The sad conditions we face at this moment in our political life as a nation summon a particularly high-spirited parable from a couple of red-blooded Americans whose minds often turned on the fate of human liberty. It’s a parable that tests the proposition that one can find a liberal political conscience even in those illiberal, uncharitable, self-righteous politicians who masquerade as champions of the people.

In April 1817, precisely 200 years ago, 81-year-old former president John Adams wrote a marvelously candid letter to his onetime rival and successor as president, Thomas Jefferson. Adams was still getting hammered in print by a fellow New Englander whom George Washington had hired as secretary of state and Adams had fired, three years into his presidency, for political disloyalty and warmongering. The embittered Timothy Pickering refused to give Adams credit for any accomplishment, either as a committed Revolutionary or as chief executive. Adams returned the favor when he renewed his attacks on Jefferson’s legacy some years later.

“My loving and beloved Friend, Pickering, has been pleased to inform the World that I have ‘few Friends,’” the wry Adams told Jefferson. “I wanted to whip the rogue … till the blood come.” But, he continued, his true friends cautioned him that “nothing that such a Person could write would do me the least Injury.” Ironic, perhaps, that Adams was entirely comfortable, in 1800, with the Alien and Sedition Acts — legislation passed amid a counter-revolutionary fervor — which severely restricted freedom of the press and resulted in the imprisonment of editors who criticized the president in print. Ironic, too, that Jefferson, as president, actively tried to impeach a Supreme Court justice, simply for criticizing him from the bench.

They were politicians, through and through, though they’d mellowed somewhat as the years passed. Adams went on to tell Jefferson how he’d convinced himself that even one so mean-spirited as Pickering had to possess a conscience. Not that religion played any role, mind you. He didn’t quite know where to turn, but he refused to give up hope. Adams could not despise mankind, he wanted Jefferson to know, because all men were created equal in their combined qualities of reason and ridiculousness.

There were moments when Adams was prepared to go public with the message that he classed religion with the ridiculous: “I have been upon the point of breaking out, ‘This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there was not Religion in it.’”

But then, he reconsidered.  If “indelible marks of Conscience” adhered even to the most egoistic of exalted political leaders, and he was convinced it did, then religion deserved some credit.

Adams went on to tell Jefferson that all the promises he’d ever heard, earthly and heavenly alike, left him feeling naught but “pitty” for his fellow creatures. Whether in the political forum or the pulpit, “Fears and Terrors appear to have produced an universal Credulity,” he wrote. In Adams’ judgment, humans succumbed to their fears to such a degree that they repeatedly settled for tyrannical rulers who exacted obedience and bowed before a religious authority that preached posthumous punishment so as to control parishioners’ day-to-day behavior.

Jefferson, for his part, backed up Adams on both scores.  

As for Pickering and the vengeful others who spoke ill of them, the sympathetic Virginian wrote quotably, “Were such things to be answered, our lives would be wasted in the filth of fendings and provings, instead of being employed in promoting the happiness and prosperity of our fellow citizens.” He also commiserated with Adams as another longtime critic of the miraculous in religion and the gullibility of those overburdened by their attachment to church dogma. And he agreed with Adams that “moral precepts, innate in man,” bolstered by the general principles laid down by religion, helped avert a human-produced hell.    

The Adams-Jefferson correspondence, especially that of their later years, stands as a reminder of two decisive truths about America’s history as a nation: 1. The prevalence of character assassination as a feature of U.S. politics; and 2. The constancy of moral appeals to “the happiness and prosperity of our fellow citizens” (whether helped along by a nondenominational religious persuasion or not).

The parable of 1817 still retains its value in 2017, when it seems near impossible to justify whatever rationale self-identified conservatives in Congress use in proposing the abandonment of liberal-inspired programs that address the suffering of our citizens.  

While blaming “government” for social ills, no matter what their true cause, conservatives somehow convince people who would do better in a more equitably based society that they should hate nothing so much as equalizing legislative measures. Moneyed power-brokers with their hooks into members of Congress keep rewarding themselves while deceptive crumbs are thrown to everyone else. These same people, hypocritically spouting religious morality at every campaign stop, acquiesce to an irreligious chief executive who “makes deals” at the expense of morality. 

These are painful times. People are justly dispirited and confused. Graphs objectively displaying economic inequality are becoming ever more stretched and distended. In a modern republic, we all agree, the government does not abandon its duty to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,” to borrow a phrase from the Constitution’s Preamble.  

But it does.  

Conservatives in Congress and in too many state legislatures make sure it does. Their love for “liberty” and “freedom” is legend: There’s a Republican Liberty Caucus, a House Liberty Caucus, and the most recent of newsworthy incarnations, the House Freedom Caucus. All of the Liberty caucuses oppose social spending. There’s Liberty University, but the political endorsements of both its founder and current president suggest less of an appreciation for the blessings of liberty than for a strict social order. Obey. There was even a Liberty Party in the U.S. in the 1840s. Its platform was slavery abolition, which makes the party name quite literal — and quite different from conservatives’ modern adaptation. 

Conservatives in Congress exploit the fear of undocumented workers with undocumented rhetoric. They again rail ad nauseam about infiltration by foreigners — except those pulling strings in Moscow — who threaten public security and the national economy. Of course, immigrants make America strong. They always have. They succeed bigly. But if you’re a conservative, you convince easily conned voters that immigration reform is amnesty, that it interferes with the promise of American liberty. When hysterical hatred of strangers ensues, you get, well, what we have now. The same goes for voter fraud. Conservatives make sure the longest lines are at minority community polling places — to maximize liberty?