INSIDE MICHIGAN POLITICS: CAN AMERICA SURVIVE?

Jon Meacham thinks so. The Pulitzer Prizewinning historian spoke to a crowd of nearly 400 at The Flint Institute of Arts on Sept. 24, nearly six weeks before this year’s general election. Below is a partial transcript of his remarks, containing the most salient parts. Ellipses denote skipped-over segments and some humorous anecdotes and asides, but nothing printed below has been taken out of context:

“Thank you (for the introduction, to standing applause) … It shouldn’t be as fraught as it is now … Too many of us see politics not as an arena of contention where we have rivals and opponents as opposed to enemies. Rivals and opponents are fine. You can deal with rivals and opponents. If someone’s an enemy, they have to be destroyed. If politics moves from being an arena of contention to being a battlefield, we break faith with what set us in motion … (I’ll quote) Alexander Hamilton, who wrote in the First Federalist that ‘The American Constitution (is) a test of whether reason and deliberation could prevail against force and accident.’

“That’s the test that we face every day. The ferocity of the battle ebbs and flows. I wish it would ebb a bit more these days, but it’s not. And so that’s why we’re here. We’re here to look back so that we might find some way to move forward. And that sounds like a coffee mug, but it has the virtue of being true. Plutarch once said that the point of history was to know what to follow and what to forswear. It’s a great definition, what to follow and what to forswear. So in looking back, we don’t get a GPS map to the future. Doesn’t work that way. (Let me give you) kind of a diagnostic guide. There are certain symptoms that recur in human affairs that suggest the existence of an underlying condition and that has proven to be susceptible to certain kinds of treatments. That’s what this is. That’s what history is.

“It’s interesting, isn’t it? So much of our vernacular of politics actually comes from health care. The body politic. Corruption meant disease initially, not graft. Crisis was from Hippocrates. It’s the moment in a disease where a patient lives or dies. It’s a reminder that the ancients saw public life as important as our health because we live in community and we cannot break apart. And so the test we face every day is ‘To what extent are we going to prove that Alexander Hamilton was right about reason and deliberation?’ Or to what extent are we going to fall away from it and allow force and accident and the rule of the strong to overcome and end this journey toward a more perfect union? And there may be one or two of you who are discouraged at the moment. Just Guessing. And I’ve already quoted Plutarch. We’re going to talk about St. Augustine … and I’m going to go ahead and get the highbrow stuff out of the way. I want to tell you, my favorite political philosopher, who’s not really appreciated enough, is John Belushi, who in Animal House said, “We did not give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.” Right.

“So we cannot give up. I decline to surrender American democracy to cable news and algorithms. Right. Doesn’t mean it’s easy, but I decline so (that) we can judge, I think, every day of our public life by the degree to which (we adhere) to … the Hamilton sentence …

“The second most important sentence, the most important sentence I believe ever originally rendered in English, is that written by Thomas Jefferson 250 years ago in June, that ‘All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ It’s a sentence that has changed more lives around the world and continues to do so. Now, some of you may think that that’s a little hyperbolic to say it’s the most important sentence originally rendered in English … I believe we can judge every matter of public significance by the degree to which we live into the implications of that sentence or the degree to which we fall from it. (That sentence) is the North Star, it is the scale.

“And you don’t have to take my word for it. Maybe take Frederick Douglass’s word for it. Imagine what it took for a Black man born into enslavement in the middle of the 19th century to say the following:  “I, for one, do not despair of the Republic. The fiat of the Almighty, let there be light, has not yet spent its force.” Why on earth did he think that? Because he believed that people who looked like me — boringly heterosexual, white, southern male Episcopalians, right? — there may be only six of us left, but (he believed) we meant what we said. We voluntarily founded this nation on an idea, not on blood, not on soil, not on specific sectarian creed, but on a universal creed that anyone who assents to that, anyone who ascribes to our beliefs can become an American. It’s a little like what Ronald Reagan said in his last remarks as president. You can go to France, move to France, but not become a Frenchman, move to Germany, not become a German, move to Turkey, not become a Turk. But anyone could come to the United States of America and become an American. And without that, we sacrifice not just the creative entrepreneurial energy that we self evidently receive from the free flow of people and goods and ideas, but we lose that moral core that we didn’t fully embrace ourselves in the beginning. Let’s be very clear. If you look like me, all of American history has been fine. If you don’t look like me, it’s been stutter-stepped. And we’re going to talk about a moment like that in a second.

