interesting passage. One of the things that Fisher notes is that even when Puritans moved to the Massachusetts Bay Area which is a place that was mostly abounding in natural resources, they like keeping up the traditions that they kept in England for so many centuries. On page 135, he actually talks about their diet. He says, For three centuries, New England families gave thanks to their Calvinist God for cold baked beans and stale brown bread while lobsters abounded in the waters of the Massachusetts Bay and succulent game birds slowly orbited overhead. Rarely does history provides so strong a proof of the power of faith. And this is the mindset of the Massachusetts Bay Puritans. They want to live in a way where they're not enjoying things too much. They are putting up with their lot in life. And that is an important moral aspect of life. It's important to stay away from too much enjoyment or too much revelry because that might lead to temptation. Now, of course, they also very, you might know from fictionalizations of the time like the Scarlet Letter that they are very much against any kind of sexual misconduct, premarital sex, anything of the sort. It's not to say that they were unromantic in the confines of marriage. Fisher does provide many examples of, you know, endearing relationships, but they were, as their name suggests, very Puritan. So this, I guess, should give you a view of the kind of Puritan mindset. I think this more than the other groups is one that people sort of know about. Now, again, I've given you a very piecemeal account based on stuff that you might already know. But if you look in the book, you'll see that Puritans not only have a distinct way of architecture, but you can look in the specifics of their diet, their clothing, etc., which I can't go over for time. Now, so what about group two? Now, group two, again, is the planters. And the planters come from various areas, but mostly southwest England. And the planters were the royalists. They were supporters of the crown in the English Civil War. And their ideology is based on that and sort of their aristocratic nature. Now, the core ruling class, of course, is a series of more or less related families with particular surnames who come to the United States who are extremely wealthy. And they bring with them a indentured servant. Now, if you don't know what this is, if you're not familiar with American history, indentured servants are people who basically want to move to America to start a new life, but they don't have enough money for the voyage. So what they do is they promise someone much richer, like, for example, the planters. They promise the planters, okay, I'll work for you for free more or less. I'll be your slave, in essence, for five, 10, 20 years, something like that, so long as you pay for my voyage and you pay for my living while I'm working for you. So the planters are not just a kind of upper class from a particular area. They're also indentured servants that come with them. Now, the planters have a worldview that is quite distinct, very different from not just ours, but the Puritans as well. Now, one of the planter families, and Fisher goes into this, is the Filmer family, and one famous name in the Filmer family is, in fact, Robert Filmer. Now, if you took the NRX pill, you may already know who Robert Filmer is, but Filmer wrote a book called Patriarcha, which I think the subtitle is the Natural Power of Kings. And it was a defense of divine right absolute monarchy. And we don't have to go into the specifics of the book, but I guess the general idea is that the natural order of society is one where there is a patriarch, where there is a, on earth, there is a ruling king and he, in effect, has full control. And then at lower levels of societies, there are families which, again, are sort of patriarchal. They have a leading man. And of course, all of this is under the universe, which is run by the patriarch of all. And that is God. Now, Robert Filmer, of course, wrote this book that sort of illustrated this political ideology, but it also vibes with the planter or the royalist ideology generally. This is their culture. It's built on a view of society that's hierarchical, where there are some people who are aristocrats and it is their lot in life to rule. And there are other people who are lower on the totem pole. It's their lot to, you know, for, I guess, serve whatever goal they're supposed to do. Maybe they're workers. Maybe they have some, some goal in life, but people are born with a particular station and they should work in that station. Now, the royalists move to the United States. Again, they come with a lot of indentured servants and they come with a lot of wealth. So they begin to create a kind of culture that's similar to what existed in England originally. So it is a stratified it's a stratified society. And when the indentured servants run out, they, the planters are the ones who actually begin recruiting, or well, not really recruiting, but buying African slaves. Now, Fisher actually notes there's this idea that sometimes people have of the, I guess, the plantation culture that arose in some parts of the antebellum south. There's an idea that there is an aristocratic culture and that comes from the fact that slaves were bought and moved to the United States. But Fisher actually says that's putting the cart before the horse. In his view, it's really the aristocratic culture that was there in the first place and that motivated the purchasing of slaves. That motivated the slave trade as it moved to the United States. So that's, that's his view of it. The planters, in essence, wanted an aristocratic society and when that, that lower class of indentured servants ran out, they begin drawing their, drawing people from Africa, buying them from the slave trade. Now the, I guess the patriarchal views of the planters aren't just in reference to political life, but they also have sort of political view or I guess you could say like views of gender relationships that are very patriarchal in the same way. That is, their view, again, of the family is that it is the man's, well, of course, everyone at this time had the idea that, well, of course, yes, a man is the director of the family, but this is very strong in the planter society specifically. And in fact, they had many cultural institutions while for example, in Puritan society, if two people were found being unloyal or infidelous, not faithful in their marriage, they were usually punished in Puritan society more or less equal, both men and women. But planters, I don't know, I guess you could say that planters had more of what you could call nowadays, thought patrol. That is, planter society, while both men and women were punished, the emphasis was more on female infidelity than male fidelity. And you also have to think of the gender politics of planter society. Now, when Puritans came to America, they were more men than women, but not that many more. But planters, I forget the exact statistics in the book, but it was something like 15 men for every female or something ridiculous like that. In fact, nearly everyone who was coming to the United States as part of the planter movement were either aristocrats or indentured servants, and women are not going to be indentured servants. This is going to be something that a man is going to want to do. You know, oh, I'm going to move across the world. I don't have anything else to do. I'm going to become, you know, a worker in a totally foreign land. That's a male thing to do. So there were very few women and the culture sort of evolves around, well, I guess, what you could call in-cell rage. So there's a lot of masculine energy and there aren't many women around. What's even more is that since it's a very aristocratic society, access to females is limited to a very small portion of society. Now, one person in particular that is talked about a lot in Albion Seed is one person. He's one of, let's see, oh, William. William Byrd II. He's part of the Byrd family in Virginia. And William Byrd II does us the great favor of leaving a diary to go through his daily life. And it is hilarious. It's almost sad, but it's a pretty raucous life that is he's an aristocrat and really day in and day out, you know, he talks about, okay, I had to beat this servant today, beat this indentured servant and then he goes on every single day. He has some kind of sexual encounter with a different woman. Maybe he just, you know, grabs the behind of some random woman in, you know, life or something like that. Or maybe he sleeps with the servant or maybe he does this or that. He's flandering all the time. It's sort of, it gives you a view of the kind of mindset that these guys have. And of course, he says a lot of stuff with guilt, but obviously not, not enough guilt to not do it. You know what I mean? So he lives in the society where there's very few women, but they're for the aristocratic people, for the people who are higher up in station, at least in this earlier part of the planter society. There's very much, I guess a lot of instability and lack of social cohesion. Now this isn't to say that this is going to survive forever, because obviously, you know, eventually there's going to be a population of married people. It's not going to be indentured servants forever, but you have this supreme kind of inequality and the ruling class here is going to be a little blasé. Now we'll talk more about the