In the foreword to his just-released book, which explores the start of the American Civil War, Erik Larson references today’s politics.
The book’s title is “The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War.” In his opening, Larson invites readers to step back into the past, into what he described as a time of fear, dissension and heartbreak.
He tells readers, “I suspect your sense of dread will be all the more pronounced in light of today’s political discord, which, incredibly, had led some benighted Americans to whistle once again of secession and civil war.”
Dread aptly describes the mood of many as we enter the final six months of the most important presidential election in our lifetimes.
Look, Richard Nixon was a meanspirited crook and a liar, Ronald Reagan was blithely unaware of how government worked, and George W. Bush was not up to the job intellectually.
Donald Trump checks all three boxes.
Yet day after day, when the non-MAGA population should be genuinely fearful, too many people feel free to nitpick this or that about President Biden.
They might say they are just not feeling it for him because of his advanced age, or that he fails the latest test of ideological purity, or because of the high price of milk. Whatever.
What am I missing?
Every day, Trump reveals his dictatorial vision.
Is Biden a perfect candidate? Of course not. Perhaps he should have stepped aside for someone younger. But who, exactly? Vice President Kamala Harris, who is 22 years younger, has also been widely criticized, fairly or otherwise.
I don’t agree with everything Biden has done. As a left-leaning pragmatist, I wonder if the flood of federal money spent to restore the post-pandemic economy has been excessive and exacerbated inflationary pressures.
I worry that the huge sums Biden wants to direct to forgiving college debt is somewhat unfair to those without college degrees who went into the building trades or retailing or home health care.
And I sense how conservatives must feel when I watch federal dollars spent on a bus rapid transit system in Madison that I worry may become an expensive, underused mistake.
But no way will I make a stink because the alternative is apocalyptic.
There are three specific targets for my ire: (a) the far left, which is prominently represented and politically dominant here in Madison; (b) traditional Republicans, people who, if old enough, once idolized former Gov. Tommy Thompson’s style of conservatism with a heart; and (c) the mainstream media, which spends too much time navel-gazing about allegations of liberal bias and not enough finding ways to effectively warn people about Trump.
Let’s start with the far left. No one has the answer on the crisis in Gaza. One can deeply empathize with suffering Palestinians while thinking the rising tide of antisemitism in America is repugnant.
But do protesters really think withholding support from Biden, directly fueling Trump’s narrative of “chaos” under the incumbent president, will yield suffering Palestinians a better result?
In the summer of 1968, anti-Vietnam protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago crippled Hubert Humphrey’s chances of defeating Nixon that fall. The irony was that Humphrey, although President Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, was so dovish on the war that from 1965 on he was excluded from White House meetings on the subject.
Instead of Humphrey, the nation got Nixon. The war raged on until 1975, as Nixon preferred to shed more American blood in a hopeless cause rather than commit the ultimate political sin of looking weak.
Today, the Gaza protests rage on, support for Biden is withheld, and the Trump threat grows.
Next are the Republicans who I thought I understood through my decades around Wisconsin politics. I remember them in the Wisconsin statehouse I covered in the 1980s, mostly small-town and rural capitalists who believed in limited government. Today’s culture wars were nowhere on their radar.
They are extinct, or so it seems.
The business elites who once dominated the party seem unconcerned that their grandchildren might not enjoy the freedoms — or for that matter, the livable climate — that they have. They cannot stomach Biden because he might somehow, at some point, raise their taxes a bit.
Some of these traditional Republicans comfort themselves by invoking “bothsidesism,” a pox-on-both-houses lament in which they criticize both politicians and the press. They speak as if there is anyone resembling Marjorie Taylor Greene, the outrageous Republican member of Congress, on the left. Or they overlook the fact that only on one side — theirs — do politicians talk of not accepting election results and hint at violence to come.
They also proclaim themselves to be political “orphans” when it comes to the press, that somehow the lies of Fox News are counterbalanced by left-leaning media, which is preposterous.
In the end, many of these country club Republicans apparently regard Trumpism as an unpleasant but passing fad.
Finally, there is the mainstream media, which spends too much time navel-gazing about attacks on its integrity. The latest example involved Uri Berliner, a National Public Radio producer who made himself a far-right celebrity by publicly backstabbing his now former employer over alleged liberal bias.
The New York Times hyperventilated in the aftermath: “NPR in Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias” read a recent headline. The story’s lead paragraph was no less alarmist: “NPR is facing both internal tumult and a fusillade of attacks by prominent conservatives this week after a senior editor publicly claimed the broadcaster had allowed liberal bias to affect its coverage, risking its trust with audiences.”
My God, people, in a world in which the cynically manufactured lies of Fox News helped elect Trump, how can one disgruntled, attention-hungry employee merit so much notice?
One would hope the media find ways to tell people, especially those who don’t follow politics closely, just how different the next four years will be in their own worlds depending on the election’s outcome.
Which takes me back to where I started — bewildered at what many others are thinking, and quite worried.
