American politics assigns different groups of Americans to different silos. Their preferences, attitudes, incomes, affiliations, subscriptions, car choices, music preferences, television viewing habits, digital footprint and physical geography are generally used to divide them into warring camps. This is done for the purposes of maintaining the positions of powerful interests atop a system in which taking as much as you can get is the order of the day. It is breaking America.
The easiest divisions in American society are the most obvious: race and gender. The indisputable evidence of American injustice that was rooted in profound and almost indescribable hypocrisy is the absence of a 13th, 14th 15th and 19th Amendments to the US Constitution that applied to white men of European descent. Yet, it must be said that the injustice faced by oppressed groups was universal — not an American invention. The birth of America did not make either America or the world free. But it did mark the possibility that, one day, there would be a just society in which all people stood equal under the rule of law, where freedom and liberty were the birthrights of all people.
When Martin Luther King prophesied his death in Memphis during his final speech he did not speak angry words, but rather grateful and hopeful ones. He wasn’t frivolous about life at the hour of death. He was at peace. He was a real revolutionary — every bit as great as Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton and Lafayette. There seemed to be — as was the case with Lincoln — a bottomless place from which to draw the strength to call for reconciliation without malice.
When President George Washington bade farewell to the country, he issued a warning about “factions” — the vocabulary of the day for political parties. Specifically, he was speaking to Adams and Jefferson, the leaders of the diverging factions. Those two Founding Fathers destroyed their friendship over politics, but not their love for one another. When both men died they had made their peace with each other. They died on July 4, 1824, the 50th anniversary of the birth of the United States.
George Washington did not live to see the dawn of the 19th century. He died in 1799. Abraham Lincoln had not been born. Neither had Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Franklin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Susan B. Anthony, James Garfield, Ulysses Grant, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, Queen Victoria, Adolf Hitler, Douglas MacArthur, Harry Truman, George Washington Carver, the Wright Brothers, George Patton, Babe Ruth, Thomas Edison, Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker and Robert Lee. These people were all born in a 100-year span of history that made the United States a continental nation and global power that stood at the precipice of becoming the most powerful nation in world history.
The decisive events that shaped the second half of the 20th century, which became known as the American century, were led by the men and women born in the 19th century. The first American president born in the 20th century was John Kennedy, born in 1917. Born in 1924, George HW Bush was the youngest combat pilot in the US Navy during WW2. Jimmy Carter, born in 1925, graduated Annapolis in 1946. Ronald Reagan was born in 1911; Gerald Ford in 1913; Richard Nixon in 1913; and Lyndon Johnson in 1908. Each of those presidents served in the Armed Forces of the United States during WW2. They held the American presidency for 32 years from 1960 to 1992. These were the turbulent years of the Vietnam War, civil rights and women’s rights movements. These were also the years Americans landed on the moon and invented the internet. These were the presidents who broke the Soviet Empire, defended global freedom, led the democratic alliance of free nations and prevented World War 3. Collectively, they all had great achievements. They also all made mistakes. Together, the world they left behind was more prosperous, secure and just than the world into which they were born. They will be remembered by history for what they did. The label assigned to them by Tom Brokaw was “the Greatest Generation.”
William Jefferson Clinton was 46 years old in 1992. Senator Joseph Biden, who was too young to be sworn in when he won an upset election in 1972 at age 29, was 50.
Thirty-two years have passed since Fleetwood Mac scored the “Don’t Stop” anthem to the Clinton/Gore bus tour that announced the arrival of the baby boomer generation to the pinnacle of American power. It was a momentous event as the children of Woodstock and Vietnam, the largest generation of Americans in history, took control of America’s destiny. This was the generation that heeded JFK’s call to service and was traumatized by assassination, war and violence. This is the generation that produced some of the greatest entrepreneurs and inventors in American history.
This was the generation that launched a generational culture war that has infused American politics with deep malice. It produced the founding father of this indecent moment — Newt Gingrich — and elevated him. It produced the modern American media and invented reality television, subprime mortgages, cracked the genetic code and connected the world through the instant transfer of the sum of mankind’s knowledge in an instant.
This generation has produced five presidencies. Three have been Republican and two Democratic.. The first Republican administration under President George W. Bush began two wars that would end in strategic defeat, and in the case of Afghanistan, national humiliation after 20 years on a Democratic president’s watch. The two wars killed 3,360 Americans, and wounded 52,546 more. The men and women who fought America’s longest war have sustained a great moral injury because America’s political leaders were unwise in the expenditures of American power and prestige. The Bush administration created the vast Homeland Security apparatus, saved millions of African lives from AIDS, kept America safe from a second large-scale terror attack, failed to thwart the subprime crisis and was compelled to stave off Depression with the most massive federal government intervention in the American economy since the Great Depression. George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, handed his successor a world that was far less peaceful, secure, and prosperous than the one he found when he became president.