ideology of them or their conception of liberty in a bit, but hopefully this will give you a view of what exactly the planters were like. But one passing note on linguistics, on the language that the planters spoke. Now all of these groups, all these four groups are, of course, English speaking groups, but they speak systematically different varieties of English. Now I'm going to read directly. Now again, note planters are high class, a very aristocratic, and they have an aristocratic way of speaking, but that aristocratic way of speaking several hundred years ago is going to sound very different if we say it today. So I'm going to read, this is from page 257, and this is going to give you an idea. Well, I'm just going to read it and then we'll talk about it in a second. Now this is me reading. We're a northerner, that is a Puritan, said, I am, you are, she isn't, it doesn't, and I haven't. A Virginia, even of high rank, preferred to say, I be, you be, she ain't, it don't, and I ain't. The people of the Chesapeake used like for as if, he looked like he's dead. Boston's James Russell Lowell noted with an air of disdain that this construction was never found in New England. Now the interesting thing about the planter culture, again, although they are a high-class aristocratic group, they speak a variety of English, you know, saying you be, he ain't, stuff like that, that nowadays would come across as extremely small-brained, I suppose. Now this is characteristic of Southern dialects, as they exist nowadays in the United States, and this is because a lot of the planter culture, including that linguistic aspect, actually becomes, merges with the borderer culture that we'll talk about it in a bit, to provide a lot of the situation that we actually have in the modern South, and the language of the planters, although it sounds sort of silly to us now, this is a holdover of this old aristocratic, Virginian accent, and of course it actually does indeed come from their home in Southwest areas of England. So at the time, it's important to remember like English has, at the time in Britain, there were many different varieties of English and many different standards to which English was held, and this particular variety of English spoken in Virginia, which later becomes, came Southern English or Black English get parts of it, it was highly perceived back then, despite the fact that some of the same constructions saying I ain't or they don't, or well, everyone says they don't, like he don't, that's what I meant. The same constructions like that sound silly to us now, but at the time, they were very highly perceived and what happened is this aristocratic dialect, sort of, I guess, trickled down to other portions of society, as opposed to, again, New England, which had an accent, I didn't talk about it, but New England had an accent that, you know, they said Dhar and Har. Actually, if you read, if you read like HP Lovecraft, sometimes they'll talk about the rural people of New England and how they speak, and it's actually a decent rendition. So you could check that out, but anyway, so that's about it for the planters. Now the Quakers differ from the Puritans and the planters in pretty significant ways. They are the opposite of the planters in the sense that while the planters are highly aristocratic, the Quakers are extremely egalitarian. So now the planters are actually very traditional Anglicans. They believe in this kind of hierarchical church, whereas the Quakers or the Society of Friends, again, this is a religious movement, they have an extremely egalitarian way of looking at religion in which there's not even necessarily a formal church hierarchy. The reason they're called Quakers, if you don't know, is because Quakers would have meetings, religious congregations or whatever, and during the services, God could speak through any person there and when God spoke through people, they would begin to shake, they would begin to quake. So other people would call them Quakers. So as opposed to the sort of aristocratic way of looking at society, even in church, the Quakers had the idea that anyone can be a vessel for God. And they were also, so this is in, you know, opposition to the planters, but in opposition to the Puritans, the Quakers had a kind of a very tolerant view of religion. Although like the Puritans, they were extremely religious, they had a view of toleration and actually tolerated many of the people and, you know, the Puritan world and invited people even who are not Quakers to the area. Now, nowadays, we don't necessarily think of Pennsylvania as being Quaker territory and that's for a very specific reason. It's because that Quakers, although they create a culture that still sort of continues and defuse ways in the United States, Quakers invite a whole, they pretty much invite whoever wants to come in different regions of Europe to the area and many other people settle there who are not Quakers. Their toleration gradually gives way to them being replaced by other people. Now, Quakers survive for quite, I mean, they're still around today, but the Quakers are still dominant in Pennsylvania for quite a period, but their view, their, I guess the cultural values that they have still have effects on the area and actually America generally. So one thing that Quakers popularized at the time is they don't necessarily like deferring, calling people sir, calling people my grace, my lord, which would be normal for a planter. Quakers popularized, for example, the handshake. Now, the handshake, we sort of take it for granted, but it is a very egalitarian way of greeting someone. It's not like one person is bowing to the other. Quakers popularized the handshake as a particular way of greeting people where everyone is on the same footing. Now, linguistically, since we talked about language a minute ago, a minute ago with the planters, the Quakers preserved some sort of interesting aspects of English. One of them is the second person singular pronoun. So English like most, English used to be a more normal language. Now, most normal languages will have two second person pronouns. There will be, for example, a singular pronoun that refers to one person you're talking to, let's say you, and then a plural pronoun which will be like you all, you guys or something like that. In English, we just have you and you have to throw all our guys on the plural to make a plural. But historically, you was a plural pronoun and the singular equivalent when you're talking to only one person, you use thou or thee. Now, the reason why thou or thee fell out of the English, this is actually not directly related to Quakers, but we'll get to it in a second. But the reason that thou or thee fell out of the lexicon of English is it became, it became, I guess, polite or deferential to refer to someone who is higher in station as you as the plural pronoun rather than thou or thee. So gradually over time a process occurred where people were being more and more polite, more deferential to people until you just became the only pronoun left. Now, at the time that the Quakers were settling this area, thou, thee, was still common, commonly used in different places. And the Quakers, they actually preserve the use of thee. They'll say actually, they won't say thou art, they'll say thee is. That's another story, but they still use the second person's singular pronoun. And at the time, this was perceived as impolite or indignant or not necessarily. I mean, it's egalitarian. If a Quaker would talk to any kind of high church Anglican, you know, a planter and refer to him as thee, he would probably get upset. Actually, Fisher in the book has some stories of Quakers who refer to people as thee and they get extremely insulted. They might beat him with their cane or something like that or, you know, the Quaker refuses to call them a lord or something like that. And this sheds a lot of light on the Quaker mindset. They are radically egalitarian. Now, it's not to say they think that everything goes, everyone's equal. They do have firm religious beliefs and the way that Fisher puts it, I think, is they believe in a kind of moral aristocracy. That is, God can speak through people, but you have to be more or less open to it. But this is the Quaker mindset. I think the Quaker mindset is a little bit more what we would think of as being modern. I think a lot of people look at the planters or the Puritans and sort of think of them as being alien cultures, although they do survive and they do survive in important ways. Now, the Quaker culture survives as well. It's maybe a bit more friendly to modern sympathies, but one of the reasons that Quakers aren't so popular or you don't really run into Quakers that much. Simply because Quakers were so accepting, they literally just let many people in. Now, although the Quakers were very sympathetic, very open people, there was one group they didn't necessarily like that much. And that last group is our fourth group. It's the borderers. Now, the borderers, I think I said earlier, are sort of like the American cowboy archetype in a lot of ways. Now, again, they're traditionally called the Scots-Irish. That's not necessarily a correct term to call them, but the borderers have a very interesting history. Now, England and Scotland have been off and on in war for time, immemorial, nearly. And the borderers are the people who live sort of between the two states for centuries and centuries. And you