“The wonderful thing, to use Plutarch again, is that we know what to follow and what to forswear if only we have the moral energy to actually do the right thing. It’s not a mystery. Now, you all are better people than I am, which is not hard, so don’t get cocky. But I know that if I do the right thing 51% of the time, that’s a hell of a good day. And I don’t have that many of those right. I’m driven by appetite and ambition and greed and selfishness. I’m not unique in that. We’ve been doing this since the third chapter of Genesis, right? There was a piece of fruit. We were told not to take it. We wanted it, we took it. Mayhem ensues. That’s that elemental drama (that is) unfolding at this hour in the United States of America. We know what to do. We choose for reasons of self interest, not to do it. The wonderful thing about that is that it is a choice. And we can choose to do the right thing. We can follow what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature and forswear our worst instincts. And all we have to do is get 51% of us to do it. Because let’s be very clear, in our finest hours, the United States of America has been divided at least 60-40. So I was thinking, because Jon Stewart once called me a dork …  I think he meant it as an insult. But I took it the opposite way. I was thinking a couple years ago, all right, what’s a presidential election? Think about this. If you’re here, you’re dorking out. What’s a presidential election? That should have been 70-30. So I was thinking, you know, not the early stuff, but sort of mid-19th century on. It occurred to me that 1872 was a pretty good candidate. All right, why is that? No, sorry. 1868. 1868.

“We had just finished the Civil War, right? We’re three years, three years out. More black folks could vote still vote in the south for a brief period of time. A lot of white folks could not vote in the south because they had not yet re-entered the covenant. U.S. Grant, known as the most famous American in the world, the conqueror of the Confederacy, the savior of the Union, is the Republican nominee. The Democratic nominee is a man named Horatio Seymour. You have not had him thrown at you in a long time. Horatio Seymour was a former governor of New York who was a white supremacist, sort of a copperhead Democrat, wanted to repeal the verdict of the Civil War, did not support the Civil Rights Act … 750,000 people had just died in this country. We were 36 months away from Appomattox. We had a clear choice between Grant and a white supremacist Yankee. You know what the race was? You think, well, it has to be 70-30. It was four points.

“So when I get asked, which I do occasionally, why can’t it be like it used to be? When is that exactly? That’s not the question. The question is what can we take from the past that is illuminating and try to push ahead? This is not simply about civic recovery. We’re about civic creativity. We’re about civic vivacity and vigor … Looking back, I believe insofar as (that) arms us successfully, (we can) try to create eras that we want the future to follow and not forswear.

“That’s the challenge we have. And history has given us a particularly fraught and difficult hour, unquestionably. But we don’t get to choose what hours arrive to shape our time. So I want to talk about two things. I would like to talk about a moment that I think felt like this. And then some characteristics that I believe emerge out of the American story that we should follow and not forswear that will make us as citizens more civically creative, more civically vigorous.

“So what if we had been here 100 years ago? (Former Congressman) Dan (Kildee) would have been running for office. So there’s that. Yeah, he walked into that man. 1926. What would be going on? We would have just finished the first World War. Cataclysmic event. One of the largest events in human history which led to the mechanization of warfare. Tanks, airplanes, chemical weapons were all in the advance in the first World War. Released nationalisms around the world. There was a significant and ferocious anti-immigrant sentiment, not least because of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 where the Soviet Union had been formed. Created anxieties that socialists were coming for all of us. Any of this sound familiar?

