191. America, Britain, and Canada

Link to Table of Contents

On the streets

I knew that pattern of only loud, crazy women couldn't hold up forever. This afternoon I ran into a shouting crazy person who was male. Balance returns to the city.


Continued from last time...

We Could All Have Been Canadian

There follows a review about how nasty the Revolution was. It was after all, at the time, a civil war, and there is nothing more vicious. From that, Gopnik moves on to comparing the Revolution to the American Civil War.

Had the British won, we might now be taught about a fight between brave British emancipators and indigenous slaveholders, with the black slaves who defected to the British-loyalist side [and were returned to their owners after Yorktown] seen as self-emancipaters, as the blacks who defected to the Union Army are now, and with Washington's and Jefferson's [some of the owners who got their slaves back] rhetoric of liberty shown the same disdain we have for the not-very-different libertarian and individualist rhetoric of their heirs in the Confederacy. We would perhaps wonder, far more than we are allowed to, how radical Whigs like Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Paine ever allowed themselves to betray their own Enlightenment principles by making the tragic error of entering into a compact with slaveholders.

Yes, I did hope they would eventually get around to integrating "Tory" into these party definitions, but no such luck. I presume Tory describes the party that both of these parties were struggling against, though he also says that they were in opposition to the "regular" Whigs.

...Three decades ago, Gordon Wood, in "The Radicalism of the American Revolution." asked us to see the Revolution in the broadest historical scale, and to realize that, whatever its failings and brutalities and hypocrisies, it represented a decisive break with doctrines of inherited power and monarchical rule, and a move toward democracy that had scarcely been so dramatically accomplished since very ancient times. Jonathan Israel's forthcoming book "The Expanding Blaze" promises to make a similar case: that the revolution was the great radical act of its day, responsible directly and indirectly, for the onset of the modern age. Abolitionism rose from the promise of the Revolution more than the Revolution sustained slavery.

Indeed, that abolitionism burned brighter in Britain than in the independent States, as historians have argued, has at least something to do with America's triumph: Britain could demonstrate that it was better, more honorable, than its former colonies at a time when such a demonstration was urgently sought. Then, too, the separation of the Southern plantation owners from the West Indian ones weakened a formidable lobbying force within the Empire...
...

The authoritarian reformers -- the empire, in other words -- have something to be said for them; and what is to be said for them is, well, Canada. Our northern neighbor's relative lack of violence, its peaceful continuity, its ability to allow double and triple identities and to build a country successfully out of two languages and radically different national pasts: all these Canadian virtues are, counterintuitively, far more the legacy of those eighteenth-century authoritarian reformers than of the radical Whigs. This is literally the case; the United Empire Loyalists, as they were called, the "Tories" who fled from the States, did much to make Canada. More than that, Canada is the model liberal country because it did not have an American-style revolution, accepting instead the reformers' values of a strong centralized, if symbolic, monarchy... a largely faceless political class; a cautiously parlimentary tradition; a professional and noncharismatic military; a governing elite -- an establishment.

The Canadian experience was not free of sin -- as the indefensible treatment of the First Nations demonstrates... Still, there is something to be said, however small, for government by an efficient elected elite devoted to compromise. The logic of Whig radicalism, in whatever form it takes, always allows charismatic figures undue play; there's a reason that the big Whigs remain known today while the authoritarian reformers mostly sink into specialists' memories of committees and cabinets. 

The first modern charismatic politician, John Wilkes, was among the greatest Whig heroes of the American radicals. Nor is it entirely accidental that he would give his name to the charismatic actor who killed Lincoln. The red thread of theatrical violence, violence as show and spectacle and self-definition, links the violence implicit in all cults of great men...

A couple times here I started thinking of Christian Tiejen's Toryism as being part of this "authoritarian reform" tradition, especially if you think of him as first presented in Some Do Not. And perhaps this is so, but I would have to know more about how this story played out in Britain after the Revolution, and Gopnik doesn't indicate if du Rivere goes into that.

I still want more, but this was so much what I needed to read that I'm still shocked that I should have stumbled upon it. And he doesn't really go back on the position laid out at the start. The position I can't argue with. And I'm glad he invoked the libertarian tradition, even if it was only applied to the Confederacy. The core libertarian values (free rein to exploit everything and everyone) are the most consistent American values from Colonial days to now. "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" was in part political, sure, but also signaled the rise of the middle class. This is why America was the Great Satan to Dostoevsky.

The Reichs

Yesterday I was thinking, as one does, about America now and Germany in the 1930's. The thing to remember about the Third Reich is the extent to which it was an after effect of the Second Reich. The House of Hohenzollern had been breeding a docile, leader craving population for a century. To expect that population to seize it's own agency was simply unrealistic. (The same goes for the Arab world today). The American population may be just as racists as the Germans were in the 30's, but they are as un-docile as can be imagined. I think it's easier to imagine the U.S. slipping into a chaos like Syria than into anything like the Third Reich.

Or to go back to my previous view, I can still see us going the way of Rome starting with Marius. That the population seems to be nearly balanced between the Blue and Red, supports this and the Roman history of alternating terrors.