So now a new group has appeared claiming to eschew all political labels. Appropriately, they have taken the moniker “No Labels.” A closer examination of this group, however, seems to indicate that this is about as artificial as artificial can get.

The “No Labels” approach is inherently contradictory. Simply by creating the group and giving it a name, it has been labeled. Now we have Republicans, Democrats, and No Labelers. While it claims to be inclusive, it seems to attract primarily those to the left of center, whether Democrats or Republicans. The thing is, they don’t consider themselves left of center; rather, they place themselves squarely at the center and conclude that anyone not of their ilk is a “wingnut.” In fact, one of this group’s founders, John Avlon, wrote a book using that term.

I think it’s also instructive that this movement, such as it is, arose only after Republicans took back the House, made gains in the Senate, swamped governorships, and dominated state legislatures in the November elections. Why all of a sudden the need for a centrist party? Obviously because the Republicans did so well—and they must be stopped.

This effort is probably not going to make much of a dent in American politics. The idea that there are no “sides” in political debate is fanciful. Even the Founding Fathers had to face up to that. The Constitution, as originally written, did not take into account the development of political parties. There was this high hope that statesmen would govern for the good of all. Yet during Washington’s administration, we divided into Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans.

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Phase one for restoring the republic is over: the House is now in Republican hands, thereby assuring nothing radical will sail through the Congress in the next two years (although it would be wise to be on the alert for unconstitutional executive orders intended to accomplish that purpose). If the electorate remains informed and stays on task, 2012 will see the Senate flip as well since the majority of seats up for reelection are currently in Democrat hands.

Phase two may be more difficult. How likely is it that an incumbent president will be stripped of his position? What will it take? Some say it’s a very difficult task, yet it has occurred rather often. Under what circumstances? A short survey of twentieth-century presidential politics may offer some clues as to the feasibility that Barack Obama will be a one-termer.

We can begin with William Howard Taft, Republican winner of the 1908 election as the handpicked successor to Theodore Roosevelt.

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One must be careful not to draw exact parallels between a historical event and a current situation, at least not without sufficient evidence. I want to be cautious. However, as I was teaching a class on the Civil War era last week, I noticed what appeared to be a rather striking similarity in the fate of the Democrat party in the 1850s and that same party today.

Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas

Here’s the history: In 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois made an all-out push for a bill he sponsored called the Kansas-Nebraska Act. On the surface, it sounded good—let settlers moving into those areas decide for themselves whether or not slavery should be allowed. Douglas referred to his plan as popular sovereignty, and he saw no problem with it because for him slavery was not a moral issue. Whatever the people decided was fine.

Yet for many others, it was a moral issue, and an increasingly contentious one. The ideological divide between North and South was growing. Further, what Sen. Douglas’s bill did was to alter the agreement the Congress had reached back in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise. At that time, Congress decided to draw a line extending west from the southern border of Missouri that forbade slavery in any territory north of that line.

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The “Restoring Honor” event at the Lincoln Memorial was inspiring. That should be just the beginning of a “Restoration Movement.” We don’t really need a revolution in America; all we need to do is restore what once was. I have a suggestion for another aspect of our Founding that needs to be restored—a suggestion that some will call unrealistic, yet one that the Founders considered essential.

Let’s restore the provision in the original wording of the Constitution that allows state legislatures to choose a state’s senators who serve in Congress.

Article I, Section 3 says, “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof.”

The reasoning was lucid: the people of each state already had direct representation into the national government via the House of Representatives; it was necessary as well to provide representation for the state governments in the national Congress. The goal was to make sure that laws passed by each state were not going to be overturned by the national government without good reason.

It was one of those key checks on power; it was to provide balance in the federal system.

Why did this change?

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You had to live through it to recognize the metamorphosis. During those early days of June 2004, as the nation mourned the passing of Ronald Reagan, you would have never known he had been ridiculed and treated with disdain for most of his political career—not only by Democrats but by establishment Republicans. Frankly, I was stunned by the display of love and gratitude in 2004.

