U.S. has history of near misses with disaster

With the end of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, the presidency of Joe Biden begins in earnest. But neither the law nor his vanity will allow Trump to disappear. He will haunt us still.

Which makes this a good opportunity to consider how we got here and what might have happened along the way to produce a different outcome — in this case, a re-elected Trump.

Counter-factual history is more than a parlour game. It's a sobering reading of the past, explaining how nations come to the abyss. And how, through wisdom or luck, they withdraw.

This has happened often in the history of the United States: The republic comes close to making a mistake and reverses itself. “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing,” observed Winston Churchill, “after they have tried everything else.”

Not always. The United States embraced slavery, fought a civil war, abandoned Reconstruction, tolerated a century of racial segregation. It pursued misadventures in Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq. It scorned Irish Americans, killed Native Americans and interned Japanese Americans. It outlawed alcohol.

But let's consider some of its choices — personal, political and institutional — that led America to a better place.

In 1797, George Washington left the presidency after two terms of office. He could have overstayed, an act of royalism that would have left the American experiment stillborn.

Instead, he established the peaceful transfer of power, a tradition which became the loudest boast of American democracy. This understanding among presidents endured until 2020.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was improbably elected in a four-party race. Had it been one of his rivals, the Union would have faltered.

In 1864, with the Civil War still raging, it appeared that Gen. George McClellan might defeat Lincoln and sue for peace with the

South. But in September, Confederate Atlanta fell, Lincoln was re-elected, the war ended. It could have gone the other way.

In 1901, William McKinley was assassinated, which any democracy abhors. He was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt, who introduced a breathless progressive agenda, particularly on labour and conservation. Fortune made him one of the country's great reformers.

In 1919, Woodrow Wilson proposed the League of Nations. It failed but led, a quarter century later, to the creation of the United Nations and the institutional architecture of the postwar world, led by the United States.

In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover, ending a disastrous decade of Republican laissez-faire economics. FDR created the New Deal and saved capitalism.

In 1941, FDR signed the Lend-Lease Act, a shrewd exercise of guile and good which saved a beleaguered Great Britain. The year before, he defeated a Republican, suffocating a popular isolationism.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon. Had it gone the other way, would America have gone to the moon, established the Peace Corps, survived the Cuban Missile Crisis, and begun racial reconciliation?

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, among the nation's most consequential laws. A southerner with racial prejudices, he was an unlikely agent of change. Sen. Barry Goldwater, his conservative opponent in 1964, opposed the act.

In 2008, the country chose Barack Obama over John McCain. Consequences? Among others, it prevented Sarah Palin from succeeding McCain, and made possible Joe Biden.

Ah, President Biden. How the fates would have conspired against him after he lost the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, and had Representative Jim Clyburn then refused to endorse him. But he did support him, which won Biden South Carolina's black voters — which won him the state, which won him Super Tuesday, which won him the nomination, which won the Democrats the election.

Other pivotal moments in 2020: Tara Reade's accusations of sexual assault against Biden failed; Trump mishandled the pandemic, which crippled a strong economy; the campaign to undo the election failed. All this could have been different. Once again, against the odds, the Americans did the right thing.