The Long History of Partisan Conflict in the USA

Our despair over the rancor and seemingly irreconcilable nature of our current partisan conflict might lead on to suspect that this is an outlier in the history of the republic.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

From the very first days of our founding the United States has been a veritable cauldron of partisan fury.  The mixture of religious zealots, ne’er-do-well misfits who fled their failures in another land, rapacious opportunists, political or criminal exiles, the hopeful poor, the established quasi-aristocracy, the adventure seekers and the idealistic children of the enlightenment created a volatile brew that would never achieve any true equilibrium.

In an effort to better understand our complex history I have been reading the Oxford History of the United States series.  These books, written by eminent historians, each cover a piece of the American story and tend to be in excess of 800 or 900 pages!  I have now read one on the period of reconstruction and the gilded age – 1865 to 1895, one on the revolutionary war up to the writing of the constitution, and am currently reading one on the period that encompasses the years following the constitutional convention up to 1815.  I look forward to reading all of them.

The books are so rich with detail that I will certainly only retain a small portion of what I read.  However, there are distinct themes that one sees throughout our history and these make a deep impression. 

One of these is the depth of disagreement and partisan discord that runs through all of our almost 250 years as a nation.  Whether Federalist versus Democratic-Republican, Whig versus Democratic or Democratic versus Republican, our nation has always divided itself into factions, and these factions are often so passionately at odds with one another that some sort of civil war or other violent episode seems imminent.

The question of slavery and the American civil war are of course the most dramatic examples of this underlying political conflict.  But there have been many times when the issues that divided people into separate camps sparked passionate insults, outraged condemnation and even violent attacks.

Given the romantic ideal of our founding fathers and their colleagues, one might think that the earliest days of our grand experiment in political science was one of harmony and general agreement on the basic principles of our government, and that only with the increasing tensions of slavery did our ancestors begin to have any real conflict.

But before slavery became the primary point of contention there was the profound antipathy between Democratic-Republicans, who feared too much federal control and federal banking as a return to a monarchical and aristocratic society, and Federalists, who feared ‘mob democracy’ and the adoption of ideas from the French revolution.  John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were strident in their condemnation of Jefferson and Madison, and those Virginians returned the enmity with vigor!

Here are some interesting observations from Gordon Wood, who wrote Empire of Liberty, A History of the Early Republic from 1789-1815: 

• In 1809 a Republican minister declared that the “parties hate each other as much as the French and English hate each other in time of war”.
• In 1807, General Solomon Van Rensselaer, a prominent Federalist in Albany, NY, beat the author of a Republican resolution questioning his integrity with a heavy cane and then stomped on him.  Partisans on each side joined in the fray and turned the city into a ‘tumultuous sea of heads, over which clattered a forest of canes’.
• The Federalist press accused the Republicans of being filthy Jacobins and monsters of sedition, and the Republican press denounced the Federalists for being Tory monarchists and British-loving aristocrats.
• By the late 1790’s, both President John Adams and Vice-President Thomas Jefferson believed they had become the victims of ‘the most envious malignity, the most base, vulgar, sordid, fish-woman scurrility, and the most palpable lies that had ever been leveled against any public official.

This historical perspective may perhaps be of little solace in our current atmosphere of distrust, but it is good to remind ourselves of the fact that tumultuous times are not rare, but rather commonplace.  Human beings are mercurial creatures who easily convince themselves that their views and opinions have eternal truth and significance. 

We feel that we are always on the precipice of some great disaster or injustice, and indeed we often are!  But happily, our dramatic differences and disagreements rarely provoke more than sporadic violence and the slow but steady evolution of society continues, however frustrating its glacial pace.

Our Arbitrary Fascination with Conquerors

Who is your favorite conqueror?  Is it Napoleon?  Or perhaps Julius Caesar?  Or maybe Alexander the Great?  Probably not Hitler.

Much of the way that we are informed about the history of our world is through stories of conquest and empire.  Sadly, that seems to be the most interesting aspect of human development for many of us.  In some cases, it is a morbid fascination.  But history has a way of glorifying or condemning conquest in a rather arbitrary manner.