have to put yourself in their position. They're people who don't necessarily have a government. They live in a kind of anarchy because they live in two governments that don't necessarily have full control of the region. So borderers are pioneer people. They are people who are not necessary. They're almost, I don't want to say barbarian. It has bad connotations, but they are uncouth. They are individualists. They are survivalists. Again, they're cowboys. And their social institutions are circulate around personal independence, personal autonomy. And they also have a strong sense of honor. And part of that sense of honor comes from the fact that you have to defend your reputation in a position of anarchy. Now, the borderers, they come originally to different parts of America. They filtered through sometimes through Pennsylvania, actually where the Quakers are. And the Quakers sort of pushed them off to the West. They originally think, okay, well, you know, these people are a little crazy, but you know, they're sort of cowboys, but maybe we could at least put them between us and the Indians or something like that. So they pushed them into the Appalachian mountains and borderers expand very quickly all over the American back country. And I think I said earlier, they later expand to parts of the South, to Texas, to Arizona. Now, borderers come with a lot of cultural things that we sort of associate with early America. One of them is the log cabin. Now, racially, I should say, borderers, again, I said, it's not necessarily correct to call them Scots-Irish. They're actually a people of, I sort of want to say a mixed ancestry because they're right at the border of England and Scotland. This is also an area that got during Dane Law, during the Scandinavian invasions, got a lot of Scandinavian culture and relationships during that period. So they have a culture that is generally Celtic, generally Germanic, and they preserve some things that are actually, for example, Scandinavian. One of those things is the log cabin, which they bring to the American back country. Now, I didn't go through all the architecture of the other cultures. Again, you'll have to read the book for that because there's just so much to talk about. But borderers bring the log cabin and settle mostly in the back country. Now, they religiously speaking, many of them were Presbyterians. As time goes on, they'll convert to other religions. But, you know, Fisher presents a couple anecdotes where really their priorities were, I suppose, well, actually, I think I wrote it down. Their religious priorities were, quote, the camp meeting, the Christian fellowship, the love feast, the evangelical preacher, the theology of Protestant fundamentalism and born-again revivalism. That is a lot of borderers affect the mentality of churches that exist in the United States now where they're not so focused on the autism of doctrine. They're focused on the kind of deep wisdom or the moral teaching behind preaching. It doesn't necessarily have to be ideologically consistent. But it's also about, as he says, the Christian fellowship, the meetings. They all have revivals and stuff like this. Their religious traditions are very much the opposite of the Anglican mode where there is a church or something like that. In the border or mindset, everything is very decentralized. There is not necessarily centralization to the religious organization. Now, in the same way, they have a lot of, I guess, pre-modern. I don't want to say pre-modern. It comes with bad connotations. But they have a lot of folklore as it contains to, for example, medicine. Fisher actually goes through a whole lot of their traditional remedies and stuff like this. They have a bunch of sayings. And there are a society which compared to the Puritans, well, they're sort of the opposite of the Puritans in a lot of way. While the Puritans are style themselves as learned and will be highly literate, the borderers are the kind of people who will brag about being country people. They'll brag about not knowing how to read. They'll have folk knowledge. They don't necessarily care about learning or any of that silly stuff. And they actually bring with them a bunch of, I guess you could even say, pagan folklore into their mindset. But again, borderers are unified by severe independence. They want to be independent from the control of everyone else. And they are used to a cultural mindset where they live at the margins of society. They live in a place where they can be their own kings. And the organization of border or society sounds like what you might hear of the Scottish Highlands or something like this. They are loosely organized into clans which are not necessarily based on descent, but they're based on concurrent marriages. That is, if you marry another woman she and your families are sort of merged in the clan or something like this. So there's very much, everything is sort of a, all the social institutions are sort of like practical institutions to survive away from the interference of the government as you could put it. And again, they are very country people. One of the sayings that Fisher mentions that they means a lot to them is the more dirt, the less hurt. That is, borderers almost even dislike cleanliness. They dislike overthinking things. They like being rough and tumble. And you can still feel a lot of this mentality not just an Appalachian people, not just in Southern people or Western people, but it's a mindset that has sort of affected a lot of American thinking generally. The borders are one of the most widely spread groups of these four. Now we've gone through the four groups and I want to take a break. I'm going to come back. I'm going to read donations, going to read emails and then I'm going to run through Fisher's rendition of American history with these four different groups. How American history is mostly an ethnic and political conflict between them with different alliances and reorganization and all the rest. And I'll also talk about the different conceptions each of these four groups have of politics and as Fisher details it, the idea of freedom, the idea of liberty because to each four of these groups the word freedom means something very, very different. All right. And we're back. So again, luke at luke smith.xyz that's the email paypal.me slash luke im smith that's im as in Mexico. So you can send donations, send emails. I'm going to read out a couple of them. Let me pull them up. I should have pulled them up right before I started the recording but okay, we're here. So I have a couple. Well, first off, thanks everyone to who is on my paypal. Again, I should probably not give you out all these links. I should just tell you go to my website luke smith.xyz it has links to everything there. Everything you could possibly need. At least everything. I think is important. All right. So let me read out a couple of donations. So Lunario sends to 10 dollars. Oh, excuse me. Not dollars euros. It's a little bit more. So he has I'm not going to read out his entire he actually has three questions are all pretty long but I'll sum them up. He wants to talk about Shumpeter's ideas in contrast to, for example, Uncle Ted's or an Asim to Lebs or stuff like this. Let me read out one of his questions. Given the modernity industrial society slash bug manhood or whatever you want to call it clearly sucks. In which ways do you propose to counter it? In this vein, how is it the cat? How is the cabin building going? Are there other things you think everyone can do to resist bug manization? Well, you know what to answer that question. I'll probably I guess I could bring in the example of the borderers in this episode, right? Or really any of these cultural groups. The thing to remember is that if you're fighting bug manism, if you're fighting modernism, you don't need to have an intellectual rebuttal to it. You just need to base a society based your cultural institutions on your needs. You can look at many different societies emerging political organizations right now. There are a lot of, for example, right wing groups right now in the United States that I know of who organize they might have political views, but they also have, I guess, a social organization to them. They will have people will know each other's families. They'll take care of each other when they get doxxed. They'll do something like this. And I think that any society, any future society is not going to be planned. We're not going to sit down and plan it. It's something that has to emerge. So I would say if you want to counter bug manism in your life, be involved with whatever cultural environment you come from. If you come from a Methodist church, even if you don't believe in God, maybe you should go to Methodist church again. Of course, I don't think you should go to Methodist church. I think you should go to a Southern Baptist church because that's my background. But just whatever you know, you should be sure not to sever your roots with it, even if it's something like religion that you might not necessarily believe in because you'll regret it sometimes if you do sever your relationship with that. Let's see. And well, Lunaria has a third question which is sort of similar to that, but I might respond to him via email since it was a pretty long email. But that's that. And we'll say in terms of donations, I actually got this week. I'm very thankful for this. I got the biggest donation I have