I recently finished reading Joseph Ellis's phenomenal book, Founding Brothers, and I have to admit I am somewhat at a loss as to how to digest it.
Every chapter is full of startling accounts of our revered, but very human, founders. Perhaps the most exciting, revealing and, in truth, disheartening, chapter is called The Collaborators. The chapter recounts the partisan battle that raged between two sets of opposing partners: President John Adams and his wife, Abigail on one side; Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on the other.
The issue was Federalism vs. Republicanism. George Washington and John Adams's view of the necessity for a strong executive vs. Jefferson and Madison's view of the primacy of states' rights; Washington and Adams's conviction that Americans must begin to "think of themselves as a collective unit with a common destiny" vs. Jefferson and Madison's emphasis on individual liberty and personal freedom.
So, not much has changed in this debate, really - a notion that I find simultaneously fascinating and dispiriting.
One doesn't typically think of Jefferson and Madison as waging partisan warfare as we experience it today, but wage it they did, and then some.
Madison engaged in most of the dirty work, while Jefferson tried to remain above the fray. Nevertheless, everyone - inside government and out - knew that Jefferson was leading and directing the campaign against President Adams - all while serving as Adams's Vice-President.
Ellis says:
Jefferson's interpretation of the escalating party warfare was richly ironic, since he had contributed to the breakdown of personal trust and the complete disavowal of bipartisan cooperation by rejecting Adams's offer to renew the old partnership. But Jefferson was fairly typical in this regard, lamenting the chasm between long-standing colleagues while building up the barricades from his side of the divide. Federalists and Republicans alike accused their opponents of narrow-minded partisanship, never conceding or apparently even realizing that their own behavior also fit the party label they affixed to their enemies.
"Enemies." Most people are probably vaguely aware that there was some tension during the founding of our nation, some push and pull around the issue of states' rights, slavery and such. But we don't typically think of the Founders as being each others' enemies.<div>
</div><div>Yet the revolution was still very new and emotions were at a fever pitch. Both sides felt the fate of the Republic hung in the balance. Unlike our over-the-top politicians of today, they were probably right. The nation was in a very precarious state, and all the participants in this battle were smart enough and had enough foresight to know that the outcome could likely determine the course of the nation's history for years to come.
The stakes are not as high in our era, despite the hyperventilating from the right. Nevertheless, modern conservatives are getting a lot of mileage out of framing today's legislative maneuvering as a "battle for the nation's very identity", and painting their opponents as "enemies of freedom."
Other parallels between then and now are truly remarkable:
At the domestic level...Adams inherited a supercharged political atmosphere every bit as ominous and intractable as the tangle on the international scene...Political parties were congealing into doctrinaire ideological camps, but neither side possessed the the verbal or mental capacity to regard the other as anything but treasonable; and finally, the core conviction of the entire experiment in republican government - namely, that all domestic and foreign policies derived their authority from public opinion - conferred a novel level of influence to the press, which had yet to develop any established rules of conduct or standards for distinguishing rumors from reliable reporting.
Clearly, the press, along with the rest of us, has not evolved as far as we might have hoped. In fact, the closer you look at the subject, the worse the press looks throughout the course of our history.
(Unless I am misreading history, there seems to have been one period of time, roughly from World War II through Watergate, when the press as an institution made a sincere effort to serve what we typically think of as its "proper" function - that is, it tried to live up to its stated mission of disseminating information to the public, while abiding by the principles of truthfulness, accuracy, objectivity and fairness. Trust in the "media" appears to have peaked during this era and it has declined ever since. In the 19th Century and before, the press was largely a partisan tool used for political purposes by all sides.)
But perhaps the most startling "revelation' in this chapter of Ellis's book is the way in which Jefferson and Madison wielded "national security" (though it was not referred to as such) as a bludgeon with which to beat Adams over the head, just as Dick/Liz Cheney and the GOP continue to do to Democrats and President Obama today.
According to Ellis's account, it was an "article of faith" within the Jefferson-Madison collaboration that, despite all of Adams's actions to the contrary - including inviting Republicans to serve on the peace delegation to France - Adams actually wanted war with France.
He was, declared Madison, "the only obstacle to accommodation, and the real cause of war, if war takes place."
Jefferson and Madison even managed to persuade themselves that Adams had conconcted the entire XYZ Affair to mobilize popular support for a declaration of war...Adams had orchestrated a "libel on the French government" as part of his "swindling experiment."
