Good morning. It's Friday, June 28, 2024, the day of the week when I invoke quotations meant to be enlightening or uplifting. Unfortunately, although Joe Biden and Donald Trump spoke for 90 minutes last night, there wasn't a single inspiring word uttered in their debate.
And so, forced by circumstance to look elsewhere, I settled on the wise counsel of four Americans instrumental in this nation's founding – all of whom warned about the perils of partisanship.
In October 1780, while the Revolutionary War still raged, John Adams wrote a letter to a friend expressing fears about the effects partisan politics would have on the not-yet-formed Republic. In a letter to a Boston friend named Jonathan Jackson, John Adams, still 17 years away from the presidency, wrote this:
"There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution."
By the end of George Washington's presidency – as Adams prepared to assume office – GW had also come to abhor political parties. Known in his day as "factions," they were already distorting political discourse in this country. In his Sept. 17, 1796, farewell address, Washington warned his fellow Americans what would happen if their influence went unchecked.
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
I should point out that in our own time, Bill King, a frequent contributor to RealClearPolitics, has been invoking such quotations for years.
The president who succeeded John Adams was the first president who openly functioned as the leader of his political faction. Deep down, though, Thomas Jefferson knew better.
"I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself," he wrote in a 1789 letter to a friend. "Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a political party, I would decline to go."
Jefferson's hypocrisy is not something easily ignored these days, and shouldn't be, especially when it comes to race. Yet the man was a futurist who not only effectuated the Louisiana Purchase, but also mused aloud about air travel across oceans.
I wonder, though, if even the Sage of Monticello would imagine the disheartening and hyper-partisan spectacle that unfolded on a CNN stage last night. But Thomas Paine might have.
"Party knows no impulse but spirit, no prize but victory," Paine wrote in 1787. "It is blind to truth, and hardened against conviction. It seeks to justify error by perseverance, and denies to its own mind the operation of its own judgment. A man under the tyranny of party spirit is the greatest slave upon the earth, for none but himself can deprive him of the freedom of thought."
And those are our quotes of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