ever, ever gotten by PayPal. And that is I've gotten donations as large as $100 but this week actually just an hour or two ago. I got I don't know if I should read his whole name out but I got $500 huge donation from a Michael T. So thank you, Michael T. And he is based on an email he sent me. It seems like he's a user of LARBS and incredibly enjoys it. So if you don't know what LARBS is, again, just go to my website LukeSmith.xyz and check it out because you might, if someone is going to donate $500 to me for this, it obviously is worth it to someone. So maybe I'm not telling you to check it out and donate to me. I'm just saying check it out. Maybe you might like it. So so that's donations. I honestly cannot express how happy I am about getting $500. That that means a lot. I've already emailed Michael. Thanks. But yeah, he definitely deserves some thanks on air for that. It's not really on air. It's a recording. But you know what I mean. So thank for the thickest donation I've ever gotten. Thank you, Michael. So let's read a couple emails and comments. I think I just have three here an email from another Michael. There are a lot of Michaels out there as it happens. He asks my question is as follows. Does Shumpeter define what what he means by capitalism and socialism? It seems to me as if he presupposes a definition of capitalism as what we have right now. That's a good question. I think well, Shumpeter does have his own definition of capitalism. But I think in the context of what the word it was invented to me, you have to remember that capitalism as a word was effectively invented by socialists. It is a word that it's honestly a kind of rhetorical trick that is if you are creating a new ideology and let's say you have this ideology let's call it socialism and let's say that socialism I wanted to be the ideology that everyone likes and everyone is going to like when it wins and sets everything straight. So in my view I'm going to portray my ideology as everything good and I also need a term to describe everything in the world that people think of as being bad. And I think there's a sense in which capitalism is was invented as a term that means precisely what we have right now. That was the rhetorical purpose of coin ant. Now we can relate it to something like private property. We can relate it to something like some kind of lack thereof of economic regulations or something like that. But I think at the core I don't know if this is a hot take or what it's just my view of it that in real life what capitalism means to someone who is a socialist is all the stuff that exists in the real world that I don't like. You know inequality that's capitalism. Imperialism that's capitalism. Differences between men and women that's capitalism. Racial differences that's capital everything that I don't like is capitalism. I think that's that's sort of the way people use it and that's sort of the way that Schumpeter is using it. Although I think that he would be willing to describe it as private ownership of the means of production. However that is construed but I just want to say that I think in general most of the time when people use the term capitalism they mean it as what we have right now and not necessarily much more. Another comment. This is from Pepe Brian. I've read his a comment from him last time but I guess he gets to he says is there a chance that Terry had a bicameral mind that is in response to the late Terry Davis who died very recently who was schizophrenic. I did a brief video on that but well as it comes to Jane's idea of the bicameral mind. Well yeah he probably did because Jane's idea was that schizophrenia was a kind of vestigial part of the bicameral mind and so in some sense what Terry hallucinations or however they appeared to him in his brain what they could have been is some kind of vestige of I guess that that different mental frame that pre pre-conscious pre-modern consciousness people had. So yeah well something to think about I'm not going to I'm not going to stake my career on something like that but you know that question was probably actually asked as a joke but you know yeah so Tori asks it was interesting to hear Shampater's view on the intellectual class and their contempt for competency. I first started thinking about this when I read Neil Stevenson's Cryptonomic Arm there was a scene in the book where one of the characters a network engineer was at a party and his girlfriend who had the sentiment of the referred or excuse me gravitated toward the intellectual crowd the scene is brilliant at catching the sentiment of the referred topic ironically enough it's the intelligentsia in the field of economics where I see this played out the most I get the real impression that a lot of these economic academics have a deep seated contempt for entrepreneurs who didn't go to college but yet are very wealthy due to the building of successful businesses I also get the feeling that the more tangible the business the more contempt well that's less of a question is more of a common I think that's something to think about I don't think that economists have the most contempt you haven't seen the amount of contempt that for example your average sociologist has for society at large there's a lot of contempt out there you guys got to go to graduate no don't don't go to graduate school but go to graduate school and realize how how bad it actually is you know but anyway so that's about it for comments and emails there of course more I think you know I've gotten so many comments and emails and all this kind of stuff I'm going to think of a way where we can put them all in one place or maybe I can answer them publicly I might put out pages corresponding to each of these podcasts on my website that have maybe responses for me about things but keep asking them keep emailing them I'll try to get the those that I can those that I think that are instructive now back to business so as I said two things we have left to do both going to be good right so the first one is illustrating the four different groups and how they have a different sociopolitical view of the concept of freedom of the concept of liberty and this is a subheading in each of the chapters that Fisher gives how does this group think of as liberty then after that we can talk about reinterpreting American history in terms of these four groups and their different interests and their different priorities now the first group begin the puritans right so they had a concept of liberty pretty different from the modern one and that is typically they perceived as liberty as being a kind of ordered aspect of society that is Boston could have liberty the liberty of Boston the liberty of the Massachusetts Bay Colony but humans didn't necessarily have liberty liberty was something that might mean this particular community is not interfered with from beyond but it wasn't necessarily applied to individuals in the way we understand it now that is societies were ordered with a particular well to puritan puritans possibly even divine order and as part of that order people of course had to be restrained but this was liberty was not a concept that necessarily occurred for individual people now when it did when people did were said to have a liberty have a freedom it was meant in a way that we would probably use the word exemption or privilege nowadays that is the idea that this person has been given the special right to fish in a particular fishing hole that was a liberty for puritans and that's how they use it with reference to individual people also they had an idea of liberty again this sounds almost backwards to the idea of freedom that we might have nowadays but they had a concept of freedoms as being something that is a an obligation of the body politic as a whole now if you think of for example of Roosevelt's freedom from want the idea that people should be free free from wanting things that is they should have they should have stuff they should have all the food they need they should have all this stuff now if you're a libertarian you might get a little offended by that what does that mean to have a right to someone that means that someone else has that blah blah blah et cetera et cetera you've all heard this but the puritan concept of liberty is sort of the opposite of this that is there are some liberties that in the same way that you might have the right to use a particular fishing hole you might have a right or society might have a right to be entitled to particular things that are you know come from the body politic this is our saying something is our liberty is saying it's our kind of obligation and it's sort of the side two sides of the same coin to a lot of puritans so that's their conception of liberty now the planter concept of liberty is a little bit different as well from the modern concept their idea Fisher describes it as a kind of hegemonic freedom a hegemonic liberty and the idea behind it is that for them traditional culture their English history English the English social environment has in its ups and downs created a society in which they have a particular position and they of course as aristocrats have high position and their view is a liberty is more or less someone's lot in life so infringing on an aristocrats liberty means depriving them of those particular social institutions which they have now for them a king would have a huge amount of liberty and if you said something like a king shouldn't