How Brat Thinks

What do we know about David A. Brat, whose upset primary victory over out-going Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor stunned Washington? We know he dislikes immigration. We know he’s a committed RINO-hunter. Beyond that, however, we don’t know much. Going into the 2014 general election, however, that lack of information challenges the ability of the Democratic Party to compete against him.

Apart from his newfound Tea Party stardom, Brat remains an unknown Economics professor from Randolph-Macon College, a little-known liberal arts college that was ranked #134 out of 180 by U.S. News & World Report. Because Brat has no scholarly publishing record–despite listing six pages of publications on his c.v. –his American University doctoral dissertation is our only window into how Brat sees the world other than on the campaign trail.

Gawker and other websites have described Brat as an “Ayn Rand scholar,” but that description seems considerably off-base. Brat’s sole “Randian” publication is a 2010 conference paper, “An Analysis of the Moral Foundations in Ayn Rand,” co-authored with Katy Holland who, judging by her Facebook page, was one of Brat’s Randolph-Macon students. Since no other Rand papers appear on his c.v., Brat was almost certainly “co-authoring” a paper that was really Holland’s, something any good professor would do to help a student get a presentation credit (which would also explain why Holland is listed as the paper’s lead author).

The vast majority of Brat’s publications are non-peer-reviewed essays in the Virginia Economic Journal, an annual publication of the Virginia Association of Economists, an organization so small its 2014 Annual Meeting started at 1:15 p.m. on Thursday, March 20, and ended at 12:15 p.m. the next day — with 4 hours of socializing and meals included. So all that’s left for us to do is glean insights about Brat’s worldview from his dissertation, “Human Capital, Religion and Economic Growth.”

Brat’s dissertation analyzes the impact of human capital (that is, labor and entrepreneurship) on the scientific and industrial revolutions of 19th-century Europe. In it, he gives the institutions of the state in Britain, France, and Germany a great deal of credit for spurring innovation — something that could be problematic in his newfound guise as a Tea Party superstar. It is clear in his dissertation that “they built that” thanks largely to the state.

However, befitting a conservative Christian who did Master’s degree work at Princeton Theological Seminary, Brat’s dissertation also argues we can’t understand the industrial/scientific revolution without crediting capitalism and religion.

Though he grudgingly acknowledges the state helped them “build that,” Brat claims the state was simply responding to market demands, a nifty analytical trick that allows him to still accord pride of place to the almighty private sector: “While it is true that the State took the early steps to implement the rapid increase in science production, this process must e viewed as demand driven. In this sense, British and German industry played a large role in demanding the new role of the State as science producer.”

In other words, Brat believes firmly in the subordination of government to capital; the flag follows the market, not the other way around.

The most important insights we can glean from Brat’s dissertation concern his belief in the fusion of religion, culture, and state.

Brat writes that we can’t separate religious identity from the State: “The State, however, is a complex nexus of many factors … religion interacted with the State by providing the intersection between elite decision making from above and mass participation from below.”

In other words, democracy — or what Brat calls, “constitutional republics” — functions only when political elites and the public share a common religious foundation: “Protestantism,” he writes, “had the effect of rationalizing every aspect of life, including the workings of State.” As a result, Brat concludes that scientific and technological advancements were influenced by Protestantism’s effects on “the nature of educational institutions…the organizing of the State, and…philosophical modes of thinking.” His comparative case studies of Britain, France, and Germany find that Protestantism helped the economic development of Britain and Germany, while Catholicism hurt that of France.

We can expect Brat to be an outspoken proponent of the popular right-wing notion that the United States is a “Christian nation.” His general election campaign will almost certainly be premised on red-meat defenses of so-called “religious liberty” and what conservatives like to call “American Exceptionalism,” but which is more accurately described as “American Exemptionalism.”

If his dissertation is any indication, to the extent Brat campaigns on economic issues, he will be a standard, laissez-faire Free Marketeer, rationalizing the abuses and excesses of capitalist markets on vaguely theological grounds.

His opposition to immigration — which was all about “amnesty” in the primary” — will likely be re-tooled for the general election, couched in the Kulturkampf lingo of “shared values.” He won’t oppose *all* immigration, of course, just “illegal” immigration. It won’t be coincidental, given his own writings and the Evangelical base in his district, that immigration from Protestant countries will be perfectly tolerable, giving a wink and a nod to the fact that “those people” happen to come from Catholic countries (like Mexico).

In David A. Brat, liberals are confronted by another version of Dr. Ben Carson, a rising Tea Party star whose academic credentials lend an intellectual gloss to political philosophy that is quite at odds with American tradition, one based on a seamless fusion of church and state — indeed, a philosophy in which the very foundation of American cultural identity is indistinguishable from the religious orientation of its loudest minority.

By: Russ Burgos

Interested in foreign affairs, global conflict, and political narratives and discourses