Thom Hartmann is reproducing chapters of his book on his blog. This is the beginning of Chaper 12. It is insightful, brilliant, hopeful.
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolved, and the people recovering their true sight, restoring their government to its true principles. It is true, that in the meantime, we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war, and long oppressions of enormous public debt. …If the game runs sometimes against us at home, we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost. For this is a game where principles are the stake.
—Thomas Jefferson, writing about the conservative John Adams presidency
At the core of every form of political and social organization is culture—the collective stories people tell themselves about who they are, how they got there, and where they’re going. Government, in many ways, is one of the most direct expressions of culture, as we’ve seen by the forms of governance adopted by groups ranging from the Maori to the New Caledonians to the Danes to modern-day Americans. Conservatives are fond of describing contemporary political battles as “culture wars,” and this is far truer than most Americans realize.
The good news is that democracy has come under assault in America before, we’ve survived, and the nation actually became stronger for the struggle. The year 1798, for example, was a crisis year for democracy and those who, like Thomas Jefferson, believed the United States of America was a shining light of liberty, a principled republic in a world of cynical kingdoms, feudal fiefdoms, and theocracies. Although you won’t learn much about it from reading the “Republican histories” of the Founders being published and promoted in the corporate media these days (particularly those of John Adams, whom conservatives are trying to reclaim as a great president), the most notorious stain on the presidency of John Adams began in 1798, with the passage of a series of laws startlingly similar to the Patriot Act.
In order to suppress opposition from the Democratic Republican Party (today called simply the Democratic Party) and about twenty independent newspapers who opposed John Adams’s Federalist Party policies, Federalist senators and congressmen—who controlled both legislative houses along with the presidency—passed a series of four laws that came to be known together as the Alien and Sedition Acts.
The vote was so narrow—44 to 41 in the House of Representatives—that in order to ensure passage, the lawmakers wrote a sunset provision into the Acts’ most odious parts: Those laws, unless renewed, would expire the last day of John Adams’s first term of office, March 3, 1801.
Empowered with this early version of the Patriot Act, President John Adams ordered his “unpatriotic” opponents arrested (beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s grandson) and specified that only Federalist judges on the Supreme Court would be both judges and jurors.
The Alien and Sedition Acts reflected the new attitude Adams and his wife had brought to Washington, D.C., in 1796, a take-no-prisoners type of politics in which no opposition was tolerated. In sharp contrast to his predecessor, George Washington, America’s second president had succeeded in creating an atmosphere of fear and division in the new republic, and it brought out the worst in his conservative supporters. Across the new nation, Federalist mobs and Federalist-controlled police and militia attacked Democratic-Republican newspapers and shouted down or threatened individuals who dared speak out in public against John Adams.
In the end, the Sedition Act, which made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the government or its officials, expired in 1801. The Alien Enemies Act, which enables the president to apprehend and deport resident aliens if their home countries are at war with the United States of America remains in effect today (and is most often brought forth during times of war). Some things, it seems, have changed, but many remain the same from the days of Adams’s Federalist hysteria.[liv]
Recovering a Culture of Democracy
Our democracy and culture have truly reached a threshold. It is time, now, for us once again to follow Jefferson’s wise advice. Hope for the best, organize for a better America, and recognize the power and evil unleashed by politicians who believe that campaign lies are defensible, laws gutting the Bill of Rights are acceptable, and that the ends of stability justify the means of repression and corruption.
America has been through crises before, and far worse. If we retain the vigilance and energy of Jefferson, who succeeded Adams as president—as today we face every bit as much a struggle against the same forces that he fought—we shall prevail.
For the simple reason that, underneath it all, “this is a game where principles are the stake.”
While the principles of that day were confined largely to issues of democracy, personal liberty, and the public good (the interconnectedness of humans), today we have an added principle that we must draw quickly into our national—and international—consciousness. Very simply, if we fail to realize—and to make part of our national education and discourse—the reality of our interconnectedness with every other life form on the planet and the importance to hold them all sacred, we may well perish, or at the very least descend into a hellish existence of our own making.
