From The End of the Myth (Greg Grandin, 2019) pp284-5
THE SAFETY VALVE
Starting in the early 1800s, there have been many versions of the argument that liberal capitalist democracy requires expansion to survive. In the early nineteenth century, British conservatives said that the reason why the United States was able to extend the vote to white workers was that it had the “safety-valve” of the wide-open West, which would weaken the threat that they would use the vote to vote in socialism. Over the centuries, other writers have stressed different kinds of expansion (landed, economic, ideological, political, and martial) along with the different social ills that expansion would solve (the overproduction and/or underconsumption of manufactured goods, population pressure, class conflict, property-rights-threatening radicalism, capitalist alienation, modernist ennui, and civic decay, among other maladies).
Frederick Jackson Turner was influenced, as a number of historians have shown, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Born in Stuttgart six years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Hegel was both a philosopher of dependency (of individuals moving to a higher level of consciousness as they come to recognize their dependence on the people around them) and of escape. There was no internal solution, Hegel said, to the problem of “excessive wealth” and “excessive rabble.” And so the philosopher who once posited master and slave locked in a psychic conflict as the parable of what the path to true freedom might look like now urged modern economic man to give in to his “inner dialectic” and flee forward to evade the conflict. Turner might also have drawn his civil society/state division from Hegel, who identified the United States as the only republic in the world that had expansion built into its foundational premise. With “no neighboring State,” Hegel wrote in the early 1820s, the United States “has the outlet of colonization constantly and widely open, and multitudes are continually streaming into the plains of the Mississippi,” ensuring the sources of discord are dispersed. Hegel, foreshadowing Turner, describes the Mississippi River valley as an ideal of civil society, as a vast integrated network of trade and trust where virtue existed prior to the arrival of the state.
Where Hegel offered a parable of master and slave, Marx theorized capitalism as a history of social alienation, of individuals and families losing control over their means of subsistence and becoming dependent on wages and obligated to pay rent. Marx, who once considered immigrating to pre-Civil War Texas, was, like Hegel and Turner, aware of the importance of the United States in the history of capitalism. “With the accumulation of rents in Ireland,” he wrote in Capital, published in 1867, “the accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace.” And they can’t all stay in Boston. Marx briefly entertained the idea that the from tier might help the masses forestall proletarianization, citing a French writer who said that in California workers can resist being attached, like a crustacean, to any one thing: “As mining did not turn out remunerative enough, I left it for the town, where in succession I became typographer; Slater, plumber, etc. In consequence of thus finding out that I am fit for any sort of work, I feel less of a mollusk and more of a man.”
After Hegel and Marx, came others who stressed the “inner dialectic” of expansion, including Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and Hannah Arendt.
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