In the November/December issue of the Washington Monthly, journalist Chris Heller has a review of a new book on Lafayette. Sarah Vowell’s Lafayette in the Somewhat United States is “more an extended essay than a book.” She is not a historian.
She’s an essayist, a former contributing editor to National Public Radio’s This American Life, who often writes in the first person, adopting the persona of a wry, wise-cracking observer of people.
As the title suggests, a major theme of the book is that disunity is an enduring feature of American life which has been with us since the grim winter at Valley Forge. In fact, this contentiousness has been such a fixture in our history that it could almost be described as one of the defining characteristics of what it is to be American.
The question that lingers throughout Lafayette is why this democracy has lasted. If America has such an exceptional form of government, what is it that makes it so special? The answer, says Vowell, lies in our freedom to permit and accommodate protest. That’s why she sets a handful of late scenes within Lafayette Park at the White House, a site that’s probably seen more civil disobedience than anywhere else in the country, and is only a couple hundred yards away from the president’s bed. America, she’s saying, has a tremendous tolerance for insurrection…
“That, to me, is the quintessential experience of living in the United States: constantly worrying whether or not the country is about to fall apart,” Vowell writes.
Vowell’s basically uses Lafayette as a vehicle to explore these ideas. It’s an exercise in puncturing the rose-colored balloons of those who constantly hearken back to an idyllic golden age when Americans got everything right and largely agreed about how our society should be structured and governed.
Lafayette may have initially harbored those same illusions, but was quickly disabused.
You’ll want to read the whole thing.
“Unity” should never exist in a democracy except in dire emergencies.
In an era characterized by the authoritarian suppression of protest—see Occupy NY and BLM protests, as well as all attempts to protest Repub conventions—the “accommodating of protest” as our principal survival mechanism would not have occurred to me. A principle goal of today’s police militarization obviously is to ensure the suppression of organized protest by the citizenry, as is our corporate media’s decision not to cover large scale protests that challenge “conservative” vision of the country—such as the Iraq war protests and all global warming protests. To the extent the plutocrats did not (or could not) prevent such protests in the past, it was because they did not have such complete control of the institutions of the nation.
As for “why this democracy has lasted”, it is important to recognize that it didn’t. The original democracy ended in late 1860, early 1861 when the South seceded from the Union. Their rebellion was suppressed by massive military power and their new nation destroyed. Their price for going along with the new democratic order was that they be made exempt from the Reconstruction Amendments and be allowed to suppress any actual democracy within their sovereign states. That condition obtained until 1964 when they had national voting and civil rights legislation crammed down their throats, which they have been resisting in various ways ever since, with increasing success in the past decade thanks to the 5 conservative male activists posing as “justices”.
So the actual length of American democracy is somewhat in controversy. Yes, we have never been conquered and yes, the original constitution has remained in effect for a substantial portion of the country. But the actual “democracy” has been all over the board.
To the extent that “accommodation of protest” means gub’mint reacting to the “will of the people” there may be something here. Economic calamities have generally meant that the US gub’mint has attempted to respond to meet the needs of the people. Thus the progressive era was a response to the abuses of the plutocrat’s First Gilded Age. And various institutions were adopted to address the repeated financial collapses so endemic to unregulated capitalism, institution such as the Federal Reserve, now under attack from all quarters. And of course the American system did respond to the Great Depression, another calamity of unregulated capitalism and its “conservative” defenders.
Deregulation of capitalism also gave us the Great Recession of 2008, and here we can see that there has been no meaningful response to that calamity and that the gub’mint has finally been too paralyzed and mutilated to respond in an adequate fashion. So this historic capacity to “accommodate protest” has now been (finally) decimated by the plutocrats through their modern “conservative” movement.
It strikes me that the only thing that actually holds this country “together” is its crass material success and the enormous economy which fuels it. That’s the “real” America We put up with everyone’s shit because we value our personal material consumerism and our inconsequential place in the economy above all else—phony bleatings about Jeebus and democracy and liberty notwithstanding. When the economy can no longer be ginned up after some future financial crisis and/or the wealth disparity becomes irreversible, this traditional “unity” will dry up, in a nation awash in a sea of automatic weapons and deranged gun nuts, another blessing of our amoral “conservative” movement. And in that case it will remain to be seen whether our intentionally wrecked and rotted-out federal institutions will be able to “respond” to the extent they did in our past.
Interesting. My previous comment could almost be a response to this one. Obviously I disagree. I would contend that in spite of all the obvious defects, we have a firmly established tradition of regular elections, and that is not a trivial thing.
The question of how and why the democracy does persist is an interesting one. However corrupted and polluted the system may be, we have had national elections that are not entirely meaningless every two years since 1788.
The sesquicentennial of the Civil War got me thinking about this, because it’s really pretty striking that both North and South held elections in 1862 and 1864. Even in the midst of this national calamity, Lincoln was prepared to step down if he lost. What other country acts that way?
Democracy has survived because PVI is not destiny. Aaron Bycoffe and David Wassserman’s demonstration with selected voter groups shows why minor changes in voter preference and turnout can have large effects. In the early days of the Republic, legislatures made the political shifts and it was not really the public sentiment but the establishment sentiment that ruled because that was the way the system was set up. The expansion of the franchise should have changed that pattern of establishment rule, but it didn’t because of the cultural power of the establishment–even before mass media. And when the establishment is satisfied enough, they can tolerate democracy, even hide behind it as they work directly on the officials.
I am not as sanguine as Vowell because of recent changes in political culture, political process, and the flow of information. (1) Protest is tolerated by the government only if it is ineffective or does not depart from establishment discourse. (2) The corruption of the process of changes in power make democratic decision-making less likely. (3) Increasingly fictitious legal entities of various forms have more power seeking their interest than individuals and their interests are increasing separate from the interests of the individuals who are making the decisions for these legal entities; an executive is willing to endanger his own children’s and grandchildren’s health for the bottom line of the corporation that employs him; likewise, the corporate lawyers who are the foot soldiers in protecting corporate privilege. (4) There is no common market for information for comparative political decisions by individual voters and what exists begs citizens to indulge in isolation and fantasies.
It is interesting to see the move to a fasten-your-seat-belts-this-is-normal argument exactly when people are being asked in this election to decide “Whose side are you on?” That tells loads about where the remaining NPR audience is.
Vowell’s histories are always interesting and very, very entertaining. She’s one of the few writers who will get me out to the bookstore to snap up her newest one. Looking forward to this; it appears to hit a topic I’m particularly interested in these days.