Democracies are better in crisis conditions. The Framers devised a government that wouldn’t work very well under most circumstances, but when a crisis loomed, cooperation would span the chasms that normally separated the branches from each other and the states from the federal government and “considerate and virtuous citizens” from the uneducated rabble. Madison’s republic is built on social distrust and Newtonian mechanics. In a crisis, we get to keep the mechanics, but the common threat does temporary duty as “trust” and we work together. That’s the idea.
You’d think we could do it better than that after a while. Still, every looming (as opposed to an actually occurring) crisis takes power from some and gives it to others. That means that the industry of pointing to and describing the steady advance of a “looming crisis” is a rapidly growing industry. Taking one step in any direction is hazardous if there is a slippery slope two steps in every direction. And if experts, now widely reviled as the tools of [fill in name of group] can’t be trusted—and they can’t if there is always a group of “my experts” opposed by a group of “your experts”—then every uneducated opinion is as good as any other.
Under those circumstances, questions don’t aggregate. Therefore answers don’t aggregate. Therefore planning for crises that are certain but not immediate, is stuck in the governmental dilemma the Framers built for us.
I have global warming in mind. The idea of the canary in the coalmine is a warning sign from the standpoint of the miners. When the canary dies, we miners feel an urgent need to get out and get some fresh air. But with global warming, everyone feels that someone else is “the miners.” We are prepared to mourn the loss of that innocent canary, but we still believe in coal and we aren’t the ones in the mine. But, of course, we are.
It is a difficulty, particularly in the case of global warming where we actually ARE the miners, but it is not a new difficulty. Here are a couple of clips from Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War. It’s a fictional account, but Wouk continually faces the dilemma of making up “new facts” when the actual ones are widely known, or just using the correct ones. In those circumstances, he simply fills in the true history as the context for his characters, some of which are fictional (Pug Henry) and some of which are not (FDR).
On Memorial Day, 1940, the actual President Roosevelt asks the fictional Pug Henry to join him in the President’s reviewing stand. During the parade, Roosevelt handed Henry a slip of paper with these numbers on it.
Public Attitude Toward War, 28 May 1941
For getting in if no other way to win 75%
Think we’ll eventually get in 80%
Against our getting in now 82%
Here’s a little speech Roosevelt gave to Pug Henry along with the slip of paper. So far as I know, the speech is fictional, but the concerns were thought to be strategically plausible.
“If we get into war, Hitler will at once walk into French West Africa. He’ll have the Luftwaffe at Dakar, where they can jump over to Brazil. He’ll put new submarine pens there, too. The Azores will be in his palm. The people who are screaming for convoy now (“screaming their opposition to U. S. convoys,” he means) simply ignore these things. Also the brute fact that 82%...of our people don’t want to go to war.”
This is May 1940. In August 1940 the Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, just in case the United States might need an army if it were to enter the war. The bill passed the House of Representatives by a single vote, and even that might have benefited from the very agile gavel of Speaker Sam Rayburn. In December, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and we declared ourselves in a state of war against “the axis powers.” Roosevelt in his little speech was looking at the seemingly unstoppable German army on the one hand and the implacable opposition to war by four fifths of Americans on the other.
In this instance, Japan provided us the canary in the coal mine. That is what got us from that 82% to D-Day in France, 67 years ago today. The attack on Pearl Harbor wasn’t just a catastrophe; it was an act of war. It was the infliction of harm by a navy willing and able to inflict it. Being attacked, like the prospect of being hanged, “concentrates the mind wonderfully. I chose a landing craft view for D-Day, by the way, because a friend of mine at church piloted one of those on D-Day. It's not the most graphic picture of the invasion I have ever seen, but it is the one he saw, so it matters to me.
Global warming isn’t like that. No one attacks. Polar bears drown. The mythical “Northwest Passage” becomes actual. Investors are buying up land on which wheat has never been grown so they will own it when the temperatures and the rainfall at those new latitudes will support wheat farming. The water at Florida’s coastlines is rising, by my best recollection, at the rate of an inch a decade. Here is a collection of more scary stuff.
But the questions about global warming and what to do about it don’t aggregate into a single national concern. No one has attacked us. The canary hasn’t died. And most of the people think there will be plenty of time to “do something” when the crisis in upon us. Then they will demand that Congress pass HR 1, the “End Global Warming Now” Act. Then they will complain about the untrustworthiness of government when the climate doesn’t turn around, as Congressional mandate has instructed it to, and return to the values of 1700 A. D.
If it was a real crisis, someone would have warned us, right?
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