Lincoln overlooking an opportunity
“O would some power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us”. Robbie Burns’s famous line is usually interpreted in a personal sense, as it was intended, but at times it is applicable to whole nations as well as to individuals. We left for England on October 1, which was the deadline for the “funding the government crisis” and returned on October 16, the eve of doomsday for the “debt limit crisis.” I was acutely aware of this calendrical happenstance, as I did not much look forward to trying to defend, or for that matter even explain, what appeared to be our collective national lunacy.
I
need not have worried so much.
Quite to my surprise and eventually my disquiet, the British press had
practically nothing to say about it.
The Economist, intelligent as
usual, had a very substantial piece, but then I think of The Economist as only technically British. Of the major English dailies I saw, only
the Guardian, with its famously anti-American
attitude, had much to say, most of it rather superficial in my opinion.
Despite
the fact that I have lived in Britain for extensive periods of time, I have
only rudimentary notions about British politics. I can hardly expect a penetrating insight into American life
from people who pronounce the first syllable of Houston as though it were a domestic dwelling. But the journalistic tone deafness goes
somewhat further. What was lacking
in the analysis was any sense that there are actual and weighty issues at
stake. Everything was
personalities: Obama’s resolve, Boehner’s debility, Cruz’s folly, Harry Reid’s
adroitness, etc. But then, on
further reflection, how different was that really from the treatment in most of
the American press?
It
was with relief—in this regard, at least--that I got home and back to the locker
room in Dillon Gymnasium, where most mornings in the dawn’s early light there
is a lively running seminar of locker-holders on their way to or on their
return from their various athletic activities. The seminar participants vary a bit, but the core consists of one medievalist, one
plasma physicist, one financial engineer, and one pediatrician in public
health. Every month or two some of
us have an extended palaver over coffee and a baguette at Panera’s.
The
budget expert, Steven Semenuk, who is considerably younger than the rest of us,
is a great reader. His interests
appear eclectic, with perhaps a tilt toward economic and political history. It was Steve who via The Big Short set me onto the books of
Michael Lewis. Recently he has
been reading around in American history of the pre-Civil-War period, and he
suggested a parallel between the current state of affairs in Washington and
that in the 1850s. This seemed to
me a most illuminating analogy, remembering always what an analogy is—a comparison
of terms in some ways alike and in some ways not.
The
very strange allocution “kick the can down the road,” which seems to confuse a
once-popular children’s game with a mode of locomotion, denotes the peculiar
form of political pusillanimity by which procrastinating politicians try to
dodge unpleasant decisions. Though
they are now talked about as saints bright shining in the seventh heaven, the
Founding Fathers could kick a can with the best of them, and they did so with
regard to the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery. With the Missouri Compromise of 1820
our leaders kicked it a little further.
By the 1850s, if not long before, it was pretty obvious that further
kicking was not likely to work. “I believe this government cannot endure,” said Abraham Lincoln in
1858, “permanently half slave and half
free.”
The
vilification of the “Tea Party” in the “main stream media”, vigorously
encouraged by the antics of some of the most prominent party-goers themselves,
is now so complete that it is easy enough to assign our current crisis to the
categories of mental aberration or naughty behavior. So far as I could discern it, that seemed to be the European
view of the matter. Such a view is
comforting, perhaps, in that it allows us to avoid acknowledging the conflict
between two quite coherent, quite powerful, and above all quite real visions of
what American government is and should be. But not every issue can be fudged indefinitely. Some of them need actual
resolution—meaning, alas, winners and losers. The effective failure of the National Commission on Fiscal
Responsibility and Reform (alias
Simpson-Bowles) perhaps suggests that “sensible compromise” will not resolve
this particular dilemma. I expect
neither the dissolution of the Union nor Civil War, but then neither did Lincoln in
1858.
