Looking back, Jefferson’s theory of revolution holds up.
A History of Revolution
The young men of the Revolution of 1776 had become the old establishment of 1800. But the young people of the nation were dissatisfied with how things were going under the presidency of John Adams (elected in 1796), as Adams had steadily been moving the government in a more and more authoritarian and monarchical direction.
The result was that young people who voted in the election of 1800 fostered what historians refer to as “The Second American Revolution of 1800,” the first peaceful transfer of power from one party (Adams’s Federalists) to another (Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans, today called the Democratic Party) of a major nation in history. Jefferson called it a “revolution as significant” as the one of 1776.
This cycle then repeated over and over again, with each new generation bringing with it a new “revolution.”
The young people of 1800 came to power in the 1820s, and the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 was again revolutionary, in that he campaigned on a platform of overturning the existing order. In 1832, he vetoed a renewal of the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, took on the “selfish” “rich and powerful,” and humbled the banksters. He was the people’s hero, and it was a revolution against the establishment that had rigidified thirty years after the revolution of 1800.
Roughly thirty years later, the children of Jackson’s revolution fought the Civil War under Abraham Lincoln.
The next generation came of age and power in the 1880s, while America was once again facing a grassroots revolution, this one against the Industrial Age’s rise of the Robber Barons (railroads, steel, oil, finance) in a period we often refer to as “the Gilded Age.”
The children of President Cleveland’s generation watched, as they grew up, the assassination of an incredibly corrupt President McKinley, which turned power over to his vice president, Theodore Roosevelt. By 1907, the revolution was on again, and Roosevelt pushed through Congress the Tillman Act, which not only made it an explicitly criminal act for a corporation to give money or any other form of support to candidates for federal office but even provided for corporate officers and directors themselves to individually go to jail for the election-influencing crimes of their companies.
A generation later, in 1932, revolution was brewing. Forty-five thousand veterans of World War I were occupying land from the White House Lawn to the Potomac River, demanding that their bonus coupons for service in the war, redeemable in 1945, be cashed in immediately so they could deal with the Great Depression. The relatively moderate governor of New York, a man born of wealth and firmly part of the establishment, Franklin D. Roosevelt, stepped into the White House. And, recognizing the revolutionary times, Roosevelt had by 1936 become such a revolutionary himself that his opponents among the banking and industrial class were openly using the media to call him a communist and a traitor; they even organized an unsuccessful coup d’état against him.
FDR’s revolution was resolved with Roosevelt’s death and the end of World War II in 1945. So as the wheel of history turned, inevitably there came the next generation’s revolution, the one of the 1960s.
The tenth generational revolution in America, led by Ronald Reagan and a new batch of Economic Royalists, was promoted as a revolution against the “free love” and “tune in, turn on, and drop out” ethos of the hippies. But at its core it was a corporate revolt, following an outline drawn up by Lewis Powell (as mentioned previously in chapter 2) against the rising profiles of Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader, and their unrelenting and successful work regulating big business.
Reagan’s Royalist revolution was continued and expanded through the presidencies of George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton, “ending welfare as we know it” and Clinton’s declaration that “the era of big government is over.”
So, a generation after Reagan, when a young senator from Illinois came along promising change in the midst of another crisis, a nation pregnant with a new generation’s revolution found her new president.
A dozen American generations built this nation and sustained it, with each one producing its own revolution.
But Jefferson also knew that at times these revolutions would not be achieved so easily. That old forces—be they those of monarchy, aristocratic slaveholders, or Economic Royalists—would conspire to keep power and deny a new generation its revolution.
He was blunt about the consequences of such a thing happening, writing, “If this avenue [of periodic revolution] be shut to the call of sufferance, it will make itself heard through that of force, and we shall go on, as other nations are doing, in the endless circle of oppression, rebellion, reformation; and oppression, rebellion, reformation, again; and so on forever.”110
John F. Kennedy echoed this warning 150 years after Jefferson when he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”111
The Suicide Pact
Which brings us back to the Caucus Room on the night of President Obama’s Inauguration Day.
Newt Gingrich was there. So, too, were some of the most prominent Republican members of Congress, including Representatives Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy. Senators Jon Kyl, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn were there. And Frank Luntz, Republican pollster and Fox News regular, was there, too. They all sat around a square table facing each other like a group-therapy session.
After all, Democrats were now in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time since before the Reagan Revolution and they were talking about things like repealing tax cuts for the top 1 percent, reforming health care, passing a carbon tax, and spending huge amounts of money to rebuild America reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA.
Hours earlier, a man who campaigned on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” gave his Inaugural Address to the largest gathering of people the National Mall in Washington, DC, had ever seen.
A new direction is exactly what the nation pregnant with revolution wanted. And the nearly 70 million people who voted for Barack Obama (the most votes ever received by a president of the United States in the history of the nation) hoped that he was the man to bring about this revolution—just as he campaigned he would do.
So, the disciples of Reagan sat together eating their steaks and digesting the new political reality of Democrats in charge and everything they’d worked for over the last thirty years being completely wiped out. They talked about how they’d got to this point, what had gone wrong, and, most important, what to do now.
In his 2012 book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, Robert Draper recounts the outcomes of this meeting, writing, “The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward… show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies… Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves… Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.”112
Representative Paul Ryan warned that everyone “had to stick together.” Representative Kevin McCarthy chimed in, saying, “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”