Well, Duh!, is my initial reaction to this poll from Gallup:
The Founding Fathers tended to be very critical of the government and the people in their own time and they would have not been surprised that their posterity has been guilty of folly upon folly and a headlong rush to rid themselves forever of the hard won liberty that their ancestors paid such a high price to achieve. What I think would have truly alarmed them about our present day is how many Americans who know better, who believe in what the Founding Fathers set forth in the Declaration of Independence, sit supinely by and allow their nation to careen towards a cliff. Would be tyrants would not have surprised the men who won the American Revolution. They expected them to come. They realized that the only sure defense against such men was a population steeped in a love of liberty and their country. Too many Americans are cold and indifferent both to liberty and this nation, and too many who do love both seem content to adopt a “Woe is Us!” attitude and to sing sad dirges upon the United States of America. Such an attitude is not only self-defeating but a betrayal of what this nation was and can be again: the last best hope of earth.
We’re not the ‘last best hope on Earth’. We are just a county.
We have a lousy political class who are maintained in office by public apathy. Part of the reason we have a lousy political class is the secular decay in the character of the sort of bourgeois types who run for office (matched measure for measure by the wage-earning majority). Look at the distance traversed from Thomas E. Dewey to Andrew Cuomo or from Richard J. Daley to Rahm Emmanuel and you see what has happened.
You can call it ‘loss of liberty’, but the most salient phenomenon has been the placement of individuals, families, enterprises, and public institutions under the superintendency of lawyers and their auxilliaries, the helping professions. Some carve outs are allowed for academe and the entertainment business that no one else gets. Regaining liberty is, one suspects, going to require a messy and violent confrontation with the legal profession (because they have foreclosed lawful means).
Disagree with you Art, root and branch. We are not just a country but the embodiment of an idea of ordered liberty. Without what the Founding Fathers accomplished history would likely have taken a very much darker turn over the last two centuries and the Earth, if humanity survived at all, would now be inhabited by totalitarian states.
As for our decay, it is at bottom a crisis of faith.
The poll tells me 29% of Americans are clueless. And raises the question: ” How did Obama get re-elected?”
I do not think it is a crisis. It is a condition or process. It has been going on long enough that I do not think a metaphor of a cross-roads truly describes it. Humanity has never quite been at this place before, so we do not have a ready answer to the question of what happens to virtue in conditions of mass affluence.
Counter-factual speculation is generally idle. The thing is, I cannot look at Europe during the long 19th century (say from 1789 to 1914) and see a proto-totalitarian landscape, nor is it evident to me that had the United States been a British dominion like Canada that the course of world politics would have been severely injured.
Art – For one thing, if we were just another colony, we wouldn’t have been the destination of choice for people escaping lousy European governments. The spirit of innovation, combined with the immigrant’s distrust of government and our own fixation on liberty, created an ideal environment for technological growth. Our tractors, our planes, our light bulbs changed the world. Plenty of other things about us changed the world, too, but that’s one thing that we sometimes overlook.
we wouldn’t have been the destination of choice for people escaping lousy European governments.
We can check the precise size of the various immigration flows given the size of the respective territories and host populations, but there was considerable flow into Canada, into the Antipodes, and into the South American Southern Cone. (By way of example, about half of the post-war heads of state in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay have had non-hispanic surnames. By contrast, I believe Kennedy and Obama are the only two post-war Presidents who are not largely descended from Colonial-era migrants).
Umm, Pinky, I think Britain, Belgium, the Rhineland, and Switzerland saw considerable technological innovation during the 19th century.
“The poll tells me 29% of Americans are clueless.” – You are being WAY generous!
Even if the poll is valid – and I’m less impressed with polling the more of it I am subjected to – wouldn’t the 71% who are disappointed have to first have learned something about the Framers and the founding of our country?
I would be hugely surprised if more than 5% of Americans had a clue to what the Framers intended or even cared.
“Counter-factual speculation is generally idle.”
What counter-factual speculation? Totalitarian regimes arose in the 20th century and only the US had the power to stop them. Take away the US and I find it hard to see how Democracy would have survived the bloody 20th. World War I came about without the US, and, whichever side won, the losers were going to have the type of political instability that led to Communism and Fascism. I can easily see a thermo-nuclear war between totalitarian states leading to the ending of most of the life on this planet without the US having been present in the last century.
