It’s Hard to Believe This Is the Situation We Face
The Bulwark · C · trust 27/100
And somehow we are still underestimating the danger.
William Kristol , Andrew Egger , and Jim Swift July 28 Upgrade to listen 13 minutes 519 203 36 One of the smartest things Donald Trump’s political team has done this year has been to yank the leash of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., because all his anti-vaccine growling and snapping was understandably making Americans jumpy. But as the Wall Street Journal reports today, that strategic shift has left one important person grumpy: Trump himself. He has repeatedly asked Kennedy this year why he hasn’t prioritized finding a connection between vaccines and autism, and has told aides his secretary “will be a failure if he doesn’t make progress on the issue.” Happy Tuesday .
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(Photo Illustration by Sarah Rogers/ The Bulwark | Photos Shutterstock) Be Alarmed. Very Alarmed. by William Kristol
Can you believe it? How many times have we said that—sometimes plaintively, sometimes mockingly, sometimes indignantly, sometimes angrily, sometimes mournfully—over the last decade?
It’s a reasonable sentiment. Incredulity, surprise, shock, horror—these are normal and healthy reactions to Trumpism. In particular, they’re normal American reactions to Trumpism. It wasn’t supposed to happen here or now. Yes, we’ve had problems and challenges and difficulties here, but we’d weathered them, or at least were dealing with them. If you were a conservative, you were confident that America and Americans were still exceptional. If you were a liberal, you were confident that the arc of history bent towards justice. Either way, excessive confidence tended to produce a kind of complacency. It couldn’t really happen here.
Well, it’s happening. The assault on our political liberties and our civic decency, on our polity and on our society, is happening. The pace and degree at which it’s moved is hard to believe. But our surprise is a product of a complacency that we haven’t yet quite shed.
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The 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln understood that this might happen, way back in 1838, when he delivered his great address on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. All seemed well in a free and prosperous and growing America, and Lincoln begins where his audience is, by trying to capture or echo that sentiment.
In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.
It’s great to be an inheritor of blessings. But, Lincoln suggests, blessings can blind us to dangers. And so we need to focus not on our inheritance but on our task.
We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them—they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.
And, Lincoln suggests in the rest of his speech, his contemporaries weren’t yet sufficiently focused on our task. And he reminded them that they certainly couldn’t take the successful completion of that task for granted. “I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us.” In the relatively calm and peaceful circumstances of 1838, Lincoln saw failure ahead. And failure came.
We’re not in the situation of the young Lincoln. We’re closer to the one he faced two decades later. Our failure is, obviously, far less dramatic than the failure the nation faced in the late 1850s. But our failure is one for which we have less of an excuse. We in the twenty-first century didn’t have to figure out how to deal with the nightmare of slavery. We just had to improve on a reasonably stable and successful order at home and in the world, one bequeathed to us by our ancestors.
We haven’t done that. Quite the contrary. Ten years of Trumpism mark not only a failure to preserve that order, but the infliction of real harm done to it. As we look around at the state of our institutions laboriously built up—a comparatively fair system of justice at home, a relatively honest federal government, an attempt to live up to our heritage as a nation of immigrants, and an international order that was comparatively stable and friendly to the forces of freedom—it’s hard to believe how much damage has been done in the past decade. With a dramatic acceleration, of course, in the past eighteen months.
It is hard for many of us—and I include myself in this number—to believe that this is the situation…
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