be be able to command one of his subjects that is something that is against their idea of liberty in the same way again these planters who own indentured servants or later on slaves their view of liberty is such that it is their position to have a place in that cosmic order and thus removing their indentured servitude or removing slavery is a violation of liberty and that their view of liberty is this kind of long tradition social order so that is their view again it's a view of liberty that's very different but you can sort of see the logic behind behind it and how it vibes with their general worldview now the quaker concept of liberty again is a little different their idea is not that liberty is something that individuals have but it's a general environment that we live in and it's a good environment to live in liberty is a kind of mutually respecting reciprocal play field for people to live together in peace that is the quakers again they're tolerant of other religious sex they're tolerant of other ethnic groups they allow them to move into pennsylvania and are mostly peaceful with them and the quakers have the idea their view of freedom their view of liberty is an environment that people can live in an environment a generally a good kind of peaceful not utopia but something a general environment where people respect the bounds of their own I don't want to say property but their own moral authority and don't overstep that they would look at the planter view of liberty or the puritan view of liberty and see them as a little overstepping in those bounds now this is somewhat similar but different from the borderer concept the borderers really have the view of freedom that is most familiar to modern people it's the idea that I guess libertarians or other people enunciate nowadays and there are two levels you can look at it you can look at the very basic level where the borderer definition of freedom is get off my lawn I have my own property you have yours keep to yourself I'll keep to mine that's the basic level at the more big-brained level and this actually goes back to parts of the Scottish enlightenment which again are sort of tangentially related to the border environment and that is borderers have an idea of liberty that amounts to natural law that is it's not just that societies have liberty or that individuals have liberty but really everything in the world even plants can have a domain of liberty in that what that means is that each element of the world has its own environment to grow in and what's bad is when one person or you know a society tries to trespass those boundaries of what is appropriate so that could mean government interference and that's usually what borders are talking about remember they grew up in anarchy they grew up in an environment where they couldn't trust either government that purported to rule them so they grew up in an environment where you have to have well-defined property which is defined by familial relationships and honor and this is my position this is yours we can survive and similar to the Quaker idea we can survive by mutually respecting our own freedom our own property and that is the key to success whereas the opposite of their definition of freedom is something that's more like the Puritan definition where liberty is a kind of social order that is for borderers contrary to that is that social order is something that gradually arises but it's something that's going to be voluntary you don't have to necessarily constrain people they are constrained they're free people and are acting in their own interests and that's how any kind of social institutions are going to happen so the borderers again they're backwoods people they have this very get-off-my-law definition of freedom but it's also tied into the general thought at the time of freedom as being something that is natural law now of all the four cultures I would have to say that probably the borderers have the definition of liberty that has survived the most strongest followed probably by the Quaker the Quaker's view now the Puritan view and the planter view are a little different but we can still look at them in the context of the political environment so let's go ahead and get into American politics as it has formed over the years in terms of these four groups and their definitions of freedom now one of the first important notes in American history is in fact I guess what you could think of as a borderer revolution that is the whiskey rebellion now the whiskey rebellion if you don't know it was a rebellion against particular taxes on whiskey to pay for the debt of the new American Republic effectively is what it was and although it was a rebellion of some import at the time it was particularly important because it was the impetus for the switch from the decentralized government of the Articles of Confederation to the more centralized government we have in our Constitution now now this was more or less a conflict between borderer people of different origins and the three other groups the Puritans, the planters and the I was about to say the Whigs the Quakers I'm already thinking of Whigs but this is a conflict between the three groups versus the borderers now the general political the general I don't want to say two-party system but the dichotomy that you have in early American politics is the strong federal government versus the weaker federal government now initially in the Adams presidency this is a Puritan government it's a government centered around Massachusetts of course Adams is the second president the third president is Jefferson I guess we should put them in ethnic terms so George Washington was a Virginia planter but he was widely popular regardless for of course having his role in the Revolutionary War John Adams was a Puritan and he represented the Puritan interests and their values in a lot of ways they put a lot of a lot of the acts that they were famous for were things like the Alien and Sedition acts these rules that were put in place to I guess cause a more morally unified country in a lot of ways you might think of it as sort of being an Orwellian state but their goal was a Puritan one that is unifying the country in one moral footing and the third president was of course Jefferson who started to symbolize a movement from a unity between the planters and the borderers and sometimes the Quakers against the Puritans the Puritans were very populous and very powerful at the time while the other groups were probably less so now as time progressed you do have this dichotomy between the more federalist people who tend to be Puritan and the less federalist people who tend to be closer to borderers or sometimes you know the Virginia planters again particularly with you know having to do with issues like slavery as this gradually becomes an issue but before that happens now one of the first I want to say he was the eighth president I should probably have Wikipedia pulled up but you know I'm too good for that but Andrew Jackson comes to the fore eventually and Andrew Jackson in a lot of ways you can sort of think of him as the Donald Trump of his time now Jackson was the first borderer president before then they had been from the other groups but Jackson was one of the first borderer presidents and he's not just that doesn't just mean different policy he of course was a member of the Democratic Party who was it's called the Democratic Party because at the time the Democratic Party stood for radically decentralized locally governed government effectively and Jackson was not just in favor of this kind of stuff he was also an extreme kind of a cowboy he's known for he was once almost assassinated and then pulled out his cane and started just beating the crap out of us would be assassin or something like this you know he was he was rough and tumble he fought of course the battle of New Orleans but had many other scrapins with Indians and other he lived on the margins of society he in many ways was a figure that was not didn't pretend to be intellectual and because that's not what borderers cared about he kit he was a guy who took risks and he was a guy who people sort of shook up the political establishment at the time now the borderers who as I said weren't necessarily well represented in American politics before this period the borderers take on as they grew larger a more and more prominent role now as time progressed the other three groups started to move away from this kind of politics and formed what would be called the wig party now the wig party would service this opposition to extreme populism and the wigs would tend to be more federalist Lee inclined they'd be more they'd want a more activist government et cetera but these three groups again the planters well you can think of them as sort of two extremes right so the borderers have this extremely decentralized individualistic view of what the society should be like and the Puritans are on the other side and the Puritans have a moralistic view they have a total I don't want to say totalitarian it has bad connotations but a totalistic view of the the moral nature of society and Puritans felt it was need for there was a need for moral unity and a kind of uniformity ideally Puritans want everyone to be a Puritan but you can think of the conflict between borderers and Puritans which really in American history were rarely I don't think ever aligned the other two groups would side with one or the