I heard this joke from two Canadian journalists. That just about kills it, I know. Worse, I saw it on a PBS special. Still, at the founding of our neighbor to the north, the feeling was, Oh, this is great, we’ll have the best of all worlds: British government, French culture, and American know-how.
Instead, they got French government, American culture, and British know-how.
Anyway, I enjoyed it.
Regarding the Canucks’ legislative lament, you might recall from Poli Sci 101 in college how superior the Brits’ parliamentary system seemed. Vote a party in en masse and let them have at it. Vote them back out again if they screw up, but enough with this business of divided government and stalemate. Even if it’s the wrong course of action, as F.D.R. said during the mother of all crises, “Do something.”
Back when I read The Federalist Papers, I was struck first by Alexander Hamilton’s uniquely powerful, even hammering use of the English language in making his case, and then shocked by the extent to which James Madison was singly responsible for the shape of our government, the branches in triplicate, the diffusion of power, the deliberate thwarting of too much direct popular say. The future fourth president was the architect of obstruction.
The riot at the Capitol deservedly overshadowed the Georgia special election that elevated Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the Senate, finalized on the same day, but it’s too bad it did, because that was quite the turn of events, nudging the federal government toward something like unity, closer to the ability to actually do something. There’s still the filibuster, for now, but the gavel’s in new hands.
The outcome in Georgia put me in mind of a public radio interview a couple of months ago, when Bakari Sellers, the South Carolina legislator turned CNN commentator, was ham-handedly asked about African-American expectations in the aftermath of Biden’s win.
“Listen,” he said, and forgive me while I paraphrase, “Black people in places like Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia just saved the democracy. What else do you want from us?”
The democracy, he says. If we can keep it.