Is this election the start of new American era?
It is time today to face the fact that this historic race of 2016 has brought America to an endgame; the end of the post-World War II Pax Americana in which America was the singular world victor and the world would do our bidding.
{mosads}Today, as we learned when Britain led Europe to China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank last year, the world will do what it wants. And America has moved on from that vast, definitive prelude to the millennium that began at Yalta and ended on 9/11, to the rise of the millennium itself. The Pax Americana has passed, the Sixties which still draws the Democrats has passed, the Reagan Eighties which still draws the Republicans has passed and what political analyst Larry Sabato correctly calls “the Kennedy half-century” has passed.
It is time today to move on.
The center of balance for economy, people and leadership in America has moved West since World War II and continues to be moving West. We are no longer the North/South world we were in 1776 and 1865. We are today a vastly different East/West country in an East/West world. Yet our presidential candidates all still seem to come from New York or Boston or are New Englanders in cowboy boots moved just recently (relatively speaking) to Texas. And somehow, our Supreme Court justices all seem to have gone to the same one or two New England law schools.
The persistence of memory is likely baked into our DNA and subliminally makes these demands. It tells us falsely that real leaders must always come from New York, even if they have only recently moved there from Arkansas. They must go to law school at Yale or Harvard. The University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, Vanderbilt or the University of Virginia will somehow never do; not now, not ever. It is as it must be, as it was at the beginning. So today, the states and regions in the West, fully formed and matured these long years since 1776, should more energetically and explicitly demand their place at the table.
In this, our strategies of governance as defined by the Constitution and in particular by Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison among the betters, are not working as they once did. This might well be seen as a result of the great and absolute success in the American condition since World War II. We have grown rich, fat and the envy of the world in competence since then, but now we seem to be spiraling out of control. And Europe is quickly following in its own unravelling.
The state of the state needs to be examined. Questions should be asked, like how did Jefferson’s America become a federation of sociological, political and cultural tribes and hyphenated ethnicities instead of states? How can that be fixed? How did the Supreme Court become fully partisan and how can that be repaired? How did Congress become so reactive to its lobby interests and cash instead of to its people?
These are complicated questions and deserve new answers; answers which might repair our government and finely tune it to fit the rising millennium. I have suggested here for several years that these issues be addressed by an idea that started with the great post-war ambassador, the “wisest of the wise men” as he has been called, George Kennan, known as the father of containment. His end-of-life observations are usually ignored by commentators and scholars who focus instead on the post-war Soviet Union problems in Europe, but much of his later thinking is relevant today.
For instance, he claimed in one of his last books, “Around the Cragged Hill,” that America today has no vehicle for long-term planning, such as the policy planning commission he created in 1947 at the request of then-Secretary of State George C. Marshall. The candidates and senators default back instead today on think tanks or policy apparatuses, which perpetuate old geopolitical ideas well beyond their shelf life. Kennan had long lost faith in them and we might be grateful in this election to Republican nominee Donald Trump for ignoring them, as well, to force a season of fresh thinking.
Late in life, Kennan proposed the idea of a “council of state” which in fact would be what the Senate was meant to be before it was lobbied into complacency with the passing of the 17th Amendment in 1913, which insured lobbyists have easy access and could funnel easy cash to lawmakers. Tea Party renegades proposed repealing the 17th Amendment a few years back and both parties should support this. But if Washington’s agencies today seem weakened by time and circumstances, the states have often greatly advanced in wealth, culture and happiness in the 70 years since the creation, as positive a historic era as ever occurred on the face of the earth.
Today as the world turns, starting here first, from the extreme extraversion of globalization as Hamilton envisioned it, to a more mature, earthy and holistic introversion of self-reliance which Jefferson and even Ralph Waldo Emerson might approve, gears need to shift. A council of governors should be formed modeled on Kennan’s “council of state” to consider finding solutions without influence of those in the executive, judicial and legislative branches who hold responsibility for Washington’s decline. Such a super-committee of governors would answer directly to the people where they live, in their states.
Gov. Greg Abbott (R) of Texas might be consulted on this. He has begun to do just that in an ad hoc way in forming legislation on behalf of the states with other governors — “sympathetic legislation,” to coin a phrases — in direct challenge of the executive. Abbott has also advanced the idea of an Article 5 constitutional convention to consider a variety of injuries headed out of Washington. Jefferson would applaud. Kennan’s proposed council, representative of 12 American regions, could bring this under discussion.
And here is a thought on the executive that can be solved in Trump’s first term if time takes us in that direction. There is much criticism today about Trump not being “presidential” enough, meaning stylistically not being the kind of individual we expect to see as president. (Not “our kind.”)
But the same could certainly have been said and was said about our current president, born Barack Hussein Obama II; Ronald Reagan, star of “Bedtime for Bonzo”; John F. Kennedy (Roman Catholic? Irish? Where goest the vaulted Protestant Ethic?). In fact, most of the great and historic presidents who forged the turnings of America and the world have likewise been radical departures of the expected model. Abraham Lincoln most of all. Andrew Jackson next.
It was long understood even before Lincoln that for a nation as vast and diverse as our own with as many freely moving parts as our own, drama or celebrity was an absolute necessity for getting to the high office.
Perhaps we should by now accept this as a fact of this American life. I don’t know if Trump would be a good president. Not that worried about it, and think most of his outrageous statements are what paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan calls “beer talk,” although Trump does not drink. I do however think that his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) would be a great president. So would Purdue University president and former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R). So would Abbott. But these top, high-end legislators lack the celebrity style of a Kennedy, Reagan or Obama or the vast generational following of a Bill Clinton to ever find their way to the Oval Office. They are just extremely good at what they do.
“I frankly hold Dick Cheney in really high regard in his role as vice president and as an American,” Pence said on ABC’s “This Week.”
This might not be a bad model for the presidency in 2016 and beyond. Dual roles of president and prime minister or chancellor are a successful model in mature governments elsewhere and tend to insure competency in the executive suite: The president is a largely symbolic ceremonial figure important to the nation as a representative of the general culture and tradition, as a king, queen or “royal family” (or a Kennedy, Bush or Clinton) was in more tribal times; the prime minister the general manager.
The same could be done here and was said to be the model in the George W. Bush administration. Let the vice president have a role similar to prime minister. Let the president be the cultural representative of America. Let President Clinton or Trump go to the state funerals and spend their afternoons with Dr. Oz or Ellen, their evenings with Jimmy Fallon or Stephen Colbert. Let the very competent vice presidential nominees Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) or Mike Pence run the show.
Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.
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