Your Weekend Message From The Master

(Editor’s note: Charles Pierce writes daily at The Esquire Politics Blog at Esquire.com. He is an award-winning writer and author, most recently Idiot America. Every weekend, he sends out a weekly newsletter to subscribers, of which, I am one. From now through the election, I will post his weekend musings on here)

July 22, 2024

Nothing became the administration of President James Buchanan like his inaugural address did. Delivered on March 4, 1857, just after he’d been sworn in by Chief Justice Roger Taney, who had other things on his mind, it was a flat and lifeless attempt to hand-wave away the fact that the country was coming apart over slavery. Don’t worry, the new president said, the system was working; the issue of the expansion of slavery was before the Supreme Court. All was well. Or so President James Buchanan told the nation.

We have recently passed through a Presidential contest in which the passions of our fellow-citizens were excited to the highest degree by questions of deep and vital importance; but when the people proclaimed their will the tempest at once subsided and all was calm. The voice of the majority, speaking in the manner prescribed by the Constitution, was heard, and instant submission followed. Our own country could alone have exhibited so grand and striking a spectacle of the capacity of man for self-government.

What a happy conception, then, was it for Congress to apply this simple rule, that the will of the majority shall govern, to the…