On the Bargain

The coffee had gone cold on the porch rail before I noticed it, which is how I knew the news had hold of me. The river was running low and clear the way it does in October, the bees were working the last of the asters along the fence, and on the small screen in my hand Paris was burning its bins. High school students had blockaded their lycées over crowded classrooms and empty teaching posts; public workers had walked out beside them against a budget that would cut €54 billion and freeze their pay for a fourth year running. Thousands arrested. A prime minister calling it irresponsible. Teenagers with scarves pulled over their faces, standing in smoke.

I set the phone face down on the rail. The bees went on with their work. I envied them a little.

Once the smoke cleared from my own head, what struck me was how familiar the grievance felt and how foreign the remedy. Any American who has watched a paycheck stand still while the rent and the doctor’s bill climb past it understands what those students’ parents are angry about. Few of us would think to answer it with a barricade. We feel the same squeeze; we reach for something else.

I have come to think the difference was planted at the founding, the way a farmer’s first furrow decides where the rest of the field will run.

When the French overthrew their king in 1789, the tyrant lived among them. He spoke their language, knelt at their altars, and taxed their bread from a palace a day’s walk from the markets. So the lesson took root at home: the oppressor is one of us, and the remedy lies close at hand. They brought it out again in 1830, again in 1848, again with the Commune in 1871, and again when the students pried up the cobblestones in 1968. Revolution became a family heirloom, carried down from the attic whenever the house grew cold.

Our first furrow ran a different direction. We threw off a crown seated across three thousand miles of water, and when the war was lost, the redcoats sailed home. Yet a good many of the hands that had pressed on the colonies were colonial hands: royal placemen, land speculators, merchants who had prospered under the old arrangement and saw little reason to change it. The Revolution could chase off a king. It could not chase off the neighbors.

So the founders bargained. They bargained with the slaveholding states to get a Constitution at all, and we are still paying interest on that note. They bargained with creditors and speculators to set the young nation’s books in order. And they bargained with each other. In June of 1790, Hamilton sat down to dinner with Jefferson and Madison; by the end of the evening Hamilton had his federal assumption of the state debts, and the Virginians had their capital on the Potomac. Neither side liked the price. Both paid it, and the republic went on.

The French learned to tear the house down when the roof leaks. We learned to sit at a table with people we distrust and come away with a roof.

Madison saw what that habit would have to withstand. In the tenth Federalist he warned of faction: citizens, whether a majority or a minority, united by some passion or interest adverse to the rights of others or to the permanent interests of the community. He hoped a large republic, crowded with competing interests, would keep any single faction from seizing the whole machine. What he did not plan for was the two-party arrangement that sprang up within a decade of his writing, with winner-take-all contests that herd people who agree on very little under one tent before a ballot is cast. In a parliament, coalitions are built after the vote, in daylight. Ours are built beforehand, and the voter is left choosing the tent that offends him least.

I believe a faction of that Madisonian kind now holds the federal government, one pursuing an ideal the broad body of Americans does not share, and, I suspect, one a good many of its own voters do not share either. They came to the polls for a single issue, as plenty on the other side come for a single identity, each persuaded that his particular concern is the whole of the republic and the rest is scenery. A faction need not persuade a nation. It needs only to sit at the center of enough single-issue coalitions to gather their votes and spend them as it pleases. I say that without heat, the way a man notes that the creek has jumped its banks. The question is what to do about the water.

Here I owe the reader a confession. For much of my life I have spoken of “the government” the way I speak of the weather: something that happens to me, generally badly, about which a sensible man grumbles and carries an umbrella. I came by the habit honestly. Men of considerable fortune spent two generations teaching Americans that government is stupid, wasteful, and bad, and they taught it well; I repeated the lesson at lunch counters and debate tables without once asking who profited from my believing it.

But ours is a self-governing republic. Washington, in his first inaugural, called it an experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people. If the government is stupid, then we are stupid; if it is wasteful, we are the ones wasting; and if it is bad, the badness has a mailing address, and the address is ours. A town that stops attending the water board because the meetings are dull will find, before long, that someone else is setting the rates. Contempt for self-government is a form of abdication, and abdicated chairs seldom stay empty for long.

Whatever one’s faith, or if one keeps none, I have yet to find a reading of the founding in which America was meant to be an oppressor. The design calls for citizens, people who govern themselves first and then sit down with their neighbors to govern the rest.

Which returns me to the bargain, and I confess I don’t relish it. There are people I would have to sit beside, on the left and on my own side of the aisle, whose company I would sooner skip, and who would sooner skip mine. Yet the conservative who reveres limited government and the rule of law, and who has watched both treated as obstacles, has more in common this season with the liberal who reveres the Enlightenment than with the faction wearing his party’s coat. We will disagree about taxes and guns and a hundred lesser things; we can settle those in the ordinary way once the ordinary way is restored. Hamilton and Jefferson loathed each other’s politics and still shared a dinner. I can manage a cup of coffee, and I might even keep this one warm.

Self-government is a discipline before it is a right. It asks us to govern our own distaste long enough to make common cause with any American who wants this to stop. The French have their inheritance, and they are spending it in the streets this month. Ours asks more patience of us, and perhaps more humility; the bargain was our revolution, and it may yet be our restoration.

Grammina, who taught me Latin at the kitchen table and Franklin at the woodpile, liked to tell me what he said at the signing, give or take. “Hang on to each other, Nate,” she’d say, splitting kindling, “or they’ll hang you one at a time.”

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