The problem with the Congress today is that its members are unwilling to take a punch for a cause in which they believe, much less throw one themselves.
On one level, this problem is actually a very good thing. We should celebrate the fact that we no longer decide our disagreements violently in America. Today, we instead define the common good and determine public policy by participating in politics. We bargain and negotiate with one another. We persuade. We compromise. And we rightly condemn violence as being incompatible with these activities.
Yet on another level, an unwillingness to fight is a problem for successful democratic governance when it reflects a broader apathy on the part of politicians to participate in politics. Unfortunately, such sentiment is prevalent in the Congress today. Its members are less interested in participating in politics because they fear the consequences of doing so. They are gripped by an unstated conviction that unchecked political conflict leads to violence. That is, they see violence as what happens when there is too much conflict (i.e., disagreement) in politics. To the extent that politics is a contact sport, members no longer have an interest in playing the game.
Cycles of Violence?
The assumption that conflict broke Congress is implicit in a new book by Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War. In the book, Freeman, a Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University and author of Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the Early Republic, presents a vivid account capturing the deterioration of comity in Congress between 1830 and 1860, as well as the outbreak of war in 1861.
And it appears to be the lesson that the book’s readers are taking from it. Reviewing The Field of Blood in the New York Times, David S. Reynolds writes that the decades covered by Freeman were “a time so polarized that politics generated a cycle of violence, in Congress and out of it, that led to the deadliest war in the nation’s history.” In a review in the Wall Street Journal, H. W. Brands writes, “Ms. Freeman’s book goes far toward explaining why there was a Civil War. She doesn’t put it so directly, but her evidence makes clear that by the time the war came, its causes transcended slavery.” Most direct of all, Brian Matthew Jordan writes of the value of Freeman’s book in the New York Journal of Books. “Empowered by the knowledge that distrust and dysfunction in Congress have been far worse, may we find justice for our own times—and well before we reach the steep banks of Bull Run.”
The parallels to today are clear. In an introductory author’s note, Freeman describes writing a book about “extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness at a time of extreme congressional discord and national divisiveness.” She notes worrisome similarities between the present day and antebellum America’s “extreme polarization and the breakdown of debate,” the “scorning of parliamentary rules and political norms to the point of abandonment,” and the erosion of “structures of government and the bonds of Union.” The future appears ominous when viewed from this perspective. In Freeman’s words, “The nation didn’t slip into disunion; it fought its way into it, even in Congress.”
Yet while some people see in America’s present dysfunction the seeds of its future disunion, the reality is that Americans are not on the brink of another civil war. Freeman’s excellent case studies detailing incidents of violence in Congress prior to the only civil war that we have had in this country inadvertently help us understand why. The insight is inadvertent because Freeman ultimately extrapolates the wrong meaning from the violent trend she tracks. And in doing so, she misses the significance of what her excellent case studies reveal about America’s march to war.
It turns out that a collapse of political space, not violence, caused the Civil War.
The Spirit of Politics
The key to understanding why can be found in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. For the Frenchman, spirit was synonymo