Unfinished work
November 19, 1863: Gettysburg address
Things fall apart.
I memorized and recited the Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in the fifth grade at Roosevelt Elementary School. Mrs. Mekvold sat at a desk at the front of the room and listened to be sure my classmates and I got the words right.
Abraham Lincoln said that the country gained a new national purpose, one added to those at our founding in 1776. Lincoln said: "We are dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." It is part of the American deal now, he said, because so many people died here for that purpose. The battlefield deaths were the ratifying convention. They must not have died in vain.
Lincoln also said that the fighting and dying was to preserve self-government, "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Self-government was in peril then. Lincoln said the battlefield deaths demonstrated that people would die for that cause, too.
In the two decades after the disintegration of the Soviet Union Americans enjoyed the prospect that we were at the "end of history." Political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote that our system won. Liberal democracy and market capitalism had risen to the top. Americans felt triumphant--a heady and dangerous emotion. Now America could spread the American system to the world. Surely Ukraine wanted to be more like America, and the Baltic states, and all of Europe, plus China and the countries surrounding it, and Africa and Latin America. Our government works! Our economy works!
We learned in the past decade that it wasn't so simple, neither abroad nor at home. Liberal democracy and market capitalism put political equality and self-government at risk. A market economy works well for the people with market power but less well for others, and those others might be half the country, or maybe 90%, or possibly 99%. Those left-out people became frustrated and angry. There is cultural frustration, too. In America, Western Europe, India, Turkey, Brazil, and China, right populist ethno-nationalist attitudes and movements are gaining strength. It turns out the multi-cultural, citizen-of-the-world, post-racial, pro-immigrant "end of history" consensus was not a consensus at all. That fact may have been misunderstood two decades ago, but it unmistakeable now.
Popular government is not an inevitability. In early-1861, after his election, a big segment of Americans--the southern states--took arms against the government in opposition to the election. In 2021, Americans in good standing as tax-paying American citizens--people with careers, wealth, and community status--tried to reverse a presidential election. A majority of GOP voters continue to wish for it and some insist on it.
This blog looks at messaging and leadership. The people who have emerged with the passion and oratorical power to focus and energize Americans are people speaking to their tribes, not the nation. I would welcome another Lincoln, someone who could articulate a unifying national purpose. Joe Biden does not have the skillset for this task. I don't blame him. He never had it and never pretended to have it.
It isn't impossible for that new Lincoln to be a Republican, but he or she would face the uphill task of winning over the people currently feeling most threatened by cultural marginalizing. Liz Cheney is giving it a try.
The more likely person is a Democrat who speaks of there being no red states nor blue states and whose words and tone project unity. There is a problem with that. We tried it with Obama, and it led to Trump. Maybe we need a long ugly fight before we exhaust ourselves and are ready to return to the unfinished work Lincoln laid out. This is a gloomy look ahead, but I am attempting to be realistic.