Politics in a different era
Not to be tendentious, but it really does seem that we're lurching from one crisis of leadership to another here in the U.S. And none of them, for whatever reason, are sticking — so we go on lurching.
What went wrong?
I'm reading a biography of Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin called Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln managed to travel some very difficult political roads in his life, and I thought the book might be helpful in understanding political dirty pool — surely 19th-century dirty pool was just as dirty (maybe dirtier) than 21st-century dirty pool is.
Here's a paragraph that struck me yesterday:
It was a country for young men. “We find ourselves,” the twenty-eight-year-old Lincoln told the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, “in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The founding fathers had crafted a government more favorable to liberty “than any of which the history of former times tells us.” Now it was up to their children to preserve and expand the great experiment.
Great experiment? Peaceful possession? And, the big one: a government more favorable to liberty than any other in history?
What went wrong?