other depending on what was best now as the era of Jackson waned an issue that had more and more prominence is of course slavery now borderers themselves wouldn't have that strong of an opinion on slavery there were borderers who own slaves there are people of every group that own slaves but the people who are primarily going to care are the planters again they're based on a kind of aristocracy which after indentured servitude ran out relied mostly on imported slaves versus Puritans who of course were moralistically against slavery they again are the party of get rid of alcohol get rid of slaves both of them are bad etc so this is something that arises as you get further into American history and if you know anything about American history you're like one of the they constant issues that happened as people moved westward is every time a new state had to come into the union you had to the two pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions had to work out how exactly is this slave is this state gonna allow slaves or not allow slaves and whether or not that it's allowed or not allowed could affect how the Senate works and how some kind of regulation on slavery could be passed or not passed so this was a constant issue during this period now the north the Puritans were in essence changing part of their life in gradual industrialization and this would have a lot to do with the coming civil war now the civil war now of course the Democratic and Whig parties were duking and out but both of them sort of lost prominence and the Democratic Party of course is still around even today but a new party arose and that of course is the Republican Party which was an abolitionist party and it is at the time it was a hyper Puritan party they were viewed as as distinct from the Whigs the Whigs generally were sort of anti-slavery sometimes but the Republicans were overtly so now the we can skip over details but the election that led to the civil war was the 1860 election of Lincoln and it's an interesting election for a lot of reasons I don't know if you know about this now Fisher doesn't go so much into it but it's just interesting to talk about so I will during this election first off the border or I should say there's a loose alliance at the time between everyone else against Puritans that is Puritans are big into the Republican Party which is just newly founded and the other groups at the time sort of the way well I should say the Quakers are sort of on with the Republican Party I shouldn't leave them out but the everyone else the borderers and the planters and some of the Quakers are divide their vote is divided between different Democratic candidates at the time and during the 1860 election there are actually three candidates who run for the Democratic Party just because no one can decide which one they want and they're all regional candidates interestingly enough and what happens in this election is that as you would expect run it with basically three one ideology running three candidates the other guy Abraham Lincoln wins the election but he wins on very interesting terms first off he loses the popular vote he gets something like 39% of the popular vote and you might say oh wow well I guess that he well he does win the electoral college and of course become president but you might say oh well geez I guess those Democrats should have gotten it together and you know unified all the votes but it actually doesn't matter because um in the political in the electoral college system even if all of the Democratic votes had gone to the same candidate Lincoln would have still carried enough electoral votes to win because he won my well he won by a significant enough margin in the northern states in greater New England not just New England but the places that Puritans were gradually starting to settle westward he won by good enough margins there to win enough electoral votes but in the south in the planter and border or territories the Republican Party walked away from a lot of states winning less than 1% of the vote now part of that is because a lot of states didn't even bother putting the Republican Party which was widely reviled on the ballot but in the states where it was on the ballot Lincoln literally would like Virginia, Tennessee Lincoln won something like less than 1% of the vote so he lost the he lost to three different candidates lost bigly in the popular vote but still even if those candidates had unified won the electoral vote and won the election and became president and so you can sort of understand the controversy behind this election in the first place aside from the fact that a totally new and radical party with strong Puritan moral feelings won the presidency so this election of course is the the election that precipitates the Civil War many different states immediately start seceding from the Union and then after Lincoln takes some military action all the rest of them secede and of course the Civil War begins now of course we have nothing to say about the military conquests of the Civil War but needless to say the Puritans, the Republicans, the Unionists they win, they win hugely and it's a very interesting something interesting happens in the political environment because of this that is Puritans have a chance well one thing you have to remember is while the southern states are seceded the most radical edge of the Puritan political class can pass what they want in the American government second off when the south is conquered and reintegrated into the Union many voters are due to their loyalties to the Confederacy are disenfranchised first off that is a part of reconstruction and they have to gradually swear loyalty to get their citizenship back or something like that and many of these states in the elections within a decade or so don't until they formally reunite with the Union they don't have any say in the political environment so what happens is the most radical Puritans or as they call them at the time or even in history books radical Republicans really win so hugely that they can pass even the most radical stuff and controversial stuff at the time now at a surface level slavery has ended former slaves become citizens that was a big debate at the time but the radical edge again of the Republican Party won and they made all slave citizens etc etc but something even more fundamental happens I'll quote from Fisher here he says radical reconstruction was an attempt to impose by force the cultures of New England and the Midlands upon the coastal in Highland south the southern states were compelled to accept Yankee constitutions and Yankee judges Yankee politics and Yankee politicians Yankee schools and Yankee school mams Yankee capitalists and a Yankee labor system so that's what it isn't just that oh we passed a bunch of laws that we like but the north imposes itself in an event called reconstruction which really is the north militarily occupying the south for a prolonged period they occupy the south and really move out the the planter aristocracy and try and replace the border or cultural environment with their own Puritan or as he puts it Yankee culture and institutions now this lasts only so long if you know anything about American history in 1876 there was an election a contested election where for the first time in a while a Democrat finally won the presidency or at least almost won the presidency he won the popular vote lost the electoral vote by only one vote and there was a bunch of hubbub about it but one of the things that came from the negotiation is that the north would in the occupation of the south and that is the troops would move out and what quickly happened is that southerners which of course again are are a mix of planters and borderers would kick out all the Yankees and impose their traditional cultural norms in the area so and that's what happened now electorally it's also important to remember that during the Civil War the Puritans in effect allied with the black population of the south because they were viewed of course as tactical allies the Puritans had of course freed these people from slavery and so even until today there are some parts in American history where blacks and Puritans don't vote for the same party for example the New Deal coalition but even till today there's a unity between the northeastern voting block the Puritan voting block and the black voting block and this is so this is something that happened the lower class of the south becomes Puritan and the same way as immigration increases in the north these immigrants become gradually allied with the south that is many Germans for example start moving to the United States en masse and these Germans tend to tactically ally with the borderers or with the other cultures in the south now the Civil War in a lot of ways marked a decrease in the relative power of the planters with respect to the borderers in the south and there are a bunch of people commented on this in a lot of ways now keep in mind the aristocratic culture of the planters gradually wanes in power I mean nowadays the south is not very aristocratic it's like something you hear in movies or you see in you know the goofy films but it's it's not a reality but just to give you for example H. L. Minkin who is a noted I don't want to say aristocrat but he was an American intellectual who is intellectual it seems wrong to call him that but he was a guy we'll just say he was a guy who was famous for his support