On George Washington’s birthday, February 22, it is the custom in the United States Senate to read aloud his Farewell Address. This year those words must have stung those who heard it, since Washington seemed to be describing with great precision the state of American politics. It is as if the Father of Our Country took his children to the woodshed.
Read Washington’s Farewell Address. Here are some of the salient passages, as drawn out by Dana Milbank:
In 1796, as schoolchildren learn, Washington told posterity that “one of the expedients of party” is “to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.” There is, he wrote, a “fatal tendency” to replace the national will with “the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction.”
Such factions, he went on, “are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.” Washington therefore warned against attempts to “impair the energy of the system, and thus to undermine what cannot be directly overthrown.” Liberty is “little else than a name, where the government is too feeble to withstand” factions.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge . . . is itself a frightful despotism,” Washington wrote. “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In