Over the weekend, I wrote an essay pushing back against the notion that America might be better off with a “Caesar” atop its politics — that is, a strongman/autocrat type who could circumvent the forces supposedly obstructing our country’s true prosperity and freedom. I argued that such a solution does not fit the American character, and that one can acknowledge the challenges facing the country while also looking to its people and to already existing institutions for recovery and renewal.
I think that a lot of talk about Caesar, civil war, etc. is being peddled by people with a skewed and somewhat self-interested detachment from political reality, people who exist almost entirely in the Manichean world of day-to-day politics and do not apprehend the country and its greatness in their fullness. But to the extent that there is the kind of genuine discontent, particularly on the right, that would look to a Caesar figure for succor, it is worth remembering that such discontent — or at least the fear of it — is not new in American life. Indeed, George Washington warned against the very thing.
As his second term as the first president of the U.S. came to a close, Washington presciently detected a worrisome trend in the young nation’s politics: the rise of “the spirit of party” (what we would today call partisanship):
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the State, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual, and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.
There is an argument you hear more and more on the right these days: that the Left has already embraced the punitive dimension of state power and has used it against the Right, which now has no choice but to retaliate. There is, unfortunately, much evidence for the former contention, much as the Left may deny it. Thus it is true, to a considerable extent, that the existence of this retaliatory spirit on the right is the fault of the Left. And so the more the aggressions of the Left continue, the more difficult it will be to resist the temptation to descend into aggressive retaliation as an end in itself.
But Washington counseled against the “frightful despotism” of “the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension,” seeing at the end of such a process the end of America’s experiment in self-government. Today, some might say Washington was calling for “unilateral disarmament” — that he just didn’t “know that time it is.” Not true. Rather, Washington was calling for us to resist excessive escalation of this tit-for-tat attitude. Not to escape politics, which will always be with us — it is “inseparable from our nature” — but to govern for the common good with maximum deference to and use of constitutional powers.
This will still, inevitably, involve a great deal of political conflict with the Left, much of which now has little use for the framework bequeathed to us by, among other things, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. That one side of our politics is increasingly abandoning these aspects of American heritage is dispiriting, yes. But it is also an opportunity for patriotic citizens and for dutiful statesmen. In the spirit of Washington, they should take it.