The Republic Is Considerably Quieter Than the People Paid to Describe It
By Joe Cozart
I have begun to suspect that one of the great mistakes we make in trying to understand America is believing that American politics and American life are the same thing. They are not. Politics is the argument America conducts about itself. Life is what Americans are doing while the argument continues.
Every few years we are informed, usually with exquisite urgency, that civilization is hanging by a thread. One party gains power and the other discovers that the Republic has entered its final hours. Eventually the offices change hands, the ideological furniture is rearranged, and—miraculously—the people who had been defending institutional stability begin worrying about tyranny while many of yesterday’s revolutionaries discover an unexpected affection for executive authority. The rhetoric changes. The anxiety changes uniforms. The theater remains open.
I do not say this because politics is meaningless. Governments can make consequential decisions. Wars are real. Taxes are real. Regulation is real. Borders, courts, currencies, trade, property, technology, national security and individual liberty are hardly imaginary matters. But somewhere along the way we began confusing the importance of government with the proposition that government is the principal activity of civilization.
It isn’t.
Most Americans are doing something considerably more interesting.
They are living.
This morning somebody will open a diner before sunrise. Somebody else will drive a truck through North Dakota in weather no political consultant in Washington would voluntarily experience. A farmer will make a decision whose economic consequences may not be known until harvest. A young couple will sign a thirty-year mortgage without first determining which political party will control Congress in 2043. Children will go to school. Contractors will complain about suppliers. Grandparents will call grandchildren. Somebody will buy a boat he cannot possibly justify. Somebody will start a business everyone else thinks is foolish. Somebody will fall in love. Somebody will get divorced. Somebody will watch football and become briefly convinced that the officiating crew represents a greater threat to constitutional government than either political party.
And tomorrow they will do it again.
That, to me, is America.
The political class naturally believes politics occupies the center of national existence because politics occupies the center of theirs. Television believes television is important for approximately the same reason. Social media has perfected the illusion by allowing several thousand extraordinarily agitated people to appear indistinguishable from 340 million Americans.
Noise has acquired excellent distribution.
But volume is not population.
Outside the political arena lies an enormous decentralized civilization held together by habits so ordinary that we scarcely notice their magnificence. People exchange goods with strangers. Contracts are signed between people who have never met. Electricity arrives when we touch the switch. Grocery stores contain food grown hundreds or thousands of miles away. A manufacturer buys equipment expected to operate through several presidential administrations. A farmer plants a crop months before knowing its price. Banks lend money for houses that will outlive the politicians presently arguing about housing.
None of these activities requires Americans to agree very much about politics.
They require something far more consequential.
They require Americans to assume there will be a tomorrow.
That may be one of the most underappreciated measures of confidence in a civilization.
Every mortgage is a small wager on continuity. Every business investment is a declaration that the future remains sufficiently predictable to justify patience. Every child sent to school represents an assumption that adulthood will arrive in an intelligible society. Every seed put into the ground assumes there will still be markets, roads, customers, law, money and dinner tables when harvest comes.
We rarely call these acts patriotic because patriotism has become theatricalized. We prefer flags, speeches, elections and declarations.
But civilization is constructed mostly from quieter things.
Perhaps this is why I find myself increasingly unmoved by predictions that whichever political faction happens to be out of power represents the final resistance against whichever faction happens to be in power. There will always be an opposition. Opposition is one of the luxuries of a functioning Republic. The losing side makes noise because losing temporarily deprives it of the machinery through which it prefers to make decisions for everybody else.
Then eventually the wheel turns.
It has done this before.
It will do it again.
Meanwhile, I suspect most Americans—whatever their politics, frustrations or circumstances—remain occupied with the much older human project of trying to make something worthwhile out of the lives immediately in front of them.
There are exceptions, obviously. There is suffering. There is injustice. There are people who feel alienated from the country and people who believe institutions have failed them. No serious observation of America should erase them simply to make the picture prettier.
But neither should the existence of conflict persuade us that conflict is the whole picture.
The remarkable thing about America may not be that we agree.
We don’t.
The remarkable thing may be that disagreement has become such an ordinary feature of the system that hundreds of millions of people can argue ferociously about the country while simultaneously cooperating inside it.
That is an extraordinarily sophisticated social arrangement when you think about it.
You can despise the politics of the man standing behind you at the hardware store and still ask him whether he thinks the half-inch socket will fit. He can answer you without requesting your voter registration card.
Civilization continues.
And perhaps that is why I remain rather optimistic about America. Not because Americans suddenly become wise every four years. Not because Washington has discovered prudence. Not because our institutions are incapable of error.
I am optimistic because the country is vastly larger than its politics.
America possesses an almost ridiculous amount of redundancy. Families, businesses, towns, universities, farms, churches, voluntary organizations, military installations, laboratories, warehouses, restaurants, factories, neighborhoods and millions upon millions of private relationships operate simultaneously. No single election creates this architecture, and no single election ordinarily dismantles it.
The system is distributed.
That may be its secret.
There is, of course, one qualification large enough to matter. Civilization depends upon avoiding catastrophe. Nuclear war, a truly devastating global conflict, systemic collapse or some genuine apocalypse could overwhelm the ordinary mechanisms through which societies recover.
Which is why the prevention of catastrophe is among the few functions of government that deserve the word existential without quotation marks.
Keep the peace where possible. Deter those who would destroy it. Preserve the constitutional structure. Protect enough liberty and stability that people remain capable of conducting their own lives.
Then get accustomed to the astonishing possibility that most of civilization does not require Washington’s supervision every morning.
Perhaps the healthiest measure of a Republic is not the number of citizens permanently mobilized for political battle.
Perhaps it is precisely the opposite.
Perhaps success is the citizen who can afford not to think about Washington today because nothing happening there prevents him from opening his business, raising his children, writing his book, planting his field, taking his trip, building his house or sitting quietly over coffee deciding what he intends to do next.
The political world will continue shouting.
It always has.
Someone will announce another historic turning point before breakfast. Someone else will declare democracy saved or doomed by lunch. By dinner, a new outrage will have displaced the old one, and an entire industry will explain why this particular Tuesday is unlike every Tuesday that preceded it.
And then Wednesday will arrive.
The lights will come on.
The coffee will brew.
America will go back to work.
Perhaps it never stopped.
Joe Cozart, GMJoe™, GMJoe™ Consulting
GMJoe.org