A More Perfect Union?

In her column at the Washington Post Megan McArdle explains why she has hope for the United States:

So in honor of 247 years of American independence, let me lay out why I am still optimistic about our country’s future.

To people on the right, I would note that capital appears to be undergoing a Great Unwokening, and the hated deep state is the same bureaucracy that validated the Hunter Biden laptop suspicions and spent years investigating him. As for expert capture, yes, it is real. But over the long run, I’m more worried that political showboating will discredit experts who have true and important information to share, as happened with public health officials during the pandemic, than I am that some PhD will bullyrag parents into letting their kids identify as cats.

To the left, I would point out that the republic has survived many sudden reversals of Supreme Court precedent, as well as the discovery of all sorts of new rights, under the Warren and Burger courts. Disliking the results of judicial fiats is not the same as proving they are incompatible with a functioning democracy.

As for Trump, yes, he would, if he could, bulldoze every American institution that stands in his way — but note how conspicuously he has failed to do so. When he was president, American institutions were tested, but while they creaked a bit here and there, they ultimately held strong.

Will they continue to do so? Many on the left see Trump’s failings as the natural outgrowth of various troubling currents on the right and therefore fear he is a harbinger of even worse to come.

and here’s her conclusion:

Watch Americans dealing with one another day to day and you will mostly see them going out of their way to be nice. There are far more random acts of kindness in this country than there are drive-by shootings, and far more people acting with honesty and integrity, even when no one’s looking, than there are con men and thieves. We focus on the latter precisely because they are rare.

In a similar vein Charles Lipson expresses his reasons for hope in a piece at RealClearPolitics:

Our shared aspirations and common identity are our country’s best hope for the future. And our history should be a source of hope, as well as somber reflection.

Those ideals are not “our country, right or wrong.” They are not “our country with an airbrushed past.” Neither are they “our country as a relentless record of evil and oppression, at home and abroad.”

Rather, they are “our country as it strives to become better, to celebrate its accomplishments, to overcome its historical wrongs, to heal its lasting wounds and, ultimately, to achieve the ideals set before us in the Declaration of Independence and made concrete in our Constitution.” Whether our ancestors came over on the Mayflower, a slave ship, or a boat from Europe, escaping the Nazis, those are our shared ideals, but only if we embrace them.

What are those ideals? What are those accomplishments, incomplete as they still are? They are the promise that all men and women should be treated equally, allowed to speak freely and assemble peaceably, worship as they choose, permit others to worship, speak, and assemble as they choose, vote for whichever candidates they prefer, and live in safety, governed by laws made by the representatives they choose in fair elections. Those goals are grounded in tolerance and mutual forbearance, which are essential for a cohesive society where people come from different backgrounds and hold different beliefs.

I could fisk both of those pieces but rather than doing that I’ll try to explain why this time really is different.

First, both of our political parties are completely under the control of their most extreme third. The Trump wing really is controlling the Republican Party; the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party really is calling the tune there.

Second, neither of those factions is self-limiting. Progressivism by definition is not; there is always more “progress” to be made. What is being called “conservatism” these days is actually nothing of the sort. What are they trying to conserve? Quite to the contrary I think they are merely unhappy with the status quo and there’s no path to happiness that will satisfy them for the simple reason that it won’t work.

And the two factions really are at daggers drawn. No compromise is possible for either of them their goals are so widely separated.

Third, all of our institutions are either corrupted, debased, or weakened. Chesterton once said, accurately I think, that America is a country founded on a creed. What creed would that be now? For at least 10% of the population whatever you hold up as our common secular creed would be anathema.

And that’s all it takes. Communists were never more than 10% of the population of the Soviet Union; not more than 10% of Germans were Nazis.

Finally, even as recently as 50 years ago if you couldn’t stand the conditions in one part of the country, you could move to another part and escape it. Modern communications has made that practically impossible. You can shut yourself off in isolation but you can’t actually escape.