Chapo Trap House - Hell On Earth - Episode 10 Teaser

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

As the institutions of the Commonwealth fail to cohere, politics descend into conspiracy theory and culture war. Subscribe today for access to the full episode and all premium episodes! www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse

Okay, so that is the extreme thumbnail of how we get from the last vestiges of traditional English government, with the Rump Parliament of 1649, to Lord Protector Cromwell in 1655. The further details of all of this are of course very interesting and important, but it's the broader strokes that we are actually getting at. A seemingly unresolvable cycle of straining for political legitimacy, functional government, some form of democratic rule that collapsed back onto military rule by those few Puritan officers and of course Oliver Cromwell. The social base had not yet developed to the point that it could imbue authority in any

meaningful sense to institutions that did not have some sort of hierarchical connection to a greater polity. No matter what their religious belief was, that was the only thing that could unite them. And Parliament itself is dominated by people who thought that they could fix all this by applying their specific, milleniary understanding of Christianity to the question of government and thereby resolving all the contradictions through the second coming of Christ. That is their answer to the question of what about these mountain contradictions caused as Winston Lee would point out by property relations.

Their answer is, we will make these questions meaningless by bringing about Christ's return. So we don't have to give up any of our stuff before that. Yes the second coming of Christ really would fix the dialectical machine that drives history. But of course there's no popular force to fill in with real demands for reform because they didn't get, the levelers didn't get their increased democracy. So they were shut out of the process and there was no way to ground this authority, this new system in a popular, impute with popular legitimacy. So it just totters around and the only person who can stand in for that pediment is the

guy who is the closest thing to a conquering sovereign who's around Oliver Cromwell. His claim to the throne is the same as Henry Tudor's had been. I've got the guys, I've got the army. And who's going to stop me? But his literal, his ideological commitment to the project was such that he could not refound it. And the worry being that if you do that, then you undermine everyone's belief and the whole thing collapses.

So part of the, so the bourgeois now, especially the parliamentarians are going through, they're all, they're going crazy. Yes. They're driving themselves insane because the wheel of history will not turn the way they wanted to. So the bourgeois of England had been able to seize power, but holding it would require a cohesion of interest, popular social legitimacy and religious consensus that their representatives in parliament were incapable of generating in the absence of this unifying sovereign.

The fight against the king had provided them with a unifying task and purpose. Everybody left them fractured and being fired by godly righteousness, unwilling to compromise, unable to govern. Many of them retreated to religious fantasies. You just got to imagine Charles looking down and saying it's see. It's not that easy. It's not that easy. Is it so unable to govern many of them retreated as would be an active sovereign of past generations

had to religious fantasy among the various sects and manias of the time. One of the most politically influential were the fifth monarchy man, one of whom was at least a woman. The group included a number of prominent new model army commanders, parliamentarians and London artisans who were disillusioned by the failure of parliament to embody godly governance and get fucking Jesus to show up to find the solution. They looked. Where else to the Bible?

Yes, specifically to the apocalyptic books of Daniel and Revelation. What a shock. Daniel describes four monarchies that must rise and fall before Armageddon, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman. Fifth monarchists believed that Charles's execution marked the end of the fourth or Roman monarchy, which meant that they were tasked with building the fifth and final monarchy that would herald Christ's return. From Revelation, they found the number six, six, six, the mark of the beast indicating

that the final battle between Christ and Antichrist would occur in 1666. Convenience. Covered up. Yeah. Only a decade or so away. Better get fucking ready. So Cromwell was initially sympathetic to the fifth monarchists and many hailed him as the new Moses when he dismissed the romp old praise bones, bare bones of the bare bones

parliament was a prominent fifth monarchist, while a few fifth monarchists have in sympathy for the level or social vision. Most were happy to maintain the social order. If they could just impose religious uniformity on Britain, the actual substance of these arguments is incredibly tedious and about questions of tithes. How much tithes you got to give to who do you give the tithes to? You're building a Swiss watch by committee on a ship in an ocean storm. So all of them became disillusioned with Cromwell when he kicked bare bones and his

boys out of Westminster, never able to reach a mass constituency. The fifth monarchists failed to assert an independent influence on Cromwell's government. One of the most prominent later fifth monarchists, a Cooper named Thomas Venner led an abortive uprising against Cromwell in 1657. Turns out not Moses after all. Eventually Cromwell spends most of his time and power trying to get this damn system of government working in some functional way. This includes this whole business of dividing the Commonwealth into military districts under

the direct control of some major generals of the new model army, which then impose a harsh system of taxation to support the army itself. As well, Cromwell's administration worked to impose state religious institutions and morality conforming to his cadre's very specific brand of puritanical beliefs. This is the affirmations Swiss watch on the boat. This is when they really get around trying to take out Christmas as well. What do they have left? Culture war.

Yes, culture war. Literal culture war. War on culture to replace the political power that can't be asserted. And remember, it wouldn't be hell on earth if it didn't involve a bunch of people becoming obsessed with creating a heaven on earth. Why, nobody getting anything you put in at all.