Heather Cox Richardson makes observations on Obama’s recent speech at his foundation’s Democracy Forum. You can read it here. And you can read my reaction below.

There is the pluralism and there’s chaos. We are closer to chaos than to pluralism.

James Madison lived in a time when the issues of the day revolved around trade and agriculture. Some wanted protective tariffs; some wanted to extend slavery, some to end it; everyone wanted to expand westward at the expense of the native inhabitants. (Who could possibly be against free farmland?) Those involved in these discussions were, exclusively, landowners (and in some cases such as Virginia, only white landowners.) Male landowners. That made up about 20% of the population.

John Adams famously predicted chaos would ensue were voting rights to be extended to non-property owners. Soon women would demand the vote! The demands on the body politic would be unsustainable!

Comparing where we are, or where we should be, to James Madison’s day, is a common way of ennobling the argument that we’re still the good old USA, ready to work with our neighbor to make a better community. I reject this argument. Madison was president before the Industrial Revolution; before the hegemony of the US; before the abolition of slavery; before the exhaustion of free land for the people; and before the dawn of global trade. Before you could travel to China in a day rather than many months. Before we even had digested the report of Lewis and Clark.

This is a different country now. Relying on the proper way to parse an argument that no longer has any a logical parallel in the past is bound to lead to nothing but ennui.

Imagine making an argument that the issues faced by a school district with 16 students, all white, all speaking English, is comparable to a district with 15,000, with 70 languages spoken by a highly diverse group of students. The differences would undoubtedly outweigh the similarities. So it is with any reference to our post-Colonial past, and so it is pointless. The argument sure does sound good, though. But it will get us nowhere.