[img]1640|left|||no_popup[/img]Partisan gridlock, hyper-partisan bickering, Congressmen doing nothing. Complaints are louder, more shrill than ever. “The party system is a bust. We, the people, must reform the process. Let's end the hegemony of a two-party system, some suggest. Let one party have all the control. ”
This country has endured one-party rule before. Under George W. Bush and his party, from 2001 to 2007, the spending spree birthed two wars, Medicare expansions, and No Child Left Behind, which made Democrat Bill Clinton look like a conservative.
From 2009 to 2011, Congressional supermajorities and their like-minded Democratic President pushed through an unfunded mandate, using parliamentary gimmicks. The stimulus was more payout than pay up, with anemic economic recovery still dragging us down. One-party rule is bad. But an earlier telling example of the dangers of one-party rule was first dressed up as The Era of Good Feelings. The title alone, taken from the federalist bastion of Boston, suggests that all was not well. Governing never should be about feelings.
Learning from History
From 1817 to1825, a Democratic-Republican President and like-minded majorities controlled Washington. They had total control, compared to the Bush years and President Obama's first term, since the opposition party had become all but discredited following its failed convention pressing for secession.
The War of 1812 had crippled the shipping and merchant industries in the Northeast, the last standing ground for the pro-central government faction, which, to its limited credit, advanced one member into the Presidency, John Adams.
Adams’s two officious policies helped end the party's monopoly, from marginalizing immigrants (Alien Acts) to stifling free speech dissent against the government (Sedition Acts). Thomas Jefferson, the first Democratic-Republican, advanced a policy of cutting spending, limiting the federal government, impounding excessive appropriations back into the treasury. James Madison, his successor, hated being President because he could not do all the things that he wanted to, which was a good thing, and a telling declaration since he fathered the Constitution in the midst of heated debate during the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.
The year1816 was bad for the dwindling Federalist opposition. Their final Presidential candidate, Rufus King, received a measly 37 electoral votes, with James Monroe sweeping into office. The electors of 1820, with near unanimous consent, re-elected him, except for one elector who wanted to preserve the unified consent that first President George Washington had received in 1789.
What happened during this Era of Good Feelings?
First, financial panic, a depression. An economic bubble based on easy credit and suspicious speculation expanded, then popped, in the frontier region. The unified government under Monroe furthered an unparalleled spending spree, much like the later spend and debt programs under Bush II and Obama.
The Folly of Big Government
During the Monroe administration, the Democrat-Republicans incorporated Federalist policies, notwithstanding their stern opposition to the party's platforms. A national bank screams Big Government. Yet Madison permitted the re-chartering of the institution to fund defense and maintain a standing army.
Madison must have been twisting knots within himself. He had foreseen how wars inevitably justify a larger role for the state in a Republic. The Father of the Constitution found himself trampling some of his own principles to keep a standing army in place. The British had lost one war with the American colonies. They would not get away with burning down the Capitol of the American nation, either. With no party conflicts in Washington, spending went on a spree. An economic panic swept the country, setting up the division between national Republicans, later the Whigs, and Democrat-Republicans, or the Democracy, with the loathed or lavished Andrew Jackson as their standard bearer.
While supporting a strong national union, he opposed the national bank and demanded the decentralization of the country's fiscal policies. The Era of Good Feelings also witnessed the first aggressive foreign policy from the White House. President Washington discouraged future administrations from entering foreign entanglements.
Yet Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, later one of the leading national Republicans, drafted the Monroe Doctrine, warning European powers to stay out of political matters in the Americas. The Monroe Doctrine, promulgated by Secretary of State Quincy Adams, directed hands off to the rest of the Western world.
European powers, with current colonial holdings, had nothing to fear. Yet no further exploitation would be permitted. Latin American nations chafed under such paternalism, but the British Empire's widespread naval forces willingly enforced this directive.
The United States took its first step outside of the small republic aspirations of limited government advocates like Jefferson, and the original intentions of the Framers. One-party rule apparently afforded the Monroe administration an eased sense of pre-eminence to step into foreign matters, even though barely a decade prior, the British had stormed Washington and burned the White House. What were Good Feelings for the Boston press turned out to set bad precedents and bad faith in the ruling charter of the country. The antebellum Monroe administration should serve as a warning to future generations of the economic and foreign policy dangers that await a nation should they long for expedient one-party rule in Washington.
Arthur Christopher Schaper is a writer and blogger on issues both timeless and timely; political, cultural, and eternal. A lifelong resident of Southern California, he currently lives in Torrance. He may be contacted at arthurschaper@hotmail.com, aschaper1.blogspot.com and at asheisministries.blogspot.com. Also see waxmanwatch.blogspot.com.
