Tokugawa America

7/28/2019 Tokugawa America

1/5

nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnTokugawa America

An Essay by John J. Reilly

With Thanks to Akatsukami

In this sixth year of the 21st century, one might argue that the Americanunipolar moment has ended, or that unipolarity has been revealed to be notat all identical with omnipotence. In either case, many Americans now feelless safe than they did ten years ago. The anxiety has many sources, all ofthem with an international component. There are the continuing wars inCentral Asia and the Middle East, the ever more alarming terrorist threats, therelative decline of US manufacturing, the uncontrollable fluctuations inpetroleum prices, the demographic transformation arising from LatinAmerican immigration; and, an as yet insufficiently appreciated factor, the

purely confessional tensions generated by the appearance of an aggressiveMuslim minority in a Protestant-Christian country. For these and otherreasons, there is now audible sentiment in the United States for lessengagement with the wider world.

This sentiment is sometimes expressed in terms of an argument that theUnited States should share more of the cost of maintaining the global securityand economic commons. The argument is, perhaps, incoherent. Quite asidefrom the fact that it assumes the existence of peer powers with an interestcongruent with that of the United States in maintaining a liberal world order,the solution the argument implies would do nothing at all to shield Americafrom the global forces that are causing the new anxiety. The opposite may be

true: to wholly assimilate American interests to those of multilateralorganizations in which the US does not have a preponderant voice wouldsimply transform foreign engagement from a question of policy to one oflegal obligation.

More interesting, if more radical, is the call by nationalists for far more radicaldisengagement. At least for purposes of this discussion, we will not considerthe civilizationist variant, which holds that the West as a whole must fightoff Islamist aggression. Though apparently of more than one mind on thesubject, nationalists like Patrick Buchanan seem, on the whole, to be willingto write off the non-American portion of Western Civilization and concentrateon the defense and cultural preservation of the American homeland. In this

essay will consider not so much whether such a policy would be possible orsustainable, but what it would look like if it were implemented.

As a metaphor for this project, we call the thorough-going recusant modelTokugawa America, after the period in Japanese history known as the

Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868). Japan under the Tokugawa Shoguns(essentially a line of hereditary prime ministers) was perhaps the mostsuccessful and sophisticated hermit kingdom in history. It began as anattempt to re-impose order, after a long period of civil war, using an ideology


2/5

of Neo-Confucian hierarchy to support a feudal four-layer caste system. Atleast at the beginning, the regime was anti-commercial; it famously limitedforeign trade to a minimum. It also undertook to suppress Christianity as adisruptive foreign influence. Nonetheless, the Tokugawa period was by nomeans a dark age. The arts of the Tokugawa period, particularly in painting,achieved a level of evocative subtlety that has rarely if ever been matched.

Neither was the period socially immobile. The original feudal caste systemdeveloped more market features with the passage of time, as well as a livelyintellectual life. Some Japanese elites had kept abreast of events in the rest ofthe world. When the challenge from America and Europe came in the middleof the 19th century, Tokugawa Japan had the resilience and self-confidence torespond creatively, though the Shogunate itself was abolished early in thefollowing era of reform.

What the American nationalists are asking for is the Tokugawa period, butwith American characteristics.

Let us imagine that, after September 11, 2001, the American political systemhad determined to protect America by hardening the target rather than byeliminating the source of the threat. Hardening the target is here taken tomean, not simply making the US less vulnerable to terrorism from the MiddleEast, but less vulnerable to any disruption from any quarter. Thisinvulnerability would be accomplished by changes to the United States andits immediate environment, not by attempting to modify the economic orpolitical evolution of other parts of the world.

