I was sitting at my desk, listening to the nostalgic boom and bang of distant fireworks on this Fourth – a heated July evening prior to a heated Presidential election. Hearing the clatter of fierce and passionate conservatives, one might easily assume that this will be the final Independence Day in our seemingly fragile constitutional democracy. From deep Alaska, Sarah Palin opined, “If Obama is reelected, well, America, you will no longer recognize the country that today you truly love and can enjoy all of its freedom and prosperity and security.” “ObamaCare is a harbinger of things yet to come,” the governor warns darkly. Such alarms have been Glenn Beck’s stock-in-trade for some years. Rush Limbaugh has followed much the same path, musing on moving to Costa Rica. In four years, America will be France, Venezuela, or Cuba. Not Amerika with K, as the left once proclaimed, but America without the blue and its whites.
Of course, forecasts of profound transformation have been the technique of doom-laden partisans who, until the age of computer caches, could rely on the limited memory of their audience. This is not merely a trope of the right. Partisan rhetoric is often more similar than rivals would care to admit. Paranoia is bipartisan. The end is nearly near! In the weeks prior to Reagan’s election, dear friends promised to invite me to Toronto after they migrated, concluding that America would soon become a fascist regime. I never did receive those invitations. Some of those friends remained to celebrate November 2008 in Grant Park. I have wondered whether America in 2012 conforms to their dark imaginings of what America would look like from the standpoint of Reagan’s ascent.
Despite the science fiction cliché of the man who awakes after decades, the world changes slowly, even in the face of shocks to the system. The fact that gay and lesbian Americans can now marry in many states with the trend continuing is a real change, but it doesn’t create an unrecognizable America. The fact that income inequality has increased or that hunger has decreased over the past fifty years certainly matters, but it doesn’t make America, always a land of rich and poor, unrecognizable, and certainly within four years changes are unlikely to be dramatic. The century-old pictures in Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives are no longer precisely true, but they reflect a world that we know.
Conservatives point with horror to the changes that are coming to health care in America, but what is striking is that, despite changes, the structure of providing health care will not be so different. Americans will receive health care through hospitals and insurance companies and someone (corporate advisers or government advisers) will determine what procedures will be paid for and what will not. Even if government-mandated health care is repealed, personal health care options will change in ways that may be similar to ObamaCare if not in all the details. Perhaps the decision to institute a single-payer health care system with different venues in which health care will be provided would dramatically alter the face of medicine. But such a system apparently was not politically possible, and even such a system would not be unrecognizable.
With the partisan divide that is predicted to remain after the election with neither party having the ability to end filibusters or to achieve a veto-proof majority, it is likely that any changes will be incremental. Surely raising the top tax-rate from 35% to 39% will not make America unrecognizable. Neither will any foreseeable changes in energy policy alter transportation choices.
Whether one hopes for massive changes, the forces that change society are gradual. Often they are not political, but are technological, organizational, or social. The world of personal connections has been replaced by computer technology. Social media has shaped dating and social movements. If anything has made America unrecognizable it is this, standing outside of government action.
If Rip van Winkle woke up after 50 years from a Mad Men-inspired sleep, there would be surprises aplenty. Rip would be endlessly startled, and some government policies had much to do with these changes (Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Immigration Act), but many of the changes resulted from forces outside of public policy. Government channels popular desire, but should do so in ways that are modest and restrained. It is this that should make us all conservatives.
Ultimately those who fear that America will become unrecognizable are too enamored with the present and lack the sense that change does not mean a new world. We are able to incorporate change while holding to a fundamental stability. For my part I am comforted that come next July 4th I will hear those fireworks again and I will hear that America is on the precipice of changes that are unimaginable.
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