6 June

Essay: Keep History In Mind. Stay Oriented. Grasp The Past

by Jon Katz
Keep History In Mind

Americans believed Thomas Paine when he declared that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Franklin Roosevelt’s beloved teacher, a man named Endicott Peabody, told him: “Things in life will not always run smoothly.

“Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights,” he wrote, ” then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.”

When I was a child, I could not have imagined a movement for transgender people. I did not imagine that African-Americans would be legally awarded equal rights to whites, at least under the law.

I never saw a woman challenge the authority of a man, or speak out against the rampant violence towards and abuse of women. I never  saw a woman defy or challenge the power of a man and win.

I never thought I would live to see a me.too movement or a day when the U.S. Supreme Court would protect the marriage of gay people to one another, and legalize their bonds. I never once thought there would be a movement to support and protect the rights of transgender people, and that most Americans would support it.

Or that we would even think of granting legal status to any of the hundreds of thousands of children living in the United States illegally for some or all of their lives. I didn’t even know they were there, they lived only in the shadows.

These things were not even on the edge of our imaginations, they were almost literally unthinkable. Can anyone name any other country which made so much progress at expanding the rights of people, however imperfectly?

Watching the news, I sometimes despair for the souls of the American people. Reading my history, I reclaim my faith in them. We usually end up getting it right.

***

It is in response to such change, to such expansions of freedom, for such support of the “other”, that epic conflicts occur, and demagogues rise  up and masses of people feel threatened and undermined.

There is always an “other” for the demagogues and their followers to feel superior to,  to feed on. The “others” are woven into the American experience, drawn here like moths to a flame, persecuted and blamed and marginalized, so much a part of our country’s fabric.

They are always coming to us, finding a way to get in,  demanding freedom, needing help, scaring the wits out of small and frightened people. They are the river that never dries up.

If there weren’t a lot of expanding freedoms, there would be no need of a great struggle, nothing for a demagogue or his angry followers to feed on.

We live in a time of cultural and political and media hyperventilation, our noses are so stuck in the moment.

in the arguing, see-sawing, maw of ever-changing expectations, things happen so quickly, and are transmitted so instantly and incompletely, that they all blend into one another, a furious cacophony of tension, anger and frustration.

It doesn’t feel good, this tension, day after  day, and to many people it is now a  frightening time with no clear end in sight.

The beast we call the media will never tell you there is an end in sight, or even possible.

They make too much money scaring us and keeping us fearful enough to never pull ourselves away from our  screens. The corporate media and the politics  pretend to hate one another.

They don’t, neither could live without the other. We spent too much time watching them.

In the up-and-down ideology of media, where everything is covered like a sporting event at loud volume, where everything is an argument,  the hopes and fears of the opposing sides ride up and down a roller coster from from the Dark Side.

This morning, when I woke up, I was told the election was a disaster for Democrats, then a victory for them, then a night of mixed and uncertain results.Then a great Republican victory. Then they fought about it all day.  I am responsible for what I believe and put into my head.

It seems that no one bothers to wait to see what really happened, unthinking and unfounded speculation pelts us like hail in a storm. Every sentence begins with “I think…”, never with “here’s what really happened.”

I think it’s wise to keep history in mind. That works for me.

Something big is happening around us right now, and in many ways it is good, healthy and necessary. It is also inevitable. It is also not new. We have survived. We will survive. Politics, like fear, is a geography, a space to cross.

Democracy is an ugly thing ,a messy and chaotic thing,  not a perfect thing, just the best thing invented so far for ruling people and hurting as few as possible and trying out the very radical idea that people have rights. That does not seem to always  be the human default position if we look out at the world.

This is why the American experiment is so precious. We have rights. They have rights. The government’s job is to protect our rights. When they fail, everything is thrown off balance.

It might be orienting and grounding to grasp the past, it is for me.

I love history, it  has always comforted and grounded me. In his new book The Soul Of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels, Jon Meacham quotes from the great orator Daniel Webster and U.S. Senator:

When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm., the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course.”

in 1830  Webster added:  “Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float farther on the waves of this debate,  refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we are now.” Simple enough. What is happening now is a very American response to more freedom and change than anyone imagined or foresaw,  just a few years ago.

In the 1950’s during the great and frightening Red Scare, political writer Richard Rovere wrote of Senator Joe McCarthy: “I cannot easily conceive of circumstances in which McCarthy, either faulted as he was, or freed of his disabling weaknesses, could have become President of the United States or could have seized the reins of power on any terms.”

McCarthy was loud, vulgar and loose with the truth, and he had large masses of people supporting him for years.

