Is America no longer governable?

 

Is America no longer governable?

By Jamelle Bouie

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/21/opinion/2021-essays-opinion.html

 

For me, the question isn’t whether America is governable now; the question is whether America has ever been governable.

 

Inspired by the turmoil and conflict of the 1960s, the historian Richard Hofstadter approached this question more than 50 years ago in a volume on political violence, edited with Michael Wallace, appropriately titled “American Violence: A Documentary History.” The book opens with an essay by Mr. Hofstadter on the role civil violence has played in the history of the United States. He walks his readers through the varieties of violence in American history, from race riots and lynchings to assassinations, vigilantism and the quotidian violence of a society that is and always has been saturated with lethal weapons.

 

Mr. Hofstadter observes, among other things, that political violence in the United States is rarely “insurrectionary,” that our “federal structure has deflected violence from the symbols of national power” and that American violence has most often been initiated with a “conservative bias,” meaning that it “has been unleashed against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities and has been used ostensibly to protect the American, the Southern, the white Protestant or simply the established middle-class way of life and morals.” A high proportion of our violence, he writes, “has thus come from top dogs or the middle dogs.”

 

Fifty-one years later, it turns out Mr. Hofstadter was wrong about the insurrectionary character of American violence. (Although, in fairness, it took a cult of personality and the complicity of a major political party to produce the conditions that led to an attack on one of the “symbols of national power” of the United States.) Even still, the events of Jan. 6 fit the mold of his essay as much as they might break it. The rioters belonged to what one could call the petite bourgeoisie of American society, the small-time capitalists who form the backbone of the modern Republican Party: the men and women whom Donald Trump once praised as his “beautiful boaters.”

 

The simultaneously conservative and insurrectionary violence of Jan. 6 was followed, in relatively short order, by the Republican Party’s resistance to measures that might end or at least mitigate the Covid-19 pandemic. Which is to say that in 2021, Americans watched as their government was besieged by rioters and then watched as that government struggled to return the country to normalcy. This past year, then, raises the same question as the 1960s did for Mr. Hofstadter: Can the United States, with its stark divisions and conflict, be governed?

 

I am inclined to take his answer as my own. “When one considers American history as a whole,” he concludes, “it is hard to think of any very long period in which it could be said that the country has been consistently well governed. And yet its political system is, on the whole, a resilient and well-seasoned one, and on the strength of its history one must assume that it can summon enough talent and good will to cope with its afflictions.”

 

“The nation,” he continues, “seems to slouch onward into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast, too much attainted by wounds and ailments to be robust, but too strong and resourceful to succumb.”

 

Mr. Bouie is an Opinion columnist.