America too can Change for the Better

America is surrounded by democracies that adopted Lincoln’s conviction that popular democracy—government by the people, not just for the people—can work intelligently and advance human happiness. American democratic ideals, once scorned in the Old World and in their loyal colonies, have infiltrated progressive thinking everywhere. Americans are surrounded by people who insist that freedom, peace, and social justice can prevail, globally.

We live in a more hopeful world because the American Revolution worked. Yet, when something ghastly happens, hopeful people elsewhere often shake their heads and write America off as a lost cause.

There’s no mitigating statistic to balance the murder of twenty children in Newtown, Connecticut. Finding one and uttering it would be indecent. On the other hand, it is invalid and indecent as well to suggest that Americans can’t fix one core social element of last Friday’s tragedy—the ubiquity of guns.

Even Toronto’s insolent Margaret Wente succumbed to this sentiment this morning with this affecting column headline “In the US, Chances are Mommy’s Got a Gun.”

“These tragedies must end,” Barack Obama told a grief-stricken nation Sunday. Don’t count on it. Guns are more American than mom and apple pie. Gun ownership is entwined with the nation’s DNA. Every time more innocents are massacred, we hear: The answer isn’t fewer guns, but more! We should repeal gun bans in school zones! If only their teachers had been armed to the teeth, those kids would be alive today. “Gun control supporters,” insisted Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, “have the blood of little children on their hands.

“This love affair with guns is not susceptible to logic. And Americans’ beliefs about their right to weapons are essentially religious.”

Why so stingy about our closest friend?

We are cautiously hopeful about authoritarian China.  We are cautiously hopeful that theocracies will eventually stop persecuting homosexuals and women. We reach for reasons not to give up on places we’d never visit without notifying our embassy. We hope that if these dangerous places get a taste for freedom and rational discourse, they’ll want more. (Internationalists agree to make collective decisions with bad governments in the United Nations, right now.)

Is America too crazy about guns to figure out how to make their schools, homes, and public places safe? Does political extremism trump their fear of death, their ability to analyze data, and their preference for problem solving over stoicism? Do the loudest lobbyists speak for America?

Wente, on this occasion, and others consistently feel it’s safe to overlook the extraordinary fluidity of American culture and social norms—in fighting racism, in respecting gays, in advancing women, in electing a black man to the biggest job in the world, in quitting cigarettes, in fighting diabetes, and being more contentious parents. They don’t listen to us and, anyway, they’ll never be perfect.

American politics took on universal healthcare recently and may take up gun control again. Pundits elsewhere may feel its best to be pessimistic when Americans first start fighting over a significant problem.  While we don’t dwell on it, however, they often do make progress.

US Voters: it’s your job to take down that wall

In her welcome return column in the Globe and Mail today, Margaret Wente takes a fresh look at the race between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. She returns to the issue of Barack Obama’s character and repeats the question Republicans also clung to in the dying weeks of John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008: when the heat’s really on, can the professor rise to the occasion?

Wente turns to the English world’s most prolific big-book political gossip, Bob Woodward.

That’s Bob Woodward’s verdict in his new book, The Price of Politics. As he told ABC News’s Diane Sawyer, Mr. Obama is a “moaning, groaning, whining, demanding, threatening and desperate” president who is seriously deficient in people and negotiating skills. He could have cut a grand debt and spending deal with Congress last year – if only he’d been more like Reagan or Clinton. The conventional wisdom is that a deal was undoable because of the intransigence of the other side. But Mr. Woodward is not so sure. “Some people are gonna say he was fighting a brick wall,” he told Ms. Sawyer. “Others will say it’s the President’s job to tear down that brick wall. In this case, he didn’t.”

Mitt Romney used this line of attack in last week’s debate, and Barack Obama allowed him get away with it.

Obama could have reasonably asked: “Governor Romney, have you negotiated with these Republicans? Did you get any of them to compromise with you in the primaries? Last summer, did you phone any of them up and tell them what would happen if they forced the government to stop serving its debt obligations?”

In politics, as in business, you don’t keep the company of a brick wall for long. In business, you know, Mitt Romney, you sell it off; in politics this year, Mr. Obama, you better ask the voters for help.

Last year was a crazy moment to even try to negotiate a “grand bargain.” Republicans had won a fresh mandate to not raise any taxes. Their “brick wall” was in wonderful shape.

Furthermore, the US economy couldn’t withstand any immediate contraction in the federal budget. The last thing America’s detractors—and its commercial bankers—wanted Washington to do was act like the Germans and solve the deficit problem early in the recovery. 

“Professor” Obama didn’t even have the academics pushing him to “go big” and tear anything down.

The "grand bargain" talks between the White House and Congress didn’t take place to help Obama solve another economic problem, but to defuse a political crisis within the elected institutions of the federal government. It wasn’t much more than a dressing room screen behind which Congressional blackmailers were allowed to change back into good-Republican grey suits.

Now, the same Republican elders are whispering that Obama was weak, while at the same time disowning half the $ trillion in cuts they agreed to in exchange for allowing the US treasury to honor it credit obligations.

Maybe you should never negotiate with blackmailers and brick walls in the first place. At the very least, it would be rich to reward them—and the candidate who leads them—in the November 6 election.

Canada’s survival: what’s love got to do with it?

Activists who had an especially good time in the '60s often complain that young people now don’t have the passion that they had in the good old days, that with their smaller dreams big Canada will eventually disappear. The human heart and the lifespan of the Canadian federation has become a peculiar obsession of defeated Liberals, especially Michael Ignatieff.

While his suggestion to the BBC (Click on: www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-17819102) that Canada will eventually fall apart out of “mutual indifference” has been scorned, his concern that that the old passion necessary to keep us united may be missing is taken seriously. In short, Ignatieff survives again as a thinker.   

John Ivison writes in the National Post, “Ignatieff tells it like it is on Quebec.”

“Love, we are told, is a mix of intimacy, passion and commitment. It seems to me there is no great love for Canada in Quebec - and, judging by the rising demands for autonomy in Alberta, the thrill has gone for many in the West.”

Click on: www.nationalpost.com/Ignatieff+tells+like+Quebec/6520273/story.html

Margaret Wente writes in the Globe and Mail, “Michael Ignatieff was right about Quebec.”

“He’s right. Our generation embraced the French fact with passion. It was what distinguished Canada from the rest of the world. The existence of Quebec – the language! the culture! – made us feel cosmopolitan and sexy.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/margaret-wente/michael-ignatieff-was-right-about-quebec/article2414217/is

On a quiet day, there is no denying that Canadians feel great pride, mutual benefit, collective security—but there's little love from shore to shore. Without feeling sexy extra-territorially, are Canada’s provinces, in Ignatieff’s words, merely parked as “way stations” on a road that leads to independence?

History and, surely, Ignatieff's liberal faith argue otherwise.

Free peoples are not destined to play national politics in units exclusively bound by love.

Otherwise, the lose federations of North America would have never matured in the first place—or survived the religious, language, and economic strains of the 19th and 20th centuries. (Both united federations have just spent ten years fighting an unpopular war in the Middle East, after a century of world wars at others' behest.) Also, Europeans would be electing national fascist governments again, if mutual self-interest and civility weren’t uppermost in people’s thinking.

Actually, Canada and the US are relatively easy to govern when their regions are rather indifferent toward each other. “Mutual indifference” has been successfully addressed by forceful leadership, compelling external challenges, and mutual self-interest.

While federations don’t impress romantics, they’re good at addressing great opportunities and challenges that loving little nations must leave to others.