During his first 18 months in office, President Obama has often reiterated the essence of Rodney King's plaintive appeal for civil fellowship, "Can't we all just get along?" Time and again, Republicans have rebuffed Obama's pleas for bipartisanship with thundering echoes of Sarah Palin's obstructionist "Hell no!" This week, in remarks aimed at House Minority Leader John Boehner and Texas Congressman Joe Barton, Obama began to use the GOP's hyper-partisanship against itself.

If America ever was governable from the center, those days appear long gone. Right-wing zealots and political opportunists have attempted to invalidate the 2008 election results and stir anti-government sentiment to a fever pitch--indeed, to intimidate members of Congress through incitement to political assassination and fringe insurrection. As a result, the field on which political compromise must play has narrowed. The stark choice before citizens now is between protecting rational government for the good of many or promoting anarchy in the guise of patriotism. To blend the words of Paine and Lincoln (two actual patriots): These are the times that try the better angels of our nature.

In his own similarly tumultuous time, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., understood the temptations that threatened our national soul. Dana began his career as a lawyer and politician in 1840 when he passed the Massachusetts bar exam. He went on to argue the cases of slaves and helped found the abolitionist Free Soil Party. Later, as a United States Attorney, he successfully argued before the Supreme Court for the Union's right to blockade Confederate ports. He served as a prosecution counsel in the trial of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

Despite his impressive role in American political history, Dana may be better known as the author of the acclaimed bestseller, "Two Years Before the Mast," published the same year he passed the bar. The memoir chronicles Dana's life from 1834 to 1836, when he embarked as a merchant sailor on a voyage that he thought might help his eyesight, which had been weakened by a bout of the measles at Harvard, from which he had just graduated.

Dana's seafaring in the cowhide trade took him from Boston to the Spanish colonial outposts of California, by way of treacherous, half-frozen waters around the tip of South America. "Moby Dick" author Herman Melville wrote of Dana's palpable prose: "His chapters describing Cape Horn must have been written with an icicle."

So with all the makings of a thrilling yarn at his disposal, it might seem odd that Dana instead chose to compile his diaries into a book whose purpose was to chronicle the pitiful working conditions of the men who made their livings on the unforgiving seas. During the two years of his voyage, Dana shared with his mates the filthy crew quarters housed in front of the mast; he knew the hardships of overpowering waves, endless toil, thin gruel, paltry wages, cruel punishment, blistering suns and freezing nights.

Equally fickle and merciless is today's political environment. Wracked by two intransigent wars, a sputtering economy barely saved from the brink of collapse, the chronic suffering of unemployed millions, runaway corporate greed and a monstrous ecological disaster along our Gulf coast, the national psyche is stressed to the max.

Even discounting the recent effects of these problems on popular perception, the winds of change we believed in just 18 months ago had already run square into a partisan headwind before President Obama's inauguration. As the president struggled to move his agenda, blowback from the Democratic base against the Administration's pandering to the Right reached gale-force levels. And all of this mess now sounds a distress call for Democrats, who face the perfect storm in this fall's elections unless they can somehow thread the eye of the hurricane.

Forgive my extended oceanographic and atmospheric metaphor. I use it for several reasons. First, because sailing into a storm is invariably the result of failing to account for the unpredictable. It is true, after all, that fate has handed the Obama White House and congressional Democrats a nearly unbroken string of foul weather, both metaphorically and literally. But the Administration's failure to read the political winds and steer course accordingly also have contributed to why, I believe, Democrats are likely to fare worse in the fall midterms than is generally anticipated.

As I will conclude, another reason I use this metaphor is that Dana was, in some respects, oddly representative of today's anti-establishment zealotry, which sees no discrepancy between insisting on a stable society and supporting the armed overthrow of government. Dana did not take this discrepancy to the national level, but he did write approvingly of a Tea Party-style vigilante group in San Francisco, in a section appended to his book many years after its original publication. 

How strange and eventful has been the brief history of this marvelous city, San Francisco! In 1835 there was one board shanty. In 1836, one adobe house on the same spot. In 1847, a population of four hundred and fifty persons, who organized a town government. Then came the auri sacra fames [from the Roman poet Virgil: "the holy lust for gold"], the flocking together of many of the worst spirits of Christendom; a sudden birth of a city of canvas and boards, entirely destroyed by fire five times in eighteen months, with a loss of sixteen millions of dollars, and as often rebuilt, until it became a solid city of brick and stone, of nearly one hundred thousand inhabitants, with all the accompaniments of wealth and culture, and now (in 1859) the most quiet and well-governed city of its size in the United States. But it has been through its season of Heaven-defying crime, violence, and blood, from which it was rescued and handed back to soberness, morality, and good government, by that peculiar invention of Anglo-Saxon Republican America, the solemn, awe-inspiring Vigilance Committee of the most grave and responsible citizens, the last resort of the thinking and the good, taken to only when vice, fraud, and ruffianism have intrenched themselves behind the forms of law, suffrage, and ballot, and there is no hope but in organized force, whose action must be instant and thorough, or its state will be worse than before. A history of the passage of this city through those ordeals, and through its almost incredible financial extremes, should be written by a pen which not only accuracy shall govern, but imagination shall inspire.

--Richard Henry Dana, Jr., "Two Years Before the Mast," Appendix, 1869 Edition

Having played an important role in both the prosecution and resolution of the Civil war, Dana was no stranger to the notion of "taking back" America from a Confederacy that fired the first shot at Fort Sumter. And in rough-and-tumble San Francisco of the mid-19th century, it's easy to imagine that few remedies other than vigilantism were available to the city's beleaguered citizenry. Still, I was somewhat shocked that a man of Dana's rather progressive morality would endorse vigilantism without so much as a cursory weighing of the political or ethical implications.

But then I remembered that Dana was probably a zealot. And zealots operate on both the Right and the Left independent of consideration for the other side of an argument. It's easy for me to think approvingly of Dana's argument for blockading Confederate ports--until I also think of the widespread starvation the blockade meant for the people of the South. That makes it a little more complicated.

As Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham points out in a new New York Times profile, today's vigilantes seem to have no agenda other than the destruction of government itself. Graham recalls he challenged a group of Tea Partiers in a meeting: "'What do you want to do? You take back your country -- and do what with it?'...Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent."

The Tea Party's mentality of "shoot first and ask basic questions of ourselves later" isn't particularly shocking to those who have monitored its rise to utter incompetence in fulfillment of the Peter Principle. Yet this is precisely the mentality that has arisen not only among the entrenched fringes of the Right, but among many on the Left and many middle-class people who occupy the center as Independents.

"They were the worst of times and the worst of times" goes America's most enduring sentiment, for we all like to bitch and moan. In the time of this Great Recession, this Great Spill, this Great Debt, this Great Wall Street Betrayal, this Great War on Terror, many Americans are scared to death of what the future holds. Average citizens, the crew of America's ship of state, are in a panic. We see icebergs all around us.

In such conditions, mutiny is all too tempting and all too counterproductive. And it is all too dangerous for the captain and his officers.