The US set a salutary example for the UK in the 19th. Dominion status granted to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc was in large part due to the disastrous results of the American Revolution for the Brits and their determination not to go through that again with any of their colonies, at least their white ones. Outside of the anglo-sphere democracy proved to be largely a hot house flower, and I would not lay any bets to its long range survival under stress, even today, absent a United States.
1. If your counter-factual speculation has political developments in Central and Eastern Europe proceeding as they did but removes the United States from the equation, I suppose we were indispensable. I am not sure why what happened in Russia in 1917-22 was not just as contingent as the appearance of the United States as a sovereign republic, but whatever.
2. I am not exactly sure how Abraham Lincoln in 1862 is supposed to have anticipated the emergence of Soviet Russia sixty years later.
3. I am not sure why a United Empire would have been necessarily a less effective adversary for Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia than an Anglo-American alliance. IIRC, Samuel Huntington made reference in one of his later volumes to the work of a demographer who reported that 49% of the population increase recorded between 1790 and 1990 was attributable to natural increase. That aside, both Canada and Australia experienced considerable immigration from various parts of Europe in spite of the fact that the vast bulk of their respective territories is unsuitable for agriculture.
Outside of the anglo-sphere democracy proved to be largely a hot house flower, and I would not lay any bets to its long range survival under stress, even today, absent a United States.
Shades of John Derbyshire.
Some years ago the political scientist Larry Diamond offered that after more than two decades of studying the question, he had concluded that the only iron-clad prerequisite for the appearance of democratic institutions was the determination of a political class to impose such a system. You have electoral politics in every region of the globe, it has been standard in Latin America and Eastern Europe for the better part of a generation and common everywhere else, and you can identify about two dozen countries (only half a dozen or so from the anglosphere) who have had democratic institutions in place since the 1st World War or thereabouts with only foreign occupations as interruptions. It seems odd to refer to such institutions as ‘hot house flowers’ in these loci.
“I am not sure why what happened in Russia in 1917-22 was not just as contingent as the appearance of the United States as a sovereign republic, but whatever.”
Because what happened in Russia was in no way contingent on the US entering the War. The Tsar had fallen before the US intervened and the Germans had embarked on their program of sending Lenin to Russia just after the US declaration of war. None of this was contingent on the US.
“I am not exactly sure how Abraham Lincoln in 1862 is supposed to have anticipated the emergence of Soviet Russia sixty years later.”
He didn’t have to. Republics were in a very poor state in Lincoln’s world with France now being an empire and Latin American having entered their dispiriting cycle of republic-anarchy-dictatorship. At the time opponents of republics pointed to the American Civil War as an argument against the long term stability and endurance of republics.
“I am not sure why a United Empire would have been necessarily a less effective adversary for Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia than an Anglo-American alliance.”
The Brits had all they could do to stave off defeat in World War I with massive American assistance. Your query also ignores the fact that without the American Revolution Britain might well have entered the War with fairly unhappy and restive colonies, more resembling Ireland in 1916 than the dominions of 1914 in our history.
“Shades of John Derbyshire.”
Rather shades of actual evidence. Latin America speaks for itself. Democracy in Europe took firm root in Europe only under the protection of NATO, and it was a near run thing even then in many countries. Democracy in Europe in the 19th century was largely a result of the unusual period of peace, punctuated by a few brief wars, from 1815-1914. Its rapid disappearance under stress in many nations from 1914-1950 makes me not at all sanguine as to the fate of democracy in that part of the globe, with the exception of the UK and Ireland, absent the United States. Post colonial Africa demonstrates just how difficult it is for democracy to take root. Asia demonstrates that democracy in that part of the world is largely an import from either the US or Britain.
I am just not understanding you. At a particular set of historical moments, it was useful to have the United States present. You posit a considerable alteration in the political landscape but hold all other elements constant. That only makes sense to me if you regard the emergence of Soviet Russia as a function of a determined social process. I am not seeing that. Nor can I see that the United States is the only possible counter-configuration.
That aside, I cannot figure how the caudillo states of Latin America are analogous to to well-institutionalized bureaucratic authoritarian states in Europe. Aside from the caudillo regimes you had a mess of elite-dominated regimes with a certain legal order to them, though not very much electoral competition (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia). Paraguay had a totalitarian order during the period running from 1814 to 1870, but Paraguay has always been odd.
