Counting Stars By Candlelight

I was fortunate last night to have everything electronic removed from me for a few hours.

By candlelight I re-read Jefferson's First Inaugural, which I had been meaning to do since hearing about Gingrich's endorsement of a crackdown on free speech.

The Election of 1800 was unusual, to say the least. I'm not going to go into all the minutiae, but there was a very nasty split between founding friends President Adams and Vice-President Jefferson. Jefferson defeated Adams for the Presidency, but a strategic error by Jefferson's party (the Democratic-Republicans), resulted in Burr receiving the same number of electoral votes as Jefferson, sending the election to the House. There, a nasty battle resulted in a narrow Jefferson win. The former friends, Jefferson and Adams, had become so bitter that Adams beat it out of town before the inauguration.

Nastier, still, were the divides in the country caused by the Sedition Act. The Act had expired, as planned, on the last day of the Adams administration -- the Federalists wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to be in effect in case the Democratic-Republicans took control in 1800. Of course, the Federalists lost the White House and both Houses that year, in large part because of the Sedition Act.

The Act was adopted amid increasing tensions between France and the United States. Well, "increasing tensions" puts it mildly -- we were at war with the French, albeit undeclared and largely limited to the seas. The Sedition Act made it a crime to speak ill of the President or the United States government. Opposition editors were the target of the aggressive prosecutions under the Act, with many losing their savings, property, health, and even lives as a result. (Recall that, at that point, every Federal judge in the land had been appointed by the Federalists.)

It was to the bitter campaign between he and Adams, the national divide over the Sedition Acts, and the nasty House of Representatives battle just concluded, that Jefferson referred in the speech he gave after receiving the oath of office from Chief Justice John Marshall:

During the contest of opinion through which we have passed, the animation of discussions and of exertions has, sometimes, worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good.

All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle -- that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind.

Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.

And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.

During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long-lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others, and should divide opinions as to measures of safety.

But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.

We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

There is no similar voice in the Republican Party today -- there is no one to say to the President, to the Gingriches of that withered and irresponsible cabal of bitter enders -- that "every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle." There are, indeed, too few among the opposition able to say it with conviction, meaning, and persuasion. Not one Democrat has stood up to attack the Gingrich proposal as the same intolerance of political thought equated by Jefferson to the intolerance which led to religious persecution.

Newt tells us it is a dangerous world (no shit, eh?) and we could lose a city of we let people talk freely about revolution and bringing the government down. So he said, at a dinner honoring defenders of the First Amendment. Gingrich's website has edited the excerpt which appeared originally and had not reprinted the entire speech, but here is enough to get the idea:

This is a serious long term war, and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country, that will lead us to learn how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans and advocate the use of nuclear of biological weapons.

And, my prediction to you is that ether [sic] before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

Gingrich proposes that we prosecute people before they do any harm -- merely for the content of their thoughts. It is such an odious proposition that he must bind it to the nuclear annihilation of an entire American city. Gingrich may choose to dismiss it, but the nascent United States Government faced far more serious, and more real, threats to its existence than we face even in the imaginary worlds created by the Republican cabal.

In 1800, there were serious reservations, in each region and state, about the efficacy, propriety and desirability of the Union. Facing dissent aimed at destruction of the federal system, Jefferson proposed a remedy different from Gingrich's prior restraint:

If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

I know, indeed, that some honest men fear that a republican government can not be strong, that this Government is not strong enough; but would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic and visionary fear that this Government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest Government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.

It is a shame that Gingrich has so little faith in the strength of America and in the commitment to liberty and freedom. He wants to protect us by punishing thought itself -- by outlawing "false" ideas. Gingrich is wrong, profoundly wrong, dangerously wrong. And if America had adopted his philosophy, he could be in jail today.

Jefferson's confidence and courage are a lesson for the small-thinking Gingriches of the Republican cabal. The value of a free, open society is not only that the "marketplace" of ideas will correct the excesses and errors of thought, although that is true enough.

But, more fundamentally, when the government gets into the business of deciding which thoughts are "false", when the majority get to decide what is debate-worthy and what is jail-worthy, there is the overriding threat that valuable ideas, perhaps not useful at their birth, but given the opportunity to grow and mature with reasoned debate, contribute something positive to the public discourse, are instead smothered in their infancy.

But even worse than stopping a "false" idea in its tracks, is the chilling effect of such a policy. It makes each of us a censor of our own thought -- each idea is measured against the template of the acceptable and, in case of doubt, it is thrown on the scrap heap. A heap that will stand as a monument to the intolerance and arrogance of the Gingriches within the Republican cabal and the cowards on the Democratic side of the aisle unwilling or unable to stand up to bullying bullshit.

Jefferson ended his brief address in 1801 with a list of "what I deem the essential principles of our Government", and a promise that his Administration would measure their actions and policies against them:

I will compress them within the narrowest compass they will bear, stating the general principle, but not all its limitations.

• Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none;
• The support of the State governments in all their rights, as the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies;
  
• The preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad;
  
• A jealous care of the right of election by the people—a mild and safe corrective of abuses which are lopped by the sword of revolution where peaceable remedies are unprovided;
  
• absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism;
  
• A well disciplined militia, our best reliance in peace and for the first moments of war, till regulars may relieve them;
  
• The supremacy of the civil over the military authority;
  
• Economy in the public expense, that labor may be lightly burdened;
  
• The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith; encouragement of agriculture, and of commerce as its handmaid;
  
• The diffusion of information and arraignment of all abuses at the bar of the public reason;
  
• Freedom of religion;
  
• Freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.

These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment.

They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety.

Listening to Gingrich this week, that feeling in the pit of my stomach reflected the fear that, notwithstanding the midterms, we are wandering into one of those "moments of error or of alarm".