Who Can We Blame?

At the moment, it looks like the US government is going to shoot its economy in the stomach next week. The best we can hope for, it seems, is some kind of face-saving maneuver. The worst? Another recession, or even a depression. It’s hard to see any good coming out of this debt debacle. How did we get here? Who can we blame?

It pains me to say it, but President Obama has to bear responsibility. He waited until the very last moment to propose a way to settle our deficit problems. By taking a cautious “you go first” approach he opened the door to this game of chicken. It’s always risky to take the lead, and nobody can guarantee that you will succeed, but the alternative…. Well, how do you like the alternative?

The Republicans get a heaping share of blame. They invented this game of chicken, thinking they could leverage some kind of deficit-cutting action. But they proved incapable of accepting a compromise, any compromise. As David Brooks wrote a few weeks ago, they aren’t behaving like a normal political party that seeks to govern. They are behaving like a splinter faction that wants to kick the big boys in the shin. They don’t seem to accept that they are the big boys.

Truthfully, though, we the people deserve most of the blame. We have been extremely willing to buy sound bites and applause lines. We have proven allergic to any kind of shared sacrifice.  A good many of us have been willing to believe utter nonsense if it suits our mood.

I’ve been reading Ron Chernow’s biography of Washington while watching the HBO series on John Adams. Together they serve as a refresher course on American history. The founding fathers were very aware of how experimental and fragile was the republic they founded. They often wondered whether the nation—both leaders and common people—would prove worthy of the independence they had won. And indeed, by the time Washington was in his second term, the polarization and vituperation and silly conspiratorial thinking had reached dangerous levels. Only Washington’s reputation, and a prosperous economy, and some bold and fortunate leadership (Hamilton’s in particular, establishing a viable economy) kept the country together.

We don’t have anything comparable today—no unimpeachable reputations, no prosperity, no strong leadership. We do have 200 years of success, which can breed confidence. It can also breed over-confidence. We need to get serious about politics. It’s not a game.

What does “serious” mean?

It means listening to other views and seeking common ground.

It means not demonizing those who disagree with you.

It means going deeper in complicated subjects, and rejecting simplistic formulations.

It means seeking solutions to problems like health care and ballooning deficits and illegal immigration, not just declaiming about the failings of others.

It means accepting compromise.

It means accepting blame.

Conspiracy Theories

“One of the distinguishing features of most conspiracy theories is the tendency to personalize what are, in truth, impersonal forces of unwelcome change.”

This quotation comes from Joseph Ellis’ fascinating American Creation, a book I read while on vacation last week in Seattle. (Just before I went on vacation I had a bike crash and broke my collarbone and several ribs, while puncturing a lung. That’s why I haven’t been posting here lately.)

American Creation is organized around key developments in the founding of America. One of those was the creation of the two-party system. Ellis sees it as crucial to America’s success, because it channeled our differences into a continuing argument rather than trying to impose magisterial solutions. Every one of the founders loudly decried party spirit as a betrayal of American ideals. Yet by the end of Washington’s second term, they were practicing it with a vicious absolutism.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison became convinced that Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and even George Washington were ready to betray the revolution and opt for a monarchy. Pretty soon they launched covert warfare, which soon became (almost) open warfare.

Differences were inevitable, but what could have convinced Jefferson and Madison that men who had bravely fought at their side in the Revolution were now willing to betray it? Ellis suggests that at an unconscious level it was economics. The economic decline of the Virginians’ tobacco plantations was utterly mysterious to them, as was the rise of a trade-driven economy in the northeast. As sophisticated as they were in political thought, they were ignorant of finance and economics. Even the compound interest on their loans was beyond their comprehension. They became convinced that Hamilton’s Bank of the United States was titanic thievery because they had no idea how banks worked. And so, they imagined a conspiracy to deprive them of their economic and political clout. They thought that if they defeated the conspirators, all would be well. But while they won the 1800 election, and their party dominated politics in the following generation, they died bankrupt. A tobacco economy was undone by quite impersonal forces that they did not grasp.

That seems relevant today. For the right, conspiracies must be behind global warming, because the science is too complex to understand and the impersonal forces of chemistry messing up our lives are too unpleasant to contemplate. For the left, conspiracies must explain worldwide poverty, because global economics is hard to grasp and the impersonal forces of capitalism can be dreadful. And so on. Wherever a conspiracy of “them” is blamed, look for some complicated impersonal reality that is too hard to think about.

How Polarized Are We?

Observing the political carnage over health care reform, I am struck all over again at what a polarized country we have become. Health care is incredibly complicated, but that ought to create opportunities for compromise and collaboration. Re-engineering a machine with a million moving parts, there are probably ten million approaches that have some claim to plausibility. But no, the debate continually narrows itself into a shouting match over a single detail-“death panels,” or “public option.” (It will be something else next week, if the whole effort doesn’t fall apart before next week.) It’s hard to get anything done on such a complex subject when you have two sides that so deeply distrust each other.
It is not the first time in American history that we have been so polarized.
In 1800, when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson competed for the presidency, the election was marked by rabid distrust between Federalists and Democratic Republicans. Both sides fought as though the fate of America lay in the result, as they sincerely thought it did. Rhetoric was at least as strident as today, and all news was reported in highly partisan newspapers that made no pretence of objectivity. Yet, when Jefferson was elected he governed in a far more moderate way than the Federalists had expected. The only violence to come out of the election was the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. (Edward Larson’s A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign tells the story well.)

On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 resulted in the Civil War. Then, too, the nation was deeply divided, and rhetoric was extreme. When John Brown raided Harpers Ferry in 1859, he was condemned as a terrorist by much of the nation, but lauded as a saint and a hero by a significant part of the rest. With such absolutely polarized opinions, there appeared to be no option but to fight it out with guns.
The difference between 1800 and 1860 seems pretty obvious: slavery. There was no political compromise on slavery-no way to split the difference, no way to be a moderate.
Compare the split reaction to John Brown’s raid with the unified horror over Timothy McVeigh’s assault on the federal building in Oklahoma City. McVeigh acted on an extremist version of the Republican distrust of government, the sense that control from Washington, D.C. must be fought ferociously. (We hear echoes of this in the health care debate.) But nobody lauded McVeigh as a hero. We have not reached polarization of that level yet, and God helping us we won’t.
Right and left certainly do have different overarching visions of society, but I believe the differences are more like those of 1800 than those of 1860. I’m hoping we’ll eventually get past the divisive rhetoric and manage to get some business done. No sign of that yet.