Because we forget history, we forget that the American experiment cannot succeed without constant, courageous leadership. Our nation is not inherently good and our high ideals are often eclipsed by our baser nature. This has been true since our founding, and it is true now.
We also know that if American ideals depend on a single party for their protection, then that effort is doomed to fail. It’s not that America is one election from extinction. Our nation is not that fragile. But it can regress. It can forsake its ideals. And millions of people can suffer as a result.
I’m writing those words in the context of a presidential contest that already represents a national failure. Even if Kamala Harris wins on Tuesday, there should be relief, not lasting joy. The United States will have come within an eyelash of electing a man who tried to overturn an election to cling to power.
While Donald Trump’s individual actions were unprecedented, the idea that a critical mass of Americans would embrace a demagogue should not be a surprise.
Last week, I helped host a fireside chat with Susan Eisenhower, the founder and expert in residence at the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College. She’s also Dwight D. Eisenhower’s granddaughter. During our conversation, she told a story that I’d forgotten — one with direct relevance to the present moment.
In the aftermath of World War II, there was intense interest in General Eisenhower’s potential political career. He’d never voted before he left the Army in 1948. Both parties courted him, but the Republican Party needed him.
By 1952, the G.O.P. hadn’t won a presidential election since 1928, it had just lost a campaign it was certain it would win (remember “Dewey Defeats Truman”?), and Senator Joseph McCarthy was already deep into the Red Scare.
To make matters much worse, the Republican Party’s prewar isolationism was asserting itself again. In 1951, shortly before Eisenhower took command of NATO, he met with the Republican senator Robert Taft. In her book about Eisenhower’s leadership, “How Ike Led,” Susan Eisenhower notes that Taft was a favorite for the next Republican presidential nomination, and General Eisenhower wanted to solicit Taft’s support for the Atlantic alliance.
Taft, however, indicated he was opposed to NATO. As Susan Eisenhower wrote, “Herbert Brownell, later Ike’s campaign manager, mused in his memoirs that everything would have been different if Taft had agreed to Eisenhower’s request to support NATO.”
One shouldn’t argue that Taft’s position was the only thing that influenced Ike. There was a grass-roots campaign to persuade him to run, but had Taft supported NATO, Eisenhower writes, “Ike would most likely have given no more consideration to the idea of running for president.”
But if Ike chose to run, why did he choose to run as a Republican? He was opposed to McCarthyism. He was opposed to isolationism. And both those positions were deeply embedded in the Republican Party.
The answer, Eisenhower told me in a phone call, was “sustainability.” The nation didn’t just need to prop up NATO for four more years. It needed a degree of bipartisan consensus. If American national security strategy depended on the same party winning every election, it was inherently unstable.
Ike was also influenced by a different Republican senator, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts. In 1949, Lodge wrote an influential article in The Saturday Evening Post called “Does the Republican Party Have a Future?”
Lodge worried that the Republican Party had been “presented to the public as a rich man’s club and as a haven for reactionaries” (sound familiar?) But Lodge also wrote that “democracy required a two-party system, and that depended on the revitalization of the Republican Party.”
Looking back, it seems almost incredible that isolationism was arising once again. After World War I, the victorious Allies tried to create international institutions that would prevent future world wars, but America refused to participate. The Senate rejected the League of Nations, America retreated to its borders, and the remaining Allies lacked the will to resist the rise of Adolf Hitler, even when he was at his most vulnerable.
At the same time, however, there were reasons for American fatigue. More than 400,000 Americans had died in World War II. Thousands more had died so far in the Korean War, and the war itself was locked in a bloody stalemate.
Ike stepped up. He joined and — for a time — helped transform the Republican Party. By the end of his first term, McCarthyism was largely a spent force. By the end of his second term, Republican isolationism was on the wane. There was, in fact, a “postwar consensus.” American alliances were stabilized, NATO became one of the most sustainable (and successful) military alliances in history, and there hasn’t been a Great Power war since.
I recall that history in part because we once again face the rise of isolationism and reactionary populism, and many Americans of my generation — who grew up entirely within the postwar consensus — are asking an anguished question, “Is this who we are?”
Our patriotism should never be interpreted to mean that America is inherently better than every other countries, or that Americans are inherently better people than the people of other nations. There is nothing about being born within this country’s boundaries that improves the raw human clay of its citizens.