The Clinton presidency was among the most peaceful and prosperous of the 20th century. The Clinton era cemented America as the most powerful hegemon in world history. Great compromises were made between two warring factions, even as politics and the American media were spiralling out of control. This was the moment when the trial of a football star changed the news industry every bit as much as the television did. What came after OJ was impeachment. The search for something bigger, crazier and more sensational wouldn’t have been possible without the Newtian supernova of hypocrisy, but it was the media that created the spectacle. It deeply broke the country because, when faced with a presidential election that was separated by 538 votes, the distrust industry was only getting started. The age of political war and cold civil war had arrived.
President Clinton’s conduct was unacceptable. Yet, it was the hypocrisy of a cast of malignant players and sociopaths like Ken Starr, Newt Gingrich and all the stars of the right-wing movement who emerged from the embryonic cesspool of right-wing media that would endure, fester, metastasize and turn deadly in the era of Trump.
Barack Obama, the 44th president, was America’s first black president and a symbol of American hope, opportunity, and exceptionalism to people all around the world. His presidency began in the middle of the worst economic crisis since FDR took office, and time has largely proven him correct about the net positive effects of Obamacare. There has never been a president who was treated with more contempt, disdain and viciousness than Barack Obama. His inauguration marked the instigation of a war and age of pettiness brought on by small and unimaginative leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell.
This was the moment where any pretense of country before party imploded. It inversed. This happened because when President Obama was sworn in, the seat of Republican power moved from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, through the US Capitol and all the way to whatever space Roger Ailes was occupying. The opposition party became Fox News, and it eventually went completely off the rails because the hubris of reality television, demagoguery, stupidity, rancidity and malice, couldn’t conceivably end up anywhere else. Obama risked his presidency with one of the bravest decisions an American commander-in-chief has ever made. He gave the order to kill Osama Bin Laden, and he ordered US Special Operations forces to carry that mission out on Pakistani soil. Surprisingly, he failed to heed many of the obvious lessons learned in Iraq when applied to Libya, which is odd given that he foresaw Iraq. The achievements of his presidency and the distinction with which he held the office of president were nullified by Donald Trump through a cruel campaign of debasement and abuse that shrunk the American presidency.
Last night, President Donald Trump announced he would be a candidate for the presidency once again. He is 76 years old.
The overwhelming majority of prognosticators who were profoundly wrong a week ago have sufficiently recovered to inveigh that Trump is finished. They are, generally speaking, the same people who said the same thing when laughing at him when he stood at 1 per cent in the polls in 2015.
Donald Trump is an abomination and the worst president in American history, bar none. His disgraces are unspeakable and almost certainly criminal. He is among the gravest threats to the American republic in history, and will continue to be the leader of a shrinking, constantly radicalizing fringe super minority that will inspire violence, intimations of violence, conspiracy theories, outrage, anger and extremism. Yet he will never hold a position of public responsibility in the United States again. His reign of obscenity will soon yield to an era of accountability — for him, his confederates, accomplices, family accomplices, and legion of violent insurrectionists.
The announcement of Trump’s candidacy was grotesque in more ways than can conceivably be described. The crowd was something from a traveling revival circus that would have been known and seen for what it was by anyone in the 19th century. It was a crowd that made a reality TV show reunion look classy. Just two years before Tuesday night, Donald Trump was the most powerful person in the world. He isn’t anymore. He never will be again. It is time to start imagining something better again in America.
That leaves the final baby boomer President, Joe Biden. He will be 82 years old in 2024, and 86 years old in 2028.
His presidency has given the next generation of Americans a gift equal to the infrastructure accomplishments of the Eisenhower administration. The American departure from Afghanistan was a grave debacle and a searing moral injury for an entire generation of Americans. Yet, his actions in restoring global stability and countering Russian aggression in Ukraine have been reminiscent of the statecraft of George HW Bush. He has been steady, decisive and lethal when necessary. The world remains dangerous, and President Biden — unlike his predecessor — is a force for both democracy and democratic values. He has indicated that he will make a decision about whether to seek a second term in office in early 2023.
This decision has the ability to cement his legacy as a great president and that is what the country needs more than anything else right now. America needs a great president who will do something that has not been seen in America for a long time. The country needs to see an act of humility from a person at the top. They need to see a model of restraint. They need to see a president put the country first.
