gracchusdixit

Americans are thoroughly disgusted by what they believe to be the dysfunctional polarization of our political process.  Where, they ask, is the spirit of compromise?  Why, they wonder, can’t our elected officials put aside their differences and get down to the people’s business?  This disgust is entirely understandable—but it assigns blame inaccurately.

The reality is that our current fix hasn’t been caused by the idiocy of tea party politicians, although they are idiotic enough and have much to answer for:  their refusal to act in behalf of the nation as a whole; their intransigent and at times blatantly racist contempt for Barack Obama; their irrational hatred of government, combined with a refusal to acknowledge how much their own constituents owe to government.  To hear tea party politicians talk, you would never know that the constituents in many of their districts are among the most “entitled” people in the nation: dependent on lavish military spending, agricultural subsidies, government-provided water, transportation, and energy.

Despite their undeniable idiocy, the zealots of the tea party are not primarily to blame for their own folly.  The blame lies with our Constitution, the purportedly wise men who wrote it, and our own passive reverence for the political mess they bequeathed to us.

We have been told so often about “the wisdom of the Founders,” we are so puffed up with pride in the supposed superiority of our Constitutional arrangements, that we rarely stop to examine, or question, what a governmental disaster the Founders really left behind.

It was the Founders who distrusted government.  It was they who feared democratic majorities.  It was they who gave us a “federal republic” of semi-autonomous states, in which the property and privileges of their own class could be protected.  Their most famous accomplishment, the so-called system of “checks and balances,” is nothing but a series of roadblocks that prevent us from solving truly national problems.  That system perpetuated slavery for nearly a century and allowed the de facto slavery of Jim Crow to continue for another.  It wasn’t our Constitution that put an end to all that.  It was civil war, riots, and bloodshed.  Even now, we again have a Supreme Court that is using the Constitution to turn back the clock and reinstate the old evils.

Our system has survived as long as it has, not because it was wisely conceived but, rather, because we have been lucky enough to live on a vast continent, rich in natural resources, remote from much of the outside world, and protected by two oceans from the travails of that world.  It wasn’t our political system that created our good fortune.  On the contrary, it is our material good fortune that has enabled our rickety system to carry on, despite all the chaos, waste, and downright evil it sometimes produces.

Unfortunately, our luck is running out.  Our economy, though still the world’s largest, faces serious rivals for the first time in 75 years.  Our military might, though still greater by far than that of any other nation, has been exposed by two fruitless and costly wars to be largely ineffectual.  And our political system is proving itself, once again, to be utterly incapable of dealing with the critical issues that confront a modern, industrial nation.

This is not an “aberration” that we can blame on the tea party.  It is the result of what many of the Founding Fathers intended.

We need to wake up and recognize that are other models of government exist, which work as well or better than ours—parliamentary democracies in which the executive and the legislature are elected simultaneously, in which governments “fall” when they lose the confidence of the people, in which coalitions and compromise are required, not merely desired.  Can we honestly say that the peoples of Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom are any less free?  Can we honestly say that the governments of Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia have done less to provide their citizens with the opportunity to lead a decent life?

It is time for the American people to direct their anger where it belongs:  at a political system that doesn’t work and never has.  It may even be time to abandon our illusions about that system and start from scratch.