The Inevitability of History

Near the last decade of the last century a rather overly optimistic political scientist proclaimed the end of history, by which he meant the inevitable triumph of liberal capitalist democracies. He may have been misunderstood, but he was also probably wrong on both counts: history has continued, and liberal capitalist democracies haven't been doing all that well just lately. Or perhaps he was right, just a little premature, but I doubt it. What made me think of Francis Fukuyama's thesis is a book I've been reading: Chris DeRose's Presidents' War: Six American Presidents and the Civil War that Divided Them (2014). Describing the historical context leading up to the American Civil War, DeRose depicts the deepening political divisions in the country as it descends, seemingly inevitably, into violence, bloodshed, and warfare.

It's a better book than I expected, and does a very good job of showing how politicians, even those with the best intentions, can blunder into error and bring about calamities they are attempting to prevent. Clearly, the Civil War was about slavery, but it was much more complicated than that, and DeRose explains many of those complications as they applied to the political leaders from the north and south and from the various political parties. As early as the 1820s, with the Missouri Compromise, politicians attempted to find a way of diffusing the conflict that was written into the Constitution when it accepted the institution of slavery as fundamental, at least in some parts of the country. That, in fact, had been the first compromise with slavery, but the issue simply refused to go away. Perhaps, after all, the struggle was moral as well as political, since humans seem incapable of compromising where their concepts of morality are at issue. Or, perhaps, the conflict was brought on by fear of change or of a future that would alter the economic and social as well as the political landscape of the nation.

As I've been reading DeRose's book, it has occurred to me that there are many aspects of the political conflicts of the mid-nineteenth century that seem familiar. I don't actually expect we will see a total descent into rebellion and warfare, but in some ways the political processes appear to be as distressed today as they were in the 1850s. Our dependance on two dysfunctional political parties, and reluctance to seek new alignments (with the exception of the various Tea Party groups) has put greater pressure on the existing parties, both of which have split into factions. But even more perplexing is the way each faction has constructed its own political reality and demonized those who see things from a different perspective. And unlike the 1850s, there doesn't seem to be anyone even attempting to forge alliances across party lines, nor do such individuals appear to exist in either party. Another difference is our current disagreements, while in some ways perhaps also fundamental, are really rather slight. Despite all the noise, very little gets done and very little really changes. It's all a kind of shrill political theater that pays off only for those with the money to play the game (or to pay others to play for them), and leaves the rest of us to go along for the ride or stand by on the sidelines in disgust.

But the really interesting thing about DeRose's account of the political struggles that preceded the Civil War is not only that not much has really changed, but that the American system we've all been taught from childhood to revere as a model for the world, had from the outset some serious design flaws and a built in tension between the federal government in Washington and the various states that insisted on their own sovereignty. From the start it was a system based on compromises, and when the will to compromise breaks down, the whole thing grinds to a halt or descends into chaos, as it did in 1860. Or perhaps all of the flaws aren't actually in the system. Some may be in the weak and vainglorious individuals we elect to office. But that too has always been the case. The six presidents DeRose writes about were all men of ambition with a strong sense of personal honor who seemingly wanted only the best for their country and desperately hoped to preserve the union, and yet despite their efforts, and sometimes perhaps because of those efforts, they saw it all descend into bloody civil war. I wonder if we have ever really recovered from that time of division? After 150 years, we seem incapable of putting the struggle behind us. Once again it seems half the country wants a strong union and half would prefer to dismantle the federal government and devolve once again into a collection of individually sovereign states.

That tension between the states and the federal government is one of those design flaws that seem to have left us unsure what kind of nation we really are. But history is far from over, and the future may bring changes none of us ever expected or wanted. Nothing stays the same; nations and states come and go. This idea of letting people govern themselves is appealing to some of us, but it's not a given in the history of human affairs. Quite the contrary. Any notion that liberal capitalist democracies have triumphed to such an extent that we can declare history over sounds awfully delusional when one takes a look around and reads the news. I remember those haunting lines written by W.B. Yeats after the Great War:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

Will the coming age be liberal, capitalist, or democratic? I wonder will we think it's something better or something worse? In any case, I'm betting there is much more history slouching our way.