I remember having discussions with Senator McCain in 2007 about his age. McCain wasn’t a baby boomer. He was older. McCain was in Vietnamese prison for Woodstock and ready to bomb Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. He was 72 and we would talk about whether he should pledge to serve one term. It was an open discussion about whether he was too old at 72, and whether he would be at 76. The Washington, DC, media led the discussion. At times it was frustrating and absolutely ageist in moments, but it was never unfair. This is a serious question. It is an important one and the country should be able to discuss the president’s age, as well as the age of America’s politicians in a dignified manner without pulling punches. It is necessary.
Why was George Washington great? He was great because he walked away from power and set in motion the peaceful transition of power that is foundational to American freedom.
King George III asked if Washington would become king. When he was told that he would retire to Virginia as a citizen, he was amazed and disbelieving. He said that if that were true, Washington would be the greatest man of that age or any age. President Biden’s decision cannot be exculpated from the most important foundational act in American history. That act wasn’t a declaration. It was a retirement. That is why George Washington was great. He made the institution bigger than himself. It was the greatest act of humility in American history. It was one of the greatest acts of humility by a great leader in world history. He could have been emperor and he said no.
Martin Luther King surveyed all of human history in his final address. He rhetorically journeyed through history’s greatest eras. He glided from the pyramids, Jerusalem and Rome to his own era and expressed gratitude to be in the fight for justice in Selma and Montgomery
Then he foresaw the future from the mountaintop. He shared with America certitude around where this great American journey will end. It will end in the just society and it will be achieved. That was his message. He did not tell us when that day would come. Just that it would.
In the end, there are pessimists and optimists. There are cynics and idealists. There are believers and hypocrites. There are heroes and cowards. There are truth tellers and liars. There are resistors and collaborators. They come in all shapes and sizes.
Donald Trump has consumed seven years of America’s time. It has wasted a decade and made everything worse that should be made better. I did everything I could to fight him. Fighting has kept him at bay. It has defenestrated him, but it won’t protect America from him. There is only one thing that will end this terribleness and that is better. That is why John and Bobby Kennedy are important.
Assassins altered the trajectory of American history in ways that profoundly shaped the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The great tragedy about political violence in America is that when it kills, it takes the greatest leaders, seldom the average, and never the worst. Two assassinations — Lincoln’s in 1865 and Garfield’s in 1880 — shaped the 20th century.
President William McKinley’s assassinations launched the transformations of Teddy Roosevelt and the progressive era. It altered the course of history, and took the United States into the 20th century under the leadership of a 42-year-old. William McKinley was the last combat veteran of the Civil War to reach the White House.
The murders of John and Robert Kennedy took something profound from the country. America was never an innocent country, and it was never a just country, but it was idealistic and optimistic. America has always been permissive of hypocrisy, cynicism, cruelty, religious nuttery and fads of all manners, but it has always been a project of faith, a labor of love and a dream worth pursuing.
Idealism and optimism is what MAGA can’t survive. Twitter is no place for idealists and people who want to make things better. I have done more than my fair share of fighting back against a terrible and irredeemable cause there.
What I have realized is that Twitter and decency are incompatible, and that Twitter and MAGA are inseparable sewers with or without Trump on them. The only way out of our American crisis is to find our way to a new destination. There isn’t any evidence that the generation that took power in 1992 and seeks it through 2028 via the Trump candidacy and putative Biden one can lead us there.
It is depressing to hear the reciprocal justifications made by President Biden’s team that he alone can beat Trump, and from Trump’s, that he alone can win what he already lost. It’s terrible for America.
President Biden should quit politics and be a great president and commander-in-chief. He should climb above the fray and use his easy manner and smile to travel to every place he lost in 2020. Everyone likes to see the president once they quit politics. He should travel the country on Air Force One, bring the Marine Band revel in “Hail to the Chief” and make people laugh. He can bring the country together and instigate a debate about the future of the country within the Democratic Party primary process.
Ron DeSantis is the MAGA king of the hill now. The Trump show isn’t going to be cancelled, but it won’t be coming back to Washington, DC. Trump has consumed enough of my life fighting. I’m done with it because he’s done. I want to put my attention elsewhere. I am happy to live in this era because there is no time in human history that offers more simultaneous challenges and opportunities. The defense of democracy demanded holding a line in 2022. It barely held. 2024 will demand and advance towards a new horizon that has remained unimagined, unarticulated and unachieved for too long. The “high court of history” will be brutal to this era. The longer it lingers, the more brutal the judgement. It’s time to move on.
One thing I forgot to add. In a travesty, Tim Ryan didn’t win his election this year. But he definitely is a winner.
Steve is teasing us. He wants a new generation of political leadership. He wants John and Bobby Kennedy reincarnated. One such person is here already. He is genuine and authentic, a candidate who can represent the forgotten and abandoned working and middle classes. Steve spent a lot of time with him up to Election Day. As Steve well knows, his name is Tim Ryan.
Robert Lehrer
Albemarle, NC