Let's talk about Whigs. When I use the term, I'm concerned more about a mentality or a kind of values constellation than I am about the specific historical Whig Party in Britain and in America. My goal here is to trace the changing party affiliation of the Whig mentality in America to the present day. My argument is that the dynamic, future-oriented, progressive dimension of the American soul is Whiggish, so I want to spend some time to understand what that means and how it makes us what we are, for better and for worse.
I'd argue that every significant crisis in American history, to the degree that it was resolved positively, required that left-leaning Whigs rose to the challenge, either by creating a new party, as they did in 1856, or by fusing with an existing party as they did in 1932. The question I want to explore is whether the crisis we're currently dealing with is on the level of 1856 or 1932 and whether contemporary left-leaning Whigs have what it takes to rise to the challenge. But first let's lay out some background.
Whigs as I want to talk about them here lean left
or right, but at root they are both social and economic progressives. Right-leaning Whigs lean more to the commerce side, and see economic growth as the engine for progress, and left-leaning Whigs are more social-values centered and see progress as a movement toward a fuller realization of the American ideals enshrined in the Declaration and Constitution. Both left and right-leaning Whigs are meritocrats, and they are united in
resisting entrenched, consolidated power held by Tories, in whatever guise Tories present themselves (more on them later).
Whigs, though they are anti-Tory, are very much mainstream establishment types. The American Revolution was a Whig revolution, not a Jacobin revolution like the French and Russians had. So while Whigs reject the kind of entrenched, stagnant, rigidly traditionalist, anti-growth mentality that characterizes Tories, they also reject the let's-tear-down-the-old-thing-to-build-something-new mentality of the Jacobin far left (and sometimes far right). Whigs are evolutionists, and they reject the idea that society can be engineered, but they don't reject government playing a critical role in promoting the general welfare.
The best Whigs are rigorously principled, but they are true moderates. Whigs are gradualists who are willing to fight to protect their
natural rights when threatened by tyranny, but they are not about
creating the world anew. They are willing to let things take their course, confident that history is moving in a progressive direction without anyone having to force things. But they are also willing to put aside their primary m.o., which is reasonableness and compromise, when they become convinced that their opponents are bullies.
Lincoln, for instance, was a classic right-leaning Whig, with a terrific ability to appeal to left-leaning Whigs because of his eloquence in articulating Whig ideals regarding liberty and equality. He was a great believer in capitalism as the engine of progress, and loathed the resistance of the anti-progress, rural Jacksonians. Lincoln hated slavery, but he despised the
sanctimony and unwillingness to compromise of the abolitionists almost as much. He assumed for most of his early career that chattel slavery would just evolve out of
existence. He was wrong about that, and the abolitionists were right. And eventually he got on the bus with the abolitionists, but he didn't seriously consider emancipation until pretty late—spring/summer of 1862, and he defended it primarily as a tactic to undermine the southern war effort.
The abolitionists, and later the radical
Republicans who promoted more aggressive policies for reconstructing
the South, were left-leaning Whigs. They saw the federal government as
having an aggressive, critical role to play not only in economic policy, which is about as far as right-leaning Whigs wanted the government to go, but also in shaping social policies at the local level, and especially in the South after the war. Lincoln is an interesting guy because his thinking evolved, and so it's hard to know how he would have responded to the South's outrageous terrorist tactics during the reconstruction period–he was not one to suffer bullyism–but at the time of his death, it looked as if he was getting ready for a donnybrook with the radical reconstructionists.
I doubt he would have wound up in the kind of battle with congress that his successor did, but Lincoln was no great friend to the left-leaning Whigs that dominated Congress during and after the War. He was a classic Whig compromiser, who hoped against hope that things could be worked out reasonably. Guys like Stevens and Sumner knew better when it came to dealing with the South, and I'd argue they were right and Lincoln was wrong, but we'll never know for sure. Mainly because the country had to deal with Lincoln's handpicked idiot white-supremacist V.P as his successor to the presidency, and he brought out the worst in everyone.
Whatever differences there might have been between right- and left-leaning Whigs, they both saw themselves in opposition to the Tories, which for most of the 19th-century America was the party of rural land owners, both the Southern slave-holding planters and the smaller yeoman subsistence farmers in both north and south. This was the party of Jefferson and Jackson, namely the Democrats, and they were predominantly anti-bank, anti-fed, anti-tariff, anti-growth. They wanted America to be like Tolkien's Shire, where everyone lived like happy hobbits, blacks and whites together in an agrarian Shangri-la, without interference from the smoke-belching, soul-crushing commercial-industrial machine to the North. That was to a large degree the fantasy that animated southern resistance and secession–and as with most fantasies of this sort, there's a nut of truth in it, and it might have had more legitimacy if slavery was the real issue.
