Diary of the Late Republic, #22
If you had told me on January 7, 2021 that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for President in 2024—and that he had been leading in the polls for months, was gaining among people of color, and that most respondents in such polls would say a conviction for a felony would make no difference in his standing—I would not have believed you. I might have believed if you told me that some of the people who denounced Trump (among them former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and soon-to-be former Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell) are now endorsing him, because they have a long record of political opportunism, and would certainly do so if, hypothetically, the political winds shifted. I could readily believe that some would call January 6 an unorganized riot as opposed to an unorganized conspiracy, and I might have accepted that was actually the case. (What we’ve learned since, much of it from recent indictments of Trump in the Georgian and federal cases, has convinced me otherwise.) But I really believed the fever of 2016 had broken.
I was wrong. Won’t be the last time.
But if circumstances could change so much, and be so counterintuitive, I would like to believe—I can choose to believe—that they could change again. I know that my perception of the world is partially accurate at best, and that wishful thinking plays no small part even amid my anxieties. Hope may not be rational. But it isn’t entirely crazy, either.
On August 23, 1864, Abraham Lincoln was in the middle of a wartime re-election campaign in which there had been an active effort to dump him from the Republican ticket that spring. The previous month, there had been a Confederate raid on the nation’s capital, and there was growing pressure for peace negotiations to end the Civil War, which would inevitably involve recognizing the Confederacy and curtailing, if not ending, efforts to end slavery. In response to these realities, Lincoln wrote a memo to his cabinet. “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President-elect [Democrat George McClellan], as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”
On September 1, General William Tecumseh Sherman finally succeeded after a tortuous months-long effort to take Atlanta (a sleepy Southern town whose multiple rail links had turned it into a major strategic objective). Union victory now seemed inevitable. Lincoln cruised to re-election.
Things are never as good as they seem. Or as bad, either.