A colonial upstart

Went in with my coworkers to a law firm yesterday for a lesson on U.S. trade law and how it's made, plus U.S. civics in general. It was mainly for their benefit, though I learned a few new things that I hadn't known about the way we handle treaties and trade agreements before. Surprisingly interesting, actually, especially to note the incredulity and confusion many of my coworkers felt toward our system, "our way of doing things."

I'll talk about the substance of it in another post, but near the beginning I was struck when the presenter emphasized these differences, noting that citizens of nations with parliamentary governments often get confused by "our different system."

"Our different system"...only 239 years old, and we command such influence! I have read others making this observation many times before, but for some reason it felt more clear at this point than it ever had for me before.

Was our system at all made with the thought that we might one day be so dominant? Unlikely. No young or small nation bothers with that sort of thing. Even today, do we make our laws with a mind to their vast, often indirect, influence? There's certainly a tug-of-war there as far as whether to sacrifice even small gains for ourselves that we might make a better impact on the rest of the world, with the internationalists vs. the neo/paleocons--the internationalists vs. the nationalists, really, though putting it like that sounds somehow stupid.

My instincts lie with the internationalists, though I'm not so naive as to advocate throwing ourselves completely at the mercy of the U.N. in its current state, where China and Russia still exercise veto power. However, the sentimental "city on a hill" and other American exceptionalist drivel that the nationalists so love to spout gets zero sympathy from me.

We are a country of human beings, just like every other state on this earth. We happen to be blessed with certain democratic and meritocratic tendencies--some enshrined in our government, others existing purely by tradition--as well has a vast amount of living space* and natural resources. If pushed far enough and scared well enough, the American people are just as capable of enabling evil as the German and Russian peoples have historically been. Perhaps our institutions would serve as a speed bump on the road to hell, but in the end analysis, our government, just like any other government, really is one of men rather than laws, to contradict President Ford.

At any rate, sovereignty is a purely practical, and hopefully temporary, concern. As I point out above, when put to the test, the "American" prefix has little to do with the "people" that follows it. More on that in another post.





*the comparison to the loaded Lebensraum (edit: as the Nazis used it -- thanks Greg) is apt, I think, considering the way we viewed it when the natives still occupied it.