The Myth of the Golden Age of Bipartisan Comity

Via Hendrik Hertzberg, here’s Charles Dickens reflecting upon the spirit of American politics:

If a lady take a fancy to any male passenger’s seat, the gentleman who accompanies her gives him notice of the fact, and he immediately vacates it with great politeness. Politics are much discussed, so are banks, so is cotton. Quiet people avoid the question of the Presidency, for there will be a new election in three years and a half, and party feeling runs very high: the great constitutional feature of this institution being, that directly the acrimony of the last election is over, the acrimony of the next one begins; which is an unspeakable comfort to all strong politicians and true lovers of their country; that is to say, to ninety-nine men and boys out of every ninety-nine and a quarter.

Not much has changed since 1842. Which is worth bearing in mind next time there’s a hullabaloo and palaver about the supposed Death of Niceness or some such other tommyrot.

Meanwhile, Dickens captures a young country’s attempt to impress a visitor from the old country:

Everybody talks to you, or to anybody else who hits his fancy. If you are an Englishman, he expects that that railroad is pretty much like an English railroad. If you say ‘No,’ he says ‘Yes?’ (interrogatively), and asks in what respect they differ. You enumerate the heads of difference, one by one, and he says ‘Yes?’ (still interrogatively) to each. Then he guesses that you don’t travel faster in England; and on your replying that you do, says ‘Yes?’ again (still interrogatively), and, it is quite evident, don’t believe it. After a long pause he remarks, partly to you, and partly to the knob on top of his stick, that ‘Yankees are reckoned to be considerable of a go-ahead people too;’ upon which you say ‘Yes,’ and then he says ‘Yes’ again (affirmatively this time); and upon your looking out of window, tells you that behind that hill, and some three miles from the next station, there is a clever town in the next lo-ca-tion, where he expects you have concluded to stop. Your answer in the negative naturally leads to more questions in reference to your intended route (always pronounced rout); and wherever you are going, you invariably learn that you can’t get there without immense difficulty and danger, and that all the great sights are somewhere else.

The rum thing is that while one would expect this kind of argument from an up-and-coming place still feeling its way in the world, much of this attitude endures today. On the one hand there’s the nagging fear, which you will often find in the supposedly more-respectable papers, that they may do things just as well or even slightly better in cultured europe, and on the other the belief that, once all is said and done, nothing can be finer than the American way of doing anything and visitors can and surely must be impressed by the great thrust of American ingenuity and progress.

All of which is grand and helps remind one that the United States has always been enthused by competition and progress. To adapt Mencken’s definition of puritanism, Americanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be doing better than you. Accompany this with the suspicion that this should not be possible and you have an explanation for the popularity of moral panic, the ceaseless boosterism of American political rhetoric and, not incidentally, for the present illogical fear of China.