When folks tell me the calamity of the last presidential election is unprecedented and has wrecked whatever trust they’d had in the American experiment of representative democracy, I find myself wincing and thinking that this is terrible alright, but not unique.
Brutal divisiveness has swamped our national boat before but never sank it. A fiercely competitive political duality is part of our national character. It is a pattern as deeply entrenched as the all-embracing principle set in stone on the building of Supreme Court which reads, “equal justice under law.”
Labels change, terms come and go, but our intractable struggle has been generally between a reactionary conservatism, which sees equality as an egregious leveling, and an expansive progressivism, which sees equality as the gateway to inclusive opportunity and social justice.
This American dualism has been with us from the beginning in one form or another. Although comparisons and generalizations are odious, we know that the terrible tar-and-feathering of King George loyalists, the monstrousness of Jim Crow and the KKK Southern white aristocracy, even the viciousness of the “lost cause” of the War Between the States that killed more Americans than any of our other wars, are political ghosts that still haunt our collective psyche. Our modern dualism coalesced during the Great Depression, after the market crash of 1929, spinning out into the Republican and Democratic parties as we know them now.
The point is that our history tells us that the violence of our differences today are not poised to destroy us. These differences are troubling, infuriating, damaging and terrifying, but I don’t think they are dismantling.
Many of us take comfort in this assumption. It may be cold comfort, but I believe it’s fueling the current loyal opposition — the likes of Cory Booker, New Mexico’s Melany Stansbury, Liz Cheney, Jasmine Crockett, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Hakeem Jeffries — to fearlessly oppose what they see as the Godzilla of modern Republicanism.
They are doing so despite ominous threats of personal retaliation and unconstitutional persecution, threats that echo the horrors of blacklisting and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and McCarthyism in the 1950s when reactionary conservatives of both parties sought to smother dissent.
It was a dangerous time then, and is a dangerous time now, for sure. We do not know what a MAGA-driven FBI will be like, especially with its unprecedented powers of surveillance. We don’t know how a MAGA-sympathizing attorney general will behave. The political appointees who are running our justice system now seem more interested in loyalty to the president than loyalty to the rule of law. Solid proof their motives and intents elude us still.
What is clear is that MAGA Republicanism is an extreme and decadent form of reactionary conservatism. We see every day that it’s abandoning a more benign form of conservatism which values genuine economic competition, a reverence for precedence, history, and culture, the dependability of the tried and true, and supports the liberating influence of rigorous education.
In its MAGA form, reactionary politics seeks to choke out all differences, all debate, all compassion, and portrays those of modest means who’ve had to struggle to stay afloat as being whining losers. MAGAism is an anathema to the Jeffersonian ideal of equality. Under its aegis, conservatism today is represented by a political party dominated by the worst tendencies of American culture — its sadistic aristocratic racism, its brutalizing misogyny, its cruel and pathetic homophobia, its reflex toward factionalism over federalism, its coveting of the “divine right” of one religion to the exclusion of all others, its ersatz nobility of wealth, and the reflex to pit mere financial oligarchy against the decency of democracy.
MAGA Republicanism today has no truck with what revolutionary era politicians valued the most. They called it “virtue,” which meant, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, Justice.”
Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas E. Ricks writes in his insightful book “First Principles,” that virtue was, “the essential element in public life…. It meant putting the common good before one’s own interests.” The founders saw the constitutional structure of checks and balances as not only embodying virtue but making it possible.
Could they have foreseen the current megalomaniacs trashing our government? “Did the founders anticipate a Donald Trump?” Ricks asks. He affirms that they did. James Madison, for instance, wrote in the Federalist Papers, “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Jefferson echoed him saying, “bad men will sometimes get in, & with such an immense patronage, may make great progress in corrupting the public mind & principles. This is a subject with which wisdom & patriotism should be occupied.”
So far, though, extreme partisanship and the divisive duality it causes, appears no match for the Constitution. We are still seeing that, “Madison’s checks and balances operate robustly,” Ricks contends. Madison designed a structure that routinely has taken the momentum away from people “acting unethically and venally,” Ricks believes. “Again, our national political gridlock sometimes is not a bug but a feature. It shows the machinery of the systems works.”
American dualism is close to gridlock now. The courageous loyal opposition could be on the brink of winning more special elections and perhaps even gaining back a majority in the House of Representatives. When one half of a dualistic political culture like ours will go so far as to support an insurrection to retain power, the achievement of gridlock becomes a paradoxical and unlikely path toward progress. Perhaps it could even restore to us at some point a federal government that protects its citizens from the forces of greed and inequality rather than harassing them and driving them into arbitrary impoverishment.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Well said. Thank you
I hope you’re right, my brother, I surely do hope you’re right.