There is an idea, common in public discourse, that is at best naïve and at all events silly. It is the mistaken idea that the chief problem of American government today is the unwillingness of Republicans and Democrats to set aside their differences and get on with the business of government. It apparently is based upon the assumption that there is very little in the way of principle, belief, or right and wrong in the proposals and policies of the two. In this notion, the two sides are just jockeying to see who will “win.” Perhaps that comes from the view that all too many politicians throughout time have not had much in the way of principles and beliefs, mingled with the approach to politics that sees it as some sort of sports event rather than a combat over how the nation is to be governed. These are certainly the attitudes of the shallow reporting that guides most of the newspapers and major media organizations today.
This view is demonstrably wrong. While strong differences of opinion have always been part of American government since its earliest days, the issues at stake have seldom been trivial. “Winning” in American politics has been and continues to be about how the nation is to be governed, not about who “ended” with the higher score. It takes a very superficial understanding to think that American politics is all some game. At its core, political combat in America has always been about freedom, those who wish to promote and protect freedom and those who seek to limit and control freedom, those who genuinely trust people and those who do not. There is no compromise in this combat that does not either promote or reduce freedom.
The most enduring political battle of the nineteenth century was over trade, whether to have free trade or to place restrictions on the ability of people to buy and sell with whomever from wherever they wished. Every compromise either expanded economic freedoms or reduced them. Average people were made wealthier or poorer by the results of the political fights over trade.
The hottest political battles of the nineteenth century were over slavery, whether to extend it or limit it, whether to preserve or to abolish it. All of the temporary compromises that were reached either expanded freedom or reduced it. In the end over half a million people in the United States died over this issue when the battle left the ground of politics and took to the field.
This exception to political battle in the United States, when we let guns rather than politicians do the talking, was when the political question cut to the core of what we were as a nation, a nation of “We the People.” As Abraham Lincoln correctly saw, America could not forever remain part free and part slave; it would eventually become all one or the other. The nation was becoming steadily freer, slavery being killed by economic reality. When the southern slaveholders could no longer use politics to keep slavery alive within the United States, they sought a solution in disunion and eventually war. They succeeded in ending slavery more quickly than anyone imagined.
Political conflict did not let up in the twentieth century any more than it has in the twenty-first. The important thing is not that we have political battle but that, with the exception of the Civil War, we have been willing to let our battles be fought out in legislatures and elections. The sad truth is, that to the extent we infantilize political conflict into a sporting contest it will cease to be a means by which we fight out the battles of how we govern. Rule of law will break down, and conflict will find its way out of the halls of government and into the arena of the streets.
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