Getting Aaron Burr Wrong, Part Two

What do the journalists and commentators Ryan Grim, Matthew Yglesias, Ross Douthat, and Ben Dreyfuss have in common? One thing and one thing only: getting Aaron Burr wrong.

Holding varying and opposing viewpoints on most matters, those four agree more or less reflexively on the sleaziness, cynicism, even the villainy of Burr. I think that phenomenon reflects a longstanding problem in how today’s intelligentsia views the U.S. founding period’s governing elite in general.

This is the second part in a series on current Aaron Burr discourse. In Part One, I looked at the startling amount of venom expressed online nowadays regarding Burr, venom driven by paranoid, uninformed theories and fantasies about him and his activities, all very confidently stated, and tracking in interesting ways with the paranoid, uninformed theories and fantasies about Burr that prevailed in his own time.

This second batch of uninformed commentators, however, in contrast to normal Internet nutballery, are influential and authoritative. People will disagree with any or all of the opinions on current affairs expressed by Grim, Yglesias, Douthat, and Dreyfuss—but what this batch says casually and confidently about the U.S. past is likely to be taken as informed. Especially on issues where they tend to agree.

Item.

Ryan Grim: “Aaron Burr running for vice president and trying to be president on a technicality is the true founding of America”

Here Grim is roping the loonytune 1800 presidential election into an idea he has about the American founding, an idea that’s pretty clearly negative, though I can’t tell exactly what it is (America sucks?). What caught my ear is the by-the-way tone in which a characterization of Burr’s actions during that election is made to seem so self-evidently true and widely accepted that, without being argued or unpacked, it can be deployed in support of a proposition.

That’s the Burr effect. The characterization is not self-evidently true.