A recent article by Victor Davis Hanson over at National Review Online draws, in the course of making a broader argument, an interesting analogy which got me thinking about America’s current place in history.  He notes, quite interestingly, that the current noise over boycotts against Arizona have “a whiff of the climate of the late 1850s, when the federal government was in perpetual conflict with the states, which in turn were in conflict with one another.”  This statement caught my attention as being both insightful and intriguing.  At the risk of jumping into “revolutionary” talk that even I think is somewhat overdone, I do have to wonder if America might be coming to the precipice of what I would consider to be the third American revolution.

Looking back historically, the first two revolutions both have remarkably common elements about them.  Both of the first two revolutions, the American Revolution and the Civil War, were, at an important level, battles over the role of government in America.  This battle is easily seen in the American Revolution, as nearly every history class around will characterize it as a fight against the tyranny of England and the unjust, confiscatory tax policies of King George.  Those who supported American independence were convinced that the Crown was too powerful, and the battle against England was an ultimately successful fight to cast off the reigns of an overpowering central government and return a degree of independence not only to the colonies as nations, but to the colonists as individuals.  Harder to see but no less present are the shades of government oppression in play during the Civil War.  Although the common story is that the Civil War was about slavery, the issue of slaves was more of a proxy for a deeper battle being waged against the reach of the federal government, particularly in southern states which viewed the northern and federal campaign against slavery as an assault on their independence.  The South, of course, lost that battle, and the entire concept of state independence has never quite been the same since.

Of course, at the time of the Civil War, the slow collapse of federalism and the rise of federal power were hardly the foregone conclusions that they appear to have become today.  Nevertheless, the government’s intervention to bring about the demise of slavery set a precedent for using government intervention to cure America’s ills.  FDR and the New Deal, LBJ and the Great Society, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and everything that the Warren Court did, all take their strength from the fact that the government was able to “solve” slavery by aggrandizing power to itself.

What President Obama has now given us is the clearest glimpse to date of the consequences of reassigning power from the people to the government following the Civil War.  No longer is the government in the business of solving real problems like slavery or segregation — to their credit, my parents’ generation has taken care of the lingering inequalities which had echoed through time all the way since the founding.  What we see instead is that the government spends its time building up power by attacking an endless army of straw men, crafting “solutions” for things which are not problems, imagining problems and then purporting to solve them, and providing solutions to problems which would not have existed if not for the government.

The Tea Party movement — a name which, itself, conjures memories of the first revolution — is the first, best indication that the people have had enough.  As I have said now many times, the culture wars of the current generation will give way to a deeper battle over the role of government itself in America.  Tea Partiers all come from diverse walks of conservatism, and many would certainly disagree on many aspects of the culture wars including such staple issues as abortion, gay marriage, and religion.  They have, however, united under a common banner against the size and scope of the government as it exists today and as its current administration wants to grow it long into the future.  The younger generation has reached the point where the fight over liberty itself has become more important than the petty squabbles over what to do with the freedoms that have been secured.

American revolutions have never been about land, or money, or politics, or power.  They have, fundamentally, been about changing the relationship between the people and their government.  It seems to me that America is closing in on rekindling that old fight.  Shades of 1850 might just be about right.

Tags: freedom