of aristocracy and when he went to the south he was very disappointed that a lot of this planter culture this old aristocratic culture had died away after the Civil War when these institutions were replaced and what happened was that borderers in their uncouth cultural style started to replace planters now this is Minkin talking of the south again he's complaining about the planters losing their aristocratic hold in the south he says there's not a single picture gallery worth going to or a single orchestra capable of capable of playing the nine sympathies sympathies symphonies of Beethoven or a single opera house or a single theater devoted to decent plays and of course any good borderer would hear a quote like that and just immediately laugh and ask Minkin if he could fire a rifle or castrate a pig or something like this but there is a change in the south from this planter aristocracy to a more borderer enveloped culture now politics evolves from this point again you have this general divide from the democratic party which is increasingly becoming more of a regional southern party and the republican party which is tends to be a northern party and from election to election they might win different states out west but it depends on the particular politician in question but eventually the political system as it is or at least the republicans and democrats as they exist during this period comes to a confusing end in a lot of ways that is Herbert Hoover is elected as a Puritan candidate again actually he doesn't win Massachusetts when he's originally elected he wins a very interesting well you can check the map yourself but a very interesting setup but in generally the republican party which of course is the party of great moral principles including the abolition of slavery and the ban of alcohol which is now in effect at this period Herbert Hoover is elected in this party and the Great Depression happens and he's blamed for it not just that but people are also starting to sour on alcohol prohibition and so the republican party gradually becomes more and more rejected and this causes for the election of Franklin Roosevelt who rules the United States for something like 10 or 12 years he's by far he's the only president to actually have served through three terms and I think he was elected for a fourth but so he begins a total realignment of American politics and at the time originally the alignment is everyone against the Puritans when he when Roosevelt runs runs against Hoover Roosevelt basically takes the entire country Hoover wins well he wins the Quaker state of Pennsylvania and he wins a couple Northeastern states not even all of them but it's really a route and Franklin Roosevelt remains extremely popular throughout the period now Roosevelt himself there are a lot of candidates in American history who you can trace to one particular background now the thing about Roosevelt at the time is that he had a background in the Northeast which sort of appealed to Puritans in some I guess ethnocentric way and he I think he had a Dutch surname right so he had that ancestry but Roosevelt had policies that in a lot of ways mimic the populism that was popular among borderers and stuff like that so he was a generally popular candidate and this is why he could win so many elections now the Roosevelt regime of course does come to an end and afterwards the same kind of ethnic politics reemerge in the United States you have during the Truman and Eisenhower elections you have more or less the Democratic border were planter south versus the Puritan and Quaker North again the Quakers gradually give way to other cultural groups that build off of them in a lot of ways but that's the political divide you have now this divide doesn't change but the parties that cloak it change during the 1960s and that is after LBJ puts through a lot of the civil rights acts well the civil rights acts are politically important for a couple reasons now first off as we said before when the Puritans freed black slaves in the south that formed an alliance between them that was is really still still remains till today and the reason this is important is because they the blacks in the south were countervailing force in the south to the border and the planter cultures now what their blacks are a political anomaly in the United States for a lot of reasons culturally speaking blacks have a lot of these borderer and planter aspects of their culture now they're their own cultural stand in the first place but as we mentioned before blacks for example speak a variety of in effect the planter accent there are many cultural things that they take from the environment around them but politically speaking they are aligned against the borderers and the planters and both parties have understood that now when southerners regained control of the south after reconstruction they passed many laws that sought to limit the power of blacks as a countervailing voting force in the political system a lot of those were voting regulations where although due to the what is it the 15th amendment or is it 14th or 5th 15th I should well I think it's 15th due to the 15th amendment you can't make any kind of racial restrictions on a lot of core things in government however southerners would try to skirt around this to limit the role of blacks in society by for example passing voting regulations that require required literacy and blacks were less literate than whites so that shove the voting in a more white direction now during the civil rights acts a lot of these regulations are gradually come to be destroyed and they come to be destroyed actually by lbj's democratic party and remember the democratic party is the party of the south originally lbj himself wins very hugely in the 1964 election partially because he has some appeal to southerners since he is actually a southerner himself he's from texas but he really has a political program that is more friendly to the north of course it contained the civil rights act which is popular among northeasterners and blacks so he wins a landslide election in 1964 against berry goldwater now goldwater is an interesting figure in himself as well he is jewish but he is he takes after a lot of the border cultural style he is a kind of arizona i don't want to say cowboy but he has a cultural conception that we would now think of as being very libertarian in the sense that he was opposed to the civil rights acts not necessarily because he was distasteful of blacks or wanted to reduce their political power but because a lot of the civil rights acts if you don't know about this a lot of them had to do with restricting what a private business can do it used to be in the united states or well a lot of countries if you had a private business you had a say in who you could who could come to your business and do business with you in effect the civil rights acts took away the rights of public or private business owners in public to make racial judgments as to who could use their stores you can't put up a sign that says no blacks now goldwater on libertarian principles on border were principles you can think of it was opposed to these kind of things now the election of 1964 is is an interesting one lbj sort of fought dirty and he won hugely just because everyone ended up thinking goldwater wasn't really that much for radical but people ended up thinking he's some kind of lunatic so lbj wins hugely goldwater wins only his home state of Arizona and a couple southern states that really just wanted to keep the civil rights acts from passing now this election is so important well actually on one level it's not important it doesn't change any of the ethnic politics of the united states the borders still have their values the puritan still have their values they all still have their collective incentives etc. but the parties do gradually change now they don't change in every single election afterwards but this is one of the first where the original alignments of the democratic and republican party are reversed that is the south gradually starts to become the home of the republican party which originally was a hyper puritan party but now it's the party of goldwater now it's a much more conservative party or you could think of it is not necessarily changing that much but the democratic party moves i guess towards the left and so it becomes the party of the puritans of the ex quakers and of southern blacks as well now this isn't to say that every single election afterwards has been like this and for example those elections that are exceptions are those where there is some kind of ethnic reason for an exception for example jimmy carter was a democrat but he actually when he ran his initial election he won georgia and a lot of other southern states because he has he has a southerner he's one of the few modern american modern presidents who actually speaks in a southern accent in a kind of planter-esque accent he wins the south relatively well but he's still a democrat he's still you know on the political left in america and he's popular everywhere else so he won his initial election due to political events he gets crushed by reagan in 1980 but that's other details the other southerner who runs again who has some kind of border or credentials is bill clinton bill clinton again another democrat who has the policies of the puritans but has the well i shouldn't even say that bill clinton was an exception he was he marked