These are anxious times for
history spotters in the US and in Canada, looking on. There’s little time left
for those bored by gridlock, sick to death of incrementalism, or those who have
spiced up their careers warning that America, finally, is about to explode.
According to the IMF updated economic
outlook, as well as stock prices, government and corporate revenues, hiring
rates, commodity, and housing prices, the US economy is finally approaching
healthy growth — similar to the pace of growth that’s dampened apocalyptic
political temptations in the past.
In the 60s, at about the
time I experienced my first serious adult migraine, I worried about nuclear
bombs. I kept the company of spectacular worriers and read worrisome books. Influential
voices in my generation are still worrying. However, today, most opine on more manageable
concerns: on the possibility, for instance, that professional politicians,
egged on by their talking points, will blow up America’s economy, if not its
less-than-perfect union.
Meanwhile, I still worry
about the bomb.
My crazy hope is that our
leaders will secure their precious legacies by dismantling the world’s
stockpiles of nuclear warheads and melting down those devilish red buttons on
their portable triggers. Then they could give former presidents and their most
senior bomb executives shiney red lapel pins boasting: “We didn’t kill you.”
The chances, of course, of a
survivable catastrophe in American governance are higher. Actually, its
prospect is as likely to cause delight as well as alarm in global audiences
hooked on the American melodrama. So, we are focused on the debt ceiling and
the ever-present chance that the insane other side of American politics will
“go nuclear” in Congress.
CNN generates audiences for
this bloodless drama, and partisan historians add gravitas.
Last week, Sean Wilentz in
Rolling Stone and Jim Laxer in
the Toronto Globe and Mail took
maximum advantage of silence on the front in Washington to remind us that
flirting with disaster and mayhem is built into the architecture of America’s
democracy.
Wilentz recalls that ever since
the 1870s, Southern extremists have been threatening fiscal catastrophe to try
to emasculate liberal tendencies in Washington. For over 140 years, radicals
and their “subversive fury” have enjoyed the power to smash “the rules of
normal consensus-building politics” that are so necessary to the proper function of
America’s divided system of government.
Jim Laxer is an affable,
intelligent Canadian. He offers qualifiers such as: “dysfunctional features”, “government shutdowns at least for a time…”, and measures
that “could well provoke large-scale
violence.” Nevertheless, his vision is
dark: “Post-shutdown America is on the verge of outright civil conflict.” Two quite “distinct societies” are
approaching each other’s throats — one is “Old America” and one is “New
America.” Jim doesn’t explicitly pick sides; he can’t. He’s a contentious Canadian
nationalist.
Laxer does believe, however,
that Canadian federalism can handle two distinct societies — but America’s can’t.
He doesn’t suggest the Americans would still be better governed today as British
colonies. But he offers this fabulously irrefutable proposition:
“A
century and a half ago, the outbreak of the Civil War had a great deal to do
with the U.S. system of government. Abraham Lincoln was elected president of
the United States on November 6, 1860, with a minority of the vote in a four-way
contest. By the time he was inaugurated four months later on March 4, 1861,
seven Southern states had seceded from the American Union to form the
Confederate States of America. With a parliamentary system, the 1860 election
could have resulted in a minority government and some kind of compromise.”
During the century and a half
since Lincoln used his Executive powers, and Southern reactionaries found ways
to block the use of Executive powers, ordinary American politicians, with the
backing of ordinary Americans, have been able to hold together a federation of
not two, but numerous societies. Furthermore, as one republic, it won two hot and one cold global war — and successfully fostered the creation of a peaceful, decentralized world market place. Not bad for rebellious amateurs.
Sorry, Laxer. Next year, America
will be further away from extreme trouble, not closer. “Old” and “new”
Americans will be more prosperous and more secure. They will share an
ever-growing stake in peacefully managing their differences. Today’s
peacemakers, not today’s troublemakers, will re-assert themselves or be replaced by
new peacemakers.
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