Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
David P. Goldman applies the lash:
More disturbing, I think, is the extent to which America has suffered not a failure of the elites, but a failure of the people. Do we measure up to the founders of this country? The fact that Americans fought a revolution against Britain in the first place continues to astonish me. When in all of history have prosperous men with property — farms and businesses — risked their lives and fortunes to establish a better political order? Only a spiritual grandeur of a depth we barely can imagine today can explain it. When in all of history has a country gone to war and sacrificed 5% of its total population to suppress slavery? The evangelical zeal that sent the North to war, singing of the grapes of wrath in the apocalyptic vision of Isaiah 63, surpasses our understanding today.
Yes, that's right -- because there isn't anything to be done today that rises to the awesome level of political-theological authority reached by the imperative to destroy slavery. (Leave aside the brute fact that the Civil War was not, for many on both sides, a holy war about servitude.)
But this is to rephrase Goldman's question in even franker terms. If we define failure as the collapse of the foundations of political liberty, are we confronting a failure of the American people as a whole -- elite malfunction or no?
Add to that an even more embarrassing question. Will or won't the Republican party stand for the proposition that only government can save the people from such a failure, by organizing and leading them in pursuit of 'national greatness' restored?
It's unnerving that Goldman belabors Lincoln so much in this regard:
the greatest of all of our leaders, Abraham Lincoln, told the American people that the terrible Civil War was their fault — for owning slaves, and tolerating the ownership of slaves — and that the suffering must continue until every drop of blood drawn by the lash was requited by one drawn by the sword. We have chiseled these words on his monument, but we do not read them, because we do not like the implication that we might suffer because of our mistakes.
Goldman's frustration is understandable, given the dominance of irrational optimism in Republican rhetoric. But one need not be a neo-Confederate to wonder if the sort of government-led suffering he invokes is the best touchstone for today's troubles. Rather than enlisting us in a sacred, bloody mission to unify the people, Washington needs to take our marching orders -- to unwind its concentrated powers and permit American greatness to once again emerge organically, from the ground up, where and when it is able to do so.
But there is this stubborn fear to contend with among our elites that the American people are not to be trusted with their own destiny. Obama tells us that we'll slip into torpor if government doesn't mobilize and inspire us to Do Great Things. Republicans, meanwhile, fantasize that the undoing of traditional morality in the middle and working classes can be halted, ameliorated, and perhaps reversed with a cocktail of tax credits and wage subsidies. And of course all national rhetoric continues to revolve dizzyingly around war metaphors, the principle being: if government does not lead us into a national struggle for prosperity, the threats to our prosperity will defeat us.
So much for the elites. Among the American people, however, who really believes this? Anyone? Even our many citizens who will vote under any circumstance for the Democrat in a federal election characteristically believe that the key thing is 'delivering the goods' -- guaranteeing the entitlements and rights adequate to some minimum level of justice. I suspect this is largely true even of those who would agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that the Civil War "wasn't tragic" and should leave us feeling "positively [expletive] giddy."
We all like to feel giddy when our nominees stir up our passions and hopes. Inevitably, they do this with the great American themes (equality! freedom! progress! prosperity!). It's a dire problem when that kind of rhetoric becomes so reflexive and aggressively enforced that anyone who belabors the disconnect between it and our sorry state is turned into some kind of suspect. But -- and this is an epic but -- our habitual air of patriotic self-congratulation is not a problem because it lacks a profound and comprehensive national goal to justify it. Our fretful national greatness enthusiasts are right that Americans don't really have a very powerful source of unity without such grand (and, usually, military or quasi-martial) projects.
But in a healthy free society, that's a feature, not a bug. Hobbes would say the mania for grand American projects belies the secret desire of all human beings, laid bare in democratic times, to submit to the one awesome sovereign alone capable of mollifying our envy and our pride. But however unlike a people, in the Old World sense, we are, we do have this going for our shared identity: our origins were mercifully free of the Old World social conditions that made Hobbes' Leviathan not only thinkable but inescapably alluring. If the American people really are failing, Hobbes is in danger of having the last laugh. The best way to give it to him, however, is to install our own Leviathan in advance of the cataclysmic collapse that, for us, may well never come.
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Jan '11
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
Bryan Caplan makes the case that it's "the people".
I found his book pretty compelling but I found that this article that he wrote sort of summarizes why the people are responsible for the failure.
Jun '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
If your family support, especially the emotional support, is weak or non-existent, then you'll start looking for some new family to be your safety net, and that family is often Uncle Sam (or the State equivalent.) Government money becomes the substitute for the ingenuity and resourcefulness that intact families traditionally used to face hardship. A parent can work two part-time jobs to recover from a setback, but they can't do it if there's no spouse in the picture. America's elites certainly failed, but it was decades ago, when they designed a welfare system that made poor undereducated men obsolete. If the mother of that man's children didn't want them, a gang probably did.
