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Thursday, October 06, 2005

Shine, Perishing Republic

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books (cover date: October 20), a letter from Gary Hart (of all people) opines that “republics are based on civic virtue, popular sovereignty, resistance to corruption (by special interests), and a sense of the commonwealth.  By any measure,” Hart concludes, “early-twenty-first century America is a republic in name only.”

To which Tony Judt responds:

“I believe that Gary Hart is right.  Of course, one should not idealize ‘republics’; over the centuries they have taken a variety of forms.  An emphasis upon the ‘civic virtues,’ and a grounding in ‘popular sovereignty’ are not inherently incompatible with the abuse of power, as the French revolutionaries and others could attest.  But whatever their attendant virtues and defects, republics appear to decline in much the same way: their institutions atrophy, their elites become mediocre and corrupt, their citizens lose interest in political freedom and public debate or are bludgeoned into acquiescence by the specter of war or disorder.  The American republic is robust and distinctive (not least in its longevity); but it is not invulnerable.  Indeed, the illusion of invulnerability is perhaps its greatest weakness and may prove its undoing.”

I don’t endorse Judt’s comment entirely.  I am especially skeptical of generalizations across very different times and involving very different places.  But the sentiment expressed in his last sentence haunts me.  We, as a nation, seem to me to be selling—or pissing—away our democratic heritage (or our republican one, if you prefer) without the slightest sense of what we are doing, as if our daily actions in the public sphere, in our legislative bodies and executive agencies, and on the world stage are completely without consequences.

I am also aware that lots of previous doom-sayers have declared that the sky is falling—and yet here we are.  My title for this post, after all, comes from a poem written in 1925 by that world-class pessimist and misanthrope Robinson Jeffers, a poem that begins:

“While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens . . .”

I wouldn’t defend a position that claims it has all been downhill since 1925.  Our history is more up and down than that. There are various moments of renewal—and progress on some fronts even as there is lamentable decline on others.  But I do believe that the general trend of the past thirty years has been downward and that the need for renewal is immense. Where will renewal come from?  That’s the question I am charging myself to address. So you are warned: I feel a series of posts coming. (John)

Posted by John McGowan on 10/06 at 08:30 AM
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