two pense

The last post gets at it nicely - we want to know what sort of system it is that we must have in the absence of omniscient participation or some other impossibility. And that is a universal adult franchise, for the sake of peace. The cost is great. The resulting inability to make good choices is maddening. And the superstructure (I almost said the rigging) required atop it is a vast and snarled mess.

But overall, it works wonderfully well. An example: there never was a mass murder of southern whites by blacks after all. That there was not is a historical shock. How to explain why such a predictable, almost justifiable calamity - with its inevitable cycles of retribution - never occured? That is better explained by the strong currents of popular democracy than anything else.

That the franchise is there refocuses the deprived mass onto the opportunity that is right there, rather than the wealth that is also right there. Why was there a reaching out for political equality rather than for forcible redistribution or fatal retribution? Why was the dominant race only feebly involved in the Klan and amenable to federal imposition of force? (That is, why did the postbellum murder count directly related to racial injustice amount to only thousands when it could so easily have been vastly more?)

The answer is only partly that there was a sense of right and wrong at play. The answer is, far more, that there was a more practical and alluring and immediately graspable abstraction than righteousness available: the franchise. And a more painlessly extensible worldly good to offer up than the dominant race's hoarded wealth: again, the franchise.

Magical thing.

Simply wonderful that almost every immigrant group and race and troubled but potentially powerful segment of our population that had been able, had it insisted, to demand payment, instead ultimately accepted a dream, which costs us nothing to manufacture and distribute. And more: once installed in the group, this thing that cost us nothing, they begin to pay us dividends of participation and hard labor. Because the American dream really is a very hard taskmaster.

Groups that manage to refuse the American dream are so very few and far between. The Shakers, barely the Amish, slightly some Hasidic communities.