Do not be afraid! This is not a long, boring, dry essay on political philosophy.

I have been reading Gotham: A History of New City To 1898 and have been pleasantly surprised by its incredible depth. The text clocks in at over 1,400 pages, so there is quite a lot of room for exploring even the most arcane moments in the city’s history. This book is going to take months for me to get through and absorb, simply because there are so many points from which to launch into digressions and detours along the way. I have always found the city’s history fascinating, particularly the Ellis Island era and the Depression, but also the Civil War period, the Dutch and early British phases, and, of course, the grim and grimy 1970s.

As I continue to ponder (and argue online) the clumsy approach of the new Trump Administration’s diplomacy towards Europe, I am forced to re-think and re-evaluate one of the viewpoints that most often gets me into trouble with others; the view that Anglo-America and Continental Europe are two different beasts due to basic philosophical differences. I am not going to write at length about this today, but the gist of my argument is that the European continent (despite its own diversity) tends to be more collectivist while Anglo-America has a stronger focus on the individual and his or her rights. This major difference is what separates the two, as these philosophical underpinnings inform and influence governance, culture, and society.

In the book I came across this great bit:

The succession crisis in England was meanwhile coming to a head. What had held the Whigs in check thus far was the fact that James II, having no male heir, would in time be succeeded by one or the other of his two daughters, both of whom had remained Protestants. The elder of the two, Mary, was the wife of none other than Prince William of Orange—awkward, to be sure, but preferable, the Whigs figured, to having a Roman Catholic on the throne.

But in the summer of 1688, even as Andros was preparing for his journey down to New York, the queen gave birth to a son. Now faced with the certainty of a Roman Catholic succession, the Whigs reached out to William and Mary for assistance. A Dutch army landed on the coast of England in November 1688 and marched toward London. James chose not to make a fight of it and fled to France. Early the following year William and Mary accepted the crown from a grateful—not to say relieved—Parliament.

This bloodless coup, hailed by Whig apologists as the Glorious Revolution, proved to be a turning point in Anglo-American history. It secured the Protestant succession. It laid to rest the theory of royal absolutism in England. It established the supremacy of Parliament. In time, too, as Whig propagandists like John Locke labored to justify what had taken place, it would alter, fundamentally, the structure and vocabulary of Anglo American political discourse. Natural rights, popular sovereignty, constitutionalism, the inherent tendency of power to encroach upon liberty—these and other Whig commonplaces would become the conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic, so broadly accepted as to seem self-evident and timeless, a national creed rather than sectarian dogma.

“A turning point in Anglo-American history.” “Conventional wisdom”. “Self-evident”.

The authors of this book, Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, seem to agree that this is specific to Anglo-America despite the Dutch factor that helped make it happen.

When I brought this up elsewhere, many protested by mentioning just that: “What about the Dutch element?” My response is two-fold:

1. That Dutch Republic is long gone
2. Holland is integral to the Rhine-Danube system and therefore locked into the continent

The Dutch are one of history’s great merchant peoples and have a long and storied liberal tradition, but I argue that they did not adopt such an individual-centered worldview as the Brits, and later on, the Americans.

This is a work in progress in my brain, so we’ll return to it over and over again going forward. Maybe you guys know better than I do? If so, let’s hear it.

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