Cycles of American Politics

The presidential election circus upon which we are well launched strikes me -- solipsistically -- as a contest not among individuals, not between parties, but between two theories I've long carried about in my head about how US politics works.

I've written of these theories before.  Here is one example. What I think of as the "short cycle" theory postulates cycles that are roughly 30 years long -- so either 32 or 28 years, since 30 itself is not divisible by 4. Obama's election in 2008 can be compared to the election of other relatively obscure figures who carried on the impetus of a reform movement past its prime. A haberdasher in 1948 elected as a last hurrah for the New Deal. Four years later he bowed out, letting Adlai Stevenson take the fall for Eisenhower's victory. Twenty-eight years after 1948 brings us to 1976, when a peanut farner was elected as a final upsurge of New Frontier/Great Society sentiment. Four years later he was mugged by a Kennedy on the way to a re-nomination that proved worthless.

But there is also a "long cycle" theory. According to this, there have been three great periods of constitutional equilibria in US history, separated by chaotic periods of tumult. (There were also two distinct imperial periods in American colonial history, separated by a period of tumult in the 1680s.)

It certainly appears as if the Third Republic ran aground in 2007-08 in much the same way that the Second Republic ran aground in 1929. If that is so, then we are in the midst of a period of turmoil or chaos, and when the dust settles we shall find ourselves with a new equilibrium, a Fourth Republic. If this cyclical theory is right, then Obama is a Washington, a Lincoln, or a Roosevelt, and 2012 is not 1952 or 1980 all over again.  It is 1936.

I enjoy the contemplation of both theories, and I have carried them both around in my head. Now I find that they are in stark conflict, and that one of them seems about to receive its falsification.  My only regret is that I have but two theories to give for my country.

If the court can not come to Chase

Cliff Sloan and David McKean have written The Great Decision, a book about the Supreme Court's decision in Marbury v. Madison. The subtitle portentously speaks of "Jefferson, Adams, Marshall, and the Battle for the Supreme Court."

But what the book adds are matters interstitial to the main line of the narrative, a main line that is after all fairly well known already to the sort of folks who would consider reading such a book.

I like the bit about Samuel Chase and the gout. Chase suffered from that affliction so badly in February 1803 that he could not hobble the short distance from Stelle's Hotel, where he was staying, to the Capitol, where the court was meeting.

Meanwhile, Justice Cushing was ill in Massachusetts and Justice Moore was apparently also ailing and absent. So Chief Justice Marshall could not get a quorum.

What did he do? He moved the site of the meetings to the lobby of Stelle's. Chase could thus attend.

But by the morning of February 24, when the result in Marbury was announced to the world, Moore too had recovered sufficiently so that he could attend, so everyone other than Cushing was there in the lobby of the Hotel. In addition to Chase, Moore, and Marshall, there was Bushrod Washington, the nephew of the First President (and thus the cousin of his country?), and William Paterson.

A neat anecdote, though if you want some broader resonance to it you may have to look elsewhere. Gout is gout, not a symbol of constitutional crises or of their resolution.