Benjamin Wachs: The Banana Republic of America

Watching the extraordinary spectacle this past week of the governor of Texas talking about succeeding from the Union because the Bush marginal tax rate reduction on people making over $250,000 will end …

… watching 150,000-plus protesters nationwide talk about impeaching a president after just three months in office …

... and after seeing how much gun sales have soared since the November election …

… I can’t help but wonder, when did we stop behaving like a functioning democracy?

We have elected leaders who can be held accountable for their actions; we have a proven system in place for the peaceful transition of power; we have an independent judiciary; we have the right to assemble, to free speech and to sue the government for redress.

Yet we’re acting like citizens of a banana republic. Right and left, liberal and conservative, we’ve all been guilty of this recently. Do we really think that President Clinton murdered Vince Foster? That President Bush started a war just to line the pockets of his friends? Should we really be talking about a “second American revolution,” as some are now?

What’s come over us?  The more we prove that democracy works, the less we’re willing to use it responsibly. Congress changed hands peacefully twice in the last 15 years, and the presidency changed hands three times. We’ve proven that the vote is king. And yet we’re talking about guns, impeachment and secession more than ever. In a land filled with options, we’re acting like the government is giving us no choice.

Some reasons for this trend are well established: Americans have self-segregated politically over the last 30 years, so that we rarely have to be confronted with people who disagree with us. Americans have a vastly wider range of niche media options made available to them now, so that we rarely have to be confronted with ideas that we disagree with. Americans have become less cordial over the past 30 years, so that we’re much more inclined to act like bastards when we do meet people who disagree with us.

The anonymity of the Internet is a huge problem, as is the 24-hour news cycle and (let us not forget) the fact that we now live in an instant-gratification culture. Wait more than three months to decide if Obama is a good president? Who has that kind of time?

Still, the more I look at our present shameful rhetoric in the context of American history, the more I have to (sadly) conclude that the problem of vicious, polarizing, snap-judgment hatred in politics hasn’t gotten worse — it’s gotten better.

The current polarization does not equal the state of war that existed between political cultures during the 1960s; nor is it nearly so vicious, suspicious and delirious as the 1950s Communist scare. The early attempts by government and business to break the union movement in the early part of the 20th century created a far more toxic political atmosphere than anything we see today. And the populist movement of the late 19th century was far more up-in-arms than today’s “tea party” protests, which were made first and last for the media. The Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, every period in this country’s history was marked by intense public antagonisms.

In short, our behavior has actually gotten better and our standards have gotten higher. And yet any reasonable person is still appalled. Perhaps that’s because, back in the day, the issues people were fighting over were genuinely enormous: whether unions would exist, whether the government could persecute communists, whether we would pass civil rights laws or remain in an undeclared war.

Now? We have superheated rhetoric about secession and impeachment and a second American revolution over marginal tax rates. Not “taxation without representation,” but an elected president implementing the tax plan he campaigned on.

I suppose reasonable souls are appalled because even though the political rhetoric has gotten less heated, we as a people have gotten much more trivial. We’re not angry about issues; we’re just angry.

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