260604: American Shitshow
Once, before the war, (alas! I dare not say how many times the mood has come!) I, too, was fill’d with doubt and gloom. A foreigner, an acute and good man, had impressively said to me, that day—putting in form, indeed, my own observations: “I have travel’d much in the United States, and watch’d their politicians, and listen’d to the speeches of the candidates, and read the journals, and gone into the public houses, and heard the unguarded talk of men… I have everywhere found, primarily, thieves and scalliwags arranging the nominations to offices, and sometimes filling the offices themselves… Of the holders of public office in the Nation or the States or their municipalities, I have found that not one in a hundred has been chosen by any spontaneous selection of the outsiders, the people, but all have been nominated and put through by little or large caucuses of the politicians, and have got in by corrupt rings and electioneering, not capacity or desert. I have noticed how the millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics are thus the helpless supple-jacks of comparatively few politicians. And I have noticed more and more, the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the government, and openly and shamelessly wielding it for party purposes.”
So reported Walt Whitman, in the years after the American Civil War. The sentiments close to our own, though recorded nearer to the nation’s founding than we to Whitman.
Today, we have a surprising but historically precedented situation, where not just conservatives but even American liberals cling to an idealized view of the American past. Granted, the liberal is under no illusions as to the (racial, sexual, etc) ethics of past ages: He is acutely aware of the failings of Columbus, and Christianity, and the hypocrisies of the Founders on the matter of human freedom. He does not forget the American policy toward Indians, nor the Civil Rights battles of living memory.But he is troubled by the suspicion that American morals—the local prosociality of individuals, which we call common goodness—have seen better days. And he is positive that the standing of constitutional, republican governance in America has never been worse.
Measuring morality is beyond me—though the claim that society has grown more corrupt, over the course of the claimant’s lifetime, seems to be a rare constant in recorded history. It is the default sentiment of the old, to perceive decline, and it is the constant temptation of the young to believe their elders' visions. This alone should give us pause.
On this blog, for the Semiquincentennial, I’d like to challenge these nostalgias—the view that we are in the midst of an unprecedented Constitutional crisis, an unprecedented era of American fraud & corruption & electoral hijinks. Toward that ends, I’d like to tell a handful of stories about American political history which might recontextualize the present moment. Because the history of American democracy is an immunological history, full of illness and antibodies. Our modern political structure and norms are a mess of scar tissue.
Everyone knows the First Amendment. Like the main one, the most important one. In 1791, America's leaders decided free speech was a beautiful idea: everyone, including the press, had the right to assemble and criticize the government.
Well, by 1798 the ruling Federalist Congress decided actually that democracy and speech were a terrible idea and they needed to lock shit down. So they passed the Sedition Act, which made all criticisms of the government illegal. A buncha people were thrown in jail, including newspaper editors and cartoonists political enemies.
Editors were arrested for making fun of how fat & pompous Prez John Adams was. A ship's pilot got drunk and made a tavern joke about Adam's arse; the Feds fined & jailed him. Some of these people died awaiting trial! Govmt just tossed em behind bars indefinitely, contra the whole "speedy right to a hearing" thing, and moved on. A sitting congressman from Vermont was jailed 4 months for making a pamphlet. Then he won re-election from his cell.The only reason it stopped was Adams lost re-election and incoming TJ pardoned everybody. Congress let the laws expire, except I think the Alien Enemies Act, which got used in the World Wars for the mass incarceration of Germans and Japanese. That's within living memory! There are people alive in America who were put in concentration camps by FDR! FDR is the president who tried to pack courts because “checks & balances” was a pesky obstacle to his agenda. And who then decided to serve four terms in office, which scared the shit out of half of Americans, who were all convinced he'd self-elected as dictator for life. Luckily, FDR died in his fourth term, so we never found out whether he’d have stepped down voluntarily.Back to Adams, and stepping forward chronologically...