“We would have just come through a global pandemic — the Spanish Flu. 1920 was the first time about half of you were allowed to vote in federal elections with the 19th Amendment. Isolationism was one result of the First World War. We signed the Kellogg Briand Pact denouncing war as an instrument of national policy. Signatories included Germany, Italy and Japan. Whoops! That didn’t work out very well. Protectionism. Smoot-Hawley. The idea that there could be a fortress America. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1915, at Stone Mountain, Georgia, not far from where I grew up, the Ku Klux Klan was re-founded. The flames from that cross went across America. Ten United States senators, 30 members of the House, and five governors were members of the Klan. One hundred years ago, Texas and Georgia, which, given American history, at least tracks, (but also) Indiana, Colorado and Oregon had Klan governors 100 years ago. Why (did) the 1924 Democratic National Convention (go) to 103 ballots? Because there were 347 Klan delegates at Madison Square Garden who would not vote for Al Smith, the governor of New York, to be the Democratic nominee. Because (he was) Irish Catholic. That was seen as the Sharia law of the era. Why? See if any of this sounds familiar. Extraordinary demographic change. The 1920 census was the first time more Americans lived in cities than on farms. So think about it. Until 1920, a majority of Americans were absolutely culturally sovereign. They decided what books to read, what magazines to subscribe to, what newspapers to take, where to go to church, who to talk to. Suddenly you’re going into this wage-based system because the industrial revolution has ignited these great engines of prosperity, and you are disoriented. You’ve gone from being sovereign to being more. You seem more dependent. That was the first demographic shift.

“The second was a technological shift in how we process information. I don’t know if any of this sounds familiar. The first iPhone was the radio. And I don’t really need to tell anybody from this part of the world about the power of radio. Father Coughlin (from Michigan) could tell you all about that. But radio was not commercially available in the United States until 1925.

“So again, you were utterly sovereign until 1925. You buy a machine, you put it in the corner, you put it in the parlor, and suddenly what these people in Washington and New York and Hollywood and Washington, what they say matters to you, it was exciting, it opened up the world, it widened the aperture, but it was disorienting because suddenly you were confronting a world that did not seem as familiar as it used to seem. As Mark Twain once said, history may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme, right? We end the decade with the stock market crash, the Great Depression. We’ve lost track of the Thirties. We’ve lost touch with the Depression, which we should not do. One out of four American men were out of work. There were food riots in the Midwest. A live question about whether democratic capitalism was going to survive the decade. One of the most important books of the era, bestselling books, was by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh’s wife. It was called The Wave of the Future. And in her view, the wave of the future was not the messiness of democratic capitalism with its complicated 18th century constitutional checks and balances that make it so difficult to do anything. It’s difficult to do anything because the founders knew that most of what we would want to do is wrong. We’ve proven them right again and again. But in her view, that was not the wave of the future. The wave of the future was a totalitarian type government with a strong man who rose to power on a cult of personality and might someday take control of the means of production and the means of media in order to make the country more responsive to an ever shrinking global world. Huh.

“So what happened in this moment of absolute fear? And when I say fear, here’s Aristotle. We’ve had Belushi, so let’s give Aristotle a moment. Aristotle defined fear this way. It’s a brilliant definition. (He said that) it’s the emotion created by the anticipation of the loss of something you love. I’m going to say that again. It’s the emotion created by the anticipation of the loss of something you love. When you are fearful, you are defensive, you are more violent, you are more reflexive, you are not reflective because you feel under siege. The answer to fear is hope. And hope cannot simply be a homily or a reassuring word. It has to be a world in which we have the means of prosperity, the means of growth. The security that enables us to try to live lives of purpose and again, of prosperity.

“In the Depression, in the first five years of the Depression, the suicide rate in the United States of America recorded its largest single increase. People were desperate. John Maynard Keynes was asked, has there ever been anything like the Depression before? He said, yes, it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years. So what happened? Why did democratic capitalism survive? I think in many ways, Franklin Roosevelt is a good place to start in answering that question. Not because he’s a Democrat, not because he was a big government guy, but because he refused, as we must refuse, to let democratic capitalism end on his watch. So the line we all remember from the first inaugural address is ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ Nameless, unreasoning fear that paralyzes our advance and converts progress into retreat. Fascinating, isn’t it, that he used the word paralyze? He had taught himself to walk again. He thought he could teach the country to walk again. But the line, by the way, I think one of the reasons we remember that line is it’s on the first page of (the novel) To Kill a Mockingbird. That’s how Harper Lee grounds the story in 1933.

