Throughout history battle over powers granted to national government have rarely ceased.
Let's admit it. When it comes to Congress debating whether to pass a stopgap spending bill or to increase the government's borrowing power, a political stalemate was totally predictable — a fact that House Speaker John Boehner confirmed last week. No wonder Congress' popularity is on par with its productivity: paltry.
But the ongoing battle is not really about the congressional vote, or even whether the government is forced to shut down for a while. Ultimately, the debate is about differences of opinion on spending and about the size and role of the federal government.
Frustrated as citizens may be, this Congress did not invent polarization. Throughout history, from the time that Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton battled inside George Washington's Cabinet over the powers granted to the new national government, the argument has rarely ceased.
What makes it so ill-tempered in our time is the result of a number of forces: the evolution of Democrats and Republicans from uneasy coalitions of conservatives, moderates and liberals into colonies of ideological uniformity; decades of cultural and racial conflict unleashed in the 1960s; and a news media, whose traditional affinity for conflict has been honed to lethal sharpness by modern technology.
If the term "Era of Good Feelings" has a quaint ring to it, it is because it was coined in the first decades of the 19th century and has applied to few periods since.
Slavery and states' rights
While slavery, the pre-eminent moral issue of the mid-19th century, was the underlying cause of the Civil War, the debate, at least from the Southern point of view, was the ability of the individual states to control their own "domestic institutions," the most obvious one being slavery.
Even after emancipation, the doctrine of states' rights continued to be invoked passionately against any effort by federal authorities to interfere in the manner in which white people treated black people in the states of the old Confederacy. The efforts in Congress to pass anti-lynching laws were always met by the defense that lynching was just another felony that could be handled by state criminal codes, an argument that might have had moral validity had the state laws been fairly applied.
The New Deal unleashed a fierce debate over the role of the federal government that had been mobilized by Franklin Roosevelt to deal with a crisis that transcended state boundaries. But the expansion of the role of the federal government in the 1930s was breathtaking.
If the New Deal had done nothing more than created the Social Security system in 1935, the federal government would have directly affected the lives of more Americans than the actions of all previous presidents. But the New Deal went far beyond to encompass areas of American life, from the marketing of securities to the buying and selling of hogs.
World War II augmented the federal role even more by regulating employment and prices. But it was the programs that we refer to today as "the social safety net" that proved the most enduring.
Ike protected safety net
Throughout the 1930s and the war years, conservatives railed against these programs and succeeded in heading off a move toward national health insurance. Indeed, it seemed as if their time had come to pare back the excesses of big government when Dwight Eisenhower took over the White House in 1953 after 20 years of Democratic dominance. Spoiling for a fight, GOP conservatives looked to Eisenhower to push the beast back into its lair.
But Ike didn't take the bait. Correctly assuming that Americans had grown fond of these programs, he made no serious effort to repeal the New Deal and ushered in one of those rare periods of consensus on the role of the federal government.
The story of our time is that the dispute has been reignited in earnest. It is expressed in the rise of the Tea Party movement in 2010, in aggressive attacks to repeal or defund ObamaCare, in the use of the statutory debt limit to cut federal spending and, in an echo from the 1830s, a drive by some states to nullify certain federal laws.
Even the opposition to drone strikes has more to do with a fear of an overbearing federal government than an expression of pacifism or isolationism.
No sabbaticals from polarization are on the horizon. As always, disagreement over the scope of the federal government will continue to shape our politics.
Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers University, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
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