a move from the democratic party in the i guess the end of the cold war so to speak economically more to the right this is part of the what is it the what they call them the new democrats i think that's what they call them at the back in the day but he was one of those but regardless despite the fact that he was a democrat and supported policies that were characteristic of democrats he did when very well in the south it wasn't actually just because ross perot one he did very well independently of that now as it comes to ethnic politics now this book again was written in 1989 so some of the later things that happen like for example the clinton election later on the election of so we can take the ethnic analysis a little bit further and think about more contemporary events and more contemporary politics now one thing to remember is that the four groups are going to support different policies they define what kind of political issues are being accounted for in political life and they're going to take whatever sides they need it's very rarely that they agree on much of anything now one of the only things that fischer notes they do agree on is the 1920s immigration regulation that is all of the four groups don't want more groups they don't want any other people be they from i mean at the time of course most all immigrants were coming from Europe but even those immigrants they don't want now one of the significant changes that happens in american politics in the 1960s is the 1965 immigration act which people are actually now starting to talk about the heart sealer act as they call it and this was important because traditionally american immigration was focused on cultural and racial continuity that is we have these four groups we have this these american cultural strands and if we have immigrants those immigrants should come from the same kind of setting that these groups already come from now the heart sealer act changes that in a lot of ways it sort of accelerates some later immigration law actually places in quotas that take people from totally different countries so the united states has millions of people moving into it from latin america asia parts of africa which are the people moving in are very distinct from so there are a bunch of different populations which begin to have their own kind of ethnic conflicts not just among each other but with of course the four original groups and this is really the context of the past two presidents that we've had that is first off barack obama is a son of one of these immigrant groups a lot of people think okay barack obama's black so maybe his parents were x slaves or something that's not the case barack obama's father of course is african african i think he was a professor or something i don't even know the specifics but he is straight from kenya there is no connection that he has with american blacks but he has that and he also has a white mother i don't actually know what her ethnic background is you could probably look it up yourself but barack obama's an interesting candidate because he's really one of the first as i said van buren doesn't necessarily fit in to any of the groups and neither does kennedy and neither does obama and obama is one of the first well really the first president we would think of is not even being white so obama of course is a very interesting candidate for that reason he's one of the first from these non for groups in fact he's not he has partial european heritage but again only partial heritage and during the obama administration you actually see or the original obama election you actually do see some ethnic changes that is specifically non-white immigrant groups tend to order or merge against the republican party in a lot of ways now this wasn't always the case it used to be for example that asians were a consistent republican voting block this changed during the obama election there is a gradual unity of what we would now just call non whites versus whites and when we say whites we more or less mean the four groups and whatever white immigrants came in fitting into those four groups now trump on the other hand is sort of the incarnation of the four groups which are becoming you could think of as being a little bit more unified nowadays that is as there is another racial and ethnic amalgam of people that have a political reality in the united states the interests of the four groups have become a little bit more unified now trump is interesting for a lot of reasons now I mentioned earlier recently in the election you actually would see some people quoting from this book quoting from albion seed about how trump fits into it because trump of course is of german extraction but as I said earlier a lot of german immigrants coming into the north would tactically ally with borderers and trump is one of the most borderer people you can run across culturally speaking he is trump might be a new york billionaire but he has the disposition precisely the opposite of what that is trump is one of the most borderer people you could possibly run across culturally and people were already during the election talking about how popular he was in this quote-unquote scott's irish voting block or the german voting block even though people aren't cognizant of these ethnic distinctions in the united states they do vote very significantly differently and trump was very popular among them even more important than that is the fact that trump despite the fact that he is a jacksonian cowboy trump won states during the election that he wasn't supposed to win he won some of these states that have a dual quaker and puritan background that is or states that have well for example he won wisconsin he won ohio iowa michigan and got close to winning minnesota which is partially scandinavian the scandinavians when they came over politically they've aligned with the puritans in a lot of ways but they're sort of distinct but he almost won minnesota he almost won new hampshire and he also almost one main he won one electoral vote from main so as the ethnic politics of the united states change we might actually see a unity of the four ethnic groups which colloquially we just call whites we might just see a unity of whites against the ever-increasing amount of non-whites in the united states but you know that's for history to tell we can't be sure if this kind of unity will continue but it's definitely something that the trump administration has shown light on now trump of course himself is a personality that rubs feels like sandpaper to a lot of people i guess you could say but if you imagine someone with trumps semi-protectionists shema semi-protectionist and anti-immigrant policies coming to the four who is much more personally likeable or respectable a lot of people might be more willing to vote for someone like him so that's something to see i think that's the definite possibility in the next election but otherwise we can also we might project it's always unwise to project but we might project an increase in the racial divide between the two parties and i think everyone sort of knows this everyone sort of has been harking on this for years or sometimes you know you get a lot of people will give you a lot of shame for harking on it but it's something that happens you know it's something that's happening but anyway that's just something to think about but i think we have spent way more time than i expected on this book but the reason we have is because there is so much in it again i encourage you if you don't want to buy the book check your local library if they have it just go there don't even have to check it out just leaf through it because that this book talks about and are detailed in the original cultural context and i think it will when you really think about your own family history if you are an american or even if you're someone in the united kingdom who of course comes from the same kind of cultural strands if you think about your own family history in this context i think it's interesting enough as well so i encourage you again check out albion seed for British folk ways in america and i am luke smith if you have any comments about this episode put them in the youtube description or no in the comments section you can't put things in the description that's my job put them in the comments or email me at luke at luke smith dot xyz actually just go to my website luke smith dot xyz got ways you can donate got other stuff to look at and subscribe to the podcast not related dot xyz just go there rss is there everything else is there just do it so that's about it i'm tired i've had to re-record parts of this it was actually sort of a pain so i'll be having another episode as i said last time we'll be having an episode on democracy and that's going to be next i'm going to be talking about probably a couple of different books really just going to be ad-libbing a lot of it but going to be building up not just shumpeter's capitalism socialism and democracy but a couple other books i have i won't tell you them because it's no fun if i tell you what the books are before we do an episode but also if you have any suggestions for books to do in the future i have a list of them that i'm going to be doing or topics in general that might not have a book but if you have a suggestion go ahead and give them to me because if you know i might not have thought about it before or something like that but anyway that's it see you guys next time