For anyone who is worried that our political culture is deteriorating...

[Little Raven]

A reminder that it has been much, MUCH worse than it is today.

merican democracy has had a rough few years. We seem to have worn out the word “unprecedented.” Even if the pace of the news out of Washington has slowed in the Biden era, the respite still feels precarious.

But if you look back further in history, American democracy has seen some crazy before. In fact, in the years between the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century, U.S. politics was far more unruly, violent and corrupt than it’s been before or since, for politicians and ordinary Americans alike. It was a period of mass participation, but also mass outrage. Even as millions turned out to vote, march and fight, many agreed with the populist newspaper the Nonconformist when it grumbled, “we are the worst governed country on the face of the earth.”

It might be hard to accept that the political worries of a nation of mutton-chopped Rutherfords could feel as urgent as our own. But the volume of politics in the late 1800s drowns out anything any living American has experienced. For one thing, that era saw the highest turnouts in U.S. history. Imagine if, instead of the impressive 66 percent of eligible voters who went to the polls this past November, the 2020 election drew a turnout of 82 percent, as in 1876. Or if, instead of being decided by hundreds of thousands of votes in half-dozen swing states, elections were won, as in 1884, by just 1,047 voters in one state. Or if, instead of lies about widespread fraud, tens of thousands of votes really were stolen at each election.

Imagine a 2020 every four years, for 40 years.

Or consider living in an age when, instead of individual incidents of political violence, the news contained so many outrages that the papers could barely list them all: Black voters murdered during Reconstruction, organized labor crushed with brute force, urban machines warring like gangs, regular “knockdowns” and “awlings” — when campaigners actually stabbed people with awls to keep them from voting for the opposition. Literally thousands of people died in political warfare. These were the years, after all, that saw three of the four presidential assassinations in American history.

[Jaymann]

I made reference earlier to the Nixon era, that was some dark shit indeed. I think the difference now is social media and technology. I would like to blame A-holes like Zuckerberg, but it was inevitable in some form.

[Sudy]

I realize this is a bit of a straw man (the article is interesting), but I find little solace in the fact that the past may have technically been worse. Isn't the last century supposed to have been about the escalation of massive positive social change, as flawed and arduous as it's been? I don't go to bed with the confidence, "Hey, at least we're not living during the Siege of Carthage."

[Kraken]

We're all subject to the recency effect, wherein events within our lifetime loom larger than those in history books. I've been alive for over 1/4 of US history (64/245 years). The Vietnam/Watergate era was an existentially bad time. The difference between then and now is that we were all reacting to the same facts and living in the same reality. When Walter Cronkite signed off with "and that's the way it is," we believed him. Fake news makes the present uniquely perilous, at least within my lifetime. I realize that partisan journalism goes way back and has always inflamed passions, but even then Americans fought over a shared reality that we don't have anymore.

[Little Raven]

Isn't the last century supposed to have been about the escalation of massive positive social change, as flawed and arduous as it's been?

Progress is usually disruptive.

[malchior]

I'm sure the book the article is based on is interesting but it isn't likely particularly applicable except in the broadest strokes.

[Little Raven]

A fantastic piece from the NY Times reminding us that even the Founders thought we were doomed.

It is old hat to note that Americans have deified their “founding fathers” as saints — secular or otherwise. What is a little less obvious is how that deification has frozen them in time.

We hail the Thomas Jefferson of 1776, not the one of 1806; the James Madison of 1787 rather than the one of 1827. We remember George Washington the triumphant military leader of 1783 more than George Washington the reluctant president of 1793.

...

Washington’s famous farewell address — in which he warned against faction — was as much about the circumstances of his own administration as it was a warning to future Americans. In his final year, however, Washington seemed to surrender to the reality of parties and factionalism. Asked to consider a third term for president, he told the governor of Connecticut, Jonathan Trumbull, that he was “thoroughly convinced I should not draw a single vote from the Anti-federal side” and that character was irrelevant to the outcomes of elections. “Let that party set up a broomstick, and call it a true son of Liberty, a Democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose, and it will command their votes in toto!”

...

For the remainder of his years, Rasmussen notes, Adams would oscillate between a kind of optimism and a disillusionment with the American experiment: “I fear there will be greater difficulties to preserve our Union, than You and I, our Fathers Brothers Friends Disciples and Sons have had to form it,” Adams wrote to Jefferson in 1816. During the administration of James Monroe, Adams wrote on an even darker note to John Quincy, “If there is any Thing Serious in this World, the Selfishness of our Countrymen is not only Serious but melancholy, foreboding ravages of Ambition and Avarice which never were exceeded on this Selfish Globe.”

The “distemper in our Nation is so general,” he concluded, “and so certainly incurable.”

...

Jefferson, who backed the South’s position, saw the conflict in apocalyptic terms.

...

I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves, by the generation of ’76, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.

And yet, we remain.

[Isgrimnur]

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

[Kraken]

I guffawed when Selina Meyer called them the Founding Fuckers. Veep alone is worth getting HBO Max.

Our political culture has deteriorated noticeably in my lifetime, though. Both parties used to be loyal to the Constitution.

[malchior]

Yeah the fact that a major political party has gone off the rails is a big problem. I mean I get people holding onto hope but I'm still getting my shit together. The experts on modern backsliding tell me we are very far down a road on which democracies fail and one possible model -- an unlikely one albeit -- is bad. Like really bad. That is what the Founding Father's knew. They knew the truth of human nature, that men like Trump inevitably come, and that all democracies before their model of one failed.

[Carpet_pissr]

I’ll say it one last time: It was a HELL of a run though, right?

[Isgrimnur]

Comeback Democracy of the 19th Century.

[El Guapo]

Well, France is on their fifth Republic, and they adopted democracy later than us. So I think we're doing better than them to date, at least.