“But the line that got the biggest cheer on the east front of the Capitol was when (Roosevelt) said, our current crisis is of such scope that ‘I’ might require wartime-like executive powers to govern as if we had been invaded by a foreign foe. And the crowd roared. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote in her diary that she was chilled to the bone because it seemed the people might be ready for a dictator. That night, like a good Episcopalian, FDR was having a glass of whiskey and going to bed. That’s what we do. That’s why there’s so much whiskey, because there’s so few of us. An aide comes to him — Rex Tugwell, a brain truster, came to FDR and said, kind of pretentiously, if you think about it, ‘Mr. President, if you solve the crisis of the Depression, you will go down as our greatest president. But if you fail, you will go down as our worst.’ And FDR looked at him and said, “If I fail, I’ll go down as our last.” He understood the stakes of the hour and insisted that we see each other as neighbors, sometimes as rivalrous neighbors, but as neighbors. And without that, democracy does not work.

“It’s really hard to love your neighbor. If it weren’t, Jesus wouldn’t have had to have brought it up. Right? Commandments do two things. They either urge you to do something you are not doing, or it warns you not to do something you are doing. Right. So somebody in ancient Israel was having sex with a goat, right?… Because you wouldn’t wake up one morning and say, ‘Don’t have sex with a goat.’ Right. It had to be happening, right? That was not on your bingo card. It’s really hard to love your neighbor. But if we don’t at least try, this doesn’t work. That’s why what we’re experiencing right now and in the 250th year is a moral crisis. Yeah. There are structural questions, of course. There’s too much money being spent. But you know what? If enough of us decide something should be a certain way, it’ll happen. So we have to decide that. And that requires democracy, requires a capacity to defer our immediate gratification. And that’s really hard. I’d rather not. I’d rather have what I want when I want it, thank you very much. But you know what? The men of Lexington and Concord and the Battle of New Orleans and Gettysburg and Omaha Beach deferred their immediate gratification. The women of Seneca Falls, the enslaved who rose up. (The late former Congressman) John Robert Lewis of Troy, Alabama, deferred his immediate gratification. It’s not immediately gratifying to be beaten by an Alabama state trooper. And why did they do it? Because they believed in something larger than themselves. Not because they were saintly, though John was. Not because they were perfect, which John was not. But because they got just enough right in their heart and in their soul and in their mind.

“And I’m not minimizing what they’ve done with their legacy. I’m really not. What I’m trying to do is make a point that they weren’t perfect. They had good days and bad days. We’re not perfect. We have good days and bad days. But they managed to bend that arc of a moral universe toward justice. And if they could do it, then we can, too. We can follow that example and forswear, however briefly, our own designs, our own ambitions. Because that’s the promise of the autocrat. The promise of the autocrat, the promise of the strongman, is you rally to me. I will protect you and your kind. That’s nationalism. There’s a difference between nationalism and patriotism. Nationalism is an allegiance to your own kind, to people who look like you. Patriotism is an allegiance to an idea. That idea encapsulated in the Declaration. It’s in the user’s guide of the Constitution. It unfolds in every legislative chamber ever since. If we cannot find a way to follow the best of the past, then the autocrat wins.

“So how do we take care of that? I think there are three things.

“I think we have to be curious. You’re here on a perfectly lovely day, so you’ve got that box checked. But curiosity is a vital democratic virtue. When Jefferson sat down to write that sentence, he did so not simply because he was a bright young politician of Virginia, though he was, but because he had been curious enough. And (this was) in the years before he was 33. When he wrote that sentence, when I turned 34, it was very depressing. Jesus saved the world. Jefferson wrote the Declaration. I was like, you know, (I) had been in a figurative conversation with the previous three or four decades, three or four centuries, Western life.

