Richard Moore

Once upon a long time ago, the United States of America was a land of real ideas, the substance of which was debated fiercely in presidential elections.

They were often radical ideas, at least for their time – you know, some of them led to a revolution – but, revolutionary or not, the theoretical constructs were never very small. Scholarship and philosophy, not pettifoggery and partisanship, were the driving forces behind the moral and political commitments of our Founding Fathers and other early political leaders.

That’s not to say spiteful, greedy grabs for power were absent. After all, you can’t strip bald-faced opportunism from the body politic any more than you could disembody liberalism from Barack Obama. Oh, that we could.

Take the election of 1884, for instance, when Grover Cleveland was running against James G. Blaine. At the time, Blaine was caught up in a stock market scandal and accused of unethical business dealings, which led to this barb from the Cleveland campaign: ‘Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, The Continental Liar from the State of Maine.’

Catchy.

Of course, the Blaine camp had its own weapons stemming from rumors that Cleveland had fathered an out-of-wedlock child. They bounced back with: ‘Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa, Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha.’

Ouch.

Truth be told, name-calling was part of the political landscape from the get-go, and even the lofty Founding Fathers could wallow in the mud with the best of them. Take the election of 1800, when fabled Thomas Jefferson squared off against the legendary (and incumbent) John Adams.

That campaign featured attack ads, personal smears and electoral trickery – all of it as vile as the tenor of this summer’s Wisconsin recalls. Jefferson’s supporters called Adams an unstable, hypocritical elitist, while Adams’ backers accused Jefferson of being a trouble-making demagogue, and an atheist to boot.

Edward J. Larson, a noted historian, captured all this in his book, “A Magnificent Catastrophe,” in which he described the two Founding Fathers like this: “They could write like angels and scheme like demons.”

Both sides viewed the 1800 election in apocalyptic terms, just like today.

“For both sides, freedom (as they conceived it) hung in the balance,” Larson wrote. “One election took on extraordinary meaning. Partisans worried that it might be the young republic’s last.”

The republic survived, and so it shall in these raucous times.

But all this is not to say we haven’t slipped from a lofty perch since the toddling days of our republic. For while the Founding Fathers happily and energetically fought in the muddy trenches, they did so for philosophical ideas they considered noble and critical; in the end, the lofty ideals were all that made the muddy trenches worthwhile.

Which is to say, there has always been a slimy layer to American politics, but it has not always been nastiness for nastiness sake; if dirty politics was one lip of the double-edged sword, the other was the American ideals of republican democracy.

To wit, that mudslinging election of 1800 was no less than a transformative event, a campaign that saw then dominant Federalists swept from power by Democratic-Republican forces opposed to more federal power.

Here’s how Mr. Jefferson put things in 1798:

“Two political Sects have arisen within the U. S. the one believing that the executive is the branch of our government which the most needs support; the other that like the analogous branch in the English Government, it is already too strong for the republican parts of the Constitution; and therefore in equivocal cases they incline to the legislative powers: the former of these are called federalists, sometimes aristocrats or monocrats, and sometimes tories, after the corresponding sect in the English Government of exactly the same definition: the latter are stiled republicans, whigs, jacobins, anarchists, disorganizers, etc. these terms are in familiar use with most persons.”

In 1800, then, American politics reached a political critical mass, and it mattered not whether the philosophical war was won by the high road or the low.

We are no less reaching a new critical mass today. As I wrote recently, the years since the mid-1960s have been dominated by a two-party consensus of ever bigger government and special-interest “compromise” that a new oxygenated grassroots force is rising to challenge.

Since the mid-1960s, then, elections have not been about fundamental underlying propositions – the underlying principle of the corporate welfare state went unchallenged by just about everybody. Presidential elections were liberated from the inconvenience of principle: the mud in the trenches covered up no noble theoretical foundation, but oozed simply from the fetid muck of special-interest power.

The mud was all that mattered.

With the rise of the Tea Party, all that is different. The Tea Party has not only railed against Democratic big-government programs but has taken on the Republican establishment as well. Once again, principles are on the table, even if the mainstream media denounces them as anachronistic and dysfunctional.

But there’s another difference.

All of the philosophical debate – all the serious discussions about the country’s direction – is taking place within the Republican Party. There’s the fiscal conservatives versus the establishment RINOs, and there is the ongoing divide between religious fundamentalists and libertarian and states’ rights conservatives.

Much of the time this leads to personal potshots and face-to-face pit politics. All of it looks like impairment, but it really expresses rather rigorous philosophical debate engaging many of the same thorny issues that mattered so much to the Founding Fathers.

The decisions to be made are critical. Jefferson and Adams would be proud of the knife fight going on within the GOP.

But not so on the Democratic side.  There stands an ossified dinosaur wedded to a rigid view of bigger-is-better government, with hardly a shred of protest within its borders. Just where did all the blue-dog Democrats go?

Whereas philosophical battles used to be waged on the presidential stage between two competing philosophical forces – the Federalists v. the republicans, each of whom tried to sully the other along the way – now that battle is waged within the perimeter of only one of the forces that will compete for the presidency.

And so it is no longer principle v. principle on the general-election stage, as it was during the time of Jefferson and Adams, but principle v. naked power. Nobody believes in big government as a principled way of governance anymore; it is an excuse for a collection of special interests to advance private agendas, and everybody knows it.

The bottom line is, mudslinging and polarization, not to mention electoral shenanigans, are just facts of life in American politics, and always have been. In and of themselves, they tell us nothing about the health of the Republic.

What’s important is whether the mudslinging is for principle or power.

In the Republican Party, the wars are over the former; in the Democratic Party, it’s shamelessly about the latter. In this summer’s recalls, Republicans have stood up for the taxpayers they represent as a whole, while Democrats have held for the narrow private interests of public-sector unions.

Can any reasonable person doubt that, in these elections, it’s about principle v. power?

That makes all the difference in the world. Smear us for the sake of principle and we can shake you off and fight on; smear us for your greed and you squeeze the very soul from the body politic.

And one last point. If I may join in the spirit of this summer’s mudslinging, I think Jefferson’s crowd was right: Adams sure was a hot-head, and an ivory-towered one at that.