It might seem counterintuitive to think of the typical Jacksonian redneck as an American Tory, but he was insofar as he allied with the aristocratic planters and supported the values and basic social structure of a quasi-feudal, southern, slaveholding society. The early 19th century Democrats,
whether poor or rich, were the anti-progress, anti-modern, rural,
traditional-values party. The Democrats were generally against "improvements",
like canals, bridges, and railroads. They didn't want change, and
they hated what the commercial north was doing to the country.
I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that the southern mentality had more in common with premodern, feudal mentality of
Catholic Latin America than it did with the modern, commerce-and-finance driven Puritan North. And
the Democrats in the North represented the interests of yeoman farmers and
the mostly uneducated peasant immigrants. The immigrant mentality was
traditionalist and premodern, many acculturated in old-country quasi-feudal cultures, and they had little understanding of Whig ways and little in common with their values and world view.
In any event, it became clear in the 1850s that slavery was not going to wither away. The Compromise of 1850 enshrined the Fugitive Slave Act and, California excluded, opened up for slavery most of the territory annexed after the Mexican War; the Kansas Nebraska Act in '54 dispensed with the Missouri Compromise that since 1820 made slaveholding illegal north of 36'30"; and the Dred Scott decision in '57 set the stage for slavery to be legal wherever slaveholders wanted to set up shop, including the north, and it became plausible that slavery could be expanded beyond the cotton fields into factories and industrial production.
This understandably freaked the Whigs out. The slave society, rather than fading away, was looking more and more as though it would play a dominant role in shaping America's future. That's how Lincoln saw it–the country was either going to be a slave society or it was going to be a free society; it couldn't continue to be both. Compromise was no longer an option, and the war became inevitable if the union was to be preserved.
So the Whig Party, in the 1850s a dysfunctional party in disarray, much like the Democrats are today, disbanded and left-leaning Whigs invented the Republican Party in 1856. And the Republicans in taking the Whig mantle became the political party that advocated for for social and economic progress until the Democrats, for reasons I'll get to in a minute, gradually took it from them, decisively so in 1932. But until then, if you were a social progressive, you were probably a Republican the likes of Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Susan B. Anthony, Robert LaFollette, Teddy Roosevelt, and so many others. But these people were hardly radicals, and they worked within a party that was also embraced by the pro-business, right-leaning Whigs. Whigs, whether on the left or the right, were always the party that celebrated free enterprise.
But starting in the late 19th Century, the Whig mantle gradually passed from the Republicans to the Democrats. The country had become sick to death of the intractable Negro problem in the south. New issues presented themselves to the progressive minded in the North, and left-leaning Whigs began to focus on problems related to the growth of the new corporations and the exploitation of their workers. A union movement was spawned, and the Democratic Party became its home because of its affinity with poor immigrants and rural populists. The traditional hostility of Democrats toward Northern business interests merged with the urban immigrant workers opposition to those interests, and progressives, if they were interested in supporting the cause of the little guy against big money, migrated from the Republicans to the Democrats. Free enterprise is one thing, monopolies and syndicates were another.
And so a coalition of socially progressive Whigs and socially conservative rural and urban Jacksonians came to compose the Democratic Party whose common ground lay in fighting for the little guy against the power of Big Money and inside influence, which was the province of the right-leaning Whigs in the Republican Party. After its abandonment by the left-leaning Whigs, the GOP became pretty much the party of right-leaning, pro-business Whigs–the party of small businessmen, merchants, and professionals, as they had always been, but a party that in effect was dominated by the interests of the new huge corporations.
After 1932, although there were some left-leaning Whig holdovers in the GOP even into the 1960s and 70s–Mark Hatfield, John Lindsay, Nelson Rockefeller come immediately to mind, the GOP gradually became dominated by hard core conservatives, first from the Libertarian Mountain West and the Orange Counties type suburbs, and then after the Civil Rights legislation of the sixties, the Tory South. In the sixties there were still enough old-school Whiggish Republicans to support the Dems in their effort to pass the Civil Rights legislation, and even today Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, Rhode Island's Lincoln Chaffee, and Maine's Snowe and Collins are faint ehcoes of the old-school Whigs that used to define the mainstream GOP mentality. But that all changed in the seventies, and since then the GOP has been dominated by the Tory South, the Social-Darwinist Mountain West, and a hodgepodge of fringey, right-wing political and religious cults in suburbs and ex-urbs everywhere.
So if in the 80s the GOP became the party of reactionaries and deracinated corporate Whigs, the Democrats self-destructed in another way in the 1970s. They allowed the New Deal coalition of left Whigs and socially conservative rural whites and urban blue collars to fall apart. I've argued before that I think the Dems' identification with abortion and the culturally left identity-politics movements in the 70s was the primary reason for this break up, but the divorce was sealed in the 90s when blue collar whites saw that there was no reason to expect the Democratic Party to represent their economic interests.
