Our Toxic Politics Don’t Compare To The Ugliest Drama In US History

A small but noteworthy development in the GOP presidential race: the first candidate has dropped out.

In a lengthy post on the website formerly known as Twitter, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said he is suspending his campaign for the nomination. Which will come as a surprise to those who never knew he was running in the first place.

Suarez wrote that he will be:

…keeping in touch with the other Republican presidential candidates and doing what I can to make sure our party puts forward a strong nominee who can inspire and unify the country, renew Americans’ trust in our institutions and in each other, and win.

It’s a fine sentiment and one that, in normal times, should be taken as a given. We should take for granted that our presidential candidates, regardless of party, would have faith in our institutions, the rule of law and each other.

That we are faced with appeals to “renew” trust in such things shows how much damage our increasingly toxic, deeply unserious and profoundly incurious politics has done.

But as crude, coarse and shallow as politics are today, they can’t hold a candle to the politics of the early Republic:

The Founding Fathers were locked in a raucous feud. President John Adams, seeking reelection, was attacked relentlessly by Jefferson’s Republicans as a licentious fool and criminal tyrant. The Jefferson campaign spread a story that Adams planned to marry one of his sons to a daughter of King George III, start an American dynasty and reunite with Britain. Another tale had Adams sending his running mate, Charles Cotesworth Pickney, to England to procure mistresses for the president. Adams’s allies furiously attacked Jefferson. “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practiced,” warned the Connecticut Courant, a pro-Federalist newspaper. “The air will be rent with the cries of the distressed, the soil will be soaked with blood and the nation black with crimes.” The invective against the author of the Declaration of Independence in Federalist pamphlets and newspapers included charges that Jefferson was a coward during the Revolutionary War as governor of Virginia, an infidel of dubious parentage and a thief who once robbed a widow of an estate worth 10,000 pounds. The contest, which Jefferson won to become the nation’s third president, was so bitterly fought that Abigail Adams, wife of the defeated incumbent, remarked sadly that enough “abuse and scandal” was unleashed “to ruin and corrupt the minds and morals of the best people in the world.”

But that was just the beginning. When the election of 1800 ended with Thomas Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, tied in the Electoral vote, the election was sent to the House of Representatives to decide the winner. Deadlock and intrigue ensued. So, too, did threats of military action:

Republican Gov. Thomas McKean of Pennsylvania contemplated the use of force — a militia of up to 20,000 men — to arrest the conspirators and take back the government for Jefferson. Jefferson’s protégé James Monroe, now the governor of Virginia, began preparations for massing troops near the perimeter of the District of Columbia, to take back the government by force if necessary. Several states, including Vermont, warned that they might secede if the Federalist coup succeeded. How close we came to the collapse of the American republic just a little more than a dozen years into its existence is unclear. In retrospect, since we know how things turned out, we underestimate how close we came to national catastrophe.

It makes the whole kerfuffle over “wokeness,” for example, seem downright quaint.

Not that anyone should welcome a return of the rough-edged politics of old. We can barely handle the politics we’ve got.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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