And when you read history with open eyes, that reality has been plain for more than 400 years, since the first European settlers set foot on these shores. Every single human vice of the Old World was replicated in the new, sometimes at awful scale.
And those vices were not momentary blips in the American story. We’ve still lived longer with slavery and Jim Crow than we have with equal protection under the law. We’ve lived longer with religious discrimination than we’ve lived with religious liberty.
At the same time, however, millions of Americans throughout history have stood in their own ways against the vices of their times. American virtue is rooted in their courage and in the courage and wisdom of key leaders, at crucial times, who restrained our worst impulses and called us to our highest ideals.
But wisdom and courage have hardly been constants in American life. The immense progress we’ve made in the United States in eradicating our besetting sins hasn’t been uniform. It’s been episodic, with periods of great progress marred by decades of terrible backsliding.
The same nation that ratified the Bill of Rights in 1791 also sharply limited its application, and states were free to violate the rights of their citizens at will. The same nation that ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868, launched Reconstruction, and elected Black Americans to state houses and Congress permitted the white supremacists of the Confederacy to reassert their authority and impose Jim Crow.
Americans are frequently ignorant of our sins and regressions. When I speak to audiences about American history, I sometimes ask a series of questions. How old were you when you first heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre? Are you familiar with the Philadelphia Bible Riots? Do you know what Blaine Amendments are? Have you ever heard of the Battle of Blair Mountain? Rare is the person who knows of more than one of these American tragedies.
I don’t do this to argue that America is uniquely bad — or to discourage patriotism — but to introduce a sense of sobriety and seriousness to our political participation. We cannot, in fact, rest on the shoulders of previous generations. We have our own work to do.
What is true of the nation as a whole is also true of the conservative movement. When Trump clinched the Republican nomination yet again this year, I thought of one of the best books I’ve read about American conservatism, “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism” by the American Enterprise Institute’s Matthew Continetti.
It’s a masterful history, and it demonstrates that the right has never been a single movement with a single ideology. It’s long been a coalition of competing factions, and in the years following the Republican Party’s inspiring battle against slavery and disunion, it has too often been tempted by reaction, isolationism and xenophobia.
By the end of Trump’s term, Continetti writes, the right had yielded to those old temptations. Trump left office “with the Republican Party out of power, conservatism in disarray and the right in the same hole it had dug with Charles Lindbergh, Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, George Wallace and Pat Buchanan. Not only was the right unable to get out of the hole, it did not want to.”
That was true in 2022. It is doubly true now. Republican primary voters overwhelmingly rejected the only viable candidate of the postwar consensus, Nikki Haley. Eisenhower would recognize her commitment to NATO, for example. And the mention of Charles Lindbergh was perhaps more prescient than Continetti could imagine.
It was hard to watch Trump’s hateful, racist rally in Madison Square Garden and not remember that Lindbergh himself had used the same perch to make his “America first” case against intervention in World War II in 1941. Or that the German American Bund had sponsored its own “Pro American Rally” in 1939, one that placed a 30-foot image of George Washington right next to swastikas.
There is nothing new under the sun.
After I read Continetti’s book, it was clearer to me than ever before that I was born in an unusual time. By the time I came of age, the renewal of conservatism that had begun under Eisenhower was in full swing under Reagan. In 1981, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic senator (and Democratic intellectual leader) from New York, said, “Of a sudden, the G.O.P. has become the party of ideas.”
It was a mistake for anyone to believe the transformation was permanent — that the isolationism and reactionary populism of the past had been discarded. There was even a term, “paleoconservatives,” for the few remaining old-right stalwarts. Their ideology seemed as extinct as the Stone Age.
In hindsight, however, it is clear that this new consensus was unstable. As Continetti writes, “What began as an elite-driven defense of the classical liberal principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States ended up, in the first quarter of the 21st century, as a furious reaction against elites of all stripes.”
Note that phrase — “elite-driven.” The transformation of the Republican Party that began with Eisenhower was top-down, not bottom-up. And we can easily name the individuals who were most responsible. William F. Buckley Jr. energized conservative thought in the pages of National Review. Ronald Reagan turned conservatism into a governing ideology, one that was rooted in three clear concepts — a strong national defense, social conservatism and limited government.
An emphasis on individual liberty replaced an emphasis on moral authority, and isolationism became a dirty word in official Republican circles.
