I started out this process uncertain; I ended up convinced. America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not. Over the past half century, both parties have helped cause this predicament””Democrats by unintentionally giving governmental efforts a bad name in the 1960s and ’70s, Republicans by deliberately doing so from the Reagan era onward. At the moment, Republicans are objectively the more nihilistic, equating public anger with the sentiment that “their” America has been taken away and defining both political and substantive success as stopping the administration’s plans. As a partisan tactic, this could make sense; for the country, it’s one more sign of dysfunction, and of the near-impossibility of addressing problems that require truly public efforts to solve. Part of the mind-set of pre-Communist China was the rage and frustration of a great people let down by feckless rulers. Whatever is wrong with today’s Communist leadership, it is widely seen as pulling the country nearer to its full potential rather than pushing it away. America is not going to have a Communist revolution nor endure “100 Years of Humiliation,” as Imperial China did. But we could use more anger about the fact that the gap between our potential and our reality is opening up, not closing….
For tomorrow, we really have only two choices. Doing more, or doing less. Trying to work with our flawed governmental system despite its uncorrectable flaws, or trying to contain the damage that system does to the rest of our society. Muddling through, or starving the beast.
Readers may have guessed that I am not going for the second option: giving up on public efforts and cauterizing our gangrenous government so that the rest of society can survive. But the reason might be unexpected. I have seen enough of the world outside America to be sure that eventually a collapsing public life brings the private sector down with it. If we want to maintain the virtues of private America, we must at least try on the public front too. Rio, Manila, and Mexico City during their respective crime booms; Shanghai in the 1920s and Moscow in the 1990s; Jakarta through the decades; the imagined Los Angeles of Blade Runner ””these are all venues in which commerce and opportunity abounded. But the lack of corresponding public virtues””rule of law, expectation of physical safety, infrastructure that people can enjoy or depend on without owning it themselves””made those societies more hellish than they needed to be. When outsiders marvel at today’s China, it is for the combination of private and public advances the country has made. It has private factories and public roads; private office buildings and public schools. Of course this is not some exotic Communist combination. The conjunction of private and public abundance typified America throughout its 20th-century rise. We had the big factories and the broad sidewalks, the stately mansions and the public parks. The private economy was stronger because of the public bulwarks provided by Social Security and Medicare. California is giving the first taste of how the public-private divorce will look””and its historian, Kevin Starr, says the private economy will soon suffer if the government is not repaired. “Through the country’s history, government has had to function correctly for the private sector to flourish,” he said. “John Quincy Adams built the lighthouses and the highways. That’s not ”˜socialist’ but ”˜Whiggish.’ Now we need ports and highways and an educated populace.” In a nearly $1 trillion stimulus package, it should have been possible to build all those things, in a contemporary, environmentally aware counterpart to the interstate-highway plan. But it didn’t happen; we’ve spent the money, incurred the debt, and done very little to repair what most needs fixing.
Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair. But Starr is right. Our only sane choice is to muddle through. As human beings, we ultimately become old and broken and dysfunctional””but in the meantime it makes a difference if we try….
The American experiment is over. The Constitution a dead letter. All that matters now is power and the ability of the state to impose its will. The 1860’s will be a walk in the sun, compared to what is coming.
Private virtues are rarely, if ever, created by public (or statist) power – look at the Soviet Union, the greatest concentration of statist power the 20th century knew. It is the ‘small platoons’ of family, church and voluntary associations of citizens that build thse essential virtues of a free and flourshing society.
On your way out, stop by the handbasket stand at the Briar Patch.
The Rabbit.
Why do Americans hate government so much? Sure, you feel let down by it, but actually hating government as such is like saying, I hate publically funded roads, sewers, parks, schools, and meeting places for governance and culture. You seem to have the widespread attitude: private good, public bad. Here in Canada, for the time being the party in power is on the right, but dare not dismantle puiblically funded health care which has nurtured prosperity for half a century. In fact, insofar as someone in Canada has the anti-government attitude, they sound American to us. Our public institutions have by and large served us well. The grumbling one might hear does not dislodge the underlying sense that public institutions are necessary and represent a common will. This is true not just for surprisingly efficient health care, but for a wide variety of marketing tools for food, private/public ventures, and even the much maligned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, our version of the BBC. Yes, there are robust debates about these things, but we have learned that a mania for privatising everything is not a panacea, but can soon turn a public good into freebooting profiteering. Canada still retains a certain amount of collective compassion, and we expect government to reflect that.