Imagine a country where the rival political factions view each other as an existential threat to the survival of the republic. The news media publish scandalous accusations against major political figures. The citizenry is swept away by conspiracy theories. There is widespread fear of foreign meddling in domestic politics. And people resort to violence against their political opponents.
This may describe our own times. The America of 2022 is beset by polarizing personalities including a former president who waged an unsuccessful, deceitful campaign to overturn an election he lost, as the House Jan. 6 committee hearings are illustrating. People assume the worst of their political foes. Magical thinking abounds.
The picture we are painting in this episode of History As It Happens is not of our current morass. It is the 1790s.
As George Washington took his retirement after two terms as president, his moderating influence on national politics vanished. Federalists and Republicans began openly accusing one another of trying to destroy the country.
Ordinary citizens expected a French invasion of the U.S. mainland would spread the radical contagion of the French Revolution. Republican newspapers printed scurrilous attacks on the Adams administration, provoking Federalists in Congress to pass the Sedition Act. Rival factions brawled in the streets of the capital, Philadelphia. As historian Gordon Wood pointed out, every aspect of American life became politicized. The nation nearly came apart.
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Are there any useful parallels between that contentious time and our own? The answer is yes, according to historian Joseph Ellis, who said he fears for the future of the republic or, as he puts it, res publica, the public interest.
“The United States is facing a crisis which is to some extent unprecedented. The challenge we are facing now does put democracy as we define it, or as the founders would call it, a republic, at genuine risk,” said Mr. Ellis, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.”
Mr. Ellis is troubled by polls showing about one-third of the electorate believes former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Democracy cannot function when the losers of an election refuse to accept their loss, thereby undermining public confidence in the electoral system.
As contentious as the 1790s were, President John Adams ultimately accepted that he lost the election of 1800. Relative calm returned to politics, as the ascendant Republican Party controlled the presidency for the next 24 years under the so-called Virginia dynasty.
Listen to why Joseph Ellis does not expect calm to return to American politics today by downloading this episode of History As It Happens.
