Democracy has done plenty of gob-smackingly dumb things over the ages, reelecting Obama, putting Socrates on trial, passing prohibition, and those are among its less ugly disgraces. But there’s also the really stupid things it has almost done, that good people have had to run around expending enormous energy to keep it from doing.

Lord Charnwood’s book on Abraham Lincoln says that in August 1864 it appeared to many astute observers that the American electorate might deny him reelection, elevating the resolute George McClellan in his place, and thereby likely forcing the government to come to a settlement with the rebellion on the verge of defeating it, perhaps even revoking the Emancipation Proclamation. It wound up that Lincoln won handily, in part thanks to pressure tactics used on union soldiers described by my friend Jonathan White in his new book Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln, but let the deep shame of the near-miss aspect of the situation sink in for a moment. We seriously toyed with getting rid of Lincoln. Right when he was about to win. At the risk of preserving slavery.

Much less is at stake, but this August it looks like the Scots, a people I apparently have some genetic relationship with, will very nearly vote for their full independence from the United Kingdom. The odds remain against it, but the polling is getting pretty close. A longtime opponent of Scottish Independence lays out a fulsome case in the National Interest for why it would be an utter “folly”: Little institutional groundwork to prepare has been done, the pro–Independence party wrongly just assumed Scotland would get automatic EU membership, wrongly just assumed it could keep using the pound, has totally unclear plans for what will happen to the share of the national debt it will inherit, the nuclear weapons it will inherit, and on and on. Their first prime minister would likely be Alex Salmond, a man who easily makes George McClellan look like a tower of wisdom and virtue. RTWT.

As far as I can tell, there is no pressing reason for it, either of advantage, safety, or mistreatment. Can someone explain to me why Independence is needed? Could it really be just what it appears, a case of auto-pilot resort to literary and grievance politics causing a civilized people to sleep-walk into a pointless mess?

Those in the know say Mel Gibson remains silent about whether he will accept a Salmond offer to become Deputy Defense Minister, and I haven’t had the heart to do the research about whether the band Big Country (apparently active again) supports Independence, and if so plans to change the lyrics of their ’80s hit. I suppose the chorus would now have to be:

In a little country,
dreams stay with you,
like a lover’s voice
fires the mountainside.

A Scotland that left its storied independence and intractability of old as a kind of poetic resource for its romantics and regional pride, but that in its day-to-day politics remained engaged in the long old project of Greater Britain, might well seem to have something interesting and grand about it; but this, this just seems staggeringly foolish, and more than a bit little.