When American students are in middle school and they discuss presidents, it’s rare that anyone ever says anything complimentary about Franklin Pierce. By most accounts he is considered the worst president in American history. Yet if the late era of “expertise” has taught us anything, it is to be curious enough to reexamine our unwavering presuppositions. Pierce was the second to last Democrat to be elected to office before the Civil War. In a time of deep division in the United States, Pierce was the president who’s decisive election in 1852 began the death of the Whig party. Pierce was a Democrat from the North who was said to have “southern sensibility.” His election was the last grasp at reconciliation ahead of war and secession by the voting public.
The Democrats at the time were trying to hold their party together between the rapidly dividing North and South regions of the country. He struggled with the absolutism of the Abolitionists, stating that without some kind of temperance to their actions, the country was accelerating uncontrollably to a Civil War.
Hindsight may be unfair to President Pierce because of the immorality of slavery and the abhorrent scar upon the republic that it has left, but Pierce was doing all he could as a leader to resist the temptations to destroy their southern neighbors out of exuberance and a hubris bolstered by the Northerners belief in a superior morality. I think that while history doesn’t always repeat itself, there are similarities in human behavior that showcase themselves over and over again - and Franklin Pierce and many of his contemporaries had some prescient quotes that we might be wise to recall.
The current realignment of many people within the political system that is happening in 2024 is similar to the disruption that happened just prior to the Civil War - and there were voices desperately trying to call out in warning about the looming darkness. Pierce was lamenting about radicalism and its impacts upon the people of a nation. He discussed openly that this prevailing sentiment was one in which radicalism had become antithetical to its objectives.
“We may all have regarded with too much indifference the swelling tide of reckless fanaticism, but we are not too late to breast it now,”
He was an ardent believer that the secret to rescuing this march in tension towards war was in reliance upon the principles of the constitution. It was what historian James Huston has called “Democracy by Process” which he describes as “a process of people choosing the laws they live under.” The theory also supposes that “morality in politics is determined by process, not by outcome.” In other words, the laws we live under are what democracy is about - when we assign those laws a morality of our liking we are changing the objective. The objective is the process of Democracy not to create a utopia of morality. That impossibility is a dangerous burden to place upon the law. Pierce was trying in his own way to describe these dangers.
“My hope and faith in the Constitution and in the permanence of the institutions which it upholds is strong, but with a knowledge of the weakness of poor human nature, and with the light of history cast upon our path, I certainly need not warn you that the loss of the great blessing which you now enjoy is not impossible.”
He was telling the people of the country that the Constitution provides a strong framework for solving our problems, but to read upon it a morality based upon the nature of man was going to be troublesome. I’ve argued before that if the Constitution has one inherent flaw it is that it depends upon noble men to seek power. That imperfection creates a vacuum in which those who want to impose their vision of righteousness upon people can implant it with the use of force.
Pierce continued his arguments for the utilization of the Constitutional process to solve the ills of the moment.
“Never allow your minds to be diverted from the fact that this is the great experiment in modern times, of man’s capacity for self-government, and that if the experiment cannot succeed under this Constitution and this union of the American States, its success on this continent under any new arrangement is hopeless.” His argument was that only a renewed adherence to the Constitution can save the Union and American liberty “from those calamities of civil war and of political anarchy or tyranny which destroyed the ancient Republics, and which now prevail in those of South America”.
The realignment of politics that is happening before our eyes is not simply because of political normality. The unusual circumstances of a Democrat from an iconic Democratic family aligning with Donald Trump is not just a simple calculation for placement - this is about the relief valve that has become necessary in the light of extremism by the Permastate and the powerful in Washington. Pierce was leading and warning his people about the pressures of dogmatic extremism in a similar time. He admonished his countrymen that if the extremism of the moment, no matter the “rightness” of the cause was allowed to prevail that the country would be, “face to face as enemies, rather than shoulder to shoulder as friends.”
Pierce’s contemporary and influential author Nathanial Hawthorne described this fixation on singular radicalism in his short work “The Birthmark”. In it a doctor becomes fixated on an imperfection in his wife’s skin and obsesses about the removal of the mark - to the point that he ultimately removes the mark, but kills his bride. He described what happened to the doctors as, “the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea over his mind.”
In his controversial 1862 Atlantic article “Chiefly about War Matters,” published in the throws of the Civil War, Hawthorn doubled down on that tyrannizing influence.
“No human effort, on a grand scale, has ever yet resulted according to the purpose of its projectors…. We miss the good we sought, and do the good we cared little for.”
It seems to describe the Democratic Party perfectly at the moment. They have decided that all evil is justifiable for the sake of the defeat of Donald Trump. There’s an obsession about it. Their fixation on the need to remove him at all costs has bled into every aspect of the American political landscape.
They must protect all of the narratives they have created in order to preserve the morality they have assigned to the moment. If it means the abandonment of all principles, that must become the objective because their fears of the alternative are too great. Contradictions be damned - they are not important and no adherence to their named convictions is allowed, because the necessity to defeat Trump or Kennedy or anyone who speaks against their vision of the world, must be the objective. The stakes are too great to them and so they must adhere to what Willmoore Kendall in his book Contra Mundum, describes as the Political theory of “derailment”. Kendall writes and aptly describes the modern monsters of power and their anointed vision of themselves. He argues that they believe themselves superior because they are, “terribly sure that they are right and everybody else is not only wrong, but wrong because of their wickedness and perversity. People who have suffered such a derailment, we understand at once, are not likely to enjoy waiting for a deliberate sense of the community, and are not likely to content themselves with any process of persuasion and conviction. They know they are right.”
This is our modern moment. The uniparty and expression it has manifested in the Democratic Party of the time, know they are right about everything and so any alternative voice is dangerous. Speech must be managed and outright controlled because differing ideas are too uncontrollable. It would shed too much question upon their rightness. In the end, they defend all of their actions from a place more akin to religion than politics. They know they are right and any alternative to that is an apostasy - which must be eradicated.
Pierce saw this in his time - the speed in which the abolitionists wanted to move the country ultimately left 750,000 American boys dead on the fields of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia and other lands. Today’s entrenched masters of power’s insistence upon their rightness will exacerbate radicalism and create a moral construct that will be defined and used with brutality by those in power. That is dangerous, and must be called out by the open minded.
The realignment happening in our politics today is comparative to what happened in the first era of our republic but it must continue in a better direction than the first time we were visited upon by this choice as a country. We are seeing a unification around the unwinding of the parasitic type devotion to rightness and the corresponding radicalism that it engenders in its devotees. We are seeing people come together to try to stop this destruction. They are hoping to do it under the constructs of the Constitution and the values of the republic. The jury is out as to whom will prevail. The road of “right-ness” that the powerful insist is the pathway, has a violent unwind as its outcome. The alternative world that so many are trying to make, can dismantle the vision of moral superiority of the powerful, that has been used to abuse the citizen.
It may seem strange to say, but perhaps our supposed, “worst president” was on to the solution that would have avoided the violent moment it came to. Maybe this time, we can learn from history instead of repeating it.
Essay 69 - Lessons From Franklin Pierce