In an interesting essay on TPM today, historian Greg Downs writes that the Republican Party’s willingness to embrace unorthodox methods during the Civil War and Reconstruction period allowed it make radical changes ending slavery and creating a transformative legal framework for civil rights.
We are too often taught that American history is a story of conservative evolution through careful adherence to the vision of the Founding Fathers. This had been a straight jacket for 21st Century reformers. Downs writes that:
The United States has survived not by keeping the same system but by transforming its rules at crucial moments.
Our historical amnesia about the reworking of our political system has significant consequences for the way we think about politics today. More so than in the past, U.S. politicians — even purportedly radical ones — have deeply constrained views about changing the rules of the political game: how the president is selected, how seats are allocated in Congress, how many states exist, how voting rights are defined, how much power the Supreme Court wields.
Downs writes that What five years ago was taken for granted, was challenged by the rising Republican Party a century and a half ago. He reminds us:
In his Second Annual Message to Congress in December 1862, Abraham Lincoln dismissed some restraints of tradition as he and Congress waged the Civil War and prepared for the impending Emancipation Proclamation. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” he wrote. “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” So, Lincoln continued, “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
The essays differ in their solutions but they share two common premises. First, that a Democratic victory alone will not be sufficient to fix the political system. Second, that the history of the United States provides useful models of politicians seeking to change the very political and constitutional system they worked within.
A Democratic victory in 2020 undoubtedly would restore some sense of decency in the country’s operation and brake the extremist positions of the current administration, but still the nation would not be safe at home. The conditions that prompted a Trump victory would remain intact, along with the probability of revanchist neo-Trumpite movements, perhaps led by his children. So, too, would Democratic victory only marginally stave off Republican state efforts to roll back voting rights, to attack necessary congressional delegation of regulation, to assault the rights of women to control their own bodies, to transform the nature of the Census in order to disadvantage Democratic states. The hope that the Supreme Court might save the country from an extreme right-wing agenda has died.
The radicalism of the methods employed by the early leaders of the Republican Party offer a way forward for today’s Democrats:
U.S. history provides a different, riskier, but in some ways more promising alternative. In my recent book The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic, I argue that Civil War and Reconstruction-Era Republicans permanently transformed the political system by methods that would appear shocking today. When Republicans needed more states to balance the Senate, they created them. When the Supreme Court threatened Republicans’ Reconstruction policies, Congress restricted the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, added and then subtracted justices, and threatened to dismantle the court altogether. When the Constitution did not defend the civil and voting rights Republicans prized, they transformed the nation’s founding document through three sweeping constitutional amendments, the last two passed in the face of bitter opposition not only from white Southerners but from many white Northerners. Between 1860 and 1870, Congress considered many other constitutional amendments, including some to eliminate the Electoral College or to enfranchise women. In 1888, as Heather Cox Richardson has written, Republicans faced a Democratic Party that sought to build a permanent congressional majority by disfranchising black Southern voters; Republicans responded by creating six new western states between November 1889 and July 1890, though they tragically (and narrowly) failed to pass a voting rights bill. The new political map that Senate Republicans fashioned still shapes our world
Where did that sense of boldness go? In 2009 the Democrats possessed for a time a 60-seat bloc in the Senate, yet barely considered the obvious (in retrospect) move of adding Washington D.C. as a state, much less investigating the addition of Puerto Rico or the creation of multiple states out of California or New York. Of course Democrats look timid today next to Abraham Lincoln; what’s astonishing is how timid they look compared to Benjamin Harrison.
There is something fearful about facing the nation’s history. Our history of norm-busting politics suggests that Republicans today are less anomalous than Democrats might like to think. We forget the nation’s bloody and confounding political history because there is pleasure in amnesia.
But there is power in recognition. The Democratic Party has become adept at defining problems for which the party offers no realistic solution. Against the assault on voting rights and the outrages of partisan gerrymandering, Democrats passed — to their credit — a significant bill in the House of Representatives that will never pass the Senate; now the party seems prepared to wait for courts that seem unlikely to intervene. Against the overweighting of rural votes or the problems of the Electoral College, Democrats complain about unfairness, instead of proposing a fairer system. Even the most-radical major candidate to run in 2020, Bernie Sanders, inexplicably declined to support the timid act of undoing a non-constitutional filibuster rule in in the Senate, ensuring that even a 2020 Senate victory will mean that moderate Democratic bills are doomed to defeat at the hands of Mitch McConnell…
If the United States does not face an existential crisis, if this is just another blip in the political road, then of course Democratic caution makes sense; so too does defense of the status quo. But if Democrats see this as a nearly unprecedented challenge to the nation’s ideals and images, then they must propose solutions as grave as the crisis. Perhaps it is time for us, too, to disenthrall ourselves from a hope that the United States will naturally right itself and to get about the work of saving our country.
…the past can provide some guidance as we do the painful but necessary work of expanding our sense of the possible, of assessing the problems in our political system, and of devising solutions sufficient to address them.
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