Historian Allen C. Guelzo worries:
...US politics has been full of more alienation and polarization than at any time since 1861.... And just as in 1861, that divide has opened up over a single deep question. Then, the question was “What makes for liberty?” In 2011, it is “What makes for justice?”
It’s a tough question, Guelzo explains:
The new health-care law, for example, is not merely another entitlement; it springs from a new way of understanding what justice is, and thus it ends up entirely rewriting the relationship of citizens to the state. Likewise with “don’t ask, don’t tell” and gay marriage. These are not merely variations on sexuality and marriage; because they represent an entirely new way of thinking about human nature, they bring into question our understanding of what Jefferson called “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
He continues:
Still, if it’s the fundamental clash over justice that really is making the lids rattle, there is nothing that makes their blowing off inevitable. Even allowing for that vast gulf in understanding of a fundamental concept like liberty, Northerners and Southerners discovered in the Civil War how alike they still were.
Guelzo suggests:
Such prudence would serve us well today – and all the more because we know in 2011 how very much it cost us in 1861. Lincoln’s injunction from his first inaugural address comes back to us: “My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well upon this whole subject.”
He leaves us with this advice:
Think before we push the envelope one more time, before we stoke one more fire for partisan gain, before we invent one more ideological sneer whose outcome merely feeds our self-righteousness. See the beam in your own eye before demanding a court order to remove the splinter in your brother’s. Realize that the slowness of our constitutional system is not a cause for impatience, but a wise and deliberate way to induce self-restraint and reflection.
Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, and the author of “Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.”
