One myth of the new republic came from George Washington's great hero, Cincinnatus, the Roman soldier-statesman who answered the call of patria but longed to return home to his beloved country birthplace. This was a pervasive ideal in early America, witness Jefferson's Monticello or his slave-holding exploits. Can you imagine a modern President literally running a farm? No, but you certainly feel urged to do it from the Founding Fathers and this call to government by the demos (people) is evident in the structure of our early governmental structure. All that changed starting in the middle 20th century, of course, as we mandarinized the profession of governmental function, but the Founder's envisaged system was an elegant and minimalist expression of citizen-statesman. The government did not stay in session year round so men could travel the great distances to their home districts and tend to their personal affairs. Now they do this traveling to press the flesh. But the myth prevails as Jimmy Carter still gets called a peanut farmer, Ronald Reagan passes his catatonia on a Western set, and George Bush junior gets press for vacationing on his hot and miserable desert ranch.
A resilient expression of this founding myth in modern culture is the presidential argot of "crawfishing", "wheedling" and even turns of phrase like recent memory's "when a turtle gets up on a fence post". Everyone knows America is an anti-intellectual society. Be suspicious of anyone more educated than you: they are probably communists.
It is predictable enough that this model of the "hardest working man in politics"--the regular guy, who's not so smart or slick, but from your part of the world, and who just fights for every vote--has made its way elsewhere around the world. Chino pants and the first-name basis have traveled from California companies to the German and British bankers, and with it have come some similar frameworks of values. The Americanization of world culture is the dispensation with formalities and the love good healthy competition. A fair fight above all, best efforts from all sides, no punches pulled and no cheating off your neighbor. But in the end everybody's chums.
America's Empire is more than a cultural dominion, but a real expression of a military and economic wingspan that touches every market and government in the world. This is now a familiar observation, and the parallels with the Pax Romana have been noted, along with the Gallic dissent that seems to grate on their straight-talking outre-Atlantic allies.
When Bush came calling to Paris this summer, an American reporter in the press corps directed a question to Chirac. Bush's reaction was contemptful: how dare someone speak french in front of him? There could not be a better contrast on this occasion than with Chirac. It was only a few weeks later that he avoided an assassin's bullet, riding in a parade, to be delivered minutes later into a live, televised interview with the country's three leading news anchors -- the first since his re-election and one where he faced directly a serious litany of questions on an unfolding political scandal. On this occassion, Chirac was dressed impeccably, like the resident of Faubourg St. Honoré he is, and spoke an oralized prose that assembled words into sentence and sentences into paragraphs and those into whole masses of coherent ideas on issues ranging from Islamicism to poverty to the right-wing and America.
Chirac is known as a slick politician, but the expectation is what's important. French politicians as a class are expected to speak a language of neutral and universal comprehensibility. Rather than identifying an educated french with incomprehensibility, excesses subtility, and nuance, the high french of les hommes politiques is the single comprehensible language appropriate for the body politic. Chirac is not by any means a soldier, farmer or business man (the ex-CEO, the modern American version of the citizen-statesman myth). He is a professional politician, a product of a government-operated group of schools for educating the Administrative Class and a lifetime politician. The political process makes no forced effort to express a distaste for the very business that sustains it.
You would expect this attitude from a culture that takes a principle source of pride its role in originating the very principles of government, liberty, civil society, and sociality that gave rise to the modern liberal democracies around the world. The Marquis de Lafayette was America's first great borrowed Frenchman and the Bourbons supplied money too, later still de Tocqueville would come to reflect on what nation was becoming, but at the founding moments the French influence was even deeper. The enormous influence of the French Enlightenment thinkers, Les Lumieres, is everywhere throughout the birth of the American state and its fundamental liberties. One should be careful not to overstate this -- Locke is the author of "life, liberty and property", the words that were gussied up to open the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence -- but Englightenment project crystallized in France, with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Encyclopedists, and ultimately the political movements and leadership the led to the French Revolution (largely a follow-on of the inspiring American Democracy installed after the American Revolution).
France's post-Revolution arrangements continue to be significant, but it's worth noting that the systematically bureaucratic (bureaucracy is a french word) approach ante-dates the "rationalization" of the system, with the enormous nation-wide system of administrators existing even before Louis XIV. France suffered a disorganized nation-hood since the very beginning, Charlemagne being the first French emperor, but it hardly compares to the domestic disorder that continued in the UK even into the 20th century, and the other very recent European states built in the 19th century. France as a political entity has been around a while, centralizing around the city-state Paris and organizing a massive national governmental momentum.
In the early achievement of centralization, the French achieved the blueprint for the rise of nation-states. In carrying the fire of Enlightenment, the basic doctrines to underlie modern rights and political theory. They can't seem to digest it though. Long after the founding of the basic modernist frameworks of minimal, republican states, the French have become in this century Marxist, then welfare states. The role of the state as instrument of sociality is immense.
Not so in the US. The land that inherited a one-shot endowment of life, liberty, and property is still offerring nothing more than freedom from tyranny. Why should it? But in so doing it has airlocked the founding myths. Not developed there in the first place, they sit in the collective history like inviolable concepts from sacred origins. The French are on their fifth republic. The British have been constantly evolving their mechanisms of state since the Glorious Revolution in 1688. The Europeans, bound up with their heritage, struggle with and against their products. The Americans preach the religion of converts. And like the reflective, deliberative Greeks, the Europeans have fallen out of the path of the enormous economic and military might of the grand Western Empire. The question: will this democratic republic end up like the Roman? And is it better to overgrow and collapse in decay, or is it better to simply fade away? The French seem condemned to the Greek's fate. Maybe America is condemned to Rome's.
Posted by amol at September 13, 2002 07:50 PM