As the Reagan motorcade drove toward the Reagan Library for the final tribute, ordinary citizens along the route were paying their final tributes as well. It was an amazing moment.

But it was not always so.

When Reagan first ran for California governor in 1966, a lot of people, both Democrat and Republican, treated his candidacy as a joke. First, he had to get the nomination. Establishment Republican George Christopher, a former mayor of San Francisco, painted Reagan as a right-wing extremist and racial bigot. Having overcome that hurdle, he had to face governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, who was running for reelection and expected an easy triumph over the “B” actor.

One of Brown’s ploys was an infamous commercial he ran during the campaign in which he told a group of small children, “I’m running against an actor, and you know who killed Abe Lincoln, don’t you?” It didn’t work.

After two terms as California governor, Reagan took on Gerald Ford for the presidency in 1976. The entire Republican establishment opposed him. Ford was the sitting president, having achieved that position only by Senate appointment as vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned and then after Nixon was forced out of office by Watergate. He was not exactly the people’s choice. Again, the big guns came out to declare the challenger an extremist. It was an uphill battle, one that Reagan lost that year, only to claim the nomination four years later, this time defeating the establishment candidate George Bush.

Democrats in the 1980 campaign depicted Reagan as an idiot, a grade “B” movie actor who had starred with a chimpanzee, of all things.

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When hard times come, people might wake up. They might have to rethink their foundational beliefs. Some of that may be happening right now as the Obama administration leads the nation ever deeper into a moral, political, and economic decline. This was supposed to be New Deal II. Well, maybe it is, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. If we can come up with a leader who has learned his or her lessons from this experience, there might be hope for real change.

It happened before in the case of Ronald Reagan. Raised a New Deal liberal, Reagan never seriously questioned his political faith until after World War II. It was then that he became president of the Screen Actors Guild and had to confront the enemy in the form of communist subversion of the movie industry. Communist-led strikes created chaos; lives were threatened—even Reagan’s. He had to carry a gun for months after an anonymous caller warned that his actions would end his career. He was told later that plans had been made to throw acid in his face.

Reagan became the voice of the actors in congressional hearings. He went to Washington to testify in 1947.

Reagan Testifying at Congressional Hearings on Communism in Hollywood

In his autobiography, he stated,

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I’ve never met Glenn Beck, but after watching him for the past year and a half, I feel I know him to some extent, at least in that modern concept of knowing people, at a distance via technology.

I sincerely appreciate what he has been doing on his television program, particularly his emphasis on history. Specifically, I have loved the following:

1. The exposé of progressivism, showing how that philosophy has permeated our politics and government.
2. The excellent choice of guests ranging from Amity Shlaes to Jonah Goldberg to Larry Schweikart.
3. The Founders Friday series in which he reintroduces (or introduces, as the case may be) the thinking of the Founders to a national audience.
4. His desire to lead Americans back to faith in God and all the values that flow from that faith.
5. His sense of how to combine substance with entertainment, thereby making the substance far more interesting to those who watch.

Oh, I’ve had some quibbles with him along the way. First, I’m not overly fond of Thomas Paine. Yes, his Common Sense was instrumental in leading toward independence, but his later Age of Reason, which trashed Christianity, met with overwhelming rejection by the American people—justly so, in my view.

I’ve also wished at times that his critique of Republicans didn’t make all Republicans seem like sellouts. Not all are (and I’m sure he realizes this).

My third quibble has been his reliance on proponents of Ayn Rand’s philosophy as a basis for championing the free market and capitalism.

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Presidents from the last half of the nineteenth century don’t get a lot of attention. Most people would have a hard time coming up with the names of even one or two. Yet there were some good men who served during that era, men who are now largely forgotten. I’d like to mention two of them and pass on a few words of wisdom from them that might benefit our nation today.

