Editor’s note: This article has been adapted from the newly released Democracy or Republic: The People and the Constitution.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {L} ast week, I turned on the news to see Nancy Mace — a Republican congresswoman from South Carolina — walking through the hallways of the House of Representatives with a scarlet A emblazoned on her shirt. I immediately pondered two questions. First, has she actually read Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter? If she had, I’m not sure that’s the letter she would have chosen. And second, what was her point?
In fact, the political spectacle of this whole era may be summarized by that question: What is all of this supposed to accomplish? What did the Founding Fathers intend for us to do with these institutions of government they built for us? Mace, of course, is a ridiculous figure — too absurd even to be parodied. But the fact that her actions fall within today’s realm of acceptable behavior for an elected representative says something about the pointlessness of all our politicking.
If you go by the rhetoric of the two parties today, politics is like a holy crusade. Politicians frequently invoke martial metaphors: One side pledges to “take back the White House” and another to “retake the House,” as if the seat of the executive branch is territory that has been lost to the other army. For her silly little part in the story, Mace fits into this genre of politics. She is being persecuted by evil and vile forces that bedevil the nation. The people need to wake up to these outrages. What exactly these are, she is not entirely certain, but if you go to Nancy Mace dot com and donate $23 today, you can help her figure it out.
Framing politics as a winner-takes-all fight between good and evil is hardly a new phenomenon. Perhaps its greatest expression came from Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912, Roosevelt challenged his one-time friend and political supporter, William Howard Taft, for the Republican presidential nomination. When he lost, he and his supporters formed their own Progressive Party, which nominated him as its candidate. In his speech to the delegates, Roosevelt thundered:
Surely there never was a fight better worth making than the one in which we are engaged. . . . Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness; and even though we who now lead may for the time fail, in the end the cause itself shall triumph. . . . We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.
Roosevelt was actually an adroit compromiser during his presidential tenure (1901–09), finding ways to advance progressive policies within a Republican Party that still was predominantly conservative. This speech is not the measure of his legacy. It is an outlier.
The problem is that this rhetoric has now become the norm rather than the exception. It is now how, in the ordinary course of politics, the two political factions see each other. Republicans and Democrats today conceive of each other as totally, irredeemably corrupted. The two sides fight over everything, large and small, from major problems to utter trivialities. To borrow a phrase from Madison’s Federalist No. 10, “where no substantial occasion presents itself,” they fight tooth-and-nail over “the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions.”
The mutual hatred between the Left and the Right leaves little political space for compromise. Fundamentally, they do not wish to compromise; they want to destroy each other. They hope that each election will be the final triumph of their side over the opposition, the victory of the forces of good over the forces of evil. So it is little wonder that our government has been so frequently halted by gridlock. The left and right wish to be hegemonic, but the Constitution is designed to prevent factional hegemons from emerging in our country. If the two sides enter the government not with a spirit of compromise but with a spirit of destruction, they should expect to be blocked at virtually every turn — which is precisely what has happened.
There have actually been periods in our country when big disagreements between the parties gave way to compromise and ultimately national reconciliation. The most significant was spearheaded by two of the most important men of the American Founding: Thomas Jefferson and Madison, whose political moderation following their ascendancy to power in 1801 led eventually to the temporary collapse of the two-party system altogether, for the grounds of conflict simply evaporated.
The politics of the 1790s were ugly, as the country split over domestic and foreign affairs. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans accused Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists of elitism and secretly planning to impose a monarchy on the nation. The Federalists responded that the Democratic-Republicans were godless Jacobins, intent on uprooting the entire social order. This clash culminated when the Federalist-dominated Congress enacted the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to defame the government.
In the election of 1800, Jefferson triumphed over John Adams for the presidency. Jefferson could have gone measure for measure against the Federalists and stuck them with a version of the same Sedition Act that had been imposed on the Democratic-Republicans. However, in an often-overlooked gesture of national reconciliation, he purposefully turned down the political rhetoric. In his first inaugural address, Jefferson urged calm:
We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.
This was not mere rhetoric from Jefferson. He followed it up with a policy of reconciliation, such that by 1820 the Federalist Party had ceased to exist, being absorbed by the Republicans.
The point is not to idealize the Jeffersonian era — nor to deny that Jefferson and his allies contributed to the nastiness of the 1790s. It is rather to draw lessons about how the people of that time, both average Americans and elites, viewed politics. They wanted political harmony, believed that common ground was possible, and found ways to make it a reality. They understood the difference between opinions and principles. They appreciated that a free-flowing discourse was essential to discovering shared interests.
The United States of the 21st century makes no such collective effort. Instead, Roosevelt’s extraordinary rhetoric of 1912 has become ordinary for us. We declare all differences of opinion as not only differences of principle but signs of our opponents’ evil. Politics has become like a religion — and a simplistic Manichaeism at that. This is true of our political elites, as this rhetoric comes from the top; and it is true of average Americans, many of whom ravenously feast on a steady diet of political hatred, through both social media and cable news.
This is no way to run a country — any country. But it certainly dooms us to failure under a consensus-based regime like the United States Constitution. If we want to rail against the evils of our opponents for nothing more than the sheer pleasure of the cathartic release, so be it. Nothing will get done while we spew our splenetic bile at one another. But if we actually want to solve problems in this country, we need to recognize that, under our system of government, working together is the only way to do that.