history

Inauguration Day

/ xeyeti / Leave a comment

Here in the US, today is Inauguration Day: the day when we swear in the new President and prepare ourselves for the next four years.  I’ll be honest, I’m not looking forward to the new administration.  I have far too many friends who stand to suffer considerably as the powers that be systematically strip away a lot of the progress that was made over the last eight years.  Or eighty years, even.  It’s really hard to gauge how bad it’s going to get.

I’ve always been a proponent of the belief that the President, as a single individual with constitutionally-limited powers, can only do so much.  It’s not like being an absolute monarch, after all.  The President has two other branches of the federal government to hold him in check, not to mention his own branch filled with advisers and experts.  But this is a unique situation: the same political party controls both houses of Congress and the Presidency, and gets to appoint at least one Supreme Court Justice in the next four years.  All of that changes the dynamics of things.  Already, Congress is working to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which – if stories from the internet are to be believed – folks across the country didn’t realize was the same thing as Obamacare (and there’s the danger of letting your opponent handle all the branding, guys: they can make it sound downright awful to you even if it’s benefiting you).

Now, I’m a straight white guy.  In many regards, nothing that happens in the next four years will hurt me in the least, assuming I don’t lose my job and have to find a new one (I wouldn’t be able to get insurance with the ACA gone, ’cause the “no pre-existing conditions” bit of the ACA – the part virtually everyone who doesn’t work for a health insurance company loves about the law – would be gone, and diabetes and mental health are huge red flags for insurance companies).  But I have lots of friends who will be affected by the sort of changes the part in power is talking about doing.  Friends who are immigrants.  Friends who are Muslim.  Friends who are gay and lesbian.  Friends with health issues and dire financial straits and all sorts of other problems.  Problems that can only be amplified by the lack of compassion the people in power display.

So, I’m spending this particular Inauguration Day in contemplation.  Thinking about what I can do to be an ally to those in need.  Thinking about how I can speak up and speak out to protect those who don’t have the same privilege and safety that I do.  Thinking about how to oppose tyranny and stand for what’s right.  Thinking about how to use the things I create – my novels, my music, my comics – to speak out against oppression and those who would do harm to those who are less-fortunate or otherwise unable to defend themselves.  I think, and I worry, and I hope and pray I can be a force for positive change.

History has its eyes on us, America.  Let’s make sure the next four years aren’t the first section of the chapter of the history textbook about America’s collapse.

A History Lesson

/ xeyeti / Leave a comment

Totally and completely unrelated to any current political platform being offered up by any major American political party, I offer up this brief history lesson.  As you may recall, my day job is teaching social studies, and historians (yes, I call myself a historian.  Yes, it’s pretentious as all get-out.  No, I’m not going to stop) like to think that, if folks bothered to actually listen to us once in a while and learn the lessons of the past, maybe we could stop repeating the dumb mistakes our great-great-great-great-grandparents made.  Or maybe we’d still make the same mistakes, but we’d make them with more interesting fashion choices or something, I don’t know.

Today, we’re going to talk about the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, a set of laws so wrongheadedly-awful that they actually killed an entire major political party.

The United States in 1798 was in a weird situation.  Under President John Adams, the country had some major decisions to make about foreign and domestic policy.  Britain and France were having a bit of a to-do over in Europe, and the United States wanted to sell stuff to both of them but didn’t want to get dragged into the conflict.  To that end, President George Washington had made a statement of neutrality one of his last major acts as Commander-in-Chief.  Washington was no fool, of course: he knew the US wasn’t up for a major conflict so close on the heels of the Revolution.  Neutrality allowed the US to keep selling things to both countries without having to pick a side.

Adams and the Federalists would try to take things further, though.  Using their win in 1796 as some sort of mandate to draft policies of isolationism and anti-immigrant fear-mongering, the Federalists in Congress created a series of laws, the Alien Acts, that gave the president the power to deport immigrants for (essentially) whatever reason he wanted, prohibit new immigrants from entering the country, and make it vastly more difficult for immigrants to become naturalized citizens (the less-discussed Naturalization Act, as part of the laws collectively called the Alien and Sedition Acts by most history textbooks, lengthened the time you had to be a legal resident of the nation from seven years to 14 years…two years longer than most immigrant worker visas lasted at the time).

The Sedition Act was even weirder.  It made it illegal for newspapers – or, well, anyone – to criticize the government in any way, punishable by jail time and fines and all sorts of lovely stuff.  All the sort of stuff you’d expect from a group that definitely thought it was doing the right thing, right?

Now, there are some ulterior motives behind laws.  The Alien Acts were designed to keep out “undesirables,” such as the Irish, who were not sending their best (to hear the Federalists tell of it).  It was surely no coincidence that the Federalists’ political rivals, the Democratic-Republicans, included more immigrants in their ranks.  Surely these laws were just spite aimed at weakening their opponents?  No political party in the United States would ever do that!

Anyway, turns out those laws were seriously unpopular.  Adams and the Federalists lost the election of 1800 to Thomas Jefferson (with a little help from the only other major Federalist in the country other than John Adams, Mr. Alexander Hamilton), and the Federalists were basically a non-entity on the national level after that.  Hell, the next couple of decades saw nothing but Democratic-Republican candidates win the White House.  They didn’t call the 1810s the Era of Good Feelings because everyone liked how itchy their wool suits made them feel.  It wasn’t until the populist jackass Andrew Jackson took the office that another national political party, the Whigs,  would even emerge to challenge the Democratic-Republicans.  It didn’t help that Martin Van Buren was all mutton chops and no action, or that Jackson killing the Second Bank of the United States destroyed the only federal fiscal regulatory tool the government had and ended up precipitating the Panic of 1832 (the event that killed Van Buren’s presidency), but that’s all a story for another post.