What John Quincy Adams can teach us and our politicians today

In his outstanding biography of John Quincy Adams “Militant Spirit”, James Traub gives us a fantastic look of one of our earliest presidents. To my friends on RallyPoint, I highly recommend reading it, as it provides you with a unique perspective of the founding of our great country while also explaining John Quincy Adams’ pivotal place in American history. Despite the wonderful perspective, interestingly, Traub did not confront the question of what the former President’s legacy can teach us today.

I think the most important extract from the blog and the book lies in how we and our founding fathers view history. From Traub’s blog:

“…our implicit notion of what lies at the bottom of history is not a moral
but a psychological one. Adams wanted to know what Cicero [or any other historical figure for that matter] stood for, to help him decide what he should stand for; we want to know what Adams was like.”

This is a critical distinction because it defines a mindset which helps shape the lenses we use to look back on history and the figures who formed it. The perspective by which you study history determines the lessons learned and how these lessons are applied to politics, society, and even how you live your life.

The next two Traub quotes are even more enlightening:

“…remember that for Adams and his generation, the study of the events
and men of the past was — along with the Bible — the great preparation
for republican citizenship.”

“For men and women of the 18th century, history was not the story of
progress — or regress — but of recurrence. Republics rose and fell, to
be replaced by tyrannies or anarchy. The American colonists, who
yearned to build a republic of their own, studied the past not only as a
chronicle, but also as a blueprint.”

You can imagine the lights inside my head flickering on after reading the last quotes. As an armchair historian, I now have a ready explanation for much of our colonial, revolutionary and foundational years as a country. Our founding fathers took a “moral view” of history which, after investigation, provided the principles by which to govern not only their personal lives but their society as a whole. Their view of history informed them as to what worked and what did not in terms of society and long-term governance.

I think our country functioned in those early years in part because of commonly held views based on moral certainty and fixed principles derived from studying human history and the rise and fall of institutions, governments, and societies. From that shared view came the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution and, most importantly in my opinion, the Bill of Rights. This blueprint for America and its constitutional based “representative government” was crafted by the moral and principle lessons. When coupled with the free market capitalism that was developing in the American colonies, these documents ignited not just a political revolution, but a social and economic one as well.

Where I think Traub really nails it in terms of what President Quincy Adams can teach us today is when he touches on how our historical view is shaped by the psychological view. I realized we are very much a “touchy-feely” world. Much of the revisionist history we have been subjected to over the last 40-50 years ignored the moral and principled framework that our founding fathers operated by. Instead, we have been fed a steady diet of perceived feelings and subconscious motivations derived by reading “in between the lines” of original sources.

Sadly, this bleeds into our current political discourse and how we choose our elected officials. More than ever, perceptions and feelings drive public policy debates and the governance of our society as a whole. Facts, reality, and the consequences from the denial of such mean less and less in the current political discourse and subsequently in public policy. I see revisionist history as only helping the liberal progressive and leftist agenda, which I believe is destroying our country as it was designed. It has been a common ply of tyrants to selectively apply history to manipulate the uninformed masses. A most recent example is Milosevic in the former Yugoslavian Republic using “history” to enflame the Serbs to attack Croats and Bosnians during the mid-1990’s. Some of us had to serve in the IFOR and SFOR to resolve that civil war.

I think the most recent example is ignoring the principle of “separation of powers” where “executive orders” are being used to usurp the legislative responsibilities of congress. This puts the country on the road to centralized power and ultimately tyranny. In our greater society, the principle of free speech is being repressed by the political correctness police, while the principle of self-defense (as an individual and societal right) is being abridged by gun control activism. This silences us and helps makes us a nation unable to defend ourselves individually and as a civilization.

So the lesson of the day is that history repeats itself, and those who ignore it suffer from the repetition of common crises. My Jewish and Catholic grandparents from Germany witnessed the rise of National Socialism and Adolf Hitler. History tells of the rise and fall of the Holy Roman Empire, the Roman Empire, the City States of Greece, and the entire Egyptian civilization. Chinese and Japanese history tell similar stories of the rise and fall of power. Moral truths and governing principles can be learned from them all, and the remaining question is whether or not we are going to apply historical lessons to exempt ourselves from the problems of the past.