As if to further drive home the point that nothing is new under the sun, even where our revered Founders are concerned, Ellis concludes this passage in the book with the following:
...The primary function of the collaboration between Jefferson and Madison was to generate mutual reinforcement for their uncompromising assault on the presidency, frequently at the expense of even the most rudimentary version of factual accuracy. In their minds, the political stakes were enormous, the threat posed by the Federalists put the entire republican experiment at risk, the battle was to the death, and taking prisoners was not permitted. They convinced themselves that Adams was the enemy, and then all the evidence fell in place around that rock-ribbed, if highly questionable, conviction.
Jefferson and Madison as George Bush and Karl Rove? John Adams as Dick Cheney? Adams did, after all, sign one of the most notorious pieces of legislation in American history when he set his pen to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, a terrible mistake and a huge over-reaction that simply "confirmed" the deepest suspicions of the opposition.
What are we to make of all this?
We who live in the present do not have the benefit of hindsight, as Ellis does with his subject. We can no more discern the "truth" behind today's propaganda than the public could in 1798. Nor can we foresee with any degree of certainty where our nation's present arguments and dilemmas will lead us.
It is safe to conclude, however, that no one so blinded by partisan ideology, whether today or two hundred years ago, cares particularly much what the "truth" is, as long as their party's interest is being served. Neither, it seems, would most of our country's rabid ideologues, past or present, be capable of recognizing the "truth" if they tripped over it. </div><div>
</div><div>This is either a very funny and liberating realization, or a very depressing one. I can't decide which.
But most fascinating of all to me is this "truth" that emerges from Ellis's book. As he states it:
With the American Revolution, as with all revolutions, different factions came together in common cause to overthrow the reigning regime, then discovered in the aftermath of their triumph that they had fundamentally different and politically incompatible notions of what they intended...The subsequent political history of the United States then became an oscillation between new versions of the old tension, which broke out in violence only on the occasion of the Civil War.
But the key point is that the debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity... Lincoln once said that America was founded on a proposition that was written by Jefferson in 1776. We are really founded on an argument about what that proposition means.
We still live with all of these internal contradictions. The problem that is more pertinent to today's political and social culture is that the public too often wants it both ways.
Conservative Arizona residents scream "tyranny" at a proposed national solution to soaring health care costs, yet blame the federal government for not doing enough to stop illegal immigration across its own state border. Conservatives want to "starve the beast" and limit the power of the federal government, yet they imagined for George W. Bush a "unitary executive" with powers far in excess of anything Washington or Adams could have foreseen. Tea Party activists march against the "totalitarian" government in Washington and protest against taxes, but vociferously oppose any attempt to limit or change Social Security or Medicare.
Texas State School Board conservatives, who are possibly the nation's strongest advocates of states' rights, want to eliminate Thomas Jefferson from the social studies curriculum because of his insistence on a "wall of separation" between Church and State, conveniently forgetting that he was perhaps the greatest champion of the republican principles they so deeply cherish.
Liberals like me want to imagine that it is possible to create national solutions to our nation's problems. We want to imagine a nation bound together by a strong sense of common purpose; a nation that lives by Paul Wellstone's well-known phrase, "We all do better when we all do better." But many of us imagine these things without a proper understanding of the differences that exist among communities in North Dakota, North Carolina and North Jersey.
It very well may be that we will never find "one size fits all" solutions to some of our economic, social and political problems. The country is too large, too diverse, too unruly. And, at the present moment, too impatient, too intolerant and too suspicious of government and each other to allow for the idea of a "collective unit with a common destiny."
Yet somehow, as improbable as it sometimes seems, most people still think of themselves as Americans, despite all of our differences. It was improbable in 1789, when thirteen colonies with no history of regarding themselves as a nation cobbled together a compromise solution of "divided sovereignty" that has somehow managed to endure for over two hundred years.
It is equally improbable today in a country of fifty states and a population that incorporates countless ethnicities, cultures, languages and personal histories.
Call me naive, but I still believe that President Obama's presidency is an opportunity for the country to re-imagine itself as a unified people with a common purpose. I believe that is why he was elected. I believe that is why so many young people and first-time voters swept him into office, against all odds.
Though Joseph Ellis teaches us that we can never really understand our own time until years later, when historians start to fight over it, I remain confident in my belief that Mr. Obama's goal is to build up our nation, not tear it apart. Those who see him as an existential threat to the nation, as Jefferson and Madison saw John Adams, are viewing today's events through the same very distorted lens.
Ironically, it is President Obama who sees himself as the type of president capable of "binding up the nation's wounds," while those who so violently oppose him succeed only in opening old wounds and gashing the body politic with new ones.
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