There would be three strategic principles:

Economic Autarky: The survival, and even the prosperity, of the United States

could no longer be allowed to depend on events outside the reliable control ofthe American state. Tariffs would become the chief instrument ofmacroeconomic policy, as they were in the 19th century. Increasingly punitiveimposts would promote withdrawal from world commodity markets, and mostespecially from the world oil market. Other areas of the economy would,presumably, produce the technological innovations needed to accommodatethe new price structure. In addition to the oil question, the US would nolonger import manufactured goods, except perhaps for some luxury items;neither would export industries be favored. The single greatest change wouldbe that the dollar would no longer be the chief international reserve currency,or the preferred medium of international exchange. Taxes on fund transferswould accomplish these goals. One suspects there would be a return to an

international gold standard for such trade as still occurred.

Military Disentanglement: The rejection of foreign sources of essentialcommodities would remove the Middle East, West Africa, and Latin Americaas possible spheres of small wars. Large wars, or at least large wars involvingthe United States, would be prevented by the withdrawal of securityguarantees from Europe and Japan, and indeed from everyplace east ofMaritime Canada and west of Hawaii. The military could shrink to the CoastGuard, missile defense, and the Marine Corps (with the latter including its air


3/5

arm).

Closed borders: Except for policed transit points, the Mexican border wouldbe closed. Areas that could not be continuously patrolled would be mined.Businesses unable to meet their personnel needs from the domestic laborforce or by automation would be expected to close. Schools, particularly

graduate schools, would be in much the same situation regarding students:student visas would be rare. Travel of all kinds to the United States would berare. Even tourists are a potential threat, both in transit and once they arrive.Government functions connected with the franchise and the administration of

justice would be conducted in English.

We should note that the condition of the United States did approximate theseprinciples during the Great Depression. The US was, almost, resourceindependent in those days. It actually ran a small trade surplus, though ofcourse the absolute volume of trade was small. The US military was trying todisengage even from residual commitments in Latin America and thePhilippines. President Roosevelt, during his first term, came close to turningthe Army into a paper force. During the early years of the Depression,immigration actually reversed: more people left the country than entered it.Important industries were subsidized and regulated to keep them in businessand to maintain employment. On the many occasions when governmentsought to influence prices, from the cost of wheat to the cost of airlinetickets, it usually tried to raise them to prevent deflation.

Internationally, of course, the 1930s ended very badly, but that was becausethe US recused itself during a period of manifestly growing threats from peerstates. It is not certain that the same bad result would obtain in a context inwhich the rest of the world were turning to rubble.

Similarly, Tokugawa America need not be a gray place of persistently highunemployment, shabby flannel clothes, and Humphrey Bogart movies. Theisolation of America in the 1930s was more a matter of necessity than design,as was the disengagement of the United States from European affairs in the19th century. The spirit and structure of a recusant regime would be quitedifferent if the isolation were a matter of policy.

We might, for instance, consider Robert Heinleins novel, If This Goes On,first published in 1940. During the 1930s, Heinlein thought that the UnitedStates would and should prescind as much as possible from European affairs.In most of his scenarios for the future, a second world war does occur, but the

United States remains neutral. If This Goes On--- uses a variation on thatidea: a few generations after the date of publication, Heinlein posits, theUnited States has dropped out of world affairs because it has become atheocracy, ruled by a line of prophets. The military is a small internal police.Life goes on pretty much as it always had (there are flying cars, but therewere many flying cars in Depression era stories), except that it has becomealmost impossible to leave or enter the country.

Avoiding personal foreign contacts is a fundamental feature of the prophets


4/5

system: the isolation is designed to prevent ideological contamination. Thisobjective does not bulk large in the writings of nationalists today; neither arethe nationalists, for the most part, would-be theocrats. The closest thatnationalists come to an exception in this regard is the question of Islam. Insome circles, every Islamic neighborhood is regarded as an incubator of fifthcolumnists. At the very least, Tokugawa America would have to discourage

the spread of Islam, a policy that would require attention not just toimmigration and nationalization policy, but also the administration of prisons.A consistent policy would also favor conversion to some form of Christianity.

