A Brief History of America’s Extreme Ideological Divide

“Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.”

— John Adams

September 29, 2025 — In the election of 1800, journalist James Callender once described presidential candidate (and then Vice President) John Adams as “a hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Adams’ opponent, Thomas Jefferson, was likewise smeared as “the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father,” and accused of being a Jacobin who would confiscate Bibles and burn churches.

The ideological divide— even from America’s earliest era— was so bad that each side thought the other would bring an end to the Republic.

It didn’t get any better. By 1804, following years of political rivalry and personal animosity, sitting Vice President Aaron Burr shot and killed former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel on the banks of the Hudson River.

The 1828 election between Andrew Jackson versus John Quincy Adams became one of the ugliest presidential elections in American history.

Jackson’s campaign came out with the original “Russia-gate”— accusing Adams of procuring an American girl to serve the Russian czar’s sexual pleasure while serving as US minister to Russia. Adams was called a “pimp” in public handbills and editorials.

Adams’s allies, meanwhile, painted Jackson as a bloodthirsty brute— a “murderer” and unhinged military tyrant who unlawfully executed soldiers. They also attacked Jackson’s wife Rachel, calling her a “convicted adulteress” and publicly accusing the couple of bigamy.

Rachel died shortly after the election, and Jackson blamed her death on the slanders she endured.

Then, of course, there was that little kerfuffle known as the Civil War.

In the aftermath, thousands of black citizens were beaten, lynched, or shot for attempting to exercise their newly acquired voting rights. White supremacist militias operated as unofficial enforcers of the Democratic Party, openly intimidating black citizens and Republican candidates.

Marcus “Brick” Pomeroy, editor of the La Crosse Democrat, described Abraham Lincoln as the worst tyrant “since the days of Nero.” He wrote, “we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good.”

Less than a year later, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated…. which sort of set off a trend; President James Garfield was gunned down in a train station sixteen years later.

By the turn of the 20th century, the instigators of political violence shifted from Southern lynch mobs to urban anarchists… and the tools of their terror shifted from burning crosses to bombs.

In 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated by anarchist Leon Czolgosz while shaking hands with the public at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

McKinley had been elected with the support of industrial interests, and critics called him a corporate puppet. Anarcho-communists cheered his shooting.

In 1908, a homemade bomb ripped through Union Square in New York during a political rally. In 1910, a suitcase bomb exploded at the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21 people — planted by union-affiliated anarchists targeting what they saw as capitalist propaganda.

Mail bombs were also routinely sent to prominent businessmen, plus judges and politicians.

Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia, a key architect of immigration reform that banned anarchists from entering the US, received a mail bomb at his home in April 1919; the senator was unharmed, but his maid lost both of her hands in the blast.

When Theodore Roosevelt returned to politics in 1912, his enemies labeled him everything at once: a fascist, a communist, a tyrant, a radical. In a single month, editorials warned that Roosevelt would “abolish property,” “install a dictatorship,” and “turn Washington into a labor camp.”

In 1919, anarchists coordinated near-simultaneous bombings in eight cities, including a blast that tore apart the Attorney General’s home in Washington.

The chaos finally calmed down during the Great Depression; after decades of bombings, lynchings, and assassinations, Americans were too broke— and too tired— to riot.

Then World War II redirected the nation’s rage outward. Then came the Cold War and the specter of thermonuclear war.

At home—aside from Senator Joseph McCarthy’s brief reign of terror in the 1950s—politics finally took on a strangely polite tone.

The Nixon-Kennedy debate in 1960 was almost surreal by  today’s standards: two men calmly debating Medicare and foreign policy devoid of any insults or personal attacks. It was just a clean, orderly exchange of ideas.

This peace between America’s ideological opposites did not last long.

Kennedy was shot in the head in 1963. MLK was assassinated in Memphis five years later. Two months after that, Robert Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles.

Vietnam War protests tore through campuses. Cities burned. Students were shot by the National Guard.

Airplane hijackings were common in the 1970s, often by communist sympathizers who demanded to be flown to Cuba. Groups like the Black Liberation Army assassinated police officers, and the leftist Weather Underground bombed the US Capitol, Pentagon, and State Department.

Point is, when you look back objectively at the entire history of the United States, the periods of ‘calm’ stand out as the exception. Culture wars, chaos, ideological violence, corrupt media activism, etc. were pretty normal.

This historical context is important to keep in mind, because, right now, the culture wars feel like they are pulling the country apart at the seams. And they are.

But at the same time, this is nothing new. America has been pulled apart at the seams over and over again. Americans have fought over everything— from the structure of government to the existence of a central bank, from slavery to socialism, from Vietnam to Palestine.

Yet America always gets over it. Eventually the culture war ends, the conflict subsides… and at some point down the road, people start fighting over some other issue. It’s the way things have almost always been.

This time is not different. It’s louder, maybe. More constant. Algorithms spoon feed outrage into our daily lives. You can turn on a screen and watch it all melt down in real time.

But the underlying cycle of America’s ideological divide hasn’t changed. It is a pattern that is playing out again and will eventually get better. It always does.

Having said that, and, as important as these issues are— men in girls’ bathrooms, “Queers for Palestine”, etc., America’s real challenge isn’t cultural. It’s economic.

Irresponsible, runaway spending combined with an ever-expanding regulatory state that strangles the private economy, is an unprecedented challenge.

Unlike the nation’s deep ideological divide whose cycle has repeated over and over again throughout the last 250 years, America is in uncharted and dangerous territory when it comes to its $37+ trillion national debt.

The culture war and ideological divide will eventually heal. The economic challenge, on the other hand, will take serious work, tough decisions, and difficult sacrifices.

Sadly, none of that seems to be in the cards right now. And that’s setting the country up for some serious consequences down the road.

To your freedom,

James Hickman
Schiff Sovereign LLC & Grey Swan Investment Fraternity

Continued Below…

P.S. from Addison: Rising political violence was a prediction we made for 2025 – and one we didn’t make lightly. Less than 24 hours later, the violent attack on Bourbon Street during New Year’s celebrations and the cyber truck bombing in Las Vegas happened.

President Trump’s return to the White House was fraught with threats even before the election in November a year ago.

“When Charlie Kirk was murdered in 2025,” James Howard Kunstler suggested this morning in his Substack post, “Civil War 2.0 kicked off. The enemy this time are not Confederates with a coherent command structure and a goal.”

Kunstler continues:

They are an army of nihilists like the gang in The Big Lebowski, who, for one reason or another, have failed to launch lives of meaning and purpose, and so have adopted the purpose of destroying the country they cannot thrive in. Unlike The Big Lebowski, this is not a joke.

But, it’s obviously a different sort of civil war than the first one.

It appears that many of these nihilists, especially the ones amalgamated as Antifa, are straight-up mentally ill — crazed young women too untamed to find a mate, many obese and self-mutilated like tattooed savages with steel bones in their noses…”

As President Trump moves to deploy the National Guard in locales such as Portland, where a bunch of the Antifa nutjobs live, we don’t expect the rhetoric or outright violence to cease. Au contraire, in fact.

If you’d like, you can drop your most pressing questions right here: Feedback@GreySwanFraternity.com. We’ll be sure to work them in during the conversation.