Conquest is generally a pretty dirty business.  People are not eager to be conquered and they tend to resist.  So conquerors attack or lay siege to the places they want to conquer.  It isn’t pretty.  People are slaughtered, raped, tortured and enslaved.  The butcher’s bill for conquest is never a small one and often mind-boggling.  There are no saintly conquerors.

But somehow, we tend to have soft spots for certain conquerors while being horrified by others.  We build monuments and dedicate statues to celebrate the favored ones, and graphically depict the brutality of those out of favor in paintings, stories and movies.  We admire Alexander the Great and his vast empire, yet we despise Attila the Hun.  We celebrate the clever military achievements of Julius Caesar, but we abhor the cruelty of Genghis Khan, whose military accomplishments were probably just as clever, or perhaps more so, than Caesar’s.

Closer to home and the current epoch, we give a pass to British conquest and imperialism as if it were just jolly good fun and an effective way to establish commerce. We also romanticize our brutal removal and quasi-genocide of Native Americans from the lands that we coveted and ultimately conquered.  And the French still revere Napoleon, whose conquests left a trail of misery and death across Europe.  

For many years we also celebrated Christopher Columbus, whose legacy is one of exploitation, slavery, and mass murder.  The other so-called conquistadors, despite their greed-driven, monstrous acts, were also generally treated rather gently by history until recent times.

On the other hand, we are indignant over the conquests of Hitler, Mussolini and Japan that precipitated WW2, and categorically condemn the Soviet and Chinese conquests associated with the spread of communism.

It seems that the beauty of conquest is in the eye of the beholder.  If the beholders are the ones being conquered and annihilated, the beauty is somewhat diminished.  There are, to be sure, no monuments to Custer on Indian reservations.

The real question isn't why some conquerors are revered and others are reviled, or even whether one is more despicable than the next.  The real question is why we don't recognize that all conquest is detestable and cease glorifying any aspect of it.

Masculinity

What is masculinity?  There is probably no more complex, fraught or contradictory concept in our current cultural landscape.  We struggle with what it means to be masculine; with how masculinity can be expressed; with its implications for violence, sexuality, partnership, parenting, competition and a host of other behaviors and traits.

Masculinity, along with other gender concepts, plays a big role in the current culture wars.  In the conservative world view, masculinity is under attack from the ‘woke’, cancel-culture, radical left.  It is difficult to get past the pervasive stereotypes and knee-jerk assumptions that inform many people’s opinions of masculinity.

First, a definition of sorts:  Masculinity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles associated with men and boys. Although masculinity is socially constructed, research indicates that some behaviors considered masculine are biologically influenced. To what extent masculinity is biologically or socially influenced is subject to debate.

What are the attributes, behaviors and roles associated with men and boys?  Traditionally they are things like toughness, aggression, competitiveness, strength, drive, courage, assertiveness and stoicism.  Some traits are framed as the negatives or lesser amounts of so-called feminine traits – less sensitive, less emotional, less feeling.

I grew up with a starkly defined image of what being masculine meant, incorporating most of the stereotypes that still seem pervasive today.  But as I matured and gained life experiences, I began to see ambiguity in the whole question of gender characteristics and roles.  It became clear to me that both men and women displayed a wide spectrum of traits and that a significant percentage of people did not fit into traditional categories.  I saw many families with completely distinct and varied gender traits (and ultimately, sexuality preferences) among their children.  I met gay people, transgender people and people who seemed to be somewhere in the middle.

I spent a good part of my life surrounded by men in very masculine endeavors – athletics and the military.  But even in those realms there was a wide variety of behaviors.  Rock music, a lifelong passion, also had a large impact on my perceptions of masculinity, as it incorporated both a very stereotypical masculine energy and aggression, but also had homoerotic and strongly emotional themes. 

I became comfortable over the years with the idea that both gender and sexuality are a continuum.  This became much easier to accept once I shed the more dogmatic elements of religion and embraced modern scientific teachings about evolutionary biology, psychology and genetics.