As Leonardo DiCaprio so eloquently points out in his movie of the same name, we are now at the eleventh hour:
An acre and a half of rainforest is vanishing with every tick of the second hand—rain forests that are not only one of the two primary lungs of the planet, but also have given us fully 25 percent of our pharmaceuticals, while we’ve only examined about 1 percent of rain forest plants for pharmaceutical activity.[lv] They account for fully half of the planet’s biodiversity, although in the past century over half of the world’s rainforest cover has vanished. In Brazil alone over 90 separate rain forest human cultures, complete with languages, histories, and knowledge of the rain forest, have vanished since the beginning of the last century.[lvi]
In 2008 the “Red List” of endangered species was updated to note that fully half of all mammals on earth (we are mammals, let’s not forget) are in full-blown decline, while the number of threatened mammals is as high as 36 percent.[lvii]
* Every five seconds a child somewhere in the world dies from hunger; every second somebody is infected with TB, the most rapidly growing disease in the world, which currently infects more than a billion people; every day one hundred to species vanish forever from this planet.
In America there are 45 million people with no health insurance, and most Americans are one illness or job-loss away from disaster. Worldwide, more than half of all humans are already experiencing that full-bore disaster, living without reliable sanitation, water, or food supplies. As global climate change accelerates, within thirty years more than five billion humans living along seacoasts or in areas with unstable water supplies will experience life-threatening water-related crises.[lviii]
Every single one of these problems (and the many others mentioned earlier) is, at its core, a crisis of culture.
Reunite Us with Nature
Nothing but changing our way of seeing and understanding the world can produce real, meaningful, and lasting change, and that change in perspective—that stepping through the door to a new and healthy culture—will then naturally lead us to begin to control our populations, save our forests, recreate community, reduce our wasteful consumption, and return our democracy to “We the People.”
This requires transforming our culture through reimagining and re-understanding the world as a living and complex thing, rather than as a machine with a series of levers and meters. We are not separate from nature, and we are not separate from each other. “We are all one” is a religious cliché, but when you look at our planet from space and see this small blue marble spinning through empty blackness at millions of miles an hour, you get that, like most clichés, it’s grounded in a fundamental truth.
The message of mystics from time immemorial is that, at its core, that we’re all interconnected and interdependent. Ironically, such mystics were the founders of all the world’s great religions, yet that part of their message has largely been ignored—although every major religious tradition still has within it the core of the idea of oneness.
In October 2005, the thirty-million-member National Association of Evangelicals sent a statement to their fifty-thousand member churches that said, in part: “We affirm that God-given dominion is a sacred responsibility to steward the earth and not a license to abuse the creation of which we are a part. … [G]overnment has an obligation to protect its citizens from the effects of environmental degradation.”
It’s a beginning that we must bring to all religions, to all governments, to all people of the world.
Please open the link to read the rest of the chapter.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hartman always has a good grasp. I enjoy his essays. I do think that he erred a bit historically. The Democratic Republicans differed from the Federalists in many ways he correctly describes, but the modern Democratic Party comes from Andrew Jackson’s 1828 election. It’s States Rights orientation was not meant to play out as it did, but was intended for the same purpose as Jefferson intended his opposition to Federalism under Adams. In that way, I can see the relationship between the two Democratic Parties, but the modern one is heir to Jackson, not Jefferson.
I respectfully disagree, Roy. In my opinion, it is folly to make any solid connections between labels and terminology today to that of two centuries ago. Just like today’s republican cult claims to be the Party of Lincoln. A Republican from 1860 bears no resemblance to one in 1960 or 2023. Neither does Jackson the Democrat in 1828 to the Democratic Party today, especially when a portrait of Jackson was placed prominently in the Idiot’s Oval Office. As a solidly leaned (not -ing) Democratic registered independent, if any Tennesseans had an impact on what it means to be a Democrat today, I could make a strong argument for Howard Baker, former Republican Senator, chief of staff to Ronald Reagan, and married to Nancy Landon Kassebaum at the end of his life, as having much more impact that Jackson did. Would also have no problem in asserting that Nelson Rockefeller. There is no question Jackson had an impact on the country and the party to which he belonged. But if one were to try to write up a recipe of the constituent parts of what sort of makes a Democrat today (there would be very many different flavors, unlike the republican mudpie for all), Jackson would be around one percent, certainly far less than five. Now tell me I’m wrong, because I’m hoping you do will teach me why. 😉 Seriously. The good news is that neither of us can ever be proven to be correct. We can just claim to be!
The Jefferson versus Hamilton debate has always been at the heart of American politics, from the Constitutional Convention to Adams to Jackson to Reagan to Trump. In the modern version, seems the Father of Wall Street is beating the academic author of the Declaration.
Greg: what I meant was that leadership in the modern Democratic Party traces itself directly through personalities that link directly to the Jacksonian era. Likewise, the Modern Republican Party has such links to the union of freesoilers and old whigs that produced the party of Lincoln.
