Chunk 21: Did Honest Abe make an honest mistake?
Imagine, it’s night time. You’re sitting in the window seat of a plane, flying directly from Australia’s west coast to its east coast. Down below, this is what you see:
Darkness. Alice Springs. Darkness.
Now imagine, you’re making the same journey from America’s west to east coast. Down below, you see this:
Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, West Virginia. All linked, liked a giant daisy chain, from one side of the country to another.
America is 1.3 times bigger than Australia in land size. But whereas a whopping 85% of our population live on the coast, that’s only the case for 40% of the US. The other 60% of their citizens live inland, in states like those I just listed.
In the last election, one of the motivating forces that helped sweep Trump to power was the belief of many Americans that their government just wasn’t working for them anymore (“Drain the swamp!”). But what if they were seeking the wrong solution? What if, in fact, America has simply grown too big to be governed like it is now?
The United States of America was a bold experiment in democracy, undertaken less than 250 years ago, when their population was 2.5 million people. Today, it has reached almost reached 330 million, and have they ever appeared more divided?
Abraham Lincoln famously won the Civil War to preserve the union. But maybe he should have just stopped when he ended slavery? Perhaps America has too many different types of people for them all to be coupled together in their current arrangement? I mean, how much in common does someone who lives in Alaska really have with someone who lives in Florida? Or someone in Hawaii with someone in West Virginia?
I’m not a scholar; I don’t claim to know the answer. But something clearly isn’t working.
I just think it’s worth recognising that there’s a reason why there’s not a United States of Africa. The Egyptians acknowledge they’re different from the Ethiopians; the Moroccans different from the Madagascans. Although, given Africa is three times larger than the US, perhaps this isn’t a fair comparison.
Still, the world’s largest democracy, India, somehow makes government work for all 1.3 billion of its citizens. Perhaps the US would be better suited to their model? India’s system of government is similar in some respects to ours here in Australia, where the head of a governing party - a prime minister - rules, as opposed to a directly elected president who (never more in the US than right now) lords over all. (India also has a president, Ram Nath Kovind, who acts as their head of state, like our Queen Elizabeth II.)
In 1980, before Ronald Reagan was elected, there were questions about whether or not the job of president had become too big for one person. Perhaps now it’s time the US started considering whether their country has become too big for its government.
