Octopus Overlords

merican democracy has had a rough few years. We seem to have worn out the word “unprecedented.” Even if the pace of the news out of Washington has slowed in the Biden era, the respite still feels precarious.

But if you look back further in history, American democracy has seen some crazy before. In fact, in the years between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century, U.S. politics was far more unruly, violent and corrupt than it’s been before or since, for politicians and ordinary Americans alike. It was a period of mass participation, but also mass outrage. Even as millions turned out to vote, march and fight, many agreed with the populist newspaper the Nonconformist when it grumbled, “we are the worst governed country on the face of the earth.”

It might be hard to accept that the political worries of a nation of mutton-chopped Rutherfords could feel as urgent as our own. But the volume of politics in the late 1800s drowns out anything any living American has experienced. For one thing, that era saw the highest turnouts in U.S. history. Imagine if, instead of the impressive 66 percent of eligible voters who went to the polls this past November, the 2020 election drew a turnout of 82 percent, as in 1876. Or if, instead of being decided by hundreds of thousands of votes in half-dozen swing states, elections were won, as in 1884, by just 1,047 voters in one state. Or if, instead of lies about widespread fraud, tens of thousands of votes really were stolen at each election.

Imagine a 2020 every four years, for 40 years.

Or consider living in an age when, instead of individual incidents of political violence, the news contained so many outrages that the papers could barely list them all: Black voters murdered during Reconstruction, organized labor crushed with brute force, urban machines warring like gangs, regular “knockdowns” and “awlings” — when campaigners actually stabbed people with awls to keep them from voting for the opposition. Literally thousands of people died in political warfare. These were the years, after all, that saw three of the four presidential assassinations in American history.

Sudy wrote: ↑Sat Apr 24, 2021 11:38 pmIsn't the last century supposed to have been about the escalation of massive positive social change, as flawed and arduous as it's been?

It is old hat to note that Americans have deified their “founding fathers” as saints — secular or otherwise. What is a little less obvious is how that deification has frozen them in time.

We hail the Thomas Jefferson of 1776, not the one of 1806; the James Madison of 1787 rather than the one of 1827. We remember George Washington the triumphant military leader of 1783 more than George Washington the reluctant president of 1793.

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Washington’s famous farewell address — in which he warned against faction — was as much about the circumstances of his own administration as it was a warning to future Americans. In his final year, however, Washington seemed to surrender to the reality of parties and factionalism. Asked to consider a third term for president, he told the governor of Connecticut, Jonathan Trumbull, that he was “thoroughly convinced I should not draw a single vote from the Anti-federal side” and that character was irrelevant to the outcomes of elections. “Let that party set up a broomstick, and call it a true son of Liberty, a Democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose, and it will command their votes in toto!”

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For the remainder of his years, Rasmussen notes, Adams would oscillate between a kind of optimism and a disillusionment with the American experiment: “I fear there will be greater difficulties to preserve our Union, than You and I, our Fathers Brothers Friends Disciples and Sons have had to form it,” Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1816. During the administration of James Monroe, Adams wrote on an even darker note to John Quincy, “If there is any Thing Serious in this World, the Selfishness of our Countrymen is not only Serious but melancholy, foreboding ravages of Ambition and Avarice which never were exceeded on this Selfish Globe.”

The “distemper in our Nation is so general,” he concluded, “and so certainly incurable.”

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Jefferson, who backed the South’s position, saw the conflict in apocalyptic terms.

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I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of ’76, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.