The last posting ended
this blog’s review of the Whig Party.
The purpose of that review was to gauge how true that party was to the
ideals of a parochial/traditional federalist thought. As this blog has pointed out, federalism
calls on people to see the polity within which they live as a partnership.
This reflects a legal/constitutional
structure of governance – one made up of a people coming together to formulate and
maintain their polity – and an emotional/reasoned commitment to promote the
health and survival of it as an ultimate, espoused political value. In this form of federalism, said commitment only
includes those within a given racial/ethnic tradition and that, in America,
being of Western European stock.
The challenges the Whig Party faced limited its viability
within the national political landscape to just over twenty years. But within those years, through its
inabilities, it offered Americans a set of practical lessons or guardrails that
political entities need to respect if they are to sustain their position within
their polity.
For one thing, an
American political party must realize that this polity exists within a
national, general governing arena or zone and not as a compilation of a
national level system alongside local or state level systems. American federalism is not a dual leveled arrangement
with the general government addressing national concerns and states taking care
of local issues, but of a cooperative system.
Of course, each has its emphasis on what it addresses, but the areas of mutual
concerns are many and continually arising.
As such, its institutions, especially ones so central as
political parties, must function nationally as well as locally. Yet the Whigs prided themselves for honoring
the localism of its members without taking into account national implications. They allowed, without any disciplinary checks,
all sorts of messaging and advocacies ranging the spectrum of political whims
of that time.
In striving to understand
that proclivity, one is helped by noting an influential mindset affecting
American political thought in the antebellum period. As with the Enlightenment, that theorizing
originated in Europe. It preceded the
start of the Whigs by twenty years but caught the imagination of many Americans
through that party’s existence and, as with the Whigs, saw its influence wane
in the 1850s.
That theorizing was
known as Romanticism. Actually, in
America there was a precursor to this line of thought and feeling during the
colonial years. That was the sentiment
expressed during what is historically known as the First Awakening. As with this later fascination, the First
Awakening was a reaction to the influences of the Enlightenment, but especially
in terms of religious thought.
Nineteenth century
Romanticism had a more pervasive effect on a broad range of interests from
literature and art to politics. But a
review of the earlier version can give one the essence of what Romanticism was. As will be further explained in the next
posting, this newer view was a reaction to what was deemed as the Enlightenment’s
over emphasis on reason.
Here, at this point, this
blog diverts a bit from describing this newer movement and provide some context
as to how Romanticism is historically portrayed. Commentary seems to rely on an assumption,
that being that the Constitution was the product of the Enlightenment. It was a bit of political architecture that was
based on reason – the mainstay of the Enlightenment – and that that engendered various
consequences. Yes, if one accepts that
premise, one can see that as the 1800s moved on, this reasoned experiment
seemed to be working, but it did solicit at least two negative judgements of
some importance.
The first was directed
at that other example of a “reasoned” political experiment, the French Revolution. There, reasoned arguments led to an uprising
of the masses that resulted in much tumult and violence with a hefty death
rate. Popularizing the image of the guillotine,
it was difficult for anyone who valued a peaceful society to see much to admire
as that Revolution evolved not to a truly democratic nation, but to the semi
autocratic rule of Napoleon Bonaparte.
And beyond that initial world wind, it would lead to an Industrial Revolution
in which …
Enlightenment’s greatest scientific achievements brought
the natural world under mastery of humanity, but humanity then turned and
converted that mastery into smoke-belching factories, cheap mass production of
goods, and the swollen wealth of a new ruling class, the bourgeoisie.[1]
The other criticism
aimed at the Enlightenment, as it was experienced in America, was that excessive
reason rendered Americans to be a shallow people. That all they seemed to be to European “observers”
was that this newer country was comprised of a population lacking in a national
identity. All one had in this burgeoning
nation was a people running around trying to maximize the amount of money they
could accrue. To this, this blogger
objects.
As this blog has claimed
– with a good deal of scholarly support – the American Revolution and the Constitution
was the product of various cultural/political developments. Among them was the Puritanical/covenantal tradition,
the emotional movement of the First Awakening, English constitutional tradition
(including ideas of separation of powers and a strong sense of localism), the relative
autonomy that the British Crown extended to the colonies, along with the Enlightenment
thinkers (e.g., Locke and Hobbes), and the common sense philosophers (e.g., Reid
and Hutcheson).
To
claim Americans are solely the product of Enlightenment thinking is to shortchange
all these other contributions of thinkers and historical events. By so doing, one underestimates how complex a
political or overall culture Americans had developed by the time they secured
their independence and their constitutional arrangement. But according to Guelzo, that image of a
short-sighted people seems to be how Europeans tended to see their American
cousins.
While
this blogger does not agree, for the sake of contextualizing this newer source
of influence, Romanticism, it helps to take that view of Americans at face
value. That would set up a model of
sorts: i.e., one begins with the beliefs
of the Enlightenment which leads to a successful American Revolution which sets
up an eventual constitutional formulation which landed up with a nation of self-centered,
shallow materialistic people. As an example
of this judgement, Guelzo offers:
Thomas Jefferson was preeminently
the American man of reason, but his political allegiance to an anti-mercantile
agrarianism and the need he felt to justify slaveholding on the grounds of
racial inferiority of slaves constantly pulled him in romantic directions,
reason and enlightenment not withstanding.[2]
But to the extent that Americans
saw themselves as being too over dependent on reason, to the exclusion of more
emotional or intuitive thinking, Romanticism provided another approach to
social, artistic, and political thinking.
As this blog approaches the effects of the Enlightenment on
America, it will, starting in the next posting, review the history – ever so cursorily
– of the development of Romanticism in Europe.
And then it will report the major events that ushered in its influence
in how this movement developed in America.
Here in the US, the term transcendentalism was adopted to designate this
movement, and the name Ralph Waldo Emerson will become prominent in that story.
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