“These are times that try men’s souls.”
When Thomas Paine wrote these words in December of 1776, he was writing about an America on the cusp of a war for independence from Great Britain and the beginning of a journey into an unchartered future. His words are very applicable to the America of 2019, on the cusp of a presidential election that will have historical ramifications no matter who wins and will be the beginning, not the end, of an extended struggle to define America.
Looking retrospectively, we tend to think of historical outcomes as inevitable because we can explain why we believe things turned out the way they did. The reality is that human history is the result of random decisions influenced by structural forces rarely understood by the people making the decisions and almost never understood by the people affected by those decisions.
However, there are times in the course of human events when we act on history rather than history acting on us.
I should restate that. The collective we never consciously act on history. Conscious (woke) individuals act on history, and what they do changes history. We become aware of their historical impact when we examine civilizations, societies or historical eras undergoing paradigm shifts. Woke folks can emerge at other times, but they really only matter when there are tectonic changes, and their failure to appear is as important to history as their appearance.
In its brief, 240-year history, the United States has undergone four paradigm-changing moments and was fortunate enough to have presidential leadership that was up to those moments. They were the founding of the republic, the Civil War, the beginning of the 20th century, and the Great Depression into World War II.
Those leaders were Washington, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. Washington and the Roosevelts were scions of America’s ruling elites. Lincoln was evidence that America’s elites were democratic and dynamic and not a function of birth. Washington you could have seen coming; the other three are a function of their moments.
The case for Washington and Lincoln is self-evident; without them there is no United States to discuss. My case for the Roosevelts is that they managed the two great paradigm shifts of the 20th century.
Theodore Roosevelt’s entire public career, including two terms as president, was contiguous with the Progressive Era, a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States that spanned the 1890s to the 1920s. The main objectives of the movement were addressing problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and political corruption. The Progressive Era established the idea of modern public policy as a permanent fixture of American political life.
Franklin Roosevelt’s four terms as president made him the political manger of the two most cataclysmic and defining events of the 20th century, the Great Depression and World War II. Both changed the course of world history. What the Roosevelts shared, besides a family relationship, was a belief that American frontier cowboy capitalism needed to be saved from itself in spite of itself.
The four of them could also lay claim to extraordinary political skills, along with the right character and temperament for their times. However, there’s something else they shared that is extremely relevant to the 2020 presidential campaign.
They were four white men trying to create and preserve a white country that was run for the benefit of white men. You could say all four were historical political equivalents of the great white hope. But when America was 90 percent white, black people were enslaved or oppressed, indigenous people were victims of genocide and white women were disenfranchised, a hegemony of white male privilege seemed the natural and rational order.
It’s this ghost of the great white hope that haunts the 2020 presidential campaign. Whether they’re neoliberal theocratic Republicans or neoliberal Democratic moderates and liberals, all are searching for the white man who can restore America as they knew it. You could characterize much commentary on the Democratic Presidential Primary as a search for the good white guy who can beat the evil white guy and restore peace and harmony to the kingdom.
November 2020 can produce a couple of outcomes that are all troubling if you’re a black American or from any marginalized community.
First, Trump could win and the excesses and venality of his first term would pale in comparison to the carnage of a second Trump term. It would not be hyperbolic to compare America of the 2020s to Germany of the 1930s. And for those who think that’s an unfair comparison, I would suggest a cursory review of American history will reveal a level of cruelty, greed and mendacity that’s comparable.
The second bad outcome would be the Democratic Establishment gets its establishment candidate, and that candidate wins the presidency. How would that be problematic?
To be continued.
