Jules Verne Was Less Of A Fantasist

 Speaking of the latest concern about erasing history:

Polarization is Trump's super power. It is how he has accrued power since 2017. It is what he has built undying loyalty on.

Anyone who ignores that is not proposing solutions.

Hell, the notion we should retain two poles is part of the problem.

First, Trump doesn’t have a superpower. He’s the temporally local product of 60 years of unstinting effort to resurrect and put back in place a pre-war (WWII, which did more than change just the political culture of Europe) American political model.

Trump, IOW, is as American as racism and xenophobia. He’s the regression to the mean, in both senses of that word. And polarization is as American as America itself.

“They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community,” he said in his Farewell Address. “They are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Washington’s famous Farewell Address, in 1796. In the campaign of 1796:

On October 1796, a mysterious editorial from a writer named Phocion appeared in the Gazette of the United States, a popular Federalist newspaper in Philadelphia. Phocion said, in terms understood by most readers, that presidential candidate Jefferson was having an affair with one of his female slaves. Phocion also accused Jefferson of running away from British troops during the Revolution, unlike his brave friend Alexander Hamilton. Phocion also paid compliment after compliment to Adams and claimed Jefferson would emancipate all slaves if he were elected president.

Jefferson’s folks had been using their own strong campaign tactics in the fight against Adams. Adams was accused of wanting to be a king and starting a dynasty by having his son succeed him as President. He was also accused of being overweight and given the nickname “His Rotundity.”

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The bitterness and rivalries seen in the partisan 1796 campaign got worse in the 1800 rematch between Adams and Jefferson. At one point in that race, Jefferson’s supporter, notorious pamphleteer James Calendar, claimed that Adams was a hermaphrodite, while Adams’ people said Jefferson would openly promote prostitution, incest, and adultery. That 1800 race ended in a tie fueled by deeply partisan tactics and more plotting by Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Burr. Jefferson was chosen over Burr in the House runoff election after Hamilton decided to support the man he once railed against as Phocion.

70 years later Verne’s fictional world traveler would cross the American West and find himself in the middle of a riot in a small town there. Except it wasn’t a riot, it was an election campaign, for the town dogcatcher. Verne’s traveler was a Frenchman’s idea of an Englishman. I’ve often wondered how much of that scene was based on Verne’s experience, and whether he just read Dickens’s American Notes.

Walt Kelly, who chronicled the polarizing era of Tailgunner Joe, reported an earlier time when his side won a Presidential election. As he and his friends rejoiced at a bar, a partisan old woman cursed them out. Her parting shot was: “You bastards are bastards!”

Don’t get me started on the ‘60’s and Vietnam and civil rights. Contrary to the canonization of MLK, Jr., he was not universally revered in life. He was actually a very polarizing figure.

FDR polarized the supporters of Goldwater so strongly they gave us the GOP of today. (In his impact on government and daily life, LBJ mirrored FDR. FDR gave us Social Security and the Pentagon. LBJ gave us Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, PBS, HEW, rural electrification, and on and on.)

Polarization is pretty much how American politics operates. Will Rogers famously noted he didn’t belong to an organized political party, because he was a Democrat. The Democratic Party traces its history back to Jefferson. The GOP traces back to Lincoln.

There’s something of a lesson there, too.