No News Is Good News On The Frontier

The driving force behind American society is the continuing American frontier, the effort on the part of Americans to come to grips with untamed elements of nature and, by taming them, to reorganize their society. The continuing frontier is the source of renewal which sustains the United States as a 'new society.'"-Daniel J. Elezar, The American Mosaic

"We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities. . .We must delight in each other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body."-John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity

America, from its founding, has been a nation of strong ideals. The importance of those ideals cannot be overstated, because they take the place of blood, common history, and shared religion in binding our disparate peoples together. The single quality that binds all Americans together and makes our country different from all others (it is often announced) is the distinctly virtuous nature of what America stands for. Aside from those ideals, the only thing about America that's "fixed" is its geographical address. America's ideals are more than just rhetoric. They shape domestic and foreign policy, up to and beyond the point of war.

Which makes it both tragic and mysterious, when you consider it, that we are unable to ever reach an agreement on even the broad outlines of what those "shared national ideals" might actually be. I think that's because we really have two "national ideals," which spring from two different mountains, flow down two divergent courses, and unite, if they ever do at all, only at the instant of joining the sea.

Call them the Frontier and Palladian visions of America, and you'll see them in our history. Call them the Red and Blue visions, respectively, and you'll see them working in the present.

The Red ideal is all about the simple, plain ethos of open spaces, open sky, and limitless possibilities. It's about independence and freedom. But it's also about the Frontier, and more particularly about the darkness and ignorance and dangers that lie on the other side of it, mixed in with the boundless opportunities. To live on a frontier is to live under threat. To live on a frontier is to accept the deep significance of its division, of the difference it imposes and enforces between the we on this side of it, and the unknown, scary them who live beyond it.

The scary-as-hell "them" is a vital necessity. Without "them," there's no frontier. You can't be a Cowboy if there aren't any Indians. So when we ran out of real, actual Indians, we went looking for more. The Hun; the Red Menace; and now the Arab Terrorist, alien and angry, upset at the supposed theft of his natural resources, willing to compensate for his enemies' asymetrical strength by attacking civilians.

The irony is rich. The hopeful side of the frontier mentality was what drew America to exploit the resources of the Middle East in the first place, while treating the aborigines squatting on top of it as a temporary and inconsequential nuisance. Small wonder, then, that identical arrogance should reap the identical result.

If the Frontier ideal elevates the value of independence, the Palladian ideal is all about interdependence, and about collective action and results. The Palladians came to serve a different God than the God of the mountains and the forests and the open skies.

The Paladians served a God who shared their soaring dream, borne across an ocean, of a shining city on a hill, where salvation and survival were both community endeavors, and where the joys and sorrows of the individual were the sorrows and joys of the whole.

That collective impulse is typically dormant. It shapes our actions (especially in the Blue states) but not our conscious view of ourselves. But every few generations, it's been known to wake up. It last awoke in the privation of the Great Depression, and stayed awake through the struggle and early aftermath of the Second World War. It was last sighted on the moon, standing next to an American flag planted in the desolate lunar soil, proudly saluting as the last Apollo lander lifted off.

This brings me to today's news, and President Bush.

If the tracking polls are anything to go by President Bush hasn't gotten much of a "bounce" from the killing of the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaida in Iraq. Nor has he gotten much joy from the ongoing stream of
non-depressing economic statistics, no matter how loudly or persistently those statistics are hyped. Or from the slow but somewhat encouraging progress being made by Iraq's elected government in bringing order to whatever is left of their country.

The reason Bush's poll numbers are so stubbornly low, viewed through this paradigm, is hard to miss. Bush lost the liberals (i.e. the palladians) a long time ago. He lost the moderates as well. His supporters now are almost all folks he's been able to manipulate by playing on the chronic xenophobia that's inherent in the psychology of the frontier.

And that's a fear that the Republican Party has been zealously stoking for years, in its efforts to cling to power. There's political advantage in painting an imaginary threat and pretending to deal with it; but there's an obvious disadvantage, too. People can be manipulated, through fear, into supporting a candidate or a party; but that's not to say that people enjoy being afraid, or the sense that they are under constant threat.

Which is why Bush's poll numbers are stuck in the 30s, despite the killing of Zarqawi. His political supporters are incapable of being reassured on the subject of terrorism or Iraq, thanks to long conditioning; and his political opponents are incapable, thanks to long and bitter experience, of being reassured on the subject of him.

The Democrats are thus far incapable of getting their message straight, or of announcing a coherent ideology. "Together, America can do better" is a clumsy attempt, but it's an attempt in the right direction.

It's only a matter of time before some brave Democrat comes to the "revolutionary" realization that the American people share a vast set of problems in common (health insurance, retirement, income volatility, debt), for which they are increasingly willing to consider common solutions. "National Health," for instance, has gone from a mocking political expletive to a serious policy option. Retirement, likewise, is a problem that can only be solved in a spirit of concern for the collective welfare, and in the presence of a sense of public trust.