The soul of America in the age of Trump

Is Meacham right? The Meacham I have in mind is Jon, the distinguished historian, journalist and television commentator who maintains in his new book that, as bad as things are now, we have seen worse and come out the better for it. From his lips to God’s ear, as my grandmother used to say.

My grandmother, in fact, is just about the only person of note not cited by Meacham. His book, “The Soul of America,” is virtually a compendium of great quotes, many of them moving. In one section, where Meacham summons the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and even Lyndon Johnson, the effect is to moisten the eye and marvel at the genius this country can produce.

And that, of course, is Meacham’s intent. This U.S.A. is a marvelous place, he says, suggesting American exceptionalism, which can be a quasi-religious conviction that God favors our nation above all others. I don’t know about that, but I do know we have been a democracy for a very long time — longer than any other nation. We have been racist, too, slave-owning and Indian-killing and Japaneseinterning and foreignerfearing and more — much more. But we have righted ourselves, for the most part, and continued on our meandering path to a more perfect Union.

You could ask for no better guide through the dark times than Meacham. He is a vivid writer and he seems to have read just about everything ever written that has anything to do with American history — from James Madison to William Faulkner. He cites plenty of bad days; 1968 was an awful year — the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy — and the McCarthy period of the early 1950s was even darker in the sense that its anti-Communist frenzy was not the work of a single deranged person, but a mass hysteria, condoned by significant parts of the political leadership.

That, of course, brings us to the Trump era, which prompted Meacham’s book in the first place. But while he says, “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before,” the bad news, I would have to add, is that never before has it been a President who was blocking the sun. As bad as Joseph McCarthy was, he was a mere senator and not the selfanointed American proconsul — above the law, pardoner of the egregious, immune to subpoena, blithefully ignorant of history and as dishonest as one can be in 280 characters. Trump is a vulgar man who would take John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” and plunk a casino in it.

The goons of the past — Huey Long, George Wallace — were largely regional figures. They had national aspirations and, in Wallace’s case, even some success in 1968 as a third-party candidate. Franklin D. Roosevelt feared Long, but the threat passed with the Louisiana senator’s assassination. As for Wallace, he, too, was shot, but by then his racist and populist message had been co-opted by the GOP, where — rancid and still potent — it remains to this day.

The trouble with historians is that they become captured by history and see it as predictive. I do, too, which is why I have written about Weimar Germany and the lessons its sudden collapse teach us. But sometimes the predictable is misleading. As Henry Kissinger once pointed out, two Balkan crises were resolved before complacency about the third cascaded into World War I.

The wave of populism sweeping parts of Europe — notably Hungary and Poland on the right and Britain on the left (don’t ask me where Italy fits) — is not new for that continent. Britain succumbed to outlandish socialism before, and Poland and Hungary are returning to the comfort of their prewar roots as nasty authoritarian regimes. But America has no such history.

In fact, America has had Presidents who succored its soul. FDR told us to fear only “fear itself,” George W. Bush went to a mosque after the 9/11 attacks, and Barack Obama, as Meacham reminds us, broke into “Amazing Grace” after nine black people were massacred in Charleston, S.C., in 2015.

Now, in stark contrast, we have a President whose rhetoric is ugly and divisive, who is appallingly not appalled by white racists, and whose whims go unchecked by important figures in his own party. He does not summon Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature” but instead stokes unreasonable fear of immigrants, of change, of diversity, of government and of the press.

Is Meacham right? Pray that he is. But act as if he isn’t.