The Founders and partisanship

Historian Joseph Ellis has a rather deceptive column in the Los Angeles Times lining Barack Obama up with the Founding Fathers in his supposed attempts to rise above partisanship. Ellis says, quite correctly, that the Founders disdained the concept of party, or factions, because they felt that once a person gave loyalty to a party, they had subordinated the best interests of the country to the interests of the party.

And here is how Washington put it in his Farewell Address: The spirit of party "agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection." Sound familiar?

Jefferson is somewhat tricky on this score, because he, along with Madison, did create the first political party, known initially as Republicans but -- this is tricky too -- soon to morph into Democrats. But Jefferson could never admit, even to himself, that he was a political partisan because it violated the core definition of republicanism (i.e. res publica, public things) and the central political legacy of the American founding.

In fact, Jefferson made two of the most eloquent statements against party politics. "If I must go to heaven in a party," he claimed, "I prefer not to go at all." And in his first inaugural address, he stunned his partisan supporters by observing that "we are all Federalists, we are all Republicans."

All this is true. But Ellis is only telling part of the story here. This is odd because he has just written a book, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic, which I heartily recommend. If you enjoyed his book, Founding Brothers, you'll certainly enjoy American Creation. It has the same format of six separate essays each illustrating an aspect of the Founding. And his fifth chapter, "The Conspiracy," details the work, conspiracy if you will, of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to build up the apparatus of America's first political party. In their eyes they were justified in violating their principles concerning parties because they needed to react to the evils that they purported to discern in Alexander Hamilton, fears that Ellis terms "quasi-paranoid" and a "preposterous distortion." But they were so certain of the evils that Hamilton was perpetrating that they resorted to whispering about the senility of Washington because the President was siding with the supposedly monarchical Hamilton. Forget that image of a Thomas Jefferson disdaining parties that Ellis describes in the Los Angeles Times. As Ellis has written over and over in his historical work on Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson was exceptionally two-faced. Here is Ellis in American Creation describing Jefferson. See if this description reminds you of any modern politicians.

Everything Jefferson saw with his eyes was filtered through the conspiratorial categories he stored in his head, which then bent the perceptions to fit the preordained conclusions. Given the certainty and clarity of his vision, he was effectively immune to evidence that might complicate the purity of his mental categories. In a sense this immunity made the ideal party leader, not just because he would never waiver in his devotion to the cause, but also because the cause itself transcended any mere squabble about loaves and fishes, was not just a partisan campaign for votes and power. It was a much more ennobling crusade for the rescue of republican principles from the abyss into which the Federalists were taking them. Serving as a party leader, then, was a necessary role to play in order to reach the higher calling of American redeemer. It was vision that verged on the spiritual.

Jefferson helped found the party that eventually became the Democratic Party. And in its very beginning was the tendency to regard political opponents as not only wrong, but as evil and destructive of true republican principles. Jefferson was indeed a great man, albeit one with great flaws. But it is only telling half the story to portray him as a man devoted to nonpartisanship and to connect that tendency with Obama's rhetoric paeans to purple America. Ellis is correct in connecting that rhetoric with the aspirations of the Founders.

Indeed, it is in accord with the most heartfelt and cherished version of our original intentions as a people and a nation.

However, after George Washington and John Adams, we were never again to see a president who was truly nonpartisan. And Jefferson scheming away from his post as Washington's Secretary of State, was the progenitor of partisanship in American politics. Since Ellis has told that story so well in his books, why would he ignore it in an LAT column linking Obama, Lincoln, and the Founders?

Political motives perhaps?