March 22, 2006
American Chromatic Exceptionalism Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 09:55 AM EST For all the virtues of using "red" and "blue" as political terms (as set forth here), it must be admitted that they are yet another example of America doing things differently from the rest of the world. Everywhere else, red means left because of its historic association with communism, and blue means Tory or Christian Democrat or what have you (though there are no true conservative parties worth mentioning in Europe). But here, for some reason, red has been assigned to the Republican party, and thus, with the present state of our politics, to conservatism. Many other practices exist in which we Americans stubbornly insist on going our own path (sometimes joined by the hybrid nation of Canada): putting the month first when writing dates with numbers; printing calendars Sunday-to-Saturday instead of Monday-to-Sunday; driving on the right side of the road; capital punishment; and, of course, refusing to adopt the metric system. I lived through the metric-system debate in the 1970s, and in retrospect, I realize that it was an important event in our nation's transition from 1960s liberalism to 1980s conservatism (a transition that Nicholas Lemann has analyzed in our pages) Beginning in the early 1970s, Americans were told that the switchover to metric units was inevitable, and that it would be beneficial and painless--even fun! Every newspaper and magazine in the country ran some sort of "humorous" piece in which maxims like "a miss is as good as a mile" or "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" were "translated" into metric. Distances in kilometers began to appear on highway signs, and with dubious precision, product labels rendered "1 pound" as "453.59 grams." Then, after a few years, Americans started to ask: Why are we doing this? Two main reasons were given: It's much easier to perform calculations with metric units, and in any event, the rest of the world uses them. But as Americans examined the issue more closely, these supposed advantages came to seem less important. Few people, it turned out, ever needed to know how many inches were in a mile, and if they did, they could either look it up or use a calculator. Moreover, when it was necessary to make a mental calculation, too many Americans proved just as incapable of multiplying or dividing by 100 as they were of doing so by 12 or 5,280. At the same time, the widespread adoption of duplicate measurements, as on the signs and labels mentioned above, was intended to pave the way for metrification, but it succeeded mainly in proving that it was, indeed, possible to use two systems of measurement at once. The idea of putting a quart of milk in a shopping cart next to a liter of soda turned out to be far less jarring for consumers than it had seemed to bureaucrats. And as the costs and inconveniences of a switchover became clearer, metrification came to look less and less attractive. By the end of the 1970s it was effectively dead--as a government fiat, that is, though many private industries adopted metric units on their own. What made the anti-metrification campaign such a milestone was that it helped put an end to the dominant pattern of American life since the 1930s, in which problems were attacked with broad, sweeping measures emanating from Washington: court decisions, legislation, executive orders, and so forth. The New Deal brought many successful examples of this approach from Congress and the President, while the Supreme Court kicked its reshaping of society into high gear with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Soon civil-rights legislation was reversing centuries of slavery and discrimination, even as constitutional amendments abolished the poll tax and reduced the voting age to 18. Perhaps the last big federal diktat of this sort was the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, which barred states from making abortion illegal. As often happens with social movements, however, repeated successes made the number and zeal of the supporters grow ever bigger even as the list of easy targets grew ever smaller. At some point these trajectories always cross, and a point arrives when the momentum behind the movement becomes disproportionate to the size of the problems it's addressing. What happens next is that the leaders take a step too far, or many steps; the degeneration of anti-communism into McCarthyism is a classic example of this phenomenon. With the top-down approach to social reform, that point arrived in the 1970s, when crusading bureaucrats who had grown up on the New Deal and the civil-rights revolution were reduced to aiming their lances at speed limits, artificial sweeteners, and, as we have seen, even ounces and inches. The biggest shock to this system was the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, which seemed unstoppable and unexceptionable until opponents, most prominently Phyllis Schlafly, made the case against it. But the 1970s revolt against Washington-imposed reforms embraced a wide range of causes, large and small. Since then, the nation has continued to change in many ways, but it's hard to name a court decision, executive order, or congressional act that has been responsible for any major shift in American life (except unintentionally, as with the military communications network that became the Internet). For good or ill, the age when Washington decided where the nation should go and then led or pushed it there is over. Part of this is because all the problems with solutions amenable to this approach have been solved, but another part is because in the 1970s Americans finally decided that they'd had enough and told their government so.
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