From the Nothing New Under the Sun Department

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles School of Law, has brought to light a fascinating document from 1799. It is essentially a reasoned political polemic against the Adams administration and its proclivity for centralizing power at the federal level. I find the document fascinating on two counts.

The first is that it reads so comprehendibly some two hundred years after it was written. This is a very accessible narrative with little of the stiltedness that one comes across in other contemporaneous documents. That is a testiment to Cooper's authorial powers.

The real fascination though, is that the opinions expressed are so contemporary. In fact, when I first came across the document, it was out of context and I assumed that it was simply a modern day polemic cast in an older style. Only when I went searching for some background on Thomas Cooper, (also by Volokh) did it become apparent that this was a real historical document by a real contemporaneous person expressing logical and reasoned arguments against political actions occurring close to the birth of our republic which he felt threatened our traditions of liberty and freedom.

It is very easy to take this document and drop it into our current political squabbles and see it as being as relevant today as it was 210 years ago. Regardless of the parties and the individuals, it brings home that part of what we are witnessing is yet one more tidal movement of the interaction between human nature (the desire for power) and idealism (a form of government of free people). There is little that is new under the sun.