Neither party bears much resemblance to their origins. Lincoln’s Republicans came out of the Civil War co-opted by industry that had already transformed it into the gilded age purveyors of moneyed oppression. That was also true of Jackson’s Democrats, who abandoned his fierce unionism a generation after him and led the County into schism. Since then, populism, progressivism, FDR, and neoliberal Democrats have all put their stamp on a changing party. Similarly, Republican figures like Taft (think Taft-Hartley), Reagan, Gingrich, and Trump have dramatically changed the modern Republican Party.
The difference between these modern parties and the early factional differences is that the modern parties claimed a structure and organization that carried the purpose of campaigning and winning elections. The older traditions did not have this character.
I agree with Most of what you and LCT say here. Philosophical approaches to political issues are based on the tension between federal and state powers and the individual freedoms people crave.
I miss debating ideas and enjoy doing so with you. Challenge me back like you do, especially when you disagree. As you know, I often take you to task for having a more charitable view of your friends than I would. And while I mean it, I also get where you are coming from. I’m sure my views wouldn’t be so absolute if I were in your shoes, and you’d likely think differently if you were in mine. That’s the nice thing about honest political and historical discussions we can have here, we see our hypocrisies, major and minor, and have to confront them. Also betting (assuming?) you have as few opportunities to have discussions like this as I do. It’s fun to stretch those brain muscles every now and then and not worry about offending. Like I do with NYCPSP.
And I throughly enjoy and learn from many of the posts here, even some I disagree with.
Sorry Greg: I had a rather lengthy response, but it was swallowed by the net. So here is the short answer.
There is organizational continuity from Jackson to modern times. Jackson’s party and the Jefferson anti-federalists were different beasts given the widening of the electorate a try that time.
You are quite correct that finding philosophical unity is a failed task
Thomas Jefferson pointed out the dangers of the Supreme Court claiming that it could rule on the constitutionality of laws: “The question whether the [Supreme Court] judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law…THERE IS NOT A WORD IN THE CONSTITUTION which has given that power to them.”
In addition, Jefferson’s fellow Founding Father, James Madison, whom we honor as “The Father of the Constitution”, recorded in the actual minutes of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, that when writing Article III, the intent of and the understanding among the delegates was that “the jurisdiction given [to the Supreme Court] was constructively LIMITED TO CASES OF A JUDICIARY NATURE” and did not include issues of constitutionality.
So, Americans can ignore the Supreme Court when it rules on the constitutionality of a law — because the Supreme Court has NO CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY to make such rulings.
Since the Constitution does NOT give the Supreme Court any authority to decide on the constitutionality of laws, where did the Court seize the authority that it claims to have? Well, the Court GAVE ITSELF that alleged authority in its Marbury v. Madison ruling.
Must be nice to give yourself constitutional authority that the Constitution doesn’t give you.
When the Court gave itself that unconstitutional authority, Jefferson sadly said that it was “the end of our democracy.”
And THE REASON WHY the Supreme Court has been allowed to get away with unconstitutionally making constitutional decisions is because with members of Congress don’t have to pass often unpopular laws — they can let the Supreme Court do the dirty work and then the members of Congress can say to their voters “See — it’s that terrible activist Supreme Court that has done this, not us.” Allowing the Supreme Court to make the hard decisions gets the cowardly Congress off the hook with voters.
But, the Bottom Line is: The Supreme Court had no constitutional authority to rule on the constitutionality of any law.
Initial reading of this piece would imply that John Adams, being the conservative, is challenged by the progressive mind of one Thomas Jefferson. Yet, that is far from the case. The Democratic Republicans of Thomas Jefferson were far from progressive or related to what we see as the Democratic Party. As a slave holder thoroughly embraced by the economics of agrarian plantations, Jefferson lived through a political perspective much more relevant to 21st century libertarian Republican political philosophy than that of the contemporary Democratic progressivism. Did John Adams, through the Alien Sedition Acts, exude autocratic tendencies, perhaps. However, Jefferson’s actions opposed to Federalism versus his literary rhetoric displayed one who embraced a slave economy that acknowledged a conservative establishment driven by white male property owners. A great deal has taken place between the presidential aspirations of John Adams versus Thomas Jefferson including the Jacksonian model that led to the Democratic Party of the 19th century, a Civil War, rejection of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the New Deal, and the current era of Reagan inequality. I’m not sure I buy Hartman’s argument.