I'll admit that during the years when I was supposed to be getting an education I was much more concerned with looking cool and getting laid. Everyone who was around me at the time can attest to my failure at both of those, but they were still my preoccupations. Otherwise I would have come to this opinion much sooner.
To be fair to all the boneheads like me, and all of the others who accepted the world as they found it and got on with their personal ambitions, the country was turning 200 years old when we were in our school years. We'd beaten the Nazis and were holding the Commies at bay. We were growing up in the greatest country that had ever existed, and it had nowhere to go but up. Wasn't everything worked out already? Sure, there had been slavery, but the Civil War stomped that out. Sure, there had been civil rights problems, but that was getting sorted out, too. Cynics could say what they wanted about corruption and incompetence, but the country was fundamentally great.
My nearsighted eyes scanned the world through prescription rose-colored glasses.
Now here we are with it all falling apart. And I come to find out, from this handy article in The Atlantic, that the defects were all built in purposely, by our revered Founding Fathers, who turn out to be a bunch of idealistic dreamers. This country badly needed some cynics back while there was still time for the cure to work.
Lots of things leaped off the page at me, but this one was especially poignant:
"The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. In recent years, calls for more civic education have become something of a national refrain. But the Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. Drawing again on his studies of ancient republics, which taught that broad education of citizens was the best security against “crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” Madison insisted that the rich should subsidize the education of the poor."
The poor bastard had no idea that the crafty and dangerous encroachments on public liberty would be the absolute aim of the rich. The rich had no need for democracy and individual liberty. The term globalism might not have been coined yet, but rich people everywhere share one unifying philosophy: become richer. Once the war of independence was done and dusted, the rich could get back to commerce. The nation itself was just a vehicle for ensuring that power remained concentrated in the right hands. Sure, the concept of liberty meant that a commoner could join their ranks through the right combination of education, experience, acquaintances, and luck. But no one had to take seriously the opinions of tradespeople and farmers unless they had managed to make their commercial endeavors sufficiently lucrative.
Or maybe he wrote the whole thing with a twinkle in his eye, as a sop to any among the rabble who might be able to read and reason a little bit. Many of our public documents scan really well. But then the Soviet Union had a nice constitution, too. And the very same US Constitution was used to justify racism and to combat it. It brought us Roe v Wade and might take it away as well. It's all subject to interpretation. Laws are only as good as their enforcement. If it was all cut and dried, no one would bother to become a lawyer.
The very concept of a republic unabashedly favors elitism. Those are your choices: the mob rule of direct democracy, or the elitism of a republic. The idealists who penned our owner's manual at the end of the 18th Century believed that an enlightened elite existed and would continue to exist. They believed that some concept of inclusive, socially responsible virtue would naturally accrue through education and good breeding. They had faith that the concept of the republic of free men would have such eternal appeal that the rich and powerful would revere it for generations.
Perhaps the fact that it was a republic of free men made its odds seem much better. Viewed through that lens, it becomes a joint business venture in which all the major shareholders get a voice unlimited by hereditary aristocracy or an overbearing monarch. The United States of the founders' vision was a nice private club. Too bad they didn't have the wit to write their charter a bit more exclusively from the outset. It would have saved us a lot of grief. Of course if you happened to be a slave or a woman or a native, things would have stayed as bad as they ever were. Careless writing set the stage for centuries of bloodshed. I blame the pot. You know those plantation owners grew hemp and wacky weed. I can just see a group of them, sitting around in a cloud of smoke. One of them, holding in a cough, says:
"Gentlemen: Imagine a country in which the only limits on a man are his own initiative and the gifts God has given him." Coughs through his nose, loses it, the whole room breaks up laughing.
I'm sure they meant well. But every concept can be twisted, and some concepts lend themselves much more easily to it than others. The United States was designed to depend on the good faith and intentions of its most powerful and influential people. And yet what do they say of power? It corrupts. Even the desire for it corrupts. We have no fail safe mechanism to filter out the greedy and the grandiose from the truly selfless and dedicated. And why should we have to depend on our leaders being saintly? If that sort of behavior wasn't rare, we wouldn't have saints. We would just have people, being routinely good.
The America of the modern ideal, say the fantasy we held in the1960s, depended on a sense of shared struggle and shared reward. That supposedly drove the country during the Second World War, and evolved into the antiwar and social justice fashions of the 1960s and '70s. But it was crumbling by the end of the 1970s, and took fatal blows in the 1980s.
I used to believe that human nature was fundamentally good. Then I started to believe that maybe some people were fundamentally bad. Now I believe that the concepts of good and bad depend entirely on your point of view. I know what I think is good and bad, but the world has demonstrated time and again that it doesn't care what anyone thinks. Evolution merely tallies the totals from every category and spits out a result.
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