Thread by @_waleedshahid

Eric Foner's essay here about peak polarization and the breakdown of Congress before the Civil War is worth the read.

"A fundamental necessity of democratic politics -- that each party look upon the other as a legitimate alternative government -- was destroyed."

"As North and South increasingly took different paths of economic and social development and as...antagonistic value systems and ideologies grounded in the question of slavery emerged in these sections, the political system inevitably came under severe disruptive pressures."

"Because they brought into play basic values and moral judgments, the competing sectional ideologies could not be defused by the normal processes of political compromise, nor could they be contained within the existing inter-sectional political system."

"Tthe coming of the Civil War is the story of the intrusion of sectional ideology into the political system, despite the efforts of political leaders of both parties to keep it out...the nature of political conflict had taken on new and unprecedented forms in the 1850s."

"The mass, non-ideological politics of the Jackson era created the desperately needed link between governors and governed. But this very link made possible the emergence of two kinds of sectional agitators..."

"...the abolitionists, who stood outside of politics & hoped to force public opinion—and through it, politicians—to confront the slavery issue, & political agitators, who used politics as a way of heightening sectional self-consciousness and antagonism in the populace at large."

"As the 1840s opened, most political leaders still clung to the traditional basis of politics, but the sectional, ideological political agitators formed growing minorities in each section."

."Northern political agitators...performed the function of developing and popularizing a political rhetoric, especially focused on fear of the Slave Power, which could be seized upon by traditional politicians and...voters if slavery ever entered the center of political conflict"

"The political system reacted to the intrusion of the slavery question in the traditional ways. At first, it tried to suppress it...both parties also attempted to devise formulas for compromising the divisive issue."

"The Slave Power idea gave the Republicans the anti-aristocratic appeal with which men like Seward had long wished to be associated politically."

"By fusing older anti-slavery arguments with the idea that slavery posed a threat to northern free labor and democratic values, it enabled the Republicans to tap the egalitarian outlook which lay at the heart of northern society."

"In the 1830s, John C. Calhoun recognized the danger which abolitionism posed to the South—it threatened to rally the North in the way Madison had said would not happen—in terms of one commitment hostile to the interests of the minority South."

"Calhoun recognized, when a majority interest is organized into an effective political party, it can seize control of all the branches of government, overturning the system of constitutional checks and balances which supposedly protected minority rights."

"By 1860, the election returns demonstrated that this anti-slavery sentiment, contrary to Madison’s expectations, had united in an interest capable of electing a President, despite the fact that it had not the slightest support from the sectional minority."

“We are not one people,” declared the New York Tribune in 1855. “We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.”

"In a sense, the Constitution and national political system had failed in the difficult task of creating a nation—only the Civil War itself would accomplish it."

Thinking about this history in the context of recent work by @ezraklein, @leedrutman, and others on peak polarization and the rigging of American politics.