A plague on both your houses part 3: Why everyone is angry
The nearly insane and completely distorting hatred with which the Bush II presidency has been treated by a considerable part of the public and the media, and for which Republican supporters have found an apt and amusing name - Bush Derangement Syndrome - is, in itself, not a good thing; but it is a symptom. People resent Bush in a way they resented nobody before, save perhaps for the searing hatred that some Republican circles felt for Bill Clinton in his prime. Of course, American politics has always been open to overstatement and unscrupulous rabble-rousing. Washington himself was the target of some astonishing name-calling, and European refugees who reached safety after barely survived the murderous attentions of their domestic governments were astonished, and often disgusted, to hear conservative Americans describe Franklin D.Roosevelt as being as dangerous as Hitler. But that was not often intended. At best, it was the froth on partisan anger; at worst, the calculated intent to exploit such anger. It is true that - thanks to the supposed “right to bear arms” - some American presidents have died by violence; but, except for one, none had to do with a domestic partisan debate grown as poisonous as it is today. President McKinley was killed by a Hungarian anarchist, and President Kennedy by a Communist; both more to do with foreign subversion than with native political struggle. President Garfield’s murder had something to do with contemporary politics, but more with what I would regard as something essentially non-political - corruption in public office. (His murderer, who was not quite sane, felt that Garfield was standing in the way of members of his own party being hired en masse by the state. He would have been hideously disappointed had he lived to find that his successor Chester Arthur, in spite of being a creature of the same corrupt system, put an end to it and generally acted above party lines.)
The only real parallel - though one that does Bush II more honour than he honestly deserves - is with the murder of Lincoln. There has been no civil war, and, with any luck, there will be no violence of that kind; but there is a fundamental resemblance between our time and his. In my first essay I pointed out that the classic form of American politics, the duopoly of Republicans and Democrats, lasted from the eighteen-fifties to the nineteen-sixties, when it began to alter out of recognition. In other words, then and now, the United States were at a stage of great political change, when new forces became focused in new formations. Even had there been no civil war, the Lincoln presidency would effectively have counted as a revolution - the first triumph of the party that was from then on to stand for the “republican” virtues of the leading classes of the country. But the forces that were losing in that historical change had seen the change coming, and had long made it clear that they would not tolerate it. Indeed, a friendly foreign observer, the French Count Agenor de Gasparin, saw the 1860 election as “the uprising of a great people” - the revolt of the American majority, indubitably Northern in manners and moral, against the blackmailing veto of the South, which, in his view, affected the country like a tyranny.
Of course, the south hardly saw it the same way. The south felt that the America they knew, the America they had wanted to belong to, was no longer the America in which they were forced to live. Within a human lifetime - Lincoln’s “fourscore and seven years” - the Union had gone from a grouping in which Virginia was the leading state and the south at least an equal partner, to one in which the south was being reduced to minority in numbers - as the count of states on either side showed in 1860 - and irrelevancy in business, where the growth of the industrial and agrarian north was answered by the apparition of a previously unknown southern poor white class.
The truth is that there were physical limits to the possible expansion of southern society; limits that corresponded to the area where slave labour could be profitably used. To the contrary, a “northern” kind of society could be set up anywhere, so long as there were no masses of slaves, and, indeed, few blacks altogether. The entry of Texas in the Union as a southern state was more than counterbalanced by the entry of California and Oregon - states that had nothing geographically to do with Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, but that had no slaves and little need for any.
They reacted with rage. Their sense of disorientation, deprivation and humiliation grew yearly stronger. Indeed, southern rage became institutional; all American politics from about 1830 to 1860 was calculated on the need to appease the southern bloc, which had already once, in the Nullification crisis of 1837, come close to secession.
It is the bitter, distorting fury of the south that seems to me mirrored, interestingly enough, in the attitudes of both parties today. I see this same sense of not recognizing the political landscape, of having had your country stolen from you, that emanates both from Democrats and from Republicans. They say as much: both a Michael Moore and a Michelle Malkin will say quite frankly, “The America that these people want is not the country I grew up in. It is not the country I know and love.”
And this rage seems to me diagnostic. It is my thesis that it is exactly to a semi-revolutionary process of this kind, and to the displacement it causes, that current Democrats and Republicans are reacting with such fury. The fierce hatred of many Republicans for the Clinton administration surprised and bewildered the rest of the world; only to give way to the equally bewildering hatred of Bush II among most of his opponents. It is my view that this is caused by a major genetic mutation that has struck both parties, and indeed much of American society.
The only real parallel - though one that does Bush II more honour than he honestly deserves - is with the murder of Lincoln. There has been no civil war, and, with any luck, there will be no violence of that kind; but there is a fundamental resemblance between our time and his. In my first essay I pointed out that the classic form of American politics, the duopoly of Republicans and Democrats, lasted from the eighteen-fifties to the nineteen-sixties, when it began to alter out of recognition. In other words, then and now, the United States were at a stage of great political change, when new forces became focused in new formations. Even had there been no civil war, the Lincoln presidency would effectively have counted as a revolution - the first triumph of the party that was from then on to stand for the “republican” virtues of the leading classes of the country. But the forces that were losing in that historical change had seen the change coming, and had long made it clear that they would not tolerate it. Indeed, a friendly foreign observer, the French Count Agenor de Gasparin, saw the 1860 election as “the uprising of a great people” - the revolt of the American majority, indubitably Northern in manners and moral, against the blackmailing veto of the South, which, in his view, affected the country like a tyranny.
Of course, the south hardly saw it the same way. The south felt that the America they knew, the America they had wanted to belong to, was no longer the America in which they were forced to live. Within a human lifetime - Lincoln’s “fourscore and seven years” - the Union had gone from a grouping in which Virginia was the leading state and the south at least an equal partner, to one in which the south was being reduced to minority in numbers - as the count of states on either side showed in 1860 - and irrelevancy in business, where the growth of the industrial and agrarian north was answered by the apparition of a previously unknown southern poor white class.
The truth is that there were physical limits to the possible expansion of southern society; limits that corresponded to the area where slave labour could be profitably used. To the contrary, a “northern” kind of society could be set up anywhere, so long as there were no masses of slaves, and, indeed, few blacks altogether. The entry of Texas in the Union as a southern state was more than counterbalanced by the entry of California and Oregon - states that had nothing geographically to do with Massachusetts or Pennsylvania, but that had no slaves and little need for any.
They reacted with rage. Their sense of disorientation, deprivation and humiliation grew yearly stronger. Indeed, southern rage became institutional; all American politics from about 1830 to 1860 was calculated on the need to appease the southern bloc, which had already once, in the Nullification crisis of 1837, come close to secession.
It is the bitter, distorting fury of the south that seems to me mirrored, interestingly enough, in the attitudes of both parties today. I see this same sense of not recognizing the political landscape, of having had your country stolen from you, that emanates both from Democrats and from Republicans. They say as much: both a Michael Moore and a Michelle Malkin will say quite frankly, “The America that these people want is not the country I grew up in. It is not the country I know and love.”
And this rage seems to me diagnostic. It is my thesis that it is exactly to a semi-revolutionary process of this kind, and to the displacement it causes, that current Democrats and Republicans are reacting with such fury. The fierce hatred of many Republicans for the Clinton administration surprised and bewildered the rest of the world; only to give way to the equally bewildering hatred of Bush II among most of his opponents. It is my view that this is caused by a major genetic mutation that has struck both parties, and indeed much of American society.