Showing posts with label
We Could All Have Been Canadians.
Show all posts
Showing posts with label
We Could All Have Been Canadians.
Show all posts
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.
Still the New Yorker
I am still working my way through the bag of New Yorkers. Scanning the early pages I noticed Jason Epstein's name following a letter in The Mail. The content of the letter is either petty or an instance of setting the record straight. What amuses me is that, while Epstein's name still comes up now and then, what I mostly remember him for was the funniest feature I ever read in Architectural Digest. The subject was his apartment (with terrace) in the old police building, though the focus of the story was actually the relationship between Epstein and the catty, gay interior decorator who put the apartment together for him. (It was a wonderful apartment.) I still have that magazine somewhere.
At last!
I finally have discovered an article that asks the core questions behind the Trump debacle, "We Could All Have Been Canadians" by Adam Gopnik in the May 15, 2017 New Yorker.
And what if it was all a mistake from the start? The Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, the creation of the United States of America -- what if all this was a terrible idea, and what if the injustices and madness of American life since then have occurred not in spite of the virtues of the Founding Fathers but because of them? The Revolution, this argument might run, was a needless and brutal bit of slaveholders' panic mixed with Enlightenment argle-bargle, producing a country that was always marked for violence and disruption and demagogy...
I'm guessing this opening is going to be countered before the end, but I can't see how I'm going to be convinced.
...In plain American, is Donald Trump a bug or a feature of the American heritage.
...The quarrels that took place in New York and Philadelphia [in the late 18th century] went on with equal ferocity, and on much the same terms, in India and England. And though they got settled by force of arms and minds differently in each place, it was the same struggle everywhere. "Radicalism flourished in Boston, Bristol, and Bengal, while fears of disorder and licentiousness provoked rural elites in both the Hudson Valley and the English shires," [Justin] du Rivage writes [in Revolution Against Empire, Yale]. "As radical Whigs gained strength in North America, the political culture of the British Empire became increasingly Janus-faced."
I can't believe how far up my street this article is.
On one side were what he calls "authoritarian reformers"; on the other, those radical Whigs. (Both were seeking to sway or supplant the "establishment Whigs.") This isn't the familiarly rendered divide between Tories and Whigs; the authoritarian reformers were less fusty country squires attached to old English institutions than an elite executive class of intellectuals and aristocrats committed to the Empire and to the reform of institutions that were seen as preventing the Empire from being maximally efficient. It was a group of men who, in spirit and psychology were not entirely unlike "reformers" in Communist China, open to change for the purpose of reinforcing their own power in an intact hierarchy. The authoritarian reformers were "not a political party per se," du Rivage writes. "They were, rather , an ideological vanguard, a loosely organized group of politicians, publicists, and theorists." (Significantly, no famous names cling to the group, career politicians and businessmen like William Murray [perhaps THIS one], Matthew Decker, and Viscount Bolingbroke [one of those guys] were their mostly interchangeable leaders.) They wanted a strong monarch surrounded by a circle of aristocratic advisers; very limited democracy; reform in the Army and Navy; and a tax-heavy system of mercantile trade -- all of it intended to make the Empire as profitable as it needed to be.
Extended taxation within the Empire was central to their agenda. They sincerely believed in "taxation without representation," because they saw citizenship not in terms of sovereignty and equality but in terms of tribute received and protection offered. Pay up, and the British Navy will keep the Frenchmen, pirates, and aboriginals away. Samuel Johnson, who was hired by the authoritarian reformers to write the 1775 pamphlet "Taxation No Tyranny," captured the argument best: the men who settled America had chosen to leave a place where they had the vote but little property in order to live in a place where they had no vote but much property. With lucid authoritarian logic, Johnson explained that even though the American citizen might not have a vote on how he was taxed, "he still is governed by his own consent; because he has consented to throw his atom of interest into the general mass of the community."
Interestingly, the flaw in this logic is the same flaw that undid many 19th century Utopian communities -- the generation born into the new status quo never consented to whatever it was their parents may or may not have consented to. The Founding Fathers were born in the Colonies and probably knew little of conditions in England or of what their ancestors may have thought was a fair trade when it came to citizenship.
The radical Whigs, though they, too, were implanted within establishment circles -- grouped around William Pitt [the Elder] and the pro-American Marquess of Rockingham, [does Gopnik not know how many people have shared these titles?] with the devilish John Wilkes representing their most radical popular presence -- were sympathetic to Enlightenment ideas, out of both principle and self-protection, as analgesics to mollify "the mob." They represented, albeit episodically, the first stirrings of a party of the merchant class. [Now I want to know to what extent all these "hons" were involved in trade.] They thought that colonists should be seen as potential consumers. Alexander Hamilton, back in New York, was a model radical Whig -- trusting in bank credit and national debt as a prod toward prosperity, while the authoritarian reformers were convinced, as their successors are to this day, that debt was toxic (in part because they feared that it created chaos; in part because easy credit undermined hierarchy).
The radical Whigs were for democratization, the authoritarian reformers firmly against it. The radical Whigs were for responsible authority, the authoritarian reformers for firm authority. And so on. This quarrel, du Rivage argues, swept across the Empire and as much as it divided colony from home country, it united proponents of either view transnationally. Those we think of as "loyalists" in the American context were simply authoritarian reformers who lost the war; those we think of as "patriots" were simply radical Whigs who won.
...
No one at the time [of the Revolution], du Rivage suggests, saw what was happening as pitting a distinct "American nation against an alien British one. Participants largely saw the conflict in terms of two parties fighting for dominance in the English-speaking world. The scandalous high-water mark of du Rivage's iconography occurs in January of 1775, when Pitt (now ennobled as the Earl of Chatham) brought Franklin, then living in London, into the House of Lords to witness his speech on behalf of the American radicals, in effect sealing the unity of the single party across the ocean. This scene... was, in its day, as significant as that of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
...Had the radical Whigs secured their power in Britain, our Revolution might well have taken on a look and feel more like those of the later Canadian and Australian dissolutions from the Brits: a political break toward "home rule" but without any of the elaborate paraphernalia of patriotism attached to it...
...Although his [du Rivage] sympathies are with the radical Whigs, he sees that many of the authoritarians' claims were not false. [The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps had to be created to replace the protection supplied by the Royal Navy.]
...
To be continued...
On the streets
The surprising thing this summer on our streets is that most of the outrageously crazy (shouting and ranting) people have been women. Maybe the shouting men seem more dangerous and get locked up by the police?
I'm at my favorite pizzeria which has a public trash container sitting adjacent to the bus stop out front. As a professional trash sorter, I notice anyone messing with trash (this reminds me of one of the many unforgettable Gary Larson, "The Far Side" cartoons in which dogs -- perhaps in two cars -- are locking eyes and wagging tails at each other while nuclear bombs go off all around). Today I saw something I've never seen before and can't explain.
A guy who looked to be a street person was breaking down the trash piled on top of the trash can just the way I would have in the process of sorting it. He was actually going further and, after removing the plastic from the cardboard trays that hold food and drink items before they are sold, and flattening them, he continued to tear them into smaller pieces before putting everything into the can.
I assumed at first that he was looking for recycling, but there was no sign of that. No idea what his agenda was.
