Re: The Tea Party vs. the GOP thread
Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2014 4:15 pm
Good points. The First Six (Washington-Monroe + J.Q. Adams) would be appalled by the partyism dominating the political life of the country. Washington spoke against this in his farewell address. Adams senior preferred to make peace behind Hamilton's back and destroy his own chances at a second term in order to nip the emerging factions in the bud. Alas, it couldn't last. A century later, Brooks Adams made the point that democracy had failed in the USA because the people did not rise to the Framers' level.kmich wrote:Ymix, it is always a challenging business comparing our contemporary political movements with the intent of the founders, mostly because the challenges for a small developing republic of the late 18th century and the challenges to an economic and military empire of the 21st century are so dramatically different. Political, intellectual, and social orientations and temperaments of the respective times are distant from each other in many ways.
The founders were conservative in the classical, Aristotelean sense of the term, in the virtuousness of public over private life. The public good, while narrowly defined at the time as the interests of propertied, white men, was paramount. Reason and extensive exercises in persuasion with the public welfare as the metric was essential to the process. Read the Federalist Papers, published tracts to persuade states to cede powers to a Federal government in the new constitution, for examples. The founders were keenly aware of the catastrophic failure to establish a viable republic following the 17th century English Civil War since partisan factionalism, political fragmentation, and the incoherence of any common, political project prevented successful governance. They were acutely aware of these dangers in the last, historical attempt to establish a republic, a century and a half before their nation’s founding where the remaining leaders of the revolution were hung, drawn, and quartered and Cromwell's body was disinterred and hung in effigy. The restraint of private passions, the emphasis on reasoned persuasion and compromise, all in the service of an Aristotelean public good, were central to their political efforts for very practical concerns.
Unfortunately, our contemporary politics has devolved into the factionalism they feared. Any sense of the public good is nowhere to be found in either party. Instead, factions are formed by private passions, convictions, and identifications commonly shared. Serious, rational persuasion is rarely to be found. Read our Op-Eds after reading the Federalist for an exercise in frustration. In addition, politics that is rooted in privately held convictions and passions turns the political process into a zero sum game where the more you win the more the other side loses and vice versa, your position and those of your tribe are of central importance over the common project, and reasoned compromise, the central governing mechanism conceived by the founders, becomes impossible. Failure to govern is of little consequence; ideological fealty and purity and the vanquishing the opposition are what really matters. Our current Congress has more in common with Colonel Pride’s Rump Parliament than what the founders envisioned. They, frankly, would be horrified at our current state of affairs.
While these problems include both parties in various ways, my disappointment with contemporary “conservatism” is more acute since I believe that a truly conservative approach of a more classical temperament could renew our republic. A conservatism that valued the public good over private need, that was wary and skeptical of ideological passions and factions, which believed in rule of law, civil society as a paramount value, fiscal prudence, and the nobility of public service, I would whole heartedly support. It is just not to be found and I do not find cynical resignation and passivity as a viable option.