The state of American politics these days is messy and unpleasant. Voices across the country can be heard decrying the polarization and hostility of our political culture, and rightly so, I think, because it really isn’t terribly healthy. As a consequence, we’ve seen a number of books in the last few years urging us to move beyond partisan divisions—though oddly enough, the solution most of them propose is that conservatives should capitulate and become liberals, a suggestion which seems neither plausible nor helpful.
Any truly intelligent response to the state of American politics needs to begin with the realization that we’ve been here before—indeed, that this might be considered the normative state of American politics. It certainly isn’t the most polarized time in American history; even the most pessimistic sort would have to admit that it ranks somewhere behind the 1860s in that regard, while a good case could be made that in fact, most of the 19th century was at least as bad.
If you find that hard to believe, I’d suggest you check out a new book by historian Edward Larson, published by the Free Press, called A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign. John Wilson, editor of Books & Culture, discusses Larson’s book in his column in the November/December issue; and as he notes, there’s an awful lot about the 1800 presidential election that sounds remarkably familiar, not least the overheated and over-the-top rhetoric of both sides. One suspects that had the term only existed back then, Thomas Jefferson would have been happy to off-handedly dismiss John Adams as “a raving fundamentalist”; from his comments, he’d fit right in with one of our age’s atheist enfants terrible inveighing against George W. Bush.