The great American art of renewal

heights.

Such radical turnarounds have been common in U.S. history. As the ancient Athenian historian Thucydides noted, large democracies are by nature volatile, they can mobilize quickly, and they can change on a dime — sometimes in the right direction.

In late 1983, Ronald Reagan was being written off a practitioner of voodoo economics. The country was still mired in a recession caused by Reagan’s efforts to break runaway inflation.

In the 1982 midterm elections, Republicans lost 27 seats in the House and one in the Senate. The man likely to be Reagan’s Democratic rival two years later, Walter Mondale, was considered a good bet to win the presidency, given his youthful vigor, his prior service as vice president and his incorruptibility.

Yet in the 12 months from November 1983 to the 1984 election, the economy grew at an astonishing quarterly rate of better than 7 percent. Unemployment dropped. Almost every economic indicator showed an unprecedented boom.

Mondale went down to defeat in one of the largest Electoral College landslides in U.S. history, largely because the economy had been reinvented almost overnight from a bust to a boom.

In 1940, Depression-era America was recovering from yet another downturn. The New Deal had not restored prosperity after the 1929 crash. Europe was largely under the control of Nazi Germany. Only the United Kingdom was left of the European democracies that had fought Hitler.

The Soviet Union was aiding Hitler. Imperial Japan was preparing to gobble up most of the Pacific, especially orphaned European colonies rich in oil, rubber, agriculture and precious metals.

The United States was torn apart politically between isolationists and interventionists. Fights broke out in Congress over whether the country could afford to rearm. In almost every area of armament, America was far behind the armed forces of the Axis powers.

Then the world again flipped upside down. After Pearl Harbor, the United States engineered the greatest economic expansion in history. Within four years, the U.S. economy exceeded that of enemies and allies together.

A war that in early 1942 looked like it might either go on for years or end in an Axis victory was over less than four years after the U.S. entered the conflict.

World War II was not the first instance of a rapid American turnaround in wartime. In the summer of 1864, pessimists warned that the North could not win the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln faced opposition for the Republican Party nomination, and even if he earned it, he was considered likely to lose the November election to Union General George McClellan.

Then, suddenly, fantasy became reality. The maverick Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman unexpectedly took Atlanta on Sept. 2, 1864. Euphoria swept the North. McClellan’s sure-thing candidacy crashed. The supposedly endless Civil War ended with a sudden and absolute Union victory that no one had foreseen.

Pundits should be careful with their sure-thing predictions, especially in the matter of a powerful, unpredictable and explosive America. With the risktaking and unconventional Trump and the hysterical opposition to him, we are entering another unpredictable and volatile era in American history.

Radical and unexpected economic recovery can happen at home and abroad. Such fundamental change in the status quo can swing the November election — and in unforeseen ways.