Forward Into the Past!

Having had an inadequate exposure to American history during my school days, I’ve been catching up. The Oxford History of the United States is a particularly enlightening series, and I’m currently reading Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 by Gordon S. Wood. What’s really fascinating about this era is the extent to which factionalism divided the nation so soon after its founding. Political parties hadn’t yet officially formed, but Federalists and Republicans (i.e. Jeffersonian Democrats) took sides in trying to determine how the country should be run. The Alien and Sedition Acts arose out of the Federalists’ fear that the French Revolution would corrupt the new nation, and they can’t help but remind me of today’s GOP paranoia.

The Party of No is sinking to new depths. It’s not enough that they’re in lockstep against any and every Democratic proposal; now they’re yowling because Obama didn’t respond promptly enough to the recent attempted plane bombing or wear a tie when doing so. Never mind the fact that W took days to react to the shoe bomber, that’s gone down the memory hole. Both O and Napolitano are perceived as being too cool on the issue when what we clearly need is alarmism.

[An aside, pursuant to my previous “The End is Near” post: My relief that the shoe bomber hadn’t used his jockstrap betrayed my ignorance of the underwear connection in this latest event. Who knows what kind of hoops we’ll have to jump through now. But there are serious gaps in airport screening, and just because wingnuts are advocating racial profiling doesn’t make it a bad idea. Profiling may be offensive, but these are offensive times; if it can save lives, then I say throw political correctness out the window. Because while other groups do commit acts of terror — fundamentalist Christians blow up abortion clinics, radical environmentalists torch new housing developments — it appears to be only Muslim extremists who exhibit a threat to air travel.]

Then of course we have Darth Cheney “swooping around like a dementor from Harry Potter” (per Gail Collins) to squawk at us again with the reminder that we’re at war. I never really bought into this concept. W declared a “war on terror,” which was like some medieval king declaring a war on crossbows. Since Americans had become used to figures of speech like “war on drugs” and “war on poverty” it was an easy sell, even though al Qaeda resembles more than anything else an international crime ring out of James Bond. But we’re not sending our version of 007 to do the job; W preferred to expand executive powers and then start a couple of real wars to justify his actions. Now we conduct extraneous military actions that put our own soldiers in harm’s way while the real-life SPECTRE continues to put operatives on airplanes. What’s wrong with this picture?

So there appear to be a few parallels between the late eighteenth century and the early twenty-first. The Federalists saw society in terms of “us and them” and envisioned the aristocracy leading the way into the future. Today’s Republicans have successfully revived that “us and them” mindset and, with an eye toward the glory days of the Cold War, seem bent on leading us back into the past. After all, there’s nothing like an international conspiracy dedicated to overthrowing our way of life to bring “us” all together — or else be counted as one of “them.”