Nor can I understand your characterization of either Latin America or Europe. Constitutional monarchy was standard in Europe in 1914. It was messy and crooked in the Mediterranean states and of uncertain establishment in Russia, but there were broad swatches of the United States where the quality of political life was quite low as well at that time. The Hohenzollerns issued a constitution for Prussia in 1851 and the Hapsburgs one for their various territories in 1860. Bar the period running from 1933 to 1949, some sort of constitutional government was the mode in the German states from that time to this; political competition was restored in the 2d Empire in 1860 and has abided in France bar periods of foreign occupation; again, bar foreign occupations, democratic institutions have been ever-present in the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Switzerland since 1848. The implosion of democratic institutions in Europe (never thorough) during the period running from 1922 to 1938 was the anomaly, not the period before and after.
How does Latin America ‘speak for itself’? There have been some sketchy patterns in Latin America’s political history – you have caudillo states, highly elite dominated constitutional states, states with legal order but without much electoral competition, patrimonial states, institutional military rule, rule by political machine, rule by military factions, hybrid systems, and modern constitutionalism. There has been a secular decline in the frequency of the caudillo state on the Latin American scene: the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic may have been the last good example. You have had a gradual increase in the list of states with abiding democratic institutions: Chile, Costa Rica, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic. Since 1990, electoral institutions have been universal and the main problem has been political and social violence.
Africa has been troubled. African countries are generally dirt poor, multi-ethnic and lacking in an extended period as an integrated political unit, and had little practice with electoral institutions before they were cut loose by Britain, France, Portugal, and Belgium. I am not sure why you consider Africa emblematic of political problems generally.
Cannot help but note that the first experiments in electoral institutions in India date from 1909. There has been only one (18 month) interruption in parliamentary government since 1948.
“At a particular set of historical moments, it was useful to have the United States present.”
Yes, in response to your description of the US as “just another country” which I regard as completely ahistoric. Describing the presence of the US as “useful” over the past 237 years is a dictionary worthy example of understatement.
“You posit a considerable alteration in the political landscape but hold all other elements constant.”
Which is proper in this thought experiment since World War I and the emergence of the political instability that plagued Europe thereafter was going to happen with or without the US for the reasons I already cited.
“Nor can I see that the United States is the only possible counter-configuration.”
One can always imagine star fleets from the Andromeda Galaxy coming to save the day Art, but all one has to do is contemplate Europe and the world in 1940 to see that without the US the totalitarian regimes were going to dominate the globe.
“That aside, I cannot figure how the caudillo states of Latin America are analogous to to well-institutionalized bureaucratic authoritarian states in Europe.”
I never said that they were. What I did say was that under crisis democratic regimes proved fairly weak reeds in almost all of Europe between 1914-1950. But for the presence of the United States as a global Super Power, Europe circa 1950 would have been under the aegis of one or more totalitarian states, any democratic regimes like Sweden or Switzerland existing only through the sufferance of their more powerful non-democratic neighbors. Fascism and Communism were widely regarded in the thirties as the wave of the future in Europe, a prediction that would have been entirely accurate but for the US presence in Europe as a result of World War II.
“How does Latin America ‘speak for itself’?”
Actually it shouts for itself in regard to democracy. There is not a nation in Latin America that has not had a period of dictatorship in the last century, usually several of them. The contrast with the United States is stark and damning. I can only imagine it would have been far worse without the example of the US to demonstrate that a stable long term democracy is possible.
“Cannot help but note that the first experiments in electoral institutions in India date from 1909. There has been only one (18 month) interruption in parliamentary government since 1948.”
Courtesy of the British Raj Art.
I am reminded of Newman’s “deep in history” statement – understanding history makes one more likely to lvove and appreciate the Church and I think the same thing applies to this beloved country- the more one understands human history, the more one loves and appreciates America. the convergences of thoughts and events that have attended the birth and growth of this nation can not be taken just as uncanny coincidences.
I also am put in mind of Isaiah- who said that God’s word does not return to Him void– I thin America is a word sent out from God and has already been the source of much blessing for the world– and could continue in that vein if we cooperate with Him.
sorry about my typos