Jackson is an easy target, everyone knows that Trump is the modern-day Andrew Jackson etc. But let's just give a brief overview.Jackson made the Constitution look like a polite suggestion. While a mere general, he illegally led an army to seize Florida from the Spanish, against the direct orders of his Commander in Chief. Then he ran an unbelievably dirty mudslinging political campaign, claiming all sorts of false and defamatory things about his opponents. Once elected, he unconstitutionally overruled the Supreme Court and militarily deported American Indians on the Trail of Tears. He famously dared the Chief Justice to enforce the court’s ruling—classic military dictator line—I control the army, so good luck stopping me. (Coupla decades later Lincoln followed suit, suspending habeas corpus and defying explicit court rulings.)
Then Jackson shut down the US Bank without Congressional approval. His own Treasury Secretaries kept refusing so he repeatedly fired them and hired new ones til one did what he wanted. That basically crashed the US economy.Then he threatened to send federal troops to South Carolina over tariff issues, and enacted martial law.Then he fired the entire federal government and replaced them with cronies and drinking buddies.All his critics called him King Andrew I, and cartoons showed him in a crown trampling the Constitution. He even got formally censured by the Senate.
Moving forward: John Tyler, 10th US president—John Tyler had... An idiosyncratic interpretation of the Constitution. That interpretation happened to be very personally convenient.When Harrison died, a month into his term, from pneumonia, no one really knew what to do. They hadn't had a president die before.
The Constitution's language was ambiguous. Most people interpreted it to mean that the VP would simply be a temporary acting President. Like for a little, a couple months til there'd be another election.John Tyler, who was Vice President, said Heck naw, that seats mine. He started calling himself President and refused to step down. He decided God had called him to the highest office, so he just moved into the White House and wouldn't leave. He just physically took over and would only answer to President and announced God had chosen him, end of story.
Meanwhile JQA, who's the only surviving connection to the founding fathers by this point, thought this was an abomination and called Tyler His Accidency. And when Harrison's old cabinet wanted to have a vote about it Tyler said No Way Jose This Isn't A Democracy My Word Is Law. Both parties disowned him, everyone was mad, but no one could or would do anything about it, because Tyler physically refused to leave the White House and no one had the gumption to evict him.
Later, future Vice Presidents just winged it & decided to do the same! Because they could, and they figured no one would stop them, and because being a President is super sick if you like power and/or have a big ego. Executive succession procedures weren’t actually formalized for like a hundred years. They just made it up as they went. Elections (and the fate of the Reconstruction) were decided in cigar smoke behind closed doors.
Anyway, I like the John Tyler anecdote because now, in our super legalistic bureaucratic formalized progressive state. Where paperwork is law. We look back and go, Oh! Succession. Of course John Tyler became President. That's how it works! That's the rule.No, there were no rules. People were just making it up as they went, and the gameplay they chose created the rules. The rules are retroactive. They're a response to gameplay.
My view is that Trump is a little weird, historically. In that we haven't had his level of "fuck around and find out" since like, WW2? But that before WW2, Trump levels of "fuck around and find out" were relatively normal, and their main consequence was immunological: The political system developed new counter-moves, and everything became more robust. Less plastic, less flexible, for better and for worse. It raises the floor of how bad things can get. But it also lowers the ceiling of how good things can get. That's what checks & balances are, that's what they do, that's how the political game works.
Nor was the post-WW2 executive branch a paragon of virtue. Truman sent troops to Korea without approval of Congress. Iran-Contra did a backdoor around Congressional embargos, then Reagan pled amnesia when caught. JFK was doing coke in hot tubs with strippers in the sixties. He shared a mistress with a mob boss! We call his administration “Camelot” now and consider it a golden age in American history! They were living under constant thread of nuclear annihilation!
Ditto with corruption. Jackson practically invented cronyism. The Gilded Age & Grant’s administration were just rife with it. Boss Tweed & Tammany Hall ran democratic electoral politics for decades—billions in graft & grift paid out to stuff ballot boxes, intimidate politicians, bribe judges. None of it’s good for the country. But none of it’s new, either.
So when liberals—clear-eyed about Columbus, quick to mention Sally Hemings and the Trail of Tears—think of 21st C America as tottering at the edge of abyss—I think it is worth remembering that the ground has always been unstable.