Fractured into factions

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

As both a big music buff and a big history nerd, you can probably guess that I am a huge fan of the Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Hamilton.” I have seen it live, I have watched it numerous times on TV, and it is must-listen material in the car on any family trip that is in excess of 2 1/2 hours.

Since the entirety of the play is sung within the lyrics of the songs, you can literally get the entire show just from the audio (it is available on Amazon Music and even on YouTube).

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with “Hamilton,” it is the story of the early days of America, going from 1776 to 1804, centered primarily on the life and deeds of Alexander Hamilton, who you might know from the $10 bill.

Hamilton’s story mirrors America’s quite well, as an immigrant who came to the colonies in search of a better life and greater opportunity and found that opportunity. It’s a great show and does a great job of presenting early American history in a very entertaining and easy-to-digest form.

One of the more astute observations one can glean from the story is how, even in the late 1700s, many of the Founding Fathers were very wary of the threat the young nation faced by

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the idea of division along political ideologies. This was, unfortunately, exactly what happened, even before the first presidential election.

At the core of the first division was the strength of the central government. There were the Federalists, like Hamilton, George Washington and John Adams, who wanted a strong federal system (centralized national power). On the other side were the Anti-Federalists, consisting of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and James Madison, who favored strong states’ rights and a weaker federal system.

These opposing ideas led to the first political parties in America, or as Aaron Burr (who played for both sides during his career) puts it in the show, as Hamilton attempts to put his plan into action (and forgive the mild profanity), “Someone came along to resist him, pissed him off until we had a two-party system.”

That someone was Jefferson, who along with Madison and several others who, perhaps realizing just being “anti” the other guys wasn’tcool, founded what became the Democratic-Republican Party. The political system was, again from the show, “fractured into factions.”

In his Farewell Address, Washington warned the nation, perhaps reading the writing on the wall, against the danger of factions, but I guess no one listened because that is exactly what happened in the Election of 1796 (the first vote after Washington declined to seek a third term). John Adams, a Federalist, won the election, with Jefferson leading the Democratic-Republicans, setting off 227 years (and counting) of a two-party, us-or-them government in the United States.

So, here’s what happened… Without Washington, the Federalist Party largely fell apart. That led to the Democratic- Republicans basically becoming the only major perty — for a minute. It only took a few years before the party began in-fighting and, you guessed it, fractured into factions.

Andrew Jackson left the party and took half the name with it, creating the Democratic Party. The remaining members took the name the Narional Republican Party, but maybe that was too much of a mouthful, so they found common ground with the former Federalists and became known as the Whigs, a name borrowed from British politics.

So, the Democrats and the Whigs did battle for a while as the only two major poliltical parties. The Whigs actually did pretty well for a while, even having four U.S. presidents, although weirdly, two of them died after only a short while after taking office.

But even under this two-party system, the divisive nature of poliltics could not be avoided. First, the Democrats split, largely on geographic lines, with the Northern Democrats and the Southern Democrats (sometimes called “Dixiecrats)) even pushing separate candidates for major offices. The Whigs also began in-fighting, mostly over economics and slavery. Eventually, the Whigs collapsed, with some forming the American Party, but with most joining the new Republican Party.

Thanks to the divided nature of the Democrats at the time, the Republicans were able to win a lot of elections in the 1850s and in 1860, they won the White House with a fellow you might have heard of, Abraham Lincoln. Northern Democrats largely sided with the Republicans going forward, with the Southern Democrats becoming the modern-day Democratic Party, thus setting the stage for the next 160-plus years of American politics: Democrats vs. Republicans.

Well, sort of…

You see, back then the ideologies were largely flipped from what you see these days. The Republicans were the progressive, liberal-minded sect, while the Democrats were staunch, traditionalist conservatives. Now, the cool thing is that each party also had folks who were able to, you know, not 100% agree with everything on the party platform, so it took a lot of bipartisanship to get legislation passed.

And that was basically what we got, especially in the early 1900s, with both parties embracing progressive ideas (there was even a Progressive Party for a while, along with other minor parties).

It was in the 1960s when you began to see the parties’ ideologies shift, with the likes of JFK and LBJ emerging as liberal Democrats, while the conservative base coalesced aound Nixon and a young Ronald Reagan, who converted a lot of the last remaining conservative Democrats to the Republican party in the Election of 1980, cementing the current alignment of the two parties.

I don’t know if you already knew all of that or even wanted to know it, but I thought it was worth offering up this (very simplified) explanation of how we got here from where we started as a nation.

I also thought it was important to point out that this divisiveness we are seeing in our country right now is absolutely nothing new, so if you are afraid this division might be signaling the end of the United States, I hope you can see that we have survived nearly 250 years of this two-party system (in one form or another), so I think we are going to be OK.

Having said all that, I am very much in favor of more political parties. I think we all benefit from more choices at the polls. I saw where a couple of polls show Robert Kennedy Jr. polling as high as 25% as an independent candidate for president in 2024. That would certainly make things quite interesting. There really hasn’t been a significant third-party candidate since 1996. And no third-party candidate has gotten electoral votes since 1968, so it will be interesting to see if there really is any interest on a national level in breaking up the two-party system, or at least in forcing the two major parties to either work together or give us better candidates…