I’ve contended consistently that robust, polemical commentary is part of the American political tradition, and that it always has been. (On the left side of FREE WHITEWATER, there’s a link to a few examples from different times in our long history.)
Ron Chernow, author of Alexander Hamilton and Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. writes about our polemical tradition at the Wall Street Journal in an essay entitled, The Feuding Founding Fathers.
Chernow writes that
In the American imagination, the founding era shimmers as the golden age of political discourse, a time when philosopher-kings strode the public stage, dispensing wisdom with gentle civility. We prefer to believe that these courtly figures, with their powdered hair and buckled shoes, showed impeccable manners in their political dealings. The appeal of this image seems obvious at a time when many Americans lament the partisan venom and character assassination that have permeated the political process.
Unfortunately, this anodyne image of the early republic can be quite misleading. However hard it may be to picture the founders resorting to rough-and-tumble tactics, there was nothing genteel about politics at the nation’s outset. For sheer verbal savagery, the founding era may have surpassed anything seen today. Despite their erudition, integrity, and philosophical genius, the founders were fiery men who expressed their beliefs with unusual vehemence.
They inhabited a combative world in which the rabble-rousing Thomas Paine, an early admirer of George Washington, could denounce the first president in an open letter as “treacherous in private friendship and a hypocrite in public life.” Paine even wondered aloud whether Washington was “an apostate or an imposter; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any.”
True, indeed, and well-understood before Chernow’s essay. Even a faint understanding of the Founders’ letters and pamphlets would reveal as much.
We’ve grown weak in our understanding of the breadth and depth of our political tradition, and have substituted for vigorous, lawful commentary only empty cheerleading. Officials and their sycophants assume that their words will go unexamined and unchallenged. Even silly contentions for which one would rebuke a child are still offered. (Worse, some reporters do little more than officials’ bidding.)
These days of declarations as though delivered from Olympus are over, even in stodgy and stultifying places that would fight mightily to prevent the return of a more energetic, robust American way of life.