“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.” So Abraham Lincoln wrote on August 24, 1855, to his friend Joshua Speed. Is it melodramatic to worry that the statement appears apt today?
Lincoln was primarily concerned about the state of the nation. But he also knew in 1855 that the party he’d been affiliated with and loyal to his entire adult life—the Whig party—was doomed. Lincoln spent much of that year and the next few years helping to organize a new party, the Republican party. Almost providentially, the Republicans rose out of the ashes of the Whigs, won the presidential election of 1860, and saved the nation.
Unfortunately, that new party didn’t prevail in the election of 1856. The Republicans contested the election vigorously but fell short, taking 11 of the 31 states and about a third of the popular vote. The Democrats under James Buchanan staggered to victory with 45 percent, benefiting from a split in the opposition, as the American Party (the “Know-Nothings”) under Millard Fillmore won about 22 percent of the electorate.
The consequences of Buchanan’s victory were dire. Who knows whether a united opposition would have won the election of 1856? Who knows if a different administration in power in the late 1850s could have averted civil war four years later?
Still, we have to admire the efforts of the new Republicans. Take a look back to their platform of 1856, and you can’t help but be impressed. You’re impressed by its ringing endorsement of “the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied in the federal constitution,” and by its resistance to the expansion of slavery. But reading it today, you’re also struck by two other propositions.
The Ostend circular has faded into the mists of history. It was a document written by American ministers in Europe from President Franklin Pierce’s administration who met in Ostend, Belgium, in 1854. The document justified the use of force to seize Cuba from Spain for the sake of expanding U.S. slaveholding territories. (One of those ministers was James Buchanan, the next Democratic president.) When made public at the demand of the House of Representatives, the Ostend circular was widely denounced.
What is striking is that Ostend was denounced not just because of its particulars, but because, as the Republican platform suggests, the principle it seemed to embody and to recommend as a basis for American foreign policy was might makes right.
In this respect one might characterize the Ostend circular as an early example of an “America first” foreign policy, a policy decisively untethered from the necessity of self-defense or the cause of liberty and self-government. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Ostend circular was Trumpian in spirit.
And here’s the final resolution of the Republican platform of 1856:
The new Republican party sought both to stand on principle and to construct a big tent. It did so by emphasizing agreement on what the party opposed rather than on what precisely it favored. This is what new parties tend to do. The example suggests the possibility of a party based on principle but welcoming to many adherents.
What does this ancient history have to do with us? It’s probably alarmist, and it’s surely premature, to suggest we need a new party to defend “the spirit of our institutions, as well as the constitution of our country.” But it would also be foolish complacency to deny the possibility might arise.
Consider the last week alone: The Republican president continues to speak out with no recognition of the normal proprieties of the presidential office, no appreciation for the dignity of the nation he represents, and no acknowledgment that he should be constrained by the truth. Meanwhile, the president appoints his daughter a White House adviser, and empowers her husband to be involved in delicate matters of foreign policy. Nepotism is a fact of life, but it would be foolish to deny that unabashed nepotism is evidence of progress in degeneracy.
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee receives information he believes troubling about the behavior of members of the preceding administration with respect to the incoming one. Rather than convening his committee and putting its staff to work, he holds a confused and hasty press conference and hurries off to the White House to brief all the president’s men.
On a different level, the House Republican leadership so loses the forest for the trees in devising strategy for the repeal of Obamacare that it succeeds in alienating conservatives, moderates, and the public—all in the service of a strategy very likely to fail even in the short term, and a policy that fails to fundamentally change the big government program the Republicans have been committed to replacing. And all of this must be rushed through for the sake of clearing the way for a tax reform that also hasn’t been sold to the American people or, to be honest, justified on the merits.
This is not the behavior of a healthy party. We say this with reluctance, because we’re inclined to the view that the current Republican party—featuring lots of attractive young politicians, with most of its elected members sound on principles of limited government at home and the defense of liberty abroad—could easily right itself from this recent bout of dizziness. But nothing is foreordained. Dizziness can sometimes be a symptom of a more serious problem.
We hope and trust that the Republican party can be restored to vigor. But if the Republicans cannot rediscover the spirit of liberty, surely we need not be condemned forever to alternating between mindless progressivism and witless reaction. Resigning ourselves to such a choice will only contribute to a progress in degeneracy.