“So what had been going on? Gutenberg. The introduction of movable type, which democratized information. The scientific revolution, the Protestant Reformations, the translation of Sacred Scripture into the vernacular. The Scottish moral Enlightenment, the European Enlightenment. An entire reorientation of the world, if you think about it, from being seen as vertical, right, where there were popes and princes and prelates and kings who were in power either by an accident of birth in a hereditary system or an incident of election in a papal one, and they were given authority over all of us. Well, the Renaissance, heading into the late 18th century in Philadelphia, was saying ‘No, that the world should not be vertical, but horizontal, that we had to all be seen as having the capacity to determine our own destiny.’ And the American Revolution, for all of its manifold sins and omissions, was the fullest political manifestation of that insight about moving from hierarchy to equality, curiosity.

“The second thing is candor. We need to be straightforward with each other. We can polite ourselves into oblivion. Franklin Roosevelt understood this. He gave a fireside chat on Washington’s birthday in 1942. It was February. We had just come through Pearl Harbor. It was before Midway. We had no capital ships in the Pacific. The army was still somewhat less than Albania’s. It was a terrible time. And FDR … quoted Thomas Paine, who said, ‘Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.’ And then he said, the news is going to get worse and worse before it gets better and better. And the American people deserve to have it straight from the shoulder. What he was saying was, if you give it to us, if I give it to you straight, will you answer in kind? And that was the answer. You tell us the truth, we will rise to the occasion. He had borrowed this point from Churchill, who a month earlier in the House of Commons had said, the British people or the American people can face any misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy as long as they are convinced that those who are in charge of their affairs are not deceiving them or not themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise. It’s an interesting two-pronged test. We want to be sure you’re not lying to us, but we also want to be sure you’re not lying to yourself. If we can get those boxes checked, we’re in. That’s candor between the leaders and the led. I believe we have to be candid with each other. It’s going to make Thanksgiving even worse, I know. I understand. My late father-in-law only encountered me in the world when I was being attacked on Fox (TV). He was a piece of Mississippi farmer and thought Fox was a little squishy liberal. And so whenever Tucker (Carlson) or somebody would put me up on the screen, he’d be conflicted, right? On the one hand it was like, ‘I agree with Tucker. The other was, well, Meacham’s big enough to be on the TV. That’s pretty good.’ He was just torn. He didn’t know what to do. Got to be straightforward. Call ’em as you see ’em, right?

“The last thing is empathy. And empathy is really the oxygen of democracy. If we don’t stop, see each other as inherently equal in stature before God and the law, not equal in talent, not equal in income — that’s a different debate. But we are all children of God. And none of us has a special or particular claim on privileges that are not available to all. That’s why we’re here. That’s the value proposition of the United States of America. And if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. We’re the oldest functioning constitutional democracy, and we’re 20 minutes old, by the way. We’re doing the 250th, and that’s great. But you know what? We’re really only 60 years old, right? We have not had a multi-ethnic, multi-racial democracy in this country except since the midterm (election) of 1966. So we’re like five minutes old. If we still were part of the UN and they were raiding us, are we still in the UN? Somebody check your phone. I did that once and I can’t remember exactly what it was, but something had happened. Like, I’d said, well, certainly we’re not going to, like, bomb Iran. And I got out and they said, ‘Did you know?’ I was like, thinking, without being able to say, we are truly in this together. Benjamin Rush, when the Constitution was ratified, said, “‘Tis done. We have become a nation.” Well, what is a nation? I promised you St. Augustine. I want to follow up. St. Augustine defined a nation as a multitude of rational beings united by the common objects of their love. Let me say that again. A multitude of rational beings united by the common objects of their love. It’s a fascinating three-pronged test. It’s a multitude, so it’s all. It’s a group of people, they’re rational.

“So we have the capacity to do what Hamilton laid out. And we love something in common. And I would suggest that America from age to age has loved the Declaration of Independence and the promise of a well-earned future for those who play by the rules. That that in fact has been a common object of our love. And when we put it aside, when we think that we have to win everything, then it falls apart. Democracy is about winning graciously and losing graciously. And you cannot love your country only when you win.

