At American Greatness Sean Ross Callaghan notes that in 1787 northern abolitionists managed to compromise with southern slaveholders to write and ratify the US Constitution. But here we are in 2021 and it seems we can't compromise on anything.
How many would-be abortions is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) willing to stop in exchange for shored-up Medicare and Social Security or an expanded child-care subsidy? For how long is Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) willing to postpone pushing for a federal ban on abortion in exchange for better-controlled immigration and narrower labor offshoring?
Yes, why don't we compromise today when the Americans of old were able to do so? Well here's one reason: Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. La Wik.
A modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 and patented in 1794.
Now you see what Bismarck meant by his statement that "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." Good old God. He made sure that we had the Constitution under lock and key before He let Eli Whitney invent the cotton gin and all of a sudden make plantation slavery a lot more profitable. And my nickel says that a cotton gin in 1784 would have made Southrons a lot less inclined to compromise in 1787.
Plus, I am sure that back in 1787 that all Americans were joined in a common fear of the Brits who might decide to try again to teach the rebels a lesson. Which they did in the war of 1812.
Today, we don't really fear foreign invaders. And we haven't had much of a worry since the good old days of the Cold War and nuclear bombers ready to take off at a moment's notice. Oh, for sure, we were scared for a couple of minutes after 9/11 and our leaders got into a jolly old war in the Middle East to show the rag-heads who was boss.
Plus our noble liberal leaders are much more concerned about the United States stepping on some helpless victim nation than worrying about, say, the terrible threat of Russia or China.
Oh, sorry, our fearless leaders were all worked up about Russia, Russia for a few months when it was helpful to discredit Donald Trump. My bad.
But Hoo Boy, were they mad when President Trump started talking about the Chinese Flu!
No, the absence of foreign threats means that for people that believe in politics, the enemy must be at home.
Remember Nazi Carl Schmitt and his dictum that politics is based on the friend/enemy distinction? If you are going to have politics you are going to have friends and enemies. If there are no foreign enemies then there must be domestic enemies. And, of course, the more passionate you are about your politics the more you are going to need those enemies.
Now, of course the whole point of elections is to encourage political diehards to get all worked up in the fight of the campaign and then cool their jets once the election is over. There is a certain calming effect, also, when you lose 60-40. But closely fought election and elections with disputed results tend to bring out the enemy hunter in all of us. Liberals were mad as hell when Bush won narrowly in 2000, and the liberal media was all over the rigged election of 2016.
So I don't think the current Wokeness era and its doppelganger the populist-nationalist era is going to be resolved any time soon.
Maybe President Xi will frighten us all to death and get us all to unite. But I'm not sure that I'd like that kind of a unity too much. I really don't want a repeat of President Wilson sending the doughboys off to France or FDR sending the GIs off all over the world. World wars were really cool for the ruling class, but I'm not sure I want a repeat. (And no, WWII was not all about saving the Jews. Not until after the war).
So, I'm afraid that we are caught in the present horrible divisions for a while. My hope is that our liberal friends will overreach themselves so much that the vast majority of good Americans recoil in distaste. But you never know.
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