The Illegitimate Style in American Politics – a.k.a. Dull American Political History

Article by Charlie Thompson. Edited by Ellie Veryard. Additional Research by Robyn Hall.

In his 1964 essay, the eminent American historian Richard Hofstadter concluded that, throughout history conspiracy theories, psychological paranoia and anti-intellectualism had played a huge part in American politics. From fears of the Bavarian Illuminati (the eighteenth-century group that ostensibly was out to destroy American freedom, despite their having no record of stepping upon American soil) to conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Hofstadter claimed that Americans interpreted political events in conspiratorial apocalyptic terms – and when there was nothing to interpret, just made them up. One academic, Hofstadter noticed, got around the dispute as to whether Kennedy was an evil communist or assassinated by an evil communist, as many believed, by proposing that Kennedy was a communist assassinated by a communist because he didn’t deliver America to communism on time. Mad!

Most, but by no means all, of the movements that Hofstadter referred to were fringe right wing populists who, even if they were popular for a while, were forgotten quickly. The red scare is perhaps the most obvious exception to this. Although he was keen to point out that there were left-wing conspiracy movements too, Hofstadter’s paranoids were universally on the far right.

Yet there is a strain of the paranoid style that is far more constant in American politics and shared more broadly across the political spectrum – the denial of political opponents of legitimacy to govern. This might be slightly odd to a British audience accustomed in the politics of parliamentary government and opposition, but many Americans, past and present, simply could not conceive that an opponent can be allowed to get into office, or if he/she did, that he/she did so without cheating.

Nineteenth-century journals often gave lurid depictions of how electoral fraud was allowing political minorities with tyrannical designs to get into power, often concluding that America was about to have the next Napoleon or Nero. One New York Herald editorial, after hearing of fraud in San Francisco, suggested that California ought to be expelled to join autocratic Russia. They simply could not conceive that a majority of American voters could support their opponents.

However, this illusion was often extremely serious. In the context of disputes between slavery and freedom, settlers in Kansas had a Civil War between two different factions claiming to be the legitimate government of the territory. Both proslavery settlers from Missouri and antislavery settlers from New England believed that the stakes were too high to risk the other side winning a democratic election and so used fraud – and then waged against war against the other side that they denounced as illegitimate. The same was also true in the South following the American Civil War: neither the white supremacist Democrats or the more egalitarian Republicans could tolerate their opponents being the legitimate government. Like in Kansas, they formed rival governments that did battle, even if Daniel Chamberlain in South Carolina and Stephen Packard in Louisiana had little authority beyond the Federal Army bayonets that guarded their offices.

This might not be surprising in the extremely racially and politically polarised South following the Civil War, but this was only an extreme example of a common problem. This was something more akin to the worldview that leads people today to delegitimize the George W. Bush presidency by suggesting that he “stole” the 2000 election (the problem actually lay with America’s archaic procedures for electing presidents) or the Obama presidency by suggesting that he was not actually born in America, as the constitution requires a president to be. Before this so-called “birther” madness appeared, some nutjobs suggested that Obama had not won any votes in Ohio because Ohio was technically not a state – an argument that curiously had not been made in the 52 intervening Presidential elections.

Where did this come from? In his book No Party Now, historian Adam Smith (no relation) developed the concept of “partisan nonpartisanship” to describe the development of ostensibly nonpartisan Union Leagues and Parties. With the future of the nations supposedly in peril, many Americans in the North re-framed political debate in terms of whether one supported the North’s attempts to prevent the South from seceding or not – with opponents inherently disloyal and not a legitimate part of the political sphere. Yet this ostensibly nonpartisan position had the partisan effect of defining the Democratic Party as illegitimate and treasonable because supporting the Union and the North meant supporting the Republican president Abraham Lincoln, who most Democrats despised. This attempt to make ‘America’ and ‘The Republican Party’ synonymous meant that the Democrats were for years tainted with treason and did not have a legitimate claim to partake in national politics.

This political style was not new. The so-called ‘American Party’ (also known as the Know-Nothings since, when questioned about their manifesto, members were ordered to answer “I know nothing!”) did the same thing by trying to maintain a political monopoly on loyalty to America rather than the Pope. They began in the 1850s as a secret society that initiated members of the two main political parties—the Whig Party and the Democratic Party—who swore not to support a Catholic for political office. Although it became a political party when the Whigs collapsed, its use of the names “Order of the Star Spangled Banner” and “American Party” alongside its attempt to redefine the two-party system into a native-born Protestant context suggests that it wanted to put Irish Catholics beyond the legitimate political realm.

Indeed, it might go back to the revolutionary era itself. Although it has become unfashionable to talk about republicanism—the supposed ideology of the period—many Americans articulated a very different political economy to what we understand today. The idea that independent (i.e. propertied) men could find an objective “common good” had currency. (To provide a modern analogy: they would have found the idea that the poor could vote for public financing of healthcare and welfare horrific because they were dependant on government, as they had little other income, and thus could only selfishly vote for money for themselves.)

However, the absence of a ‘loyal opposition’ was the logical conclusion to this point of view. If one believes oneself to understand an objective common good—even if that is in reality a subjective position—it requires all political opponents to be dismissed as not embodying the common good, and therefore corrupt interests with their own welfare in mind.

Americans might have lost the meaning behind the tropes of republicanism, but kept the style of politics that did not see politics as relative and subjective. It might seem implausible that American political culture today can be affected by language from the eighteenth century, but without being given a reason, to change the absence of the idea that political opponents are inherently legitimate may well have been handed down from one generation to the next, even strengthened in the sectional crisis of the 1850s-1870s and raised the stakes for each side.

*****

Richard Hofstadter was a strong communist believer up until 1939.

In later life he became much more conservative due to the growing radicalism that he witnessed in politics during the 1960s.

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