Perfect is the enemy of good.
The best selling point for capitalism is also the best selling point for politics in the U.S.:
It’s messy.
Messy is good. Messy means no one gets to get too comfortable. Comfort is tyranny. Comfort means the few absolutely enjoy a greater standard of living than the many. Comfort is fiction. Messy is reality.
Messy capitalism means the system can be manipulated. But a system that allows for course corrections is a dynamic one, that rewards innovation, that celebrates achievement.
Messy politics is much the same. The worst that actually comes from messy politics is an opposition that obsesses over reclaiming power.
In every other form of politics, other than the republican democracy practiced in the U.S., tyranny is the word they’re always trying to hide in the description. A system predicated on checks and balances prevents tyranny. For two hundred and fifty years, including a civil war that radically transformed the reputation of the president whose election led to it, the U.S. has maintained an otherwise impossible ideal.
Because it doesn’t look ideal.
It’s the saints of imperfection. It’s the belief that things can go horribly wrong (the Great Depression), but the system endures, both in its politics and in its economy, and somehow manages to enter a world war and emerge on the other side on better footing than anyone.
It’s the belief that mistakes, small and grave, are not the final outcome.
It’s the belief that we can disagree and believe we exist in different cultures, but we don’t, because even the worst disagreement we ever had failed to end the country, the twin systems guiding it.
It’s the belief that innovation drives advancement. For most of human history the core belief was that you could just steal it from someone else, and every single time this somehow only led to decay.
It’s still early, sure. People like to say the U.S. is still a young country, that there are other countries doing any number of things better.
Better needs to add up, though. The U.S. has fought hard not to fight every war it ever entered, up to and including WWII, which no one could have imagined, both within the U.S. and elsewhere, would’ve led to a behemoth most of the world resents, today, including many within its own borders, among its own citizens.
But there are still great demands on this country, and that, perhaps, cuts through everything else, the belief that even if perceived as adrift it’s still the most needful nation in the world. The world needs it.
The U.S. needs its politics as exactly as they are, it needs its capitalism.
It’s perfectly imperfect. Exactly the way it needs to be.