It is impossible to separate the question of masculinity from the questions of gender and sexuality.  I will not claim any certainty in my beliefs, but I believe strongly that the following is true: 

• God did not ‘create man and woman’.  Human beings evolved.

• Human beings are not binary.  There is a gender spectrum.  There is a sexuality spectrum.

• These spectra make life and society more complex, but also more interesting and more welcoming for those at the edges of the spectra.  We must learn to accommodate them.

• If there is a God or some sort of divine being or spirit, it is probably not binary either!

• Masculinity, like femininity, is not an absolute.  It is a complex mixture of biological and evolutionary factors along with societal and environmental influences.  It is in flux.

• Toxic masculinity, which I would define as extreme masculine behavior that is anti-social, injurious to others, misogynistic, racist or homophobic, is not inevitable and should be recognized and thwarted by education, social ostracism and protective laws as needed.

There were times in my life where I exhibited toxic masculinity – the classic ‘locker room talk’, the overly sexualized and objectified treatment of women, the pumped-up bravado, the ridiculing of homosexuals, the glib glorification of violence and brutality.  I am ashamed of these times, but I believe I have learned from them and am now much more aware of the potential for hurt or harm by these behaviors.  I see in my daughters and their friends a much more enlightened consciousness that will not make as many errors, though they will surely have many challenges as well.

The world is slowly changing, and I am confident it will eventually embrace or at least acknowledge the ideas that I have framed above.  Women will become equal citizens of the world, gay and transgender people will be accepted and integrated fully into society, and the concepts of masculinity, femininity and gender roles will have softer edges and be less rigid.  These changes will not come easily, but I am optimistic that the human drama will continue to unfold in a positive way.

The Allure of Self-Righteous Outrage

Part of the Trump cult is clearly the subgroup of America that feels left out and fearful of the future because their middle-class jobs have disappeared or are threatened.  Trump’s message of bringing back manufacturing and coal jobs, slapping trade tariffs on the Chinese and stopping immigration would certainly resonate with this group even though his policies never really met any of their promised goals.  Difficult economic conditions produce this kind of desperate allegiance.

But there is a second group that has no economic axe to grind, indeed that has been thriving in the last 30 years.  Many Trump supporters I know are much better off than their parents and enjoy rather luxurious lifestyles.  They live in safe neighborhoods, enjoy fine dining and exotic vacations, have secure jobs with high incomes and excellent healthcare, and, in short, have few worries.

What makes these people so outraged and angry?  What could possibly cause so many of them to become sycophants of a horribly damaged huckster like Trump?  What is really behind all this pathos?

They will say that America is losing its moral compass and becoming anti-religious.  They will throw out the ‘cancel culture’ trope and bemoan the liberal political correctness police.  They will point to abortion, same sex marriage, gender issues, so-called ‘America-hating’ intellectuals, BLM protests and other hot button topics as evidence of the decline of American values.

But what impact do these issues really have on the Trump-lovers?  Zero impact!  No one is forcing them to do or be any of these things.  It is the ‘idea’ of these things that incenses them, not their consequences.  They have embraced a purely abstract political and cultural hysteria.

I believe that one of our human frailties is a susceptibility to self-righteous outrage.  The modern lives of the relatively affluent are generally mundane and passionless.  We become listless and depressed.  There is a need for stimulation beyond the gym, the Internet and the TV; a desire for a higher cause to motivate us.  Strong emotions, especially ones that express self-righteous outrage, are very seductive.  They sweep us along toward a perceived noble calling.

It is always tempting to believe that you are part of an important movement, a call to arms to right a grievous wrong.  The Internet, talk radio and social media have provided a means to fabricate such movements out of whole cloth and spin people up into a dizzying frenzy of indignation and anger.

In ages past it was the desire for riches and the call to conquer that provoked the masses into destructive rages that obliterated their foes and then soon turned to destroy their own worlds.  Will it be boredom that launches the next wave of destructive fury? It is time for everyone to consider this basic truth:  Once the dogs of war have been unleashed, it is impossible to call them back.