As has already been said – a little too often – the one thing Americans can agree about, when it come to politics, is that we’re thoroughly divided.
Our legal system, like the two-party system, is adversarial, but – at least so far – judges and lawyers, juries and court clerks seem more inclined to follow the rules, rather than indulge the kind of unfettered rule-breaking that possessed the departing president, and has contaminated many congressional exchanges as well.
It might help to realize that a debate we see as unique to our own time has been going on for well over two centuries – from the very beginning.
True, George Washington was the presiding genius who, for a time, bridged all divides, but it was really the partnership forged in Philadelphia in 1776 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson that explains where we’ve been as a nation, and where we might be going.
Without Jefferson’s brilliance in writing the Declaration of Independence, there might never have been the “new thing under the sun” our American system turned out to be. But without Adams’s dogged pursuit of a congressional resolution, there might never have been a Declaration at all.
The two most important Founders became best of friends while serving in France in 1784, nourishing that vital alliance. Then they fell out over the meaning of the Revolution they had started, and how the new government should take shape.
Adams was often accused of being a monarchist, and, though the charge is unfair, one can see why his adversaries latched onto it. He probably lost any chance, as the first vice president, of making the office effective when he chose to begin the inaugural session with a long debate over how the new president should be addressed.
The soon-to-be Federalists who controlled the Senate bought Adams’s argument that “His Highness,” as state governors were then often called, was inadequate. Instead, Washington was to be “His Highness the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties.”
It took the proto-Democrats who controlled the House to put an end to this nonsense, and substitute “Mr. President,” which endures to this day.
Jefferson was, by contrast, sometimes seen as an anarchist by his critics, citing his unstinting support of the French Revolution even after it devolved into terror and bloodletting as proof. Jefferson was probably a bit too optimistic about human nature, but the anarchist charge is false.
Though the two patriarchs eventually made up their quarrel in a series of transcendent late-life letters, there was another opposition between them that helps explain our current dilemma.
The drafters of the Constitution, like Adams, took as their model the Roman Republic, and republicanism became the new order of the day – even providing the original name for the emerging Democrats, who first called themselves Republicans.
The direct citizen democracy of ancient Greece, especially the Athenian model, was considered unsuitable to governing a vast continent, and there were no democracies in history larger than a city state. Yet it was Greece, not Rome, that represented Jefferson’s ideal.
Adams, with his pessimistic view of human nature, always believed the central government needed more authority, even to the point of making the presidency hereditary. Jefferson always wanted power more decentralized, with states and legislatures, not the federal government, leading the way.
What we got, over the next two centuries, is a curious hybrid that closely resembles no other government or federal system in the world. Americans often struggle to describe the result, but the best description is “democratic republic.”
In that sense, we are all democrats, and we are all republicans. We accept the need for divided power, as well as the need for central authority, especially in a crisis.
So it’s no accident we’ve ended up with Democratic and Republican parties, seemingly in eternal contest, yet cooperating sufficiently to get – at least sometimes – the best of both world views.
What lies ahead is not a futile quest for a mythical “middle,” but a test of which tradition can supply the best guidance for a nation, and world, struggling to emerge from a pandemic while next confronting a global climate crisis that’s even more daunting.
We don’t have to agree on everything, and it’s actually important we don’t. The voters need free and fair elections and referendums – pure democracy. And their representatives – the republic – need to govern with full understanding not only of public opinion, but of the wisdom handed down over generations, tempered with a new understanding of urgent demands for justice and equality.
Seen that way, the divisions seem less important, and a better future more possible.
Douglas Rooks, a Maine editor, reporter, opinion writer and author for 36 years, has published books about George Mitchell and the Maine Democratic Party. He welcomes comment at drooks@tds.net
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