Edited on January 3, 2012 at 7:29pmApr '11
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
The Civil War was an explosion of violence because of the failure of the political class to resolve, in any satisfactory way, the issue of slavery. Slavery, though present at the founding, ran counter to the American creed and had to be ended.
The American people may be at fault today mostly due to their patience of the political class to address the debt problem. For almost four decades the American people have been promised fiscal reform and sobriety but get nothing but continued reckless spending, and the frustration is beginning to come to a head. TARP/ bailouts, and "stimulus" spending have pushed the American people to this heated precipice and the Tea Party movement, properly feared by the status quo in Washington, is hopefully the means to a proper fiscal end. We'll see. But the people are only to blame, at least on the right, for their patience.
Dec '11
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
Some freezing cold, snowy winter day, take your kids to Valley Forge. That's where real patriots proved their mettle.
Then drive 5 minutes east, to the lavish King of Prussia Mall and see what a soft, frivolous people we have become.
Aug '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
What a great post. This will take some thinking. As a response to the present atmosphere of personality./beauty contest in the GOP , it seems so much larger. As a setup as to whether the "people" are smart enough or tough enough to make the choices, well, the GOP isn't doing much to present that case. It is a great rebuttal to the entitlement state. Do we get a working speedometer in this car called America that is coasting down the highway of history ? How will we know how long the road is, how many turns are ahead, and whether we'll have to stop and dig our own oil well to fuel our further progress ?
Lot s of questions, hopefully it'll bring out the Ricosymposium in us.
Dec '11
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
I tried to craft a post on this very subject not too long ago - a post that would say, "Stop carping about the lackluster GOP presidential field, it's your own damn fault. You haven't been paying attention for decades."
Fortunately, James, you've done a far better job of explaining it than I would have.
Dec '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
At the close of the constitutional convention Benjamin Franklin said:
Did the people become corrupt and then appoint the elites, or did the people become corrupted by the programs instituted by the elites? Either way, Franklin was right. Our system is devolving into despotism as the people have become so corrupt as to require such a form of governance. Dr. Rahe believes they (the elites) have done it to us, I believe they're just giving what is demanded by a corrupt citizenry.
Aug '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
"But however unlike a people, in the Old World sense, we are, we do have this going for our shared identity: our origins were mercifully free of the Old World social conditions that made Hobbes' Leviathan not only thinkable but inescapably alluring."
@James, you provide a nice paraphrase of Louis Hartz's theory of American Liberalism here, but it is a theory that I don't know is accurate. I think it seemed nice at the time (1955) as it provided an argument why America wasn't prone to the Socialist/Nationalist tendencies that caused so much trouble in Europe in the first half of the 20th Century.
The thing is that the German influenced Progressive academics of the early 20th Century did all they could to plant Old World ideologies into the American psyche. One can look at much of the 20th Century as an argument regarding how America lost its liberal sensibilities. Look at how people think of liberty, equality, progress, and prosperity today.
We seem much more prone to the failings of democracy predicted by Aristotle than like a stable mixed regime today.
The people aren't to "blame," but we have lost something of our spiritedness.
Jan '11
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
Jun '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
This is a perennial question. I remember reading Hitler's Willing Executioners wherein the author tried to show how anxious the common German was to aid in the extermination of the Jews of Europe. This book was written to counter (with convincing example after example) the notion that has too often prevailed that it was just the Nazi elites who were responsible.
Ultimately, we have to admit that our democracy works sufficiently well to allow the people to enforce their will. We are getting the government that we deserve, certainly -- whether or not we are getting the government that we want at any given moment.
But, the leveraging effect that elites have in their dealings with us is pernicious. Lincoln's adage about fooling all or some of the people is apt here. My hope is that we are finally reaching the stage he describes where not all of us are being fooled all the time. But, Lincoln's gist is that "time will tell" -- and predicting the exact tipping point has proven to be difficult to do.
May '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
There's certainly a symbiotic relationship between citizens and government. Culture is reflected in politics and politics affects culture. The balance between them shifts as government grows (inevitably, a la the Ben Franklin comment cited by King Prawn). The more active and powerful the government, the less dependent on culture it becomes and the less citizens associate themselves politics.
Most Americans have become accustomed to big, corrupt government and can't imagine it any other way. That failure of imagination is one of our greatest hurdles to overcome.
People always need leaders. Much of that leadership is needed outside of government, but a President must be a cultural leader under the present circumstances. He is the only person in America who citizens listen to even when they don't want to. Such a person needs to place the greatest questions of our time front-and-center. Human beings are proud and quick to defend even their least deliberate beliefs. But if a President invited voters to consider the premises of good governance without lecturing them, perhaps even "independents" would look beyond tax cuts and handouts.
