This morning, as the Republicans
are celebrating nationwide victories, taking control of the Senate and
increasing their majority in the House, plus winning governor’s races in
supposedly liberal states, I’m reminded of the widespread liberal delusion last
year that the Republican Party was an almost-extinct dinosaur (see this blog post).
My impression is that the
American people are deeply confused. They say they’re angry about a do-nothing
Congress and then vote for the obstructionists. They say they hate government
yet demand services when it’s in their interest—when a natural disaster hits a
conservative part of the country there’s never a mention of refusing federal
aid because it’s from that loathsome government.
The reason we’re confused is
because we’ve lost any compelling story about who we are as a people. We used
to have a thrilling story, one that made me proud to be an American when I was
a child. We had thrown off a king and instituted a republic where we governed
ourselves. We were the vanguard of human progress.
Of course there were plenty of
issues with the original constitution: slavery and a limited electorate are the
obvious examples. But as time went on and we continued on the path of
democratization, we fixed those errors. We first expanded the electorate to all
white men in the 1820s, ended slavery in 1865, women finally got the vote in 1920,
and over the last fifty years we’ve been expanding civil rights.
But today we seem to be missing
the awesomeness of what we have accomplished. We don’t understand the amazing
advance in human social organization that democracy represents. We are so spoiled by the relative ease
of living and our deplorable lack of historical knowledge that we are unaware
of not only the preciousness—and precariousness—of our democracy but the great
struggles that were required to wrest control from tyrants. We take our
democratic republic for granted. And that’s why we are in danger of losing it.
