Rethink.

Some of you have asked me about what basic his­tory you need to know in order to fully com­pre­hend Amer­i­can pol­i­tics.

I think you’re ask­ing me this because you’re see­ing the same old argu­ments come up over and over. You’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing if the rep­e­ti­tion of cer­tain lines of thought is a cycle which repeats through­out his­tory.

If you sus­pect that, you’re exactly right: the polit­i­cal argu­men­ta­tion of today is descended from just a frac­tion of Amer­i­can his­tory alone. Fur­ther­more, the ear­lier the argu­men­ta­tion occurs in our his­tory, the more it repeats. So except for bring­ing up one poet below, this “guide” doesn’t go past 1900.

• pre-1776: the set­tling of the con­ti­nent, espe­cially the spirit and poli­cies of the Puri­tans in New Eng­land, is what you want to know. The only thing you need to know about the French and Indian War is that France got beat by Eng­land and the colonies. The trash­ing was so thor­ough it was, for all intents and pur­poses, the end of seri­ous French involve­ment on this con­ti­nent (i.e. we don’t speak French, even those in Que­bec who are Fran­coph­o­nes do that out a renewed sense of nation­al­ism — 50 years ago no one was speak­ing French in Que­bec). The rea­son why you want to know the Puri­tans is because they are cen­tral to the thought of Alexis de Toc­queville: you can see me muse on the sort of tyranny he wants democ­racy to avoid becom­ing, and in an attempt to do my best impres­sion of him, won­der about the rela­tion between the sacred and the sec­u­lar.
• Rev­o­lu­tion and Con­sti­tu­tion: 1776 is when we declare inde­pen­dence, 1789 is when the Con­sti­tu­tion is rat­i­fied and we receive the bless­ings of Union. The Arti­cles of Con­fed­er­a­tion, the pre-Constitutional order, are incred­i­bly sig­nif­i­cant as they rep­re­sent a type of repub­li­can­ism we are always tempted by: Why doesn’t free­dom mean com­plete local con­trol? Shouldn’t we relate to States the way Jef­fer­son related to Vir­ginia, call­ing it “my coun­try?” I say “tempted” because Union is the only guar­an­tee that the States wouldn’t go to war with each other; there is obvi­ously a strong case to be made for the Arti­cles. But a Union where the pop­u­lar will can ulti­mately remain supreme while we’re kept safe — heck, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me. The doc­u­ments you should know are the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and the Fed­er­al­ist Papers: there’s a lot more than this, i.e. Tom Paine, the Anti-Federalist, Franklin, etc. Dwelling on the major argu­ments brings forth the key issues, though. For exam­ple, I think Paine’s full polit­i­cal thought is com­pre­hended by Jef­fer­son, who does seem to think Amer­ica can be wholly sec­u­lar at some point. So.
• The entirety of Amer­i­can his­tory from 1820–1860 is grap­pling with slav­ery. The South does not have the pop­u­la­tion to keep the House, but with slave states, can keep par­ity in the Sen­ate. Slav­ery can be out­lawed by a sim­ple major­ity vote of Con­gress: it is never men­tioned explic­itly in the Con­sti­tu­tion, and even under the Arti­cles, things like the North­west Ordi­nance banned slav­ery in the ter­ri­to­ries it orga­nized. Con­tra what other schol­ars think, Jack­son­ian democ­racy is a dis­trac­tion, a pur­pose­ful dis­trac­tion. Ulti­mately it led to Stephen Dou­glas’ idea of “pop­u­lar sov­er­eignty,” where new states tak­ing votes on their con­sti­tu­tion — and not acts of Con­gress — would deter­mine the legal­ity (and implic­itly the moral­ity) of slav­ery. Never mind that “acts of Con­gress” deter­mined whether a ter­ri­tory had the right to become a state in the first place, never mind that acts of Con­gress usu­ally delin­eated the exact bounds of a ter­ri­tory. Even if you don’t agree with it, famil­iar­ity with Lincoln’s thought is a must: through him comes one of the bet­ter understandings/critiques of the Dec­la­ra­tion, and a set of the­o­log­i­cal virtues Amer­ica should adhere to if it is to pros­per and not destroy itself.
• The next two major schools of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal thought are the Tran­scen­den­tal­ists (Thoreau, Emer­son) and the Pro­gres­sives (Woodrow Wil­son, John Dewey). I don’t write on either of these schools because the argu­men­ta­tion is too close to our own. You see the argu­ment that we can live in some sort of anar­chis­tic peace or that progress needs to be embraced by the peo­ple and the State with­out excep­tion all the time. If you want some­thing deeper, try Emily Dick­in­son: a freedom-loving peo­ple can leave one alone one’s whole life. How can alien­ation from the com­mu­nity be rec­on­ciled with being a polit­i­cal ani­mal by nature? Robert Frost grap­ples also with the theme of thought and Amer­i­can life: How is it pos­si­ble to be thought­ful in a nation cen­tered on the practical?
  

Tech­no­rati Tags: amer­i­can his­tory, pol­i­tics, lin­coln, jef­fer­son, frost dick­in­son, hamil­ton

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