Well, this'll trigger an interesting rant, but I'll bite: What's wrong with the Democratic-Republicans and Canadian historiography?
more like, what's
right with the Republicans
seriously.
ideologically, the party was one of the most hypocritical in American history. it takes real obliviousness to rail against the tyranny of a law that resulted in the imprisonment of a few dozen newspaper editors during a time of national crisis, while then implementing a law that forced Americans at gunpoint to commit economic suicide for no good reason, allowed a massive expansion of the bureaucracy, and made the whole warrantless search thing fashionable for the first time in American history; one need only look at the Republicans if one has any doubt that loose constructionism is only ever deployed as a cynical political tactic to forestall policies one disagrees with, not as a principled stand in favor of small government
look at Jefferson's so-called principled stands, like his vaunted egalitarian treatment of foreign emissaries, which when you got down to it mostly consisted of looking like a slob and insulting an ambassador's wife at a dinner party, ruining the poor woman's evening because he supposedly wanted to make a point about egalitarianism (read: because she was British)? yeah, these are real marks of the new democratic man, we can definitely ignore
freaking slavery for this stuff
in terms of foreign policy, the Republicans were incapable of
not defecating in the bed. the whole Citizen Genet affair was about a foreign power that was, at that point, violating American neutrality and attacking American sailors on the high seas,
openly backing a party in an American general election. when they actually did seize the Presidency - and "seize" is the most apt description of the so-called Revolution of 1800, a non-democratic affair that changed virtually nothing except the ruling party and that resulted purely from the party machine machinations (har) of Aaron Burr - they continued to blatantly support France, from backing Napoleon's invasion of Haiti to giving Napoleon cash essentially for free to help him in his renewed war with Britain (that the Americans got Louisiana out of it has nothing to do with the Republicans and the benefits of same had little to do with them either) to instituting an American Continental System in line with Napoleon's own in 1807 to
freaking participating in Napoleon's general offensive in 1812
it is utterly unconscionable that what was at that point supposedly the freest polity on Earth backed Europe's most despicable tyrant in his war on civilization. if the Americans had somehow managed to take Canada, they would have still 'lost' the war because Napoleon would have gained by their participation, and when Napoleon gained, everybody else lost
What. The Virginia and Kentucky resolutions are da Bob-omb! And on a serious note its not like the Federalist were any better, they practically invented the smear campaign... (in the U.S.)
the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves were so radical in the eyes of most of even the Republican state legislatures that no other state endorsed them; even of the ideologues who supported them, only Jefferson's position came remotely close to the doctrine of nullification (Madison explicitly rejected it)
so: Southerner predisposed to view anything even sort of vaguely in line with Southern secessionist stuff as a Good Thing views something
very vaguely in line with same as a Good Thing...in other news, erstwhile pope took dumps in woods
There's only so many books you can fill about being America's hat.
EXACTLY.
the weirdest thing about Canadian historiography is that it's mostly fine on domestic affairs, it's just that Canadian historians suffer from Tiny Country Syndrome whenever they talk about Canada in comparison with the rest of the world, which is funny because, you know, Canada actually is reasonably large and prosperous, unlike, say, Poland
. And just because I like to fight for my idealized notion of secession doesn't mean you should group me with the other CSA loons on cfc.
