As we celebrate the Fourth of July, who can argue that our democracy is working the way the Founders intended? And who can deny that most of the blame for dysfunction must fall to the Republican Party?So begins Eugene Robinson's column in today's Washington Post, whose title I have borrowed for this posting.
To be appropriate for the day, Robinson reminds us that the man commanding the forces already battling the British Army for our independence at the time the Declaration was issued, George Washington, would in his Farewell Address after serving two terms as our first President, express his distrust of political parties, because
as they alternated power, parties would act in “the spirit of revenge” — rather than, presumably, in the best interests of the nation. The “disorders and miseries” that resulted, Washington feared, would inevitably threaten democracy.Robinson does not mention that Washington was already seeing this during his second term, with the development of what would eventually become the Democrats and the Federalists, led respectively by Jefferson and Madison. It is perhaps worth remembering that when the former, while serving as Vice President, defeated the latter, who had succeeded Washington after serving as his Vice President, the outgoing Federalists tried to stack the government by creating and filling multiple positions for Magistrates for the District of Columbia, an action that could have lead to the wholesale impeachment of the so-called "Midnight Judges" but instead lead to the seminal Supreme Court case of Marbury v Madison.
Please keep reading.
Robinson writes that for most of our history the major parties, despite severe differences, "have acted in a spirit of shared enterprise" with some exceptions of which the most notable is the "This July 4, governing in the spirit of revenge":