“So, empathy. I’ll leave you with this story. This is a story about someone you’ve never heard of named Bennett McNichol. Bennett McNichol was a classmate of George Herbert Walker Bush’s at Greenwich Country Day school in the 1930s. What’s critical to the story is that Bennett did not know what Ozempic was. He was a fairly rotund lad, vital to the story. He was in the eighth grade with George Bush. There was an annual obstacle course race that George Bush always won. And so in his last year before he went off to boarding school, the faculty came to him and said, would you give everyone else a head start? And he said, sure, whatever that voice would be. Dana Carvey once said the key to doing George Bush’s voice was Mr. Rogers trying to be John Wayne. So the whistle goes off, everybody goes. And then Bush goes. And he’s going through this very narrow set of barrels on the ground. And Bush pops out and he looks to his right and Bennett McNichol is stuck in the barrel, right? Moment of maximum adolescent humiliation. You’re the fat kid in class, you’re stuck in a barrel. George Bush is looming over you. What does Bush do? He reaches down, he pulls him out, he says, ‘Come on, Bennett, we’ll finish this together.’

“Sweet story, right? The kind of story, truth be told, that presidential families tell people like me to show how great their chieftain is. But here’s the thing about that story. I didn’t hear it from a Bush. I heard it from a McNichol. The guy told the story for 60 years. And so I took it to President Bush. We were down in Houston and I went in and I said, “Mr. President, I just heard this story about Bennett McNichol,” and the first thing the old man said was, “Bennett, he loved lunch.” I said, “No, no, no, Not. Not the point, sir.” He said, “Is he still big?” I said, “Sir, focus.” I said, “Why did you pull him out of the barrel?” And George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States, looks at me and says, “Well, I’d never been stuck in a barrel, but if I had been, I’d want somebody to pull me out.” You idiot! …

“Notice what he didn’t say? He didn’t say, I pulled him out because the Bible told me so. He didn’t say, I pulled him out because my mother taught us to do the right thing. (Instead), he said “I’d never been stuck in a barrel, but if I had been, I’d want somebody to pull me out.” He lent a hand in the expectation that he might someday need a hand. That’s a covenant. We can all get on board with that because we’re not being asked to do something saintly. It’s pragmatic, it’s empathetic. It is a form of loving that neighbor. And it’s doable, it’s actionable, and it changed the way we live.

“November 1989. The Berlin Wall, the most vivid symbol of what could have been the deadliest conflict in human history, comes down. George Herbert Walker Bush is the President of the United States. He will not give a speech. He will barely meet the press about the fall of the Wall. (TV reporter) Leslie Stahl and other people were beating him about the head, saying, ‘You don’t understand what’s going on!’ This is a man at the age of 18 (who) signed up, became a naval aviator, was shot down out of the sky at the age of 20, (so he) fully understood what was going on. He wasn’t saying anything because he was thinking about somebody who was stuck in a barrel. He was thinking about Mikhail Gorbachev, who had a hardcore right wing that did not want to see Soviet greatness go away and did not want to see Russian greatness fade. And if you doubt me, if you think this is hyperbolic, I refer you to a young FSB officer stationed in St. Petersburg named Vladimir Putin, who was part of that right wing in 1989 and ultimately was part of the coup that almost took Gorbachev’s life in 1991.

“President Bush, as he put it, did not want to stick it in Gorbachev’s ear. I think he meant eye, but Yale didn’t do a great job with that … George H.W. Bush once said, “It’s no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or the other.” Thank you, Mr. President. He once shook the hand of a department store mannequin in New Hampshire, and Barbara (Bush) said, “George, that’s a mannequin.” He answered, “Never know. Gotta ask.” One of the most important moments at the end of the Cold War, and if I had been here in 1971 or 1981, and I’d said to you, ‘You know what? The Soviet Union is going to collapse, and there’s not going to be a single American soldier in a special forward position’, you would have thought I was crazy. It did happen. Why? Partly because George H.W. Bush gave Gorbachev face. He pulled him out of a barrel. Why? Because if an American president had suffered such a loss, he would have wanted space and dignity. It was vital. And I didn’t hear that from Bush. I heard that line of argument from Mikhail Gorbachev, who said that the two most important moments at the end of the Cold War was the first summit with President Reagan at Geneva in 1985, and the way George Bush treated him with grace and dignity and empathy in November 1989. I’d never been stuck in a barrel, but if I had been, I’d want somebody to pull me out. That is the essence of American democracy. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you ……” (audience standing with applause)

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