But the base instincts of the right never went away, not entirely. In 1992, Patrick Buchanan’s “pitchfork populism” briefly threatened to derail George H.W. Bush’s nomination, and the rise of Ross Perot signaled that populism was still a potent force in American politics.
All the signs were there. The backsliding was about to begin.
We should be careful to note that there were good reasons reactionary populism ultimately found such fertile soil. The Iraq war had been long, deadly and frustrating. By the time Trump won his first race, the war in Afghanistan had been underway for more than 15 years, and there was no end in sight.
At home, the Great Recession had wrecked the financial security of millions of Americans, and the recovery was agonizingly slow. Americans were learning a new term, “deaths of despair,” to describe a tragic increase in deaths by drug overdose, suicide and alcohol-related diseases.
By many measures, the American elite had failed the American people, and this same elite (especially the Republican elite) proved incapable of responding to the rise of Trump.
I started my story with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Let me end with Mitch McConnell. In one sense, it’s unfair to compare the two men. When Eisenhower made his decision to revitalize the Republican Party, he was an unquestioned American hero. Republicans and Democrats courted him because he was one of the country’s most beloved figures, and he became the last in a long line of generals to serve as president.
McConnell is a capable politician — and by many accounts a masterful legislative leader — but he’s not a war hero, and he’s never enjoyed any real degree of public adoration. But in January 2021, he had a chance to end Donald Trump’s political career.
Ten House Republicans had joined House Democrats to impeach Trump, and he faced a trial in the Senate. No one can know for certain that McConnell could have secured enough Republican votes to convict Trump, but we know that he did not try. We know that he not only voted to acquit Trump, he later criticized Liz Cheney, the Republican House leader whose opposition to Trump ultimately destroyed her political career.
In October, The Atlantic published a fascinating excerpt from “The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party,” by Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press. McConnell told Tackett that Cheney’s “self-sacrificial act maybe sells books, but it isn’t going to have an impact changing the party. That’s where we differed.”
That’s an incredible statement. The Republican Party wouldn’t change with Trump permanently disqualified from federal office? Everything we know about Trump’s career tells us that he has a unique influence on Republican hearts and minds. None of his imitators have replicated his popularity or his success. Yes, he exploited pre-existing reactionary populism on the right, but he nurtures and feeds it.
We also know from history that populists can be shamed, humiliated and defeated. We know from history that leadership can make a difference. McCarthyism died when leaders of both parties said enough. Richard Nixon resigned when Republican leaders told him it was time.
And the American people responded. It turned out that the longing for McCarthy or loyalty to Nixon was temporary. They appealed to the American id, yet ultimately the better angels of our nature emerged. But it didn’t happen simply because the American people made that decision on their own.
Instead of leading, McConnell punted back to the Republican rank-and-file. Perhaps he’d seen the polling that indicated that Republicans still stood by Trump. Perhaps he had excessive faith that the American legal system would respond with the necessary speed and competence to hold Trump accountable. Maybe he thought after Jan. 6, Trump was finished politically.
He was wrong. I’m haunted by the last lines of Tackett’s Atlantic piece: “McConnell’s goal was to preserve a Senate majority. He wanted the energy of Trump’s voters in Senate races, without the baggage of Trump. He gambled on his belief that Trump would fade from the political stage in the aftermath of the insurrection. Instead, Trump re-emerged every bit as strong among core supporters. It was likely the worst political miscalculation of McConnell’s career.”
For members of a party that claims to revere the American founders, contemporary Republicans are quick to discard their wisdom. There’s no question that the founders did not entirely trust the American elite. There are ample democratic checks on government power. But it is equally clear that they did not trust the American majority. They knew the passions of the people could be stoked by demagogues.
Eisenhower knew that it was his role to put his thumb on the scales. The old forces of reaction and isolation had to be kept at bay, and that it would require both parties to create a sustainable strategy for deterring and ultimately defeating the Soviet Union. He worked assiduously behind the scenes to undermine McCarthy. He succeeded on both counts and helped alter American politics for generations.
McConnell, by contrast, did exactly what the founders were afraid of — he delegated his moral and constitutional responsibilities to the Republican majority, the same people who were already indicating that Trump was still their man.
The people are not always right. Moral courage is always necessary in leadership. And we cannot ever think that we have permanently vanquished the ideas that Trump and so many others before him have used to lead so many Americans astray.
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