Fourth of July Open Thread [7.4.2016]
Dylan Matthews makes a provocative point in a recent Vox column: that the American Revolution and independence from England was a mistake! But we will hear him out:
I’m reasonably confident a world in which the revolution never happened would be better than the one we live in now, for three main reasons: Slavery would’ve been abolished earlier, American Indians would’ve faced rampant persecution but not the outright ethnic cleansing Andrew Jackson and other American leaders perpetrated, and America would have a parliamentary system of government that makes policymaking easier and lessens the risk of democratic collapse. […]
Abolition in most of the British Empire occurred in 1834, following the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act. That left out India, but slavery was banned there, too, in 1843. In England itself, slavery was illegal at least going back to 1772. That’s decades earlier than the United States.
This alone is enough to make the case against the revolution. Decades less slavery is a massive humanitarian gain that almost certainly dominates whatever gains came to the colonists from independence. […]
Independence was bad for Native Americans. Starting with the Proclamation of 1763, the British colonial government placed firm limits on westward settlement in the United States. It wasn’t motivated by an altruistic desire to keep American Indians from being subjugated or anything; it just wanted to avoid border conflicts.
But all the same, the policy enraged American settlers, who were appalled that the British would seem to side with Indians over white men. “The British government remained willing to conceive of Native Americans as subjects of the crown, similar to colonists,” Ethan Schmidt writes in Native Americans in the American Revolution. “American colonists … refused to see Indians as fellow subjects. Instead, they viewed them as obstacles in the way of their dreams of land ownership and trading wealth.” This view is reflected in the Declaration of Independence, which attacks King George III for backing “merciless Indian Savages.” […]
America would have a better system of government if we’d stuck with Britain. [W]e would’ve, in all likelihood, become a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidential one.
And parliamentary democracies are a lot, lot better than presidential ones. They’re significantly less likely to collapse into dictatorship because they don’t lead to irresolvable conflicts between, say, the president and the legislature. They lead to much less gridlock. […]
The Westminister system of parliamentary democracy also benefits from weaker upper houses. The US is saddled with a Senate that gives Wyoming the same power as California, which has more than 66 times as many people. Worse, the Senate is equal in power to the lower, more representative house. Most countries following the British system have upper houses — only New Zealand was wise enough to abolish it — but they’re far, far weaker than their lower houses. The Canadian Senate and the House of Lords affect legislation only in rare cases. At most, they can hold things up a bit or force minor tweaks. They aren’t capable of obstruction anywhere near the level of the US Senate.
Finally, we’d still likely be a monarchy, under the rule of Elizabeth II, and constitutional monarchy is the best system of government known to man. Generally speaking, in a parliamentary system, you need a head of state who is not the prime minister to serve as a disinterested arbiter when there are disputes about how to form a government — say, if the largest party should be allowed to form a minority government or if smaller parties should be allowed to form a coalition, to name a recent example from Canada. That head of state is usually a figurehead president elected by the parliament (Germany, Italy) or the people (Ireland, Finland), or a monarch. And monarchs are better.
Monarchs are more effective than presidents precisely because they lack any semblance of legitimacy. It would be offensive for Queen Elizabeth or her representatives in Canada, New Zealand, etc. to meddle in domestic politics.
I am sympathetic for all the reasons Matthews lays out. But then again, that would have meant Newt Gingrich would have Prime Minister from 1995 until 1999, but then against we would have already had our first female head of government in Prime Minister Nancy Pelosi. Parliamentary systems are better, for they do allow for more third party influence (see the Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition in 2010 in the UK or the New Democrats becoming the official opposition in Canada in 2011). They do allow something closer to proportional representation.
One idea of reform of our President that I have come up with (and I have not seen proposed anywhere else, so if this gets traction then I want credit (LOL)) is to tie the Senate elections in a Presidential year to the Presidential vote, so that no matter whomever wins the Presidential election, gets to chose the 33-34 Senators up for election that year, which would likely give the President control of the Senate. That would give the new Administration some policy and appointment leeway in the first two years of an Administration, and if it oversteps or if their policies prove unpopular, they the Midterms beckon under normal rules.
Just a thought.
Anywho, Happy Independence Day!