Every society needs both elites and laymen. Balancing and unifying them is the challenge.
May '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
LowcountryJoe
America, more than any other culture in history, has honored the free will of individuals. That is the heart of democracy, and it is admirable. Even fools are endowed with free will by our Creator and deserve a voice in the community. In any government, a balance must be struck between freedom and security. Our ancestors adopted a radical preference for freedom.
That preference endures, though dulled. Claire has occasionally rebuked us for claiming our government is tyrannical by pointing out the worse conditions of other peoples, but we are seeking to uphold the high standard of freedom by which our Founders rebelled centuries ago.
Better collapse than the Leviathan. Oppression is worse than war, because souls are more precious than lives.
Dec '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
I think we get the government we deserve. Most people I know spend more time worrying about their clothes, TV shows, and other meaningless stuff. Very few of my colleagues and casual friends follow the news or ever consume any non-fiction books. The ones who do are typically conservative and are my closer friends, but the average person I come into contact with is a passive liberal. They say things about politics that they are just regurgitating from some celebrity, The Today Show, or the NY Times. One of the things that keeps me positive in the long run is what will happen after the collapse. A lot of people are going to be quite shaken and will re-examine their neglect of participating in the political process and actually thinking critically about what they are exposed to.
Aug '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
<devil's advocate mode = on>
So, you'd rather be a European in 500 A.D. than in 400 A.D.?
<devil's advocate mode = off>
May '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
Misthiocracy
<devil's advocate mode = on>
So, you'd rather be a European in 500 A.D. than in 400 A.D.?
<devil's advocate mode = off>
Technology has enabled politicians and bureaucrats to micromanage our lives and threaten us in ways corrupt governors of history could not even imagine. If we accept security at any cost, the cost will be excessive.
If I did not believe in God and immortal souls, my calculations would be different. As it is, I recognize life as a challenge, not a playground. Better to suffer now than to suffer forever.
In any case, my main point is that we should uphold a higher standard of freedom than other nations are willing to accept. I would hate to witness America becoming just another nation, lost to ennui and nepotism.
Edited on January 3, 2012 at 10:20pmFeb '11
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
I can think of one example of where the elites failed America: Illegal immigration.
If the wishes of the American people had been respected the border would have been secured, and California would have allowed to enforce Prop 187.
These would have had enormous consequences for the political dynamic in this country, but not consequences the elite wished.
So we get watch the endless machinations the elite-run government take to keep the border open and unsecured, plus Victor Davis Hanson's description of the slow collapse of California into a strange mix of anarchy and tyranny.
Considering that the American people continually voted against illegal immigration I'm not sure how you can blame this problem on us, aside from our failure to overthrow the government by violence.
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
Nathaniel Wright: [...] "our origins were mercifully free of the Old World social conditions" [...]
you provide a nice paraphrase of Louis Hartz's theory of American Liberalism here, but it is a theory that I don't know is accurate. I think it seemed nice at the time (1955) as it provided an argument why America wasn't prone to the Socialist/Nationalist tendencies that caused so much trouble in Europe in the first half of the 20th Century.
The thing is that the German influenced Progressive academics of the early 20th Century did all they could to plant Old World ideologies into the American psyche [...].
Ho ho. I meant to beg the question with "mercifully," read providentially, as Hartz doesn't do. Hartz's view that there is (or may as well be understood to be) only a liberal tradition in American politics is intriguing, but without any account of the role of religious thought it falls flat and misses the point.
The impact of the Progressives was real, but the ground for their success in America was well prepared (as was Freud's!). The Whig party may have collapsed, but Whiggery lived long and prospered.
Jan '12
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
More people voted in the 2006 American Idol competition than did in the 1980 Presidential election.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/may/26/realitytv.usnews
Only 9% of Americans attend political meetings, and only 13% contribute money to political causes
Source: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/the-politics-of-the-1-percent/
Assuming that in order for a democratic republic to function properly, the demos has to be actively involved in the res publica, it certainly seems as if America has some serious problems. Clearly, government-sponsored efforts to revitalize idealism and involvement among the populace have not succeeded. However, it is not clear that removing government interference from the every-day lives of the people would result in a civic renaissance; American Idol's popularity has little to do with government regulation, methinks. I'm new around here, so I don't know what solutions have been proposed to combat the sliding decadence of the American polity, but I see little hope. Dark the day when the Brechtian quip "Would it not be easier In that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?" utterly loses its irony.
Jul '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
It's the people who put "elites" in power, so ultimately the fault rests with them. Every democracy gets exactly the kind of government it deserves.
Dec '10
Re: Who's Failing America: the Elites or the People?
Did the founders err in believing we would select wisely?