One of the earliest funny stories B told me was about a girl who had wanted to be chosen to wear the special gown and crown the Virgin Mary's statue in May at her Catholic school, a big honor back in the Dark Ages. She had gone on a personal campaign of probity and discipline to get herself chosen, but in the end lost to another girl, less worthy. Years later she raised this bitter incident at a class reunion with the nun in charge. Sister explained to her that it was unfortunate, but the facts were that the gown wouldn't have fit her. Virtues aside, her size just did not match the dress.
I wonder if part of the craziness of America is that it is just too big. Is it possible to have anything like a common sense of belonging to something so vast and diverse and divided? Maybe we passed that point once before back in the 1860's and Civil War was a misguided attempt to keep together peoples who should have naturally separated? Is it possible to have a functioning republic with a limited government, free markets, strong defense, individual freedom and strong mediating institutions once you grow beyond a combined certain size and level of demographic and cultural difference? And the enormous change in our perceptions wrought by our near constant connection to media of information and entertainment? Perhaps mobocracy and/or mere oligarchy or worse are just inevitable. No matter how we think or act, perhaps at some point we just no longer fit the dress.
Post-thought. Suppose someone were to suggest that the whole Western Hemisphere, from Canada to Chile, be amalgamated into a single country. Insane. Size and difference would make it ungovernable.
So why should we think that simply because a huge landmass of hundreds of millions of people, now more different from each other than ever before in history, should not be ungovernable by institutions designed for a far smaller and more homogeneous population, long dominated by a particular group?
(And even they came to ferocious and fratricidal blood-letting a mere 80 years later.) I suppose you could make that into an argument for Living Constitutional Progressivism...turning American in Europe. But then take a look at Europe.
For all China's faults, for example, can we really imagine that 1 billion people --more than three USA's--could be held together in a fractious constitutional democracy rather than by a military dictatorship?
Ancient Sparta lasted 500 years. They had a system of governmental checks and balances of power which inspired the Founding Fathers. But what they had Zero of was cultural diversity. The government only worked because the culture was monolithic, and fanatically so. They believed that they and their way of life was inviolable.
I am certainly not the first to suggest that while the country (except for 1861-1865) was a single entity that it was not the same Republic since 1781 or 1791, when the Constitution was finally ratified. With Andrew Jackson, with Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction, with Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt especially, were they not really different regimes nodding to the same piece of paper? And in the last 50 years, has not another "America" appeared, hugely discontinuous with the original? After all, what about the Declaration's "Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness?"
There's a reason why only Enlightenment Anglos, the much-maligned WASPs, produced America. No one else could have. And now that they are long gone and the current population is largely ignorant of them and/or actively rejecting of them, why should anyone think that "America" can continue except as in-name-only?
I wonder if part of the craziness of America is that it is just too big. Is it possible to have anything like a common sense of belonging to something so vast and diverse and divided? Maybe we passed that point once before back in the 1860's and Civil War was a misguided attempt to keep together peoples who should have naturally separated? Is it possible to have a functioning republic with a limited government, free markets, strong defense, individual freedom and strong mediating institutions once you grow beyond a combined certain size and level of demographic and cultural difference? And the enormous change in our perceptions wrought by our near constant connection to media of information and entertainment? Perhaps mobocracy and/or mere oligarchy or worse are just inevitable. No matter how we think or act, perhaps at some point we just no longer fit the dress.
Post-thought. Suppose someone were to suggest that the whole Western Hemisphere, from Canada to Chile, be amalgamated into a single country. Insane. Size and difference would make it ungovernable.
So why should we think that simply because a huge landmass of hundreds of millions of people, now more different from each other than ever before in history, should not be ungovernable by institutions designed for a far smaller and more homogeneous population, long dominated by a particular group?
(And even they came to ferocious and fratricidal blood-letting a mere 80 years later.) I suppose you could make that into an argument for Living Constitutional Progressivism...turning American in Europe. But then take a look at Europe.
For all China's faults, for example, can we really imagine that 1 billion people --more than three USA's--could be held together in a fractious constitutional democracy rather than by a military dictatorship?
Ancient Sparta lasted 500 years. They had a system of governmental checks and balances of power which inspired the Founding Fathers. But what they had Zero of was cultural diversity. The government only worked because the culture was monolithic, and fanatically so. They believed that they and their way of life was inviolable.
I am certainly not the first to suggest that while the country (except for 1861-1865) was a single entity that it was not the same Republic since 1781 or 1791, when the Constitution was finally ratified. With Andrew Jackson, with Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction, with Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt especially, were they not really different regimes nodding to the same piece of paper? And in the last 50 years, has not another "America" appeared, hugely discontinuous with the original? After all, what about the Declaration's "Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness?"
There's a reason why only Enlightenment Anglos, the much-maligned WASPs, produced America. No one else could have. And now that they are long gone and the current population is largely ignorant of them and/or actively rejecting of them, why should anyone think that "America" can continue except as in-name-only?
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