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and some were Catholics, loyal to the Stuart monarchy and the Pope. The Catholics and the Anglicans (to the extent they retained the trappings of Catholicism) were not fundamentalists, which are, in essence, believers in the Bible and in direct communication of individuals with God, rather than through the intercession of the Pope and priests or the King (head of the Church in England) and his religious ministers. In fact, the Tories in England, and here as well, opposed the Protestants and especially those of fundamentalist bent--the real purists, the Puritans and others who recognized no authority but their own conscience, in communication with God guided by God's word, the Bible.
It was the Puritans--who had left England because they were persecuted there--who were the early American "fundies," with extensive impacts on our culture, some good, some bad. Their beliefs in individual conscience, in literacy and education and in simple living had many good effects. Their sexual puritanism was poisonous. American Tories were more businessmen, and pretty much just as ribald as the "mainstream" English were. Their sins were different--slave trading, for instance. And I wouldn't exactly call them "conservative" or more conservative than some of the revolutionaries, who also had wealth and privilege to protect. It was more: Which way to go--stay with the king, or break away--to maintain that wealth and privilege?
The Revolution, of course, had people like Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson, who had far more in mind than troubles about tea taxes. They were into "the rights of man" and revolutionary democracy. Jefferson died penniless. He was attached to his slaves and his land for emotional reasons, rather than entrepreneurship. He was a terrible businessman. But a lot of the businessmen and landowners who joined the Revolution did so for business reasons--maintaining wealth and privilege (which the king was encroaching upon)--rather than for idealistic reasons. So they were "conservative," too, like the Tories. And there was a real struggle, early on, to bend the revolutionary colonies back toward a monarchical system--for instance, they wanted George Washington to take the crown--to protect wealth and privilege from the "rabble." It was very difficult for some to grasp the new system as realistic and practical. They had only known a monarchical system as workable--with layers of wealth and privilege. They did not consider the plebians--ordinary workers, for instance--to be equal to themselves, even though Thomas Jefferson had declared it so. ("All men are created equal...")
We see some of these tensions in the Constitution's structure of power, with an elitist Senate--a la the Roman Republic--combined with a more representative, plebian House, and with an executive whom the writers of the Constitution (mainly James Madison) attempted to hedge round in every way possible, to prevent a monarchical tyranny. I would say, yes, the strain of elitism is "conservative" (trying to preserve the forms of the past), and "Tory" is an accurate enough word for it, but Tories were not fundies; they were the opposite. They believed in a hierarchical structure of power; the Puritans (fundies as to religion) did not--aside from the Puritan hierarchy of God over man, man over woman and man over children after they were out of diapers; but no man--king, pope, president--could tell them what to think.
So, "Tories" and "fundies" were rather opposite of each other. In England, the Tories were Anglican or Catholic, and the Whigs were "fundies"--that is, against the Pope and against the Catholic-like Church of England, and for a "purer" religion than Catholicism, based on the Bible (and, not incidentally, on literacy for all--that is, the ability to read the Bible for yourself and interpret it yourself). There, the fundie types were republicans, the Whigs--anti-monarchy, and for parliament's power over the king. Here, things were not so clear but that division did carry over to some extent. The Tories were Anglican or Catholic; the Rebels were mostly various shades and degrees of Protestant (including Deists like Jefferson and Adams--non-sectarian Christians).
There were Quaker Tories, by the way, and Iroquois Tories, and African-American Tories--who sided with the British, and the latter two fought for the British against the colonial Rebels. The British offered freedom to African-Americans who fought for them.
I was trying to think where I would place our current "fundies" on the political spectrum. They are kind of like nativist thugs--adhering to some sort of "white world" that never existed--more like nazis than anything else, and there is really no analog for that back in Revolutionary times. The Tories and the British were not nazi-like; nor were even the most extremist Protestants, except maybe the Cromwellians (who never had cache here). The Puritans had some nazi characteristics, but really were too religious to be called nazis. The Cromwellians provide an example of how extremist "fundies"--Puritans--would behave if they could take over nation--a joyless austerity would prevail, amid great violence and repression. I think the U.S. is too multi-cultural--too diverse--for it to work here (and that may have been true back in Revolutionary times as well). It didn't work in England for long. It could be--and, indeed, was--imposed on us as a kind of illusion (with the Bush Junta), and that effort continues. But the "fundies" in my opinion are, and always will be, a tiny minority here--but currently with a Big Trumpet, given them by the corpo-fascist media, way out of proportion to their numbers.
They are not Tories, exactly (although they seem to need authority and might follow a "big man" tyrannical leader--sort of monarchists). They are not conservative (they are quite radical). And their stupidity, intolerance and thuggishness put them way out of the mainstream. It's curious how we can become so obsessed with them, but that is the corpo-fascist press, which uses them to write false narratives of our political life to go along with the corporate-run 'TRADE SECRET' voting machine results, to create distractions from the real issues and to demoralize the great progressive majority.
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