They saw the Dems, especially after Clinton's aggressive support for NAFTA, as dominated bunch of socially liberal careerists, more identified with corporate interests than worker interests, and if the Dems weren't going to stand up for the economic interests of working people, lots of blue collars thought they might as well support the party that they aligned with regarding their more conservative social values. And so enter the Reagan Democrats. The left Whigs that came to dominate the Democratic Party ought to be sued for criminal political negligence. The party has become a mushy melange of culturally left causes with a corporatist patina, and it simply has no ballast when it comes to fighting for basic kitchen table issues that had been its core identity.
The results have been catastrophic for the country's social and political health. The Dems have become the
reincarnation of the incoherent, dysfunctional Whig Party of 1856–pro business, liberal on
social issues, and no clear agenda, vision, or purpose–no wind in their sails.
And the Republicans of today have become the party of corporate Whigs, Tory reactionaries,
and half-baked populists that dominated the Democratic Party in the
19th Century. It has factionalized in a way that is very similar to the way it did in the 1850s.
Obama, like Lincoln, is an eloquent right-leaning Whig. For a while there he gave working America some scintilla of hope that the Dems might be on their side again. He gave us all hope that maybe it was possible for the Dems to get some wind in their sails. Obama's biggest blunder, in my view, is not that he's been a moderate in his positions–I think he has to be–but that he has failed to exploit the energy, the wind so to say, that blew him into office. He let it dissipate, in his tactical choice to play the insder game. I thought he'd be smarter than that. But so it goes, and now it's a question of whether he'll be smart enough to learn from this miscalculation.
And so lacking energy and sense of purpose from the White House, we are left with this ridiculous spectacle in the senate. We have the Tories and right-wing cranks saying No to everything on the one hand, and on the other, the most visible Dems we've seen during the health-care debate have been the most egregious defenders of corporate interests. Obama has Goldman Sachs running the Treasury, and the news that Obama himself cut a deal early on with the Pharmaceutical companies just adds to the cynicism that Dems have nothing to offer to ordinary Americans.
The only argument Dems can make for traditional rank-and-file Dem support is that they are not the Republicans, but that's a hard sell for many, especially those who are socially conservative, because at least the Republicans, crazy though they might be, have energy and a sense of purpose. They have what we thought Obama was going to deliver, and right now the country craves energy and a sense of purpose, and if the Whigs in the Democratic Party can't deliver it, we have good reason to fear that the regressive far right will.
I think that's the message the Coakley-Brown race sent: Dems, stand for something; act; do something that gives us all a renewed sense of purpose, or be defeated by those who do have energy and purpose. The left-leaning Whigs of the 1850s rose to that challenge: they abandoned the Whig Party and formed the Republican Party. Is something equally drastic required now from contemporary left-leaning Whigs? I'm not talking Ralph Nader, Ron Paul or Ross Perot 3rd party movements here; I'm talking about prominent progressive Dems, as prominent Whigs did in 1856, just pulling out and rallying public support for a new political movement that promises to do what the public wants, not what the corporations want.
I know, it sounds ridiculously unrealistic, but somebody's got to do something to rattle the cage, something has to shake loose, and there have to be a cadre of contemporary left-leaning Whig patriots who understands that if the White House isn't going to take a leadership role along these lines, something like this has to be done. The Dems as they are currently constituted are a joke.
And continued Dem fecklessness simply will not do. We're at a crossroads very similar to the one the country faced in the 1850s. The forces of regression won every battle in that decade and kept winning until the major shift that occurred when they overreached at Antietam. The Southern reactionaries had will and passion in the 1850s, and they were met by well-intentioned, Whiggish compromisers who seemed at the time to be the reasonable ones, the grownups. But then as now compromisers lose to bullies, and each compromise was in fact a defeat for the reasonable people at the hands of the forces of regression. And in 1857 it looked very much like Lincoln's prediction that the nation in the long run would not last as a house divided, that if it were to become either a slave society or a free society, it was more likely to become a slave society.
Since we know how things turned out, it's hard for us to appreciate how high the stake were then regarding the future of the nation. And I'd argue that the stakes are just as high now, but in a way that is more abstract and harder to grasp. But if the oligarchic slave power was the threat to the country's future in the 1850s, oligarchic corporate power is the threat now. And because that threat trumps every other concern, especially those regarding the culturally divisive issues like gay rights and abortion, left-leaning Whigs have got to put those concerns on the back burner and focus on what really matters, and what matters is now is power and wealth aggregation in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
The key to political renewal is fusion. We need a fusion now like the fusion effected by the anti-slavery Whigs and free-soil/labor Democrats to form the Republican Party and the anti-big business fusion effected by the left-leaning turn-of-the-century Progressive Whigs with the more socially conservative rural and blue collar Democrats the economic issues where they share common ground. This means reconstituting the old left-Whig/populist and union coalition, which means bracketing social values issues and focusing on economic issues. The Whiggish left in the Democratic Party has no ballast without those rank-and-file, traditional-values conservatives. And so much is at stake now regarding the nation's future concerning whether prominent left-leaning Whigs in this country have the savvy and the will to rise to the historic challenge that confronts them. If Obama isn't going to step up, then someone else has to.
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