EricHoefler.com

I’ve been reading Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers, a book that’s been on my shelf for a while, and I’m fascinated by the echoes between the struggles this nation faced in its early years and the ones it faces now.

In chapter one, Ellis explains that America was founded in the conflict between the opposing principles of revolution and union, independence and cohesion, the individual and the republic. These two sides are embodied by the revolutionary “spirit of ‘76” and the unifying goals of the Constitution ratified in 1788. Ellis points out that the Constitution didn’t resolve this conflict, but instead captured it within boundaries that allowed the debate to continue safely. In his words: “The debate was not resolved so much as built into the fabric of our national identity” (16).

This suggests that we need to collectively recognize and acknowledge this aspect of our national identity and learn to benefit from it and harness its power, not allow that power to rip us further apart.

To put a finer point on this, consider how Ellis summarizes the two sides of the debate. On the one hand:

The core revolutionary principle according to this interpretive tradition is individual liberty. It has radical and, in modern terms, libertarian implications, because it regards any accommodation of personal freedom to governmental discipline as dangerous. In its more extreme forms it is a recipe for anarchy, and its attitude toward any energetic expression of centralized political power can assume paranoid proportions. (14) (emphasis added)

The recent “Tea Party” demonstrations are examples of the more extreme expression of this perspective.

On the other hand:

The core revolutionary principle in this view is collectivistic rather than individualistic, for it sees the true spirit of ‘76 as the virtuous surrender of personal, state, and sectional interests to the larger purposes of American nationhood … It has conservative but also protosocialistic implications, because it does not regard the individual as the sovereign unit in the political equation and is more comfortable with governmental discipline as a focusing and channeling device for national development. In its more extreme forms it relegates personal rights and liberties to the higher authority of the state … and it therefore has both communal and despotic implications. (14) (emphasis added)

The cries from the Right that Obama is building a socialist and/or fascist government find their origin here.

This debate continues, of course, in louder and perhaps more extreme terms than we’ve seen in the last few years, but it’s nothing new. I wish both sides of this debate would do more to acknowledge its origins and to recognize that it is largely this tension that has made America so powerful and unique. In short, to make the debate productive.

Most of us lament the limitations of a “two-party system,” but its origins are in our founding. And even though one side demonizes the other in an endless circle, the worst thing that could happen, I think, is if one side decisively “wins” and defeats the other.

Because both sides are right, of course, and each side must continue to check the extremes of the other. I just wish this could happen with more rational, open debate that could lead to genuine progress and compromises that bring solutions. Instead, the media and many politicians, on both sides, are content to ride the waves of hysteria and division. It’s a waste of a good debate, and it threatens our security more than either side could on its own.

In chapter two, Ellis highlights the early division and tension between political and financial power. More on that in a later post.