Thinking North America

Inroads: A Journal of Opinion, Summer-Fall, 2008 by Philip Resnick

3. Democratic institutions

These have been clearly embedded in the American system from the beginning. One thinks of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, of Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas ("These States have assumed the task to put in forms of lasting power and practicality ... the democratic-republican principle" (11)) and of Harold Laski's mid-twentieth-century The American Democracy. In Canada, democracy has enjoyed a less mercurial development, more in the British mould, though with American features such as populist movements, especially in the west. In Mexico, democracy has proven a more uncertain characteristic, winning at moments in mid-19th century and after 1910, but going into long periods of eclipse such as the Porfirian dictatorship of the late 19th century and the 80 years of one-party domination by the PRI, which ended only in 2000.

4. Levels of development

Both the United States and Canada are first-world societies, members of the G-8, with high levels of GDP per capita ($41,890 in the U.S. and $33,375 in Canada in 2007-8), high levels of public education and literacy, social programs (albeit stronger in Canada than in the United States) and well-established bureaucratic and legal norms. On the negative side, racism has long undermined equal treatment where American blacks were concerned, and Native/Aboriginal peoples have been marginalized in both countries. Mexico, compared to its two North American neighbours, is a second-world society ($10,751 GDP per capita in 2007-8), with huge income gaps between the middle and upper middle classes and the lower classes, between north and south, between creoles and indigenas. (12) The theme of Lesley Simpson's book Many Mexicos, (13) with its description of four or five distinct societies with gaps between them equivalent to the dimensions of India's caste system, is almost as true today as it was 65 years ago. To this might be added the depredations of a narco-economy--the dirty money, corruption and violence it engenders.

5. A culture of exuberance vs. a culture of doubt

In the United States, a buoyant and extroverted tone has tended to dominate, exemplified in such figures as Herbert Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, in American cinema and in a good deal of American pop culture, from jazz to rock and roll. One of de Tocqueville's more telling observations about American life notes, "They clutch everything and hold nothing fast." (14) As Max Lerner put it in arguing the case for America as a civilization,

   Most Americans persisted in their image
   of America as an unfinished country in
   which history was the art of the possible,
   but in which the possible, by experience,
   seemed to stretch further than
   anywhere else ... Since the beginning
   there have been two crucial images in
   the American mind. One is that of the
   self-reliant craftsman, whether pioneer,
   farmer, or mechanic ... the second that
   of a vast continent to be discovered,
   explored, cleared ... The American will
   not tolerate the fate of being boxed in
   like a trapped rat. (15)