Why Can't There Be More Civility In Political Life? - Are You Kidding? This Is America

There was once a roundtable talk show on French television called Apostrophes, an hour long discussion of art, literature, philosophy, and science - no commercial interruptions, no happy talk, no diversity, just ideas, lively, respectful debate, and an exploration of the intellectual universe. 

It was aired in prime time and had a viewership of millions from all classes of society.  The French, in the tradition of Voltaire and Descartes, valued rational inquiry and the lively interchange of different perspectives. Apostrophes was the very expression of the French notion of cultural relevance. France had long thought of itself as la fille ainee de l'Eglise, the eldest daughter of the Church, for its defeat of the Muslims at Roncesvalles saved Europe from barbarism and the oppression of Islam. 

Television ultimately changed, commercial narrow-casting channels came on the air, and as the French population became more African, tastes and preferences changed.  France unhappily became much more like America, and the intellectual solidarity of the nation was gone forever.  

America once had the makings of cultural refinement.  Jefferson was a European man of learning, sophistication, intellectual diversity, and social and political insight.  He and the other members of his 'genius cluster', a once-in-a-millennium grouping of uniquely talented, intellectually unparalleled men, established the new republic on the essential principles of the Enlightenment.  America was to be a nation of independence but one of laws, consideration, faith, and good works.

It didn't take long before that particular vision disappeared.  Westward expansion, the settling of the prairies and range lands, the Wild West, and the covered wagons to California, all far in both physical and intellectual distance from Philadelphia and Virginia, gave the nation its true character, and one which has not eroded a bit from 1789. 

The West was a free-for-all, a six-shooter, lasso, cowboy-and-Indians, rustler and gold-digger kind of place.  It was not for the faint hearted.  Law and civil order were abstractions.  Ranchers and farmers, herders, and planters were on their own.  Stockades, barbed wire, and Remington rifles were the rule; but out of that rugged individualism, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later ethos came economic dynamism.  These saddle-riders were Adam Smith clones who believed in enterprise, risk, self-interest, and self-protection. Government was something remote, indifferent, and irrelevant. 

Nothing was beyond the ambition and initiative of these early Americans.  Not only was the West settled, but the South.  Plantation owners whose Virginia and North Carolina lands were yielding less and less, cleared, tamed, and developed hundreds of thousands of acres of tangled cypress swamps in the Mississippi Delta to make cotton king.  The entire country was a tsunami of rapid expansion and development. Government was only a second thought, and 'culture' far from the cattleman's or grandee's mind. 

The early Twentieth Century saw this great, expansive, wealth-producing enterprise grow.  The so-called Robber Barons - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and Vanderbilt among others - developed oil, steel, rail, and financial empires and in so doing laid the foundation for American exceptionalism - a nation freed from the medievalism of Europe, socialism, and hidebound family and social traditions, became wealthy and powerful. 

 

Along the way came dynamism's dark side - the rise of Al Capone, the Mafia, and the chaos of Chicago.  Money was to be made there too with the same muscle, guile, and intelligence.  The mafiosi were no different than J.D. Rockefeller in their absolute confidence, native ability, and determination.  

Finally and at long last, after decades of faux aristocratic patriarchal governance - the remnants of Eastern Establishment entitlement - America got a real American president, Donald Trump, a man without a scintilla of Rittenhouse Square, Beacon Hill, or Park Avenue sophistication in him.  For the first time in its history America got a barroom brawler, a gunfighter, a bare-knuckled roustabout of man who took on all comers.  A man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the mean streets of New York - an ambitious, amoral, Machiavellian who understood power, the American ethos, and its permanent zeitgeist of individualism and personal ambition. 

An unapologetically lowbrow man of cheap broads, arm candy, oversized yachts, garish mansions and resorts, apartment towers, golf courses, beauty contests, and casinos. Enough of the patrician Roosevelts, Bushes, and Kennedys and their formal dinners, recitations by Robert Frost, recitals by Pablo Casals, Kandinsky and Braque on the walls of the White House, the Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Main Line. The Trump America was lowest common denominator America - bass boats, gun racks, Walmart, football, and assembly lines - and unashamedly so.  Trump was America, one of us. 

The social divide could never have been so stark - this unruly, untamed, defiant bunch of old-fashioned, unreconstructed Wild West Americans; and the fey, European-minded, socialist-trending, faux compassionate, and historically ignorant reformists of the Left. 

This latter lot is no less uncultured and unsophisticated than the Trump supporters on the Right.  So-called 'progressives', fantasy Utopians who feel they have the keys to a verdant, peaceful, and harmonious future, are just as unwashed as the other side.  

The howling hysteria of the Harris campaign, its desperateness, its resort to empty, gross epithets, and its bald pretentious posturing is very American but a caricature of it.  Its caterwauling insistence on fictional notions inverts the notion of rugged individualism.  It is American only in its disregard for imposed civility.  Beyond that it is a party of feral cats on the prowl, rabid and everywhere. 

So, civility? Propriety? Grace and manners? Are you kidding?  This is America, honey, and you better believe it.

It can't possibly get any worse.  Diversity for progressive optimists means a step forward towards a New Age society of universal respect, a jamboree of difference, hot tamales, fatback, and chitlins, serapes and grilles.  For conservatives diversity is a further dumbing down of America, a dismissal of Jefferson's intellectual diversity, Hamilton's canny understanding of history, literature, and human nature; Franklin's sense of duty, practicality, and honor.  Gone are the Greco-Roman virtues of courage, honor, respect, duty, honesty, and compassion.    

 

Yet all this is still window dressing - a cover for the solidly American crude ambitions which lie beneath.  Strip away the cant, the caterwauling, and the riotous demonstrations of fidelity and belonging, and you have the same unsophisticated confabulation of bad ideas.  

Unfortunately someone has to win this Presidential election - there is no Churchill, Napoleon, or Caesar Augustus running.  We are stuck between bombast and sanctimony, the worst kind of rock and a hard place, but it is all our own making.  'Is this the best you can do?' ask foreign observers.  What a question. Of course it is.