The Scottish Independence vote: Is the U.S. next?
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The U.S. isn't the U.K. North Dakota is definitely not Scotland, though the oil fields of both create a certain parallel. Still, as world attention turns to its former ruling empire on Thursday, every American should perk up their ears and their imaginations. Could that be us? If the stories I'm telling in The Restless Project are any indication, perhaps.
I studied British history in college, in large part because I saw it as ancient U.S. history, which it is. We should learn all we can from our parent (older brother?) across the Pond. And here's what we can learn from this Scotland vote: It's a nail biter, and most observers thought that impossible even a year ago. Those who think the U.S. is stuck forever in its soul-sucking two-party system should take heart from that (and leaders of said system should be scared.
What's going on in Scotland? You'll get hundreds of opinions, but this seems clear: folks there just don't feel like the government cares about them any more. And things are bad enough that fear of the future is at least neck and neck with fear of change. There's a great story in Salon that tries to explain the roots of the Scottish discontent. I'd like you to read this passage and substitute the words Republican or Democratic where it makes sense.
Neoliberalism, in Britain and elsewhere, has not just hived off collective resources into private hands; it has also hollowed out liberal democratic governments, placing large areas of political debate under the sole purview of dispassionate, spreadsheet-wielding technocrats, beholden only to the markets. The result is an ever-shrinking arena for the rest of us to thrash out ideas. Under this type of politics, most of the political landscape becomes ossified and uncontested. We can squabble over whether the government should implement temporary energy price freezes, but never ask why energy production shouldn’t be in public ownership altogether. We can ponder the finer details of banker bonuses, but never discuss why it is that a mammoth, rentier financial industry is allowed to gamble every day with the world’s economic future—pocketing all the profits when it wins and socializing all the risk when it loses. Amid an orgy of material choice, our political horizons have narrowed to near zero.
The fact is that Scots have been asking lots of questions for themselves and getting clued up in the process—grappling with the implications for energy, currency, international treaties, and constitutional reform. With those questions has come a steep decline in deference toward those who claim to speak with expert authority on such matters. Each dire warning of financial disaster issued by a major bank, business leader, or politician seems to have only hardened support for independence; last week, when Deutsche Bank declared that a yes vote could trigger another Great Depression, many Scots I spoke to literally laughed. The irony—of financial institutions who exploited the current system to cause economic doom, now doom-mongering themselves over any prospect of systemic change—was lost on no one.
Every day, Americans are told not to question what goes on in the halls of high finance, because we aren't smart enough to understand it. We're told not to ask why our only way to plan for the future is to tithe 10 percent of our income to Wall Street and hope we retire during an upswing instead of a depression. We're told it's socialist to question why CEOs routinely earn more than 100 times their employees, or why many of our nation's richest companies pay - astonishingly - no taxes at all.
Don't be surprised if a surprising number of Americans are rooting for Scottish independence, even if they don't know why. And don't be surprised if history doesn't repeat itself, but rather reverses itself, and an independence movement in Britain sparks one in the old colonies. I'm not saying Scottish independence is the better choice, nor am I saying such a movement in America is imminent on the right or on the left. I am saying that it's beautiful to watch people wake up and call BS in a productive, demonstrative way.