BuzzFlash Reviews

December 22, 2005

The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
by Sean Wilentz

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

The legacy of the Confederacy in current politics cannot be underestimated. Although it doesn't explain all the dastardly deeds of the Grand Hypocrisy Party, it does provide insight into some of the basic premises of the Bush Administration. These include the passionate evocation of Christ while doing evil deeds (slavery was seen as part of the divine order); the belief in the omnipotent powers of white males; the economic emphasis on cheap labor and natural resources; the blind respect for military and political hierarchy; and the firm commitment to limited enfranchisement.

These, among others, are all legacies of the Confederacy found in the modern Republican Party and in the Bush White House.

Seal Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, has written a highly acclaimed, nearly thousand page book, on America's march toward an inclusive democracy. The battle over democracy culminated in the Civil War -- only (and this is not in the book) to be reborn today in an UnCivil GOP War on democracy.

Wilentz sees the nation through a prism of evolutionary political growth. That is why the so-called "strict constructionists" want to roll back the clock to a worldview akin to the pre-Civil War Confederacy.

But enough of BuzzFlash's commentary, Wilentz is a historian -- and the period he covers in this tour de force book is from America's birth to the Civil War.

A reviewer on Amazon.com noted:

Wilentz argues that today's democracy could have been transformed into an aristocracy-based system of sovereignty, had it not been for an assembly of democratic principles which were pioneered by such figures as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom we are taught apportion a degree of responsibility for establishing a system of such principles as the timing of their occurrence would forever revolutionize the future of the country as a whole.

'The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln' covers a broad range of topics relative to the manifestation of today's contemporary American democracy, among them we have the post-American Revolution, a time frame during which the modern conception of democracy was still a subject of hostile controversy; it covers the Jeffersonians and Federalists, whose disputations revolved around the subject of governmental rule by denizens; and it also differentiates between the meaning of democracy as it was embraced by both the North and the South, two groups who would continue to perpetuate the conflict, as it related to a clashing force between Northern egalitarian nationalism and Southern racial superiority localism, at least until the post-inauguration of President Lincoln.

After reading Wilentz's account of America's evolution from "elitist young American republic" to become "a rough-and-tumble democracy" (as described by the publisher), you'll no doubt recognize how furiously the Bush Administration is trying to row the United States backwards in time.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS