In my 2014 policy book, Liberty Risen: The Ultimate Triumph of Libertarian-Republicans, I made the long-term prognosis that, eventually, younger generations of GOP members would come to eschew the defense of traditional culture. Anyone who has perused my writings (rantings?) at American Greatness, such as last week’s “Laboring Under a Delusion,” will know this is not my hope but rather an attempt at a clear-eyed assessment of the future of the GOP. But that prediction is not our concern at present, for an important presidential election looms in less than seventy days.

What is our concern? This pop quiz:

Whether, as they did in 1828 and in 2016, the conditions by which the citizenry employs an election to end the cozy corruption of an elitist American “Uniparty” exist in 2024.

Spanning the years 1815 and 1825, the so-called “Era of Good Feelings” was allegedly defined by a hope for unity and national purpose in the wake of the War of 1812.

The “unity” came with the Federalist Party’s precipitate decline due to its championing of the disastrous war and the consequent supremacy of the Democratic-Republicans. This was America’s first incarnation of the “Uniparty.” The “national purpose” was decidedly inward-looking—specifically, the moneyed eastern elitists conniving and colluding with their corrupt Uniparty to feather their own nests. It did generate “good feelings” for these elitists and their Uniparty.

Not so, among the common folk, especially those residing and expanding the nation’s (then) western frontier.

The elite’s failure in the War of 1812 to accomplish their purported objective of incorporating Canada into America’s concept of “Manifest Destiny,” the economic panics and depression, and the refusal to hear, let alone address, the concerns of common people, especially in the frontier, sowed the populism. Like today’s “Wall Street,” during the Era of Good Feelings the most reviled symbol of unjust privilege was the Bank of the United States. For citizen-settlers, the Bank epitomized the elitists and Uniparty’s usurped and corrupted power in a constitutional republic where the people were supposed to be sovereign. The common folk’s alienation and disillusionment from the eastern elitists and the Uniparty deepened and festered….

Thus, from its inception, the “Era of Good Feelings” constituted an illusory, weaponized “narrative” peddled by the elite and the Uniparty to obfuscate their greed and power. Thus, the slogan “Era of Good Feelings” proved to be a forerunner of today’s perverse prism of weaponized, partisan government and politicized justice in the service of the DIE cult (diversity, inclusion, and equity): any citizen who disagreed with and dissented from the elitists and Uniparty’s “Era of Good Feelings” could be deemed “guilty” of selfishly undermining the alleged national unity and its purpose. In the left’s parlance of today, these Western settlers and all dissenters were potential racists and domestic terrorists.

These dissenters did indeed destroy the Uniparty and cut the elitists down to size. But they didn’t use a musk or guillotine. They used newspapers and the ballot box. After the speed bump of the elections of 1820’s Corrupt Bargain, The Era of Good Feelings was crushed beneath the landslide heralding the advent of the populist Jacksonian Democracy.

Now, within this excerpt from 2014’s Liberty Risen, insert “MAGA/Republican-Populists” for “Libertarian-Republicans”:

In both eras, though there existed varying degrees of partisan parties, the defining political struggle was between a de facto government party and the people. Opposing the top-down government’s culture and possessing the democratic people’s culture, Jacksonian populists and [MAGA/Republican-Populists] rose to do political battle for a restructuring of representative institutions in accordance with America’s founding principles. In their political activism, both movements worked to attain this goal by changing the government party from within one of its subsidiary partisan parties – the Jacksonian populists from within the Democratic-Republican Party and [MAGA/Republican-Populists] from within the GOP.

Given these and other historical parallels, it is far less “astounding” that in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump and the MAGA/Republican-Populists defeated Hillary Clinton and the swampy Uniparty.

Yet, unlike the earlier demise of the Era of Good Feeling’s Uniparty, today’s swampy Uniparty proved more adept at defending itself. Armed with weapons including the administrative state, a complicit press, corporate cronies, Big Tech, and a host of billionaires, the swampy Uniparty was able to capture the 2020 presidential election. Doing so, they garnered a reprieve from the MAGA/Republican-Populist movement, and the Biden-Harris administration furiously began to retrench the swampy Uniparty’s power and perquisites.

Now, in 2024, given the public’s disapprobation of its failed policies, the Biden-Harris administration has shoved Joe down the memory hole and has “reimagined” his vice president as uniquely capable of solving all the problems she helped create. This presidential campaign of systemic deceit and Orwellian doublespeak is a breathtaking example of the swampy Uniparty’s hubris and contempt for the American people. Indeed, what else could explain how a swampy Uniparty that projects its sins upon its opponents unconscionably trumpets the “politics of joy” at a time when Americans’ liberty, prosperity, and security are all imperiled under their disastrous maladministration? Well, that is in the few interstices when they are smearing and persecuting former President Trump, his voters, and anyone who dissents from the swampy Uniparty’s Leftist ideology and aims.

On their part, despite the setback in 2020, MAGA/Republican-Populists have retained both their presidential nominee and their purpose. Like their Jacksonian populist predecessors, for this generation of MAGA/Republican-Populists, “failure has only hardened the resolve of the populist movement it inspired and laid the foundation for the sovereign people to one day prevail over a government party dissipated by a fiscally, morally and politically bankrupt top-down culture.”

As a result, the conditions remain for another instance whereby the citizenry votes to curb and cancel the rule of an elitist “Uniparty.” While no political triumph is permanent, if the MAGA/Republican-Populists prevail in 2024, it will be the vindication not of a person or a party, but of the people:

…Thus, as with their Jacksonian populist forbearers, such a victory would constitute a restoration of the Founders’ original vision of a free, constitutional republic premised upon the citizenry’s capacity to self-govern. Indeed, in the over two centuries since its articulation and implementation, the Founder’s faith that all power is derived from and with the consent of the self-governing, sovereign American people remains revolutionary and relevant.

So, what is the answer to our pop quiz?

We’ll know in November.

***

An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) represented Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.