I had never heard of James Henry Hammond until I read Erik Larson's The Demon of Unrest. Then he turned up in Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood, by Colin Woodard.

Most recently, he was mentioned by Heather Cox Richardson in her June 30 Letters From an American blog post.

Hammond is an especially despicable figure in the dark history of the Confederacy. Apart from being an enslaver, he sexually abused his nieces. We know this because he wrote about it extensively in his diaries.

It's just interesting to me that such a figure would come to my attention with such frequency in a short period of time. Perhaps not so interesting considering that both Unrest and Union deal with the Civil War.

But Hammond's views represent a strain of American thought that has existed since the founding, and which continues today. Hammond was a member of the planter class, the wealthy elite of the South. Like many successful men, he married into it.

Hammond and others openly rejected Jefferson's claim that "all men are created equal." That view lives today.

Equality and democracy threaten the status and the privilege of the elite. FDR's New Deal created a new role for the federal government, to guard the equality and dignity of all Americans, against the predations of the elite, the monied class. Ever since it was created, the wealthy and the elite have been trying to roll it back and tear it down.

Gerrymandering is a cancer on democracy, where politicians choose their voters instead of the reverse. Gerrymandered states turn into political monocultures, where the policy views drift further to the extremes because elections are decided in primaries where only the most motivated voters turn out and reward the candidate who embraces the "purest" views of the radical fringe that turns out in proportionally greater numbers in primaries.

Demagogues thrive at both extremes of our political parties. The kinds of people contemplated by Thomas Paine when he wrote:

“A government of our own is our natural right: And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. If we omit it now, some [dictator] may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.”

Democracy is messy. It can be slow to arrive at consensus. It involves compromise and concession. It confounds the impatience and ideological certainty of the extremes. At that makes it a liability they would happily do away with if they could.

If our democracy is to survive, and that is very much an open question as I write this, we must end the plague of gerrymandering. Monocultures make environments vulnerable to disease and parasites, in ecology and politics.

I just bought Heather Cox Richardson's Democracy Awakening. I'll read it on Kindle while I'm on vacation. I hope it will offer some comfort. Seems appropriate on Independence Day.

Last night I tried to stream Netflix's new Eddie Murphy Beverly Hills Cop movie. For whatever reason, which I don't know or understand, I was unable to send it to the tiny TV here via AirPlay.

So I chose a movie from my own library. I was looking for something light, but selected Darkest Hour, without giving it much thought. Perhaps I knew subconsciously it was what I needed to see. More so even than a comedy.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:04 Thursday, 4 July 2024