"As brutal as the Alabama state police and the Dallas County sheriff’s department were on Bloody Sunday, as violent as the vigilantes were who killed Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo in those weeks, as much progress as America has made in fifty years, something has gone seriously backward since 1965: the quality of American institutions."
[photo above is President Obama embracing a granddaughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. at Selma. This and photo below are White House photos.]
Packer illustrated the difference with examples literally from that day's news. Here are the concluding paragraphs of this trenchant piece, with my emphasis:
"There may still be ordinary Americans as brave and committed to justice as the civil-rights movement’s foot soldiers, but we no longer have a national government (or a federal bench, a press corps, labor unions, businesses, religious groups, universities) capable of coming together with the imagination, wisdom, and self-restraint necessary to achieve something on the scale of voting rights. These days, Congress can hardly keep the Department of Homeland Security open without tearing itself to pieces. As Charlie Dent, a Republican representative from Pennsylvania, said to the Times, “We really don’t have two hundred and eighteen votes to determine a bathroom break over here on our side.”
On Monday, forty-seven Republican senators addressed an open letter to the Iranian leadership, declaring that “we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” The senators noted that Obama will leave office in 2017, while many of them will go on serving for decades—so why should the clerics pay any attention to the executive branch? The senators didn’t release classified U.S. intelligence on the nuclear negotiations, but it’s not altogether clear what stopped them. They’re doing all they can to sabotage their own country’s position in the talks, practically making themselves the de facto ally of hardliners in Tehran. Try to imagine such actions by America’s elected leaders during the Cold War.
It may be that the postwar decades, with a booming mixed economy, middle-class prosperity, and an agreed-upon enemy, created unique conditions for Americans to address some of the country’s deepest problems, such as a century of Jim Crow. Our problems today, from climate change to economic inequality, seem immovable not because they’re so much harder, but because we no longer have the political tools to budge them. Perhaps that’s why, last Saturday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, President Obama spoke more about the daring spirit of the American people than the greatness of constitutional democracy. If solutions arise from this generation and the next, they seem unlikely to come from Washington. They’re more likely to start in obscure places like Selma."
It's a sobering conclusion. One hopes that these problems are not so deeply embedded in today's institutions, or in today's national culture, that they cannot be overcome relatively quickly. But recent events, and of the recent past, suggest he's right about solutions for at least this generation.
A large part of the problem may also be defined as the lack of quality in the people who are in positions of leadership in these institutions. I keep thinking about the nearly 900 pages of the book by Robert Sherwood I read, called Roosevelt and Hopkins, which deals in literally documentary detail with high level decisions and activities in the White House just before and during America's participation in World War II. The immense undertaking in such a short time, the immense dangers of failure, with surrounding politics nearly as idiotic as today's, required near-genius from our leaders, and unrelenting dedication (several died soon afterwards, including Hopkins and FDR.) We got it then. It's not clear that we would get it now.
One more thing... Elizabeth Cobb Hoffman at Reuters chimes in on the Republican Senators letter to Iran:
"What happens when senators and congressmen go around a controversial president to communicate directly with the enemy? They undermine the stability of their own party — and the integrity of the nation.
That’s what happened to the Federalists, the glorious political party of George Washington, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton. Could the same thing happen to today’s Republican Party?...
The American people never forgave the Federalist Party for flirting with treason during that war. Today, Cotton and other Republicans court similar disgust with their disloyalty toward the nation’s sitting president."
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