Eight score and a pair of years ago today, in the midst of a bloody civil war, our nation dedicated a national cemetery on the grounds where the Battle of Gettysburg took place a few months earlier. It was a cool autumn day, and in attendance was the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
But Lincoln was not the main orator for the event; that honor was accorded to Edward Everett, who prepared a 13,607 word address that lasted two hours. When he was done, Lincoln rose to make some concluding remarks.
He spoke for about two minutes; he used only 271 words. Everett afterward said, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
As much as he was honoring the dead of Gettysburg, Lincoln was speaking to the future of our nation. Once again, we find ourselves engaged in a great civil war of sorts, testing whether this nation, conceived and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, can long endure. Lincoln said:
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
We find ourselves at a strange juncture; our Union is at arguably the greatest risk it’s seen since Lincoln’s time. We’re not fighting in open fields with canon, cavalry, muskets and bayonets, which makes these far more insidious circumstances. Without the physical carnage of bloody bodies, it is not as easy to see the attacks made upon our rule of law by the folks in control, who, in terrible irony, refer to their caucus as the party of Lincoln.
It is for us to honor all who gave the last full measure of devotion that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom.
This is the time of year when we hear folks going through their lists to recap the past year, and to make new lists of predictions. With this past a year of hyperbole, we are heading into a new year full of dire warnings. The planet is on fire, our politics are on fire, our culture is on fire…
And yet.
It is a new year, and while the politics of the day will be front page for many months to come (You thought the 2024 contest was already taking up too much airtime and pixels? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.) it is also worth remembering that we are not living in history…yet.
The signs, all bright neon colors, flashing at hypnotizing rates every way we turn, tell us we are in a scary time for our nation. And, well, yes we are. But the signal-to-noise ratio in our public discourse is lower1 than I can recall in my lifetime, and the alarm bells are rinnging for all the wrong reasons. Deflection is the name of the game, and we – all of us – need to keep our collective eye on the ball, if we are worried about what history informs us of a possible future.
This past week in the small town of Berlin, NH, a candidate for the office of President of the United States was asked a simple question: “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” The candidate’s2 answer was anything but simple, or even to the point, let alone “presidential.” The word “slavery” was omitted; the topic not even reflected.
The next day, the spin rooms were working at high RPMs. The candidate when asked about her answer said, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery. We know that.”
Except – and this is the thing – she didn’t say it when asked. A subject like the U.S. Civil War should be the low-hanging fruit for any candidate for national office – we are in a time when so many pundits have been predicting that we are sitting on the threshold of a modern civil war.
This is the type of question for which one does not get a “do-over” or make-up exam.
This is the exemplar of the kind of question a Republican candidate should absolutely OWN, given that party’s birth in the same cause that led to the Civil War. The folks who are forgiving the candidate her verbal trespass tell us that the Republican Party has forgotten the concept their party’s name embodies.
But history tells us this is nothing new. A previous republican president of the past century, the guy who resigned rather than face the music, was impressed with the trappings of court when visiting heads of state in Europe, and in preparation for a visit by the British Prime Minister, gussied up the guards with ceremonial uniforms complete with fancy hats and tasseled tunics.
It was the President’s design, and it was panned by critics as being, among other things, “too monarchical” and compared to those you would find surrounding a head of state in a banana republic.
It’s worth remembering that story now, because a few parallels have been made between that guy who resigned and inmate P011358093, the the proclaimed front-runner for the party that has lost its way. Today, we have a candidate who has said he would be a dictator on day 1 if elected. He has said many things, many horrible things, on his way to leading the pack, and they need to be heard for what they are: words that describe what he intends to do if he gets his hands back on the levers of power.
The next closest candidate in the race, if polls are to be believed,4 can’t come to admit why the Civil War was fought – even though the Declaration of Secession of the very state she governed stated slavery was the reason for that state, among others, to secede.
Meanwhile, inflation is down. Jobs are up. Most metrics by which we measure the success of an economy indicate that the past three years have been very, very good to our nation, in no small part because out current President acted in a somewhat revolutionary way: he turned public policy toward raising up its average citizens instead of rewarding its wealthiest, the latter a trend begun under an actor5 in the biggest role of his lifetime.
We are at the beginning of a new year, the first ten months of which will be full of noise, more noise, and then some noise on top of all that. Bread and circuses will appear everywhere a crowd can gather, and much time, pixels, and airwaves will be spent confusing the people so they don’t vote in their interest. Or in the interest of the nation and the world.
We live in a democratic republic, but less and less so in recent years, as the ironically-named Republican party works feverishly to transform our nation into an autocracy, or oligarchy, or some other form of big-ass banana republic.
A republic is, as was explained years ago to sell the notion of one of our own by folks like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, a government whose fundamental principle is “…that the sense of the majority shall prevail.”6 One needs only look at this past year to see ample evidence tat the GOP is working toward the opposite principle. Perhaps the most obvious and egregious example of this is a former football coach turned U.S. Senator who singlehandedly degraded military readiness and our defense posture around the world by refusing to allow military promotions to continue for most of 2023, leaving whole branches with interim leadership – all for a cause for which that the vast majority of the general public disagrees with him.
The sense of the majority no longer resides in the leadership of the GOP. The Republican Party is not what its name suggests.
All this is nothing new to you, dear reader. If you are here, you are likely already of a similar mind. So what to do?
I don’t know. Getting a signal in past all that noise is a Sisyphean task, but we cannot let up. We cannot give up. Because if we do, they win. And that’s a future, for 2024 and beyond, that I don’t want to be a part of.
And so…welcome to the new year. Take a deep breath, and find some time to make some time to make a difference, however small, on your side of the playing field.
Things are not what they seem. But they don’t have to become what they appear to be coming to.
Good luck – for all of us – in this new year.
If you would prefer, our noise-to-signal ration is terribly high.↩︎
I would prefer not to use names of folks I don’t support on my blurg. You can look ’em up if you don’t know of whom I am talking. ↩︎
I would prefer not to use names of folks I don’t support on my blurg, but if they earn an inmate number, I’ll allow that descriptor into my prose. ↩︎
Polls at this time are not to be believed. But the give us an insight into what folks are thinking about when it comes to the horserace, so they are not without value – only without as much merit and value that is too often accorded them in the absence of easier reportage this early in the game. ↩︎
