Childhood's End
Rejoining the critical ground of Western political life.
Americans have traditionally “lived in the future.” We have created a useable past, storybook sagas, that bolsters our belief in progress, but we have been practical and efficient in dealing with the future. A future that has always been the better world that we are creating and in which our children will live, as they build a better world for their children.
In other words, we have believed in change. But responsibly. With the exception of a few odd cults, the roads we’ve traveled, if not always straight and sure, have been practical.
For we have believed not only that change will happen, but that it will be positive. And we have had a general view of where we are heading, Ronald Reagan’s shining city on the hill harkens back more than 200 years to the settling of the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1730. Recall that John Winthrop, soon to govern the new colony, preached aboard the Arbella as it arrived in “the new world,” that “we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Long time shining.
This has in part defined our political divisions. When the goal is essentially the same and when it appears obtainable, the only question is how fast should we be going to get there. In other words, how seriously do we need to take risks. And how much of our present surpluses do we commit to the project.
It is in this sense that Walter Dean Burnham wrote about the lack of a problematic dimension to American politics. In other democratic societies debate has centered on where to go. And what to risk and what to conserve in the process. This raised fundamental problems about what it means to be human and what it takes to realize these possibilities. It is the direction of change, possibly even the nature of change, that is foundational to political debate and partisan choice in these societies, not the pace of change.
Thus, in America we have been allowed to conduct elections with far less at stake. Conservatives have urged caution and counseled “deliberate speed.” Liberals have desired to fast-track change. Both sides have attracted able and ambitious “players” and the conflict has not lacked cheering crowds and bare knuckled, eye-gouging strategies.
It has not, however, done more than rattle the cages of national consensus and left most of us outside the ropes as entertained spectators at its periodic theater (played by the media for better ratings).
This uniqueness of Amerian politics may be at an end. We seem more in tune today with the politics of other societies. We have joined perhaps “the West” and can no longer avoid the principled choices between ultimate values that have torn apart other societies, older and apparently more stable than our own.
For the politics of this hour in America is far from a mere debate about the pace of change.