A Tokugawa policy for America, however, would require some broaderrationale than anti-Islamism and economic protectionism. The economic andsocial configuration it would seek to maintain is not natural. Markets do notstop at borders except at gunpoint. Energy will have to be continually appliedto prevent the system from dissolving, something that was not true of theisolation of the 1930s. Investments will be forgone and expenditures madewhere they would not be in the absence of public policy. In other words,

Tokugawa America will be expensive to maintain. The political system willhave to be firmly committed to doing so. The recusal of the United Stateswould have to be understood not just as a policy, but as a way of life.

In any case, Tokugawa America would need more command and redistributionfeatures than have been fashionable since the era of deregulation began inthe 1970s. Its not just that command would have to be continually applied tokeep the system in existence. The fact that the system would so obviously bepicking winners and losers, particularly with regard to tariffs, that the loserswould demand compensatory subsidies of various sorts. Tokugawa Americawould be in persistent danger of becoming a blocked society, in whichcompeting claims for rents would tend to freeze the political system.

The really interesting question is whether Tokugawa America would berecognizably American. The United States has a venerable history of holyhorror at the corruption of the outside world; the United States hasexperienced periods of isolationism (the 1920s was not one of them, butthats another story); for much of its history, the United States has practicedbeggar-thy-neighbor trade protectionism. What the United States has neverbeen is defensive or culturally protectionist. In this the US has been theopposite of all the worlds hermit kingdoms, including Tokugawa Japans.

These societies usually felt that their cultures were in some sense superior tothose of the rest of the world. However, far from attempting to spread theirarts or institutions to other societies, they often went to some lengths to

ensure that foreigners would learn as little as possible about these treasures.

Universal liberal democracy is not the only element in American politicalculture, but it is one of the earliest and most persistent. Only episodically hasAmerica attempted to spread its institutions to the rest of the world as amatter of official policy. Nonetheless, the American view of the world, andindeed of itself, has always incorporated the tenet that liberal democracywould or should spread, that it would be better for everybody if the worldbecame a society of liberal republics, as Kant had speculated. Do not be


5/5

deceived by the Americans who claim to overcome American chauvinism byasserting that the whole world need not be like America. They are, perhaps,the most naive of their countrymen, since they have simply globalizedAmerican patriotism by failing to see that the world society of liberalrepublics does not yet exist.

Tokugawa America would no doubt retain the language of its ancestraluniversalism, but the meaning of the words would have shifted. For the firsttime, liberal democracy would just be something that Americans do, likebaseball; whether or not other societies had similar institutions would nolonger be relevant to the American view of historical development. For thatmatter the idea of historical development as progress would not fit into

Tokugawa America. Americas only imperative would be its own preservation.That might make America less peculiar, but it would also make it lessAmerican.

Finally, one suspects that America in recusal might shift its emphasis from theproduction of popular culture to the production of a new high culture.American popular culture has always in fact been idiosyncratic, from theloner heroes in films to the advertising industrys ideal of the female figure.Nonetheless, this culture was produced by people who unselfconsciouslythought their own assumptions about beauty and virtue to be universal. Thesame holds true from music to food to the size of cars. Tokugawa America, incontrast, would be the kingdom of self-consciousness. These themes andmotifs would be taken up like popular tunes were taken up by the greatclassical composers and reworked into creations of a new order. America hashad self-consciously American art before, of course, but heretofore it hasalways been drowned out by the commercial popular arts on the one handand the acids of the avant garde on the other. In Tokugawa America,however, there would be no subsidy for the nihilist avant garde, not in apolitical culture whose first duty was national preservation. As for commercialart, its market will have shrunk with the geographical sphere of Americanculture. Discerning patrons would determine the flow of American culture.

The model we have considered is scarcely a dystopia. Tokugawa Americaneed not be poor, tyrannical or even ugly. There are ways in which it wouldbe superior to the America of history. However, let no one imagine that theestablishment of this society would be the preservation of the Old Republicagainst a globalizing world. Tokugawa America would be another country.

End

Documents

Tokugawa America