American Political History In Brief

Regular readers know I have a generational theory of American political history.

Great change emerges from great crises. These crises scar generations, and inform politics through smaller crises. Finally problems emerge that the past generation has no answer for, and a new crisis emerges.

In this post, I want to briefly review U.S. political history in terms of this theory. Consider it a review. I hope to link back here periodically and make this an important chapter in whatever book emerges from Open Source Politics:

The first generation of American politicians were forged in the election of 1800. This was the first truly competitive election. Washington was given office by acclamation and his choice of John Adams was generally accepted.

1800 — Many historians look at Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans as the first U.S. political party. Adams and Washington were called Federalists mainly in retrospect. I also view 1800 as the year of the Great Gift, in that John Adams agreed to leave office based on a vote of a free people.

• The Thesis was Jefferson’s view of democracy. Small landowners and shopkeepers. Limited government. An alignment with France. (He accepted Napoleon’s vague title to Louisiana and was a lifelong Francophile.)
• The Anti-Thesis was Great Britain. First in the form of Federalists who tilted toward British interests, later in the form of War with the mother country itself. The war destroyed the Federalists as a movement. Monroe was elected practically by acclamation.
• The Excess was the administration of John Q. Adams, specifically his selection in 1824 by the U.S. House. This resulted in the movement known today as the Democratic Party.
• The Crisis was the 1824 election, the issue of the Bank of the United States, and westward expansion, which Adams’ newly-civilized east could not answer.

l1828 — Jacksoninan Democracy was the first coherent political thesis. It was against the Bank, but it also stood for westward expansion, and a balance between North and South.

• The Thesis was later called Manifest Destiny, the idea that Young America would rule from sea to sea. This was the birth of American Exceptionalism, the idea that Americans and their system are better than others. The slave power would be balanced, with an equal number of Senators from both sides. Note that Jackson, known as "Old Hickory," was later followed into office by James K. Polk, "Young Hickory," and later Franklin Pierce, "the Young Hickory of the Berkshires."
• The Anti-Thesis were the Whigs of Henry Clay. They stood for "public improvements," canals and later railroads that knit the nation together.
• The Excess were the Presidencies of Pierce and Buchanan, who were helpless in the face of the slavery question. Their ideal of balance could no longer hold.
• The Crisis was slavery itself, slumbering like a wolf at the door of the American baby’s birth.

1860 – The Civil War was the greatest crisis ever. The nation was torn apart, literally at first, and figuratively for generations afterward.

• The Thesis of Abraham Lincoln was Union, but that of his party was capital. It was firmly established by Ulysses S. Grant during what Mark Twain called The Gilded Age. Republicans successfully waved The Bloody Shirt for a generation.
• The Anti-Thesis was the drive against corruption, what Twain again called the Mugwumps. They supported Garfield and later elected Grocer Cleveland.
• The Excess were the industrial actions of the 1880s and 1890s, and the financial crisis known as the Panic of 1893. Unfortunately for Democrats, Cleveland was still in office when the crisis hit. Democrats could not capitalize.
• The Crisis lay in the need to create a synthesis, demands of Populists for "cheaper" money, of Progressives for action against the Trusts, of urban-dwellers for action against poverty.

1896 – The McKinley Era answered the 1890s crisis with Theodore Roosevelt, who consolidated Progressivism within the Republican Party. Wall Street power would be balanced by government power.

• The Thesis again was Progressivism, gradual reform, again combined with Manifest Destiny. The Spanish-American War, the White Ships, the Panama Canal, were of a piece with the anti-trust acts.
• The Anti-Thesis was Woodrow Wilson. This included the second Rise of the Klan, wars in Latin America specifically on behalf of American interests. All this was washed away in history by World War I, where Wilson sought to "save" Europe from itself, leading a generation of Republicans to become isolationists in response.
• The Excess grew gradually, in the 1920s, through Republican regulars like Coolidge and Hoover who let the economy run itself.  Its height was the response to the 1927  Louisiana flood, a mainly private effort run by Herbert Hoover.
• The Crisis was the Great Depression, which Progressive gradualism could not address. The alliance between limited government and unlimited corporate power had no answers.

1932 – The New Deal was the first Thesis to get a real name. It was marked by collective action, mainly symbolic action at first, and eventually the joint action of the Greatest Generation, and the resulting Keynsian debt expansion.

• The Thesis emerged gradually under the name liberalism. Collective action to save capitalism from the Depression. Collective action to save the world from Hitler and Tojo on behalf of what Roosevelt called the United Nations.
• The Anti-Thesis was Dwight Eisenhower. He leaned against the New Deal’s goals. He combined the gradualism of the Progressives with a fierce anti-communism.
• The Excess was Vietnam. The Cold War consensus demanded the war. Both parties supported it. But the real excess was inside the governing party, with its growing demands for individual expression that most Americans of the Greatest Generation saw as threatening.
• The Crisis was called the 1960s. The war, yes. But also the drugs, the rock music, the revolt of the academy.

1968 — Richard Nixon defines the politics of all who came after. The 1960s would be repressed, the Vietnam probably would be bloodily finessed. The Cold War would continue on to victory, and its assumptions of how to deal with the world would be institutionalized. At his funeral in 1994 Robert Dole called the second half of the 20th century "The Age of Nixon." He was right.

• The Thesis, in a word, was conflict. Conflict with both external and internal enemies. Narrow majorities would be treated as mandates, and disagreement suppressed with increasing ruthelessness.
• The Anti-Thesis was Clinton. The Third Way leaned against Nixonism much as Eisenhower leaned against the New Deal. Note that Anti-Thesis politicians are successful in the context of their time but can’t carry that forward.
• The Excess is the Bush Administration. Iraq as a solution to 9-11 only makes sense in the context of the Cold War. The repression of our time is an extension of Nixon’s. The tilt toward the wealthy is in the name of maintaining a narrow majority that can be defined as a mandate. None of it makes sense except in terms of the past.
• The Crisis is the period we are now entering. I have sought to express a new Thesis in terms of Open Source, the ideals of the Internet combined with the possibilities found in new business models.

But we’ll see.