The failure to enact the bailout bill, or indeed, any economic recovery bill, has shaken some people to their core. It’s heightened a sense that our politics is broken and that we as a people no longer have what it takes. Someone wrote something at Political Animal that stirred in me a passionate response, and I’ve replicated it below:
Dan Kervick on September 30, 2008 at 9:23 PM
Maybe we can now stop hearing so many pious paeans to the great genius of Our Illustrious Founders, the guys who gave us this inflexible, unresponsive, creaking tub of a political system in the first place.
No, they’re still geniuses. They met in Philadelphia, surveyed all that was known of human history at that point, and sat down to solve the problem of human governance. And here’s the kicker: They actually did it. They crafted a system that included self-correction, that respected the minority viewpoint while empowering the majority, and that could cope with a vast expansion in people and area. They actually solved the problem — and they did it so well, they changed the world as a result.
The irony, of course, is that by changing the world, they rendered obsolete and invalid the conclusions they’d drawn from history. History is different, and so the old rules don’t work.
On the other hand, their system has survived (admittedly creaking) for 220+ years, risen above existential crises both foreign and domestic, expanded the definition of “citizen” (indeed, of “human”) far beyond its original sense, saved civilization (or helped save it) at least twice, while providing a standard of living so amazing that the typical person far exceeds the wildest dreams of avarice of the most powerful of old. Not so bad.
The failure isn’t in the system. The failure is in us. We live in reduced times, where we accept corruption and ignorance, where we sit back and watch cable news like it was no more significant than sport (when we can bothered to watch it at all), where we avoid the person of differing opinion and where we trust only those who already agree with us. The Founders have not failed us; it is we who have failed them, and ourselves. We have allowed ourselves to be lulled into a stupor of reality TV and Fritos; we celebrate the ignorant and mock the educated. We would rather have a President to share a beer than to solve problems, and we would rather believe the cynical testimony of implicated cronies than do the legwork to understand what’s really going on.
The system hasn’t been tried and found wanting. It’s been found hard and left untried. American citizenship is advanced democracy and it’s hard work … too hard for too many.
The failure lies in us.