Thread by @ZachariasConn

Now I am going to try to do something impossible: to live tweet the #SHEAR2022 presidential address from my amazing advisor, Joanne Freeman @jbf1755

As many of you will already know, she is a master of incisive, witty, powerful language — so with this talk in particular I will be butchering it here and if you’re not in the room you should look out for the printed version that will come out in @TheJERPano

Talk will discuss how emotion has impacted US politics in concrete ways—the emotional logic of American politics—especially outrage, both unintentionally elicited and intentionally provoked

JBF will draw upon her extensive research into the lived reality of politics in the decades leading up to the civil war — an era unfortunately relevant today

Key concept: victimization among people in power. If you feel entitled to power, and outraged at the threat of losing it, there will be a “victimization extravaganza”

Power holders who refuse to give up power pave the way for authoritarianism. To them, in effect, democracy itself is victimization.

Outrage and victimization start with emotion rather than cognition and are all the more powerful for it, but can then become a kind of ideology, particularly when weaponized in party politics

Focusing on Southern opponents of anti-slavery “fanatics” (their words, not hers!). Pro-slavery elites’ high-strung sense of entitlement, born in no small part from the experience of “mastery” at home, leaked into the public square in consequential ways

Most recent book focused on Congress because of the legislature’s power, because it was in some ways a microcosm of nation, and because it was also unusual in putting people from all sections in such close, heated contact

For a long time, those who were willing—at times eager—to threaten or wield physical violence in Congress were usually Southern, in part because of their own experiences of mastery and extreme sensitivity when that was attacked, in part because southern public loved the violence

Northerners, representing a public much less enthusiastic about violence/dueling, tended to condemn the violence and to loudly lament the negative effects upon the institutional norms of Congress—a stance that made them look principled to some but weak to others

The infamous caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks led to a sea change in Northern attitudes. Now many Northern constituents wanted Congressmen who knew how to fight. “Indignation meetings” throughout the North.

One constituent even sent a northern Congressman a gun inscribed “free speech”

Congressional clerk Benjamin Brown French left behind a marvelous cache of sources, including a detailed journal and much terrible/wonderful poetry. His own story is also telling.

Started out as a New Hampshire Democrat, hale fellow well met, liked by all sections and parties, unanimously elected as chief clerk of Congress

But by the late 1850s he bought a gun in case he had to shoot Southerners. Loved the Union deeply, couldn’t take it for granted. Left Dems, became independent then Republican, big supporter of Union war effort

Emotions, particularly political emotions like French’s, are not trans historical but deeply tied to specific contexts and events. Evidence thereof can reveal a lot.

A big difference between the political emotions of French’s cohort and our own is that they lived when Union was relatively new, conspicuously fragile, and held sacred

We, until very recently, took so much about our political system for granted — including even the basic idea that there is a singular national “we” at all

Worth sitting with the simple but profound truth that we are ALL intensely disoriented right now

“We need to let go of the comfort of American exceptionalism.”

We need to recognize the intense uncertainty and contingency of our moment—that things don’t necessarily bend towards justice. We have real responsibility. And we need to help a new generation rise to the challenges of our tumultuous era.

As I predicted, I didn’t do it justice. So look out for the eventual print version, and in the meantime check out The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War if you haven’t done so already!

We’ve moved on to the awards presentations, which I’m sure @TheJERPano will share so I won’t live tweet. But I’ll just say it’s striking how the presentations really go into the contributions of the winning book/article. A lot better than the Oscars—except for the clothes.