James Garfield might be familiar in a vague way to Americans, but don’t ask what they know about him specifically—you won’t get much of a response.

Garfield was a minister with the Disciples of Christ early in his life, served as an officer in the Civil War, then was elected to Congress, where he served from 1864 to 1881. He became a Republican leader respected by his colleagues. The Republican convention in 1880 was deadlocked on its presidential nominee after 35 ballots. On the 36th ballot, they turned to Garfield as the standard-bearer even though he wasn’t seeking the nomination. His name has since become synonymous with the term “dark horse candidate.”

As president in 1881, Garfield began to tackle some of the corruption issues within his own party. At the centennial of the Declaration of Independence five years earlier, he had warned the country,

Now more than ever before, the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities to represent them in the national legislature. …

If the next centennial does not find us a great nation … it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces.

Those are words that are not confined to Garfield’s time period. They are just as applicable today.

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Thomas Paine. John Jay. Take a survey of current conservative/libertarian activists and you will probably find Paine’s numbers higher on the recognition scale. Everybody, it seems, likes to quote him. Even Ronald Reagan used Paine’s words when he said, “We have the power to begin the world anew.” Paine’s Common Sense was the catalyst as the American colonies reluctantly concluded that independence from Britain was necessary. His Crisis series of newspaper articles, begun at a low point in the American Revolution, are stirring. Even many of our poorly educated students probably can recall hearing these words somewhere: “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

Thomas Paine: Wordsmith

Yet this man who made such an impact on the early days of the Revolution was an utter failure in business back in England, was dismissed from his position as excise officer because of neglect of duty, and separated from his wife in 1774 just as he decided to emigrate to America. If not for Common Sense, in particular, his influence on the new nation would have been negligible. Some people are great with words and little else. Paine fit that mold.

When the American Revolution ended, he tried his hand at inventing, but being unsuccessful at that, he eventually traveled to France to take part in the Revolution stirring there. He became a French citizen, served in the Convention [legislature], though without distinction [he couldn't speak French], and ended up in prison when the Revolution took an even more radical turn. Only the intercession of the American ambassador James Monroe extricated Paine from that predicament.

He then wrote The Age of Reason, an attack upon Christianity that did not go over well with the American public. Upon returning to America in 1802, he was not well received because of his radical religious views. Poverty, poor health, and alcoholism dominated his final years; his funeral in 1809 was attended by six people.

The name John Jay is relegated to the dim recesses of this same time period, at least among those who have only a cursory knowledge of the beginnings of the United States. Those who have studied it in depth realize what a debt is owed this man.

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Last Saturday I published a post entitled “Whittaker Chambers: The New Deal as Revolution.” The main premise of the post was Chambers’s view of the New Deal as a revolution of bookkeeping and lawmaking, providing a shift in power from business to politics.

Chambers’s indictment of Alger Hiss as part of the New Deal revolution led to Hiss’s conviction on perjury. To me, Chambers’s view of the New Deal [as reflected in the lives of Hiss and others] is in line with reality.

I was surprised, but also pleased, to notice that one of the comments on my posting was from Chambers’s grandson David Chambers. I was intrigued, though, with the thrust of his comment: he disagreed with my major premise. We dialogued in the comments section, and he requested that his viewpoint be presented in a posting rather than relegated to the comments. I agreed. Herewith, I present Mr. Chambers’s comments and my responses. The comments were long enough that I had to edit, but I trust I’ve captured the essence of what Mr. Chambers was saying.

He began:

One of the strangest trends I’ve seen vis-a-vis my grandfather, Whittaker Chambers, is support for attacks on the New Deal by quoting him. The passage you cite is the most quoted. The citation omits, however, a very important sentence:

“It is surprising how little I knew about the New Deal, although it had been all around me during my years in Washington.” (Whittaker Chambers, Witness, p. 471) Clearly then, Whittaker Chambers spoke about the New Deal with the caveat that he “knew little” about it.

