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From Charlie Pierce at Esquire Politics Blog:
And Kevin McCarthy Thinks He Has It Tough?Because of the most recent craziness emanating from our national government, I’ve been thinking a lot about John Quincy Adams these days.
As I pointed out in a post concerning the debate in the House of Representatives over whether to condemn the president*’s horrid racism as expressed in a series of tweets against four members of Congress who happen to be women of color, our Congress always has been unable to talk sensibly about race. Sometimes, it’s so terrifying a topic that congresscritters choose en masse simply not to talk about it at all. In the mid-1800’s, discussion of slavery in the House was forbidden by House rules. This was the infamous “gag rule” that JQA fought until almost literally the last moments of his life. He actually collapsed on the floor of the House chamber and died on a nearby sofa. And Kevin McCarthy thinks he has it tough.
The day he died, JQA was inveighing against President James Polk and his Mexican War, which Adams saw (correctly) as a attempt by the “slaveocracy” to extend the political power the Constitution had granted it into the new territories in the western part of the continent. (Adams had become convinced that the slave power could not be broken without bloodshed. He was, of course, right.) His last act in public service was to vote against a resolution to strike gold medals to be awarded to the generals who fought against Mexico. He cast his vote, collapsed at his desk, was hustled off to the Speaker’s office, and died there two days later.
This was a guy who was the golden child of one of the most stiff-necked old bastards of the founding generation and, in this area, at least, JQA had bred clear and true. His last act was to refuse to honor generals who’d won a successful war that he considered immoral and unconstitutional, and damned be the consequences. This was what carried him along battling the gag rule for as long as he did.
In fact, you’d have to have been a stubborn as a mule to react to a painful loss of the presidency to serve in the House of Representatives. He lost a vicious rematch with Andrew Jackson in 1828. A partisan editor of a Jackson newspaper accused Adams of having acted as a pimp for the Tsar while serving as minister to Russia while an Adams newspaper proclaimed that Jackson’s mother had been a camp follower with the British army who had conceived Old Hickory with a mulatto man. Jackson won, easily. Adams was crushed by a new kind of politics that a later generation might loosely call “populist.” Nevertheless, as William Cooper points out in his biography of JQA, he still burned with the desire to do some great public service. In 1830, he was elected to the House with 72 percent of the vote in his congressional district. Thus began his long and remarkable opposition to slavery in the United States.
(Part of his victory was his embrace of the oddball Anti-Masonic party, which had recently become a force in Massachusetts with the collapse of the previous two-party system. Ultimately, the Anti-Masons would morph into what eventually would become the Republican Party; William Seward was an early convert to the cause.)
He is still the only person to be elected to Congress after serving as president. In accepting his nomination to the House, JQA was fulfilling the vision of his father’s generation, and of the Constitution it had produced. Three equal branches of government, checking each other, ambition countering ambition, as Mr. Madison put it. JQA had believed that Jackson’s brand of politics not only was crude and ungentlemanly, but that it leaned a little bit towards monarchy, if not some new kind of executive dictatorship. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Washington, the slave power was active as well, this time in an argument over tariffs, and arguing that states had the right to nullify federal laws and, if necessary, destroy the Union in order to do so. The doctrine had been developed and promulgated by Jackson’s obstreperous vice-president, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina.
Having continued to write and speak against nullification while in political limbo, now that he was in Congress, and he could see clearly where nullification would take the country, Adams dug in against the forces of disunion and the slavery they were so hellbent to protect. He would speak in the Congress, and he would not be gagged, and he would be right.
The effort to strike Nancy Pelosi's words from the congressional record failed, and the president*'s words remained racist.
Anyway, I thought of all that as I watched the Republicans, the heirs to the party of Lincoln and Seward, fight to keep out of the official record Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s charge that the president*’s tweets and his rhetoric had been racist. Practically all of them lined up against Pelosi and voted in favor of “taking down” her words. The effort failed, and the president*’s words would remain racist, in the official Congressional Record, anyway. There always has been a strong native instinct in our politicians as regards racism to hate the game and not the player. There is a lot of talk about remarks being “racially tinged,” or about “racially inflammatory” rhetoric. But, up until recently, most white politicians, especially, would couch their remarks in some silly flummery about not being able to look into someone’s heart as a way to keep from calling racists racists.
(In truth, as Cooper points out in his biography, even JQA at the height of his anti-slavery efforts, couldn’t bring himself completely onto the abolitionist side as he could not make himself believe that every slave-owner was a “man-stealer.” In this, after his death, history would prove him to be sadly wrong.)
That instinct is inadequate to the present circumstances. The current president* of the United States is a racist or that word suddenly has no meaning. He is a racist who is the son of a racist. He is a racist who is determined to run a racist campaign for re-election and to continue to put in place racist policies because that is what racist people who gain political power do. Because they’re racist. For the first time, a number of politicians are finding the courage to say this obvious fact out loud. And while it is true that the real damage is done to the general political commonwealth by policies that are racist, the conclusion is finally being drawn that racist policies are put in place by racists for racist reasons. This president* has accomplished that for his country, at the very least.
There was a dangerous edge to our politics already before El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago came along. I saw it in the 2012 campaign at the fringes of the Republican primaries, and more vividly in the 2014 midterms. Something very foul and deadly has been allowed to grow and has developed a frightening momentum. Sooner or later, it has to burst the boundaries in our system that already have been fundamentally weakened by a renegade president* and a largely supine Congress. Since 2016, of course, there has been a lot of talk about kompromat, that somehow, some mysterious blackmailing effort is going on that is warping our politics in this way,. But the real blackmail is the emotional blackmail of fear that doing something big about some great peril will overturn the entire system. The real blackmail is what happens when we demonstrate to the anti-democratic impulses that exist within a free society that we have no trust in our institutions to keep them at bay, when our emotions hold our reasons for ransom, and when we see plainly what our duty is, and then fail to do it, when we somehow talk ourselves out of looking history square in the eye and deal with it plainly, as Jefferson put it, so as to command its assent.
At the end, John Quincy Adams knew it would come to civil war no matter how well he spoke or how deft his arguments. He felt the great momentum that was driving the country over the cliff. He decided to ride it as politely as a good New England WASP could ride it, win or lose and, by doing so, probably hastened by a bit the coming of the war. In 1843, he gave a speech to the black population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He spoke plain to them.
“We know the redemption must come. The time and the manner of its coming we know not: It may come in peace, or it may come in blood; but whether in peace or in blood, let it come.”
And when Congressman James Dellet quoted the speech in the House, querulously wondering if Adams meant the blood “of thousands of white men,” Adams replied,
"Though it cost the blood of millions of white men, let it come. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.”
We are not there. We never will be again, please god. But we are at one of those points at which history must be responded to in plain and simple terms, and obvious remedies applied. We have looked away from history for far too long.
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