Wednesday, October 17, 2012

The culture in Proust cont'd

A bit of a discussion has broken out in the comments of my earlier post using the different cultures of France and the USA as means of making a political point. I have no objection to people doing that but, as I pointed out in the other post, that was not my what I was doing nor is it anything I would want to do myself.*

I should also say that I would be very wary of using the most admirable aspects of French culture to make a political point. France is on its fifth republic. In case that isn't clear, France has experienced total constitutional collapse four times during the period that the USA has managed to function with just one. And the USA not only maintained its constitutional union, it fought a civil war to maintain that constitution at its darkest hour.

It's also important to grasp just how different France is from the USA (or Canada) in that France has a highly centralized form of government. The most successful, and stable western nations are all federations with a division of powers between their federal governments and their consituent states or provinces. France is not like that.

The French system is really weird to us. To understand it, imagine that there was a new revolution in the US and that the new revolutionary government abolished all the states and then divided the country up into a series of administrative districts with absolutely no regard to historical divisions and development; replacing the states with arbitrary lines drawn on the map. And the divisions in France are entirely administrative units of the federal government. Every aspect of what they do is controlled from Paris.

Third, France's admirable commonplace culture is something that sprang up independent of, and sometimes in defiance of, it's politics. People often quote de Gaulle's quip that it is difficult to govern a nation with 246 kinds of cheese but it is important to recognize that the sentiment behind that is a desire to reduce the number of cheeses by government regulation. This sentiment is hardly unique to de Gaulle, hundreds of thousands of petty bureaucrats one has never heard of in every country are constantly plotting to destroy our cultural liberty for our own good.

Finally, there is an old quip that extremism is always coming to America but somehow manages to land in Europe instead. The USA with it's greater freedoms (and it still has much greater freedoms despite the efforts of some locals to remove them) always seems like a seething pot where extremism can thrive but that seething pot also limits it by allowing for free and open debate.

There is currently a huge debate in the USA between the red and the blue. In many ways, it is a repeat of a debate they have had before. The red side is similar in both spirit and content to the fathers of the revolution and the blue side is similar in both spirit and content to the views held by the Tories who opposed independence from England. Of the many things Obama was mistaken about, he was most wrong when he said there is no red America and blue America. There is. And some sort of resolution between the two sides will have to be worked out. It is entirely possible that that resolution will consist of a clearcut victory of one side over the other. That is scary. Particularly if you are on the blue side as blue America is very much in decline right now.

But scary or not, death is not the worst of evils: Live free or die.

Speaking as a Canadian, if I was forced to choose between the two countries, I'd pick France as a country to visit and perhaps even to live as an exile but the USA as my place of citizenship.


* This sentence has been edited in attampt to be clearer. It originally read, " I have no objection to people doing that but, as I pointed out in the other post, that was not my point." 

4 comments:

  1. You make my point exactly. The US as a whole is in decline, its gotten beyond a red and blue issue and few people have come to that realization yet. As a matter of fact, the blue is not in decline in NY, MA, VT, or here in CT where our Governor and the entire Congressional delegation are Democrats. Conversely if the Republicans represent the red the disarray of that party is easily apparent by the different competing factions at war with each other. The problem as I see it is the unwillingness of either side to compromise and the notion that a clear cut victory for one side or the other is a) possible or b) desirable. You mention the Civil War, in many ways that war is still being fought. The voter supression and "stand your ground" laws are aimed primarily at blacks and the poor. Mitch McConnell's famous statement in '08 that the primary goal of the Republicans would be to deny Barack Obama a 2nd term is reflected by the gridlock which has occurred in Washington over the last 4 yrs. Things that Republicans had been in favor of, e.g., the Individual Mandate in the Affordable Care Act which was proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation 20 yrs ago, suddenly became anathema to them solely because President Obama was for it.

    At the beginning of the G.W. Bush administration the US had a budget surplus. Now, after two misguided wars and 5 tax cuts we have a budget deficit, surprise surprise. The 2010 elections were an aberration brought about largely by propaganda spread by the Koch Brothers among others and Dick Armey's Tea Party Movement (which was not the grass roots organization that it claimed to be), and the inability of the American people to grasp the severity of the financial collapse that had occurred in '08. Overall the country today is on a sounder financial footing than it was in '08, but there's a long way to go and a good chance that the budget will be balanced on the backs of those who can least afford it.

    In the early 1940s when FDR needed the money to fight WWII he said when you need money you go where the money is. Thus he proposed a 100% tax on all incomes over $25,000 (around $350,000 in today's dollars). Of course the Republicans opposed it, so they compromised on a 94% tax on all incomes over $25,000, which would be unthinkable today even in today's dollars.

    DeGaulle's statement was right on the money, and seems like a big improvement over what is going on here right now. Based on that the social democracies of western Europe look awfully good.

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    1. Only a few unfortunate actors and entertainers paid the highest tax rates. Everyone else with that kind of money simply didn't. That is historical fact, always left out when discussing historical high taxation in the USA. Those same high tax rates also brought about America's weird implementation of employer-funded health insurance.

      As for the 'surplus', that was an accounting trick, as there remained plenty of deficit. There was just a small running surplus. Like a business cashflowing positive a couple of months of the fiscal year but closing out still in the red.

      I don't know if this level of disconnect from historical realities when slinging polemic is usual outside the USA.

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  2. I might have misstated myself in the above post. What I meant to say was that anything less than a clear cut victory (for either side)is seen as a failure, and compromise is viewed as caving in to the opposition. Under those conditions a democracy can't exist, its based on compromise.

    Going back to an earlier post, the regional differences in the US are becoming strikingly more pronounced, the South is still a very different place to live than the Northeast, maybe more so in the last 10-15 yrs. The Pledge of Allegiance says "one Nation, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all." We're getting farther and farther away from realizing that ideal.

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    1. However strained things may appear now, they are much better than they were in the first half of the nineteenth century. In any case, I get less and less worried about such things with every passing year.

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