Why would those attacking the New Deal cite someone who has so clearly disqualified himself?

Much of the time, I see others quote the entire paragraph and then ignore that sentence in what they go on to write. In those instances, readers have at least some chance of catching my grandfather’s disclaimer and weighing it against the rest of the quotation. Sadly, your citation does not afford readers that opportunity.

I responded: ”David, I in no way meant to quote out of context, and I don’t believe I did. That one sentence does not disqualify him from making a judgment on the New Deal. All he is saying is that up to that point in his life he had known little about it. Writing after the Hiss case, he certainly had plenty of time to learn more. In fact, that’s what the rest of that section of Witness is all about–his newfound understanding of the New Deal. Consequently, I don’t really agree with the point you are making, but please know that I have the utmost respect for your grandfather.”

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Whittaker Chambers had a secret. He had worked in the American Communist underground for most of the 1930s. His break from that underground had been hazardous; he hid his family for quite some time before surfacing. When he did, his unique writing talent earned him a place at Time magazine, where he eventually rose to be one of its senior editors.

Whittaker Chambers at His Desk at Time Magazine

In 1939, with the outbreak of WWII, Chambers decided he needed to inform the FDR administration of what he knew about those currently working in the underground. Through an intermediary, he obtained an interview with Adolf Berle, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security. During his evening with Berle, Chambers disclosed a long list of individuals who could be threats to the country during a war that he sensed the U.S. would eventually have to enter.

Berle seemed alarmed by the revelations. Chambers was relieved that now the truth would come out. Yet when Berle took this information to FDR, he was rudely dismissed—FDR didn’t care.

When Chambers finally realized the administration was apathetic to the traitors in its midst, he had to reassess what he knew of FDR and his policies.  In his classic autobiography, Witness, he describes how this rebuff affected him:

And with astonishment I took my first hard look at the New Deal. . . . All the New Dealers I had known were Communists or near-Communists. None of them took the New Deal seriously as an end in itself. They regarded it as an instrument for gaining their own revolutionary ends. I myself thought of the New Deal as a reform movement that, in social and labor legislation, was belatedly bringing the United States abreast of Britain or Scandinavia.

What shocked Chambers was that he recognized for the first time that the New Deal was far more than a reform movement. It was ”a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation.”

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Ronald Reagan admired him  a lot. In fact, when Reagan was looking over his new house—the White House—shortly after his inaugural in 1981, he entered into the Cabinet Room.

On the wall were portraits of Truman, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The White House curator commented at the time, “If you don’t like Mr. Truman, you can move Mr. Truman out.” Even though Reagan, a former Democrat, had voted for Truman back in 1948, he made his decision: Truman’s portrait was removed and one of Calvin Coolidge was dusted off and put in its place.

Nowadays, in all the “right” circles [to be found primarily among the academic elite], the person of Coolidge is a source of amusement, if not outright derision. Why, he was a do-nothing president, someone who didn’t use the power of the office as he should have. Probably his most grievous sin, in their view, was the way he put the brakes on destiny: he was a foe of the progressive movement that was intended to reshape American government and culture.

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Paul Johnson is one of my favorite historians. In his already classic A History of the American People, he singles out the Woodrow Wilson administration as “one of the great watersheds of American history.” What does he mean by that?

Watershed Man?

Americans prior to the Wilson era, Johnson explains, “enjoyed a laissez-faire society which was by no means unrestrained but whose limitations to their economic freedom were imposed by their belief in a God-ordained moral code rather than a government one devised by man.”

In other words, although Americans were free to do as they wished, they always understood there were limits placed on that freedom by God. Generally speaking, they either stayed within those limits or were punished for violating them.

The Wilson era replaced that mode of thinking—normally called self-government—with a code created by man and instituted via civil government.

Typical of the earlier approach is this gem found in a speech by President John Adams:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge . . . would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.

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