The Little Magician and the Democratic Party by Elizabeth

The Little Magician and the Democratic Party by Elizabeth - October 2017 Scholarship Essay

If I could have dinner with any U.S. President, I would like to have dinner with Martin Van Buren. I would like to visit with him, not for the obvious reasons of learning why he advocated for certain policies or how he struggled with the circumstances preceding the civil war, but I would like to speak with him because I portrayed him in my Advanced Placement United States History class last year. Some students portrayed candidates while others were voting blocks, and we modeled how the people at the time would have voted for the President. Van Buren was given the nickname “The Little Magician,” making him the second President to have a well-known nickname—Andrew “Old hickory” Jackson was the first—which made him feel more like one of the people. Besides his nickname that helped him relate to the people, I learned that Van Buren was also an integral part of the formation of the Democratic party, the oldest surviving political party in the United States. It would be amazing to ask him about the creation of the party. Why did they decide that it was necessary to make a new party? What could not be expressed through the parties already in place so that they were forced to forge ahead and make their own party? These questions interest me, because they provide the key to political change today.
History is not simply something that we can ignore, forgetting that it ever happened. History shows the struggles and triumphs of those who lived before us. We do not wish to repeat their mistakes, not only because they were mistakes, but because making our own mistakes is just so much fun. History gives us a chance to affect the future, and this seems counterintuitive, but it is not. We can see today what worked in the past, and we can use those same principles to enact change in the modern world.
In a climate of political polarization rising in a crescendo, there seems to be no possible agreement. People are so stuck in their ways that they cannot even fathom why the other side believes their values. We shout insults at each other over the fence or hiding behind a username, but we do not stop to listen to what others have to say. Nor do we recognize that hurling rocks disguised as snowballs is ineffective at creating change, but very effective at getting worse things thrown back at us. We all need to see that we are not conversing, and use the techniques of yore to relearn how to be civilized. We may have more technology, but history had more discussion, and Martin Van Buren was important in creating one of the parties that we see today. We should learn why it was created, and see that it does not stand for those exact ideals nowadays. We are shaping what history could look like in the future by changing our actions today, and we need to recognize that we can make that change a positive change, not one to scorned by historians and students everywhere.
We want to be the reason that people study history just as Martin Van Buren is my reason to study history.