America Seems to Go Crazy Every 50 Years or So

Amid news that Donald Trump is about to be indicted by a hyperpartisan prosecutor and of his hysterical responses, and prompted by vagrant reading about the War of 1812 and Woodrow Wilson's violations of civil liberties in World War I, a thought occurred to me. America seems to go crazy every 50 years or so.

Start with the War of 1812, about 50 years after colonies' Stamp Act protests. There's a touch of absurdity here. Because of the slowness of trans-Atlantic communication, Congress declared war because of British restrictions on neutral shipping six days after the British repealed them. Americans won their major land victory in New Orleans, 15 days after the peace treaty had already been signed in Ghent.

The Americans' strategy was based on a delusion -- that Canadians would welcome American conquest -- and American tactics were riddled with blunders. Detroit was surrendered without a shot, and Washington was left undefended, allowing the British to burn the White House. The treaty left in place the status quo, and the positive response was psychological, verging on delusional. In historian Gordon Wood's words, this inconclusive war "did finally establish for Americans that independence and nationhood of the United States that so many had doubted."

Almost exactly 50 years later, the U.S. plunged into civil war, which outgoing President James Buchanan might have prevented by sending troops to secessionist South Carolina, as his mentor Andrew Jackson had done almost 30 years earlier. But the differences were fundamental. Democrats supported the "liberty" of slaveholders to retain their "property" anywhere in a nation an increasing number of whose citizens regarded slavery as intolerable. Republicans were determined to deploy the federal government to put slavery, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "on the path to extinction."