Then they tired of him and abandoned him, and he died a lonely alcoholic wreck, another American ghost.

If you have worked in the media for any length of time, as I have, then you know what the media creates, the media devours. TV made Joe McCarthy, TV did him in. Media is carnivorous, it eats its young. And its old. Anyone who lives by feeding off the masses, dies by feeding off the masses. They are insatiable.

Read your history.

“To visualize him in the White House,” Rovere wrote of McCarthy,” one has, I think, to imagine a radical change in the national character and will and taste.” For sure.

Politics has always spawned cults, that is the very nature of democracy, one of its reliable side effects said H.L. Mencken. We always revere the masses, but we often don’t like what they do.

Demagogues appear when government lies to its people. Cults are the nourishment of the demagogue, like people with devoted dogs, they can only be nourished by unconditional and unquestioned and unrelenting love.

“Cults can hide in many places,” wrote Natacha Tormey in her book Cults – A Bloodstained History.”They are so adept at blending into society and making their true colors that often their victims do not realize that they were even in a  cult until they have escaped it. Nor do they fully comprehend the severity of the brainwashing that they were subjected to, until they are finally free of it.”

We are undergoing a radical change in our time, it seems, a change in the national character and will and taste. Americans have a short attention span, they easily tire and get bored or distracted.

But they are very much awake. And certain values re-appear.  I imagine some young charismatic with a new idea and an even better understanding of technology will appear soon and spark yet another  radical change in the national character.

I think it is the new normal. This is a new age. Ideas are memes, they travel and replicate on their own.

And this certainly won’t be over soon, or in a simple and clear-cut way.

The past, writes Meacham, an honest and respected historian, tells us that demagogues can only thrive when a substantial portion of the demos – the people – want them to.

In the American Commonwealth magazine, James Bryce warned of the dangers of a renegade president.

It wasn’t the individual himself that was so dangerous, cautioned Bryce, that from the White House he could overthrow the Constitution. The real danger would come, he warned, at the hands of a demagogic president with an enthusiastic public base.

That is  scary, but not apocalyptic.

A bold President who knew himself to be supported by a majority in the country, might be tempted to override the law, and deprive the minority of the protection which the law affords it. Wrote Bryce, “He might be a tyrant, not against the masses, but with the masses.

He would have to be popular with almost everyone to pull it off, says Meacham.

Throughout our history, the masses have fed off of the masses hatred of the elites, and the demagogues feed off of the masses.

Meacham says there is cheering news and room for much hope.

The pain angry reaction is a reflection of deep and once unimaginable changes in the American idea of freedom. We sometimes forget that America was the first country in the history of the world to pledge freedom to all of its people. From the beginning, the America idea has been to steadily expand and protect the freedom of its citizens, even as it denied  freedom to so many of its citizens.

**

Take heart, say the historians. The more freedom, the more turmoil. Expansion of freedoms are the terrain of the demagogue. “”The people  often make mistakes,”  said Harry Truman, “but given time and the facts, they will make the corrections.”

We cannot argue and taunt the people who see things differently than us into seeing a different way.

They must see it for themselves, and come to it in their own time.

It took a century for many African-Americans to even be legally entitled to vote, it took decades for gays to legally marry, the transgender fight is just getting underway. It will take awhile, but Lincoln wrote that such change is always glacial, people’s hearts soften slowly and over time. America is all about the Open Field.

I think Lincoln should have the last word in this essay.

Truman said of him “he had a good head and a great brain and a kind heart.” We can’t say that of too many of our leaders today. Perhaps one will rise up and show us the way. I think so.

Addressing Union troops returning to Ohio after a fierce battle, Lincoln stopped to speak to them as they left Washington. The tall, tired, President was exhausted.

“It is,” he said, “in order that each one of you may have, though this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field, and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life with all its desirable human aspirations – it is for this that the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthrights – not only for one, but for two or three years if necessary, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”

To me, we are in yet another epic struggle, perhaps two or three years of struggle is not too long a time for us to keep our birthrights, for me, for others, for the refugees and immigrants in need of our help. I am a patriot, I love what America stands for. I believe our values will prevail, and are more powerful than any demagogue.

For all of our darker impulses, writes Meacham, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and  deferred, the experiment begun so long ago, and carried it out so imperfectly, is worth the fight. There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, “than the one we wage in the service of those better angels who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.”

I have found my better angels, or at least some better angels. We have joined the battle.

Keep some history in mind.

1 Comments

  1. Thank you, Jon, for this essay. It gives me heart and reminds me that I can’t change anyone but myself. Everyone comes to the truth eventually as we all move forward to becoming better human beings.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Email SignupFree Email Signup