Gil Troy
Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of
The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction, (OUP) and
Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents: George Washington to Barack Obama . His other books include: Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady and Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. He is a member of the advisory board of HNN. His website is giltroy.com. His next book “Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight against Zionism as Racism” will be published this fall by Oxford University Press.
This week, both America’s inauguration and Israel’s election demonstrated democracy’s vitality. Both special moments offered valuable lessons about the rational and mystical elements of this extraordinary form of government, based on liberty, mutual respect and consent of the governed.
The inauguration was a legitimizing ceremony and a healing moment, inviting Americans to cheer their system’s stability, their government’s continuity, and the opportunity every fresh start represents -- even second terms. The U.S. president is both king and prime minister, head of state and head of government. Those kingly aspects have a magical, otherworldly dimension. The pageantry, the oath, the red, white and blue bunting, the inaugural balls, and, these days, the requisite dash of celebrity with Beyoncé lip-synching the Star Spangled Banner as Bill Clinton beamed in the background, reinforced the president’s place in America’s pantheon, linked to his legendary predecessors. The range of politicians on the podium, followed by the bipartisan Capitol Hill lunch -- rather than a Tea Party -- emphasized the celebration’s non-partisan patriotic character, as even disappointed Mitt Romney Republicans hailed their president.
The inaugural address was both state paper and partisan spur. Barack Obama quoted from the Declaration of Independence and forged a new holy trinity of milestones in the fight for equality by celebrating the women’s movement, civil rights movement and gay liberation movement with his “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” phrasing. He then elbowed his Republican rivals, snapping: “We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.”
Israel’s election harked back to Americans’ drama during their presidential contest. In our world, with so many dictators and terrorists undermining liberty and disrespecting the people’s right to rule, every smooth, peaceful, democratic Election Day is a miracle to applaud, especially when it occurs in the Middle East. This time, many particularly enjoyed watching leading politicians, sophisticated pollsters and know-it-all pundits confounded.
Love him or hate him, fans of populism had to appreciate how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political miscalculations reinforced the people’s power. Netanyahu erred by uniting his Likud Party with Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beteinu Party -- Lieberman’s thuggery offended moralists while being dropped too low on the list demoralized Likud activists. Similarly, it was fun watching pollsters stumble, demonstrating that not everything is so predictable in our overly monitored, statistic-driven world. Most polls predicted 11 to 12 seats for Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid -- There Is a Future -- Party. The surge that gave him 50 percent more seats reflected the non-ultra-Orthodox Israeli middle class’s frustration with being over-taxed, over-worked and under-inspired as well as Election Day’s alchemy: moods shift, turnouts count, campaigns matter, democracy works.
Moreover, partisan commentators’ simplistic laments in Israel and abroad about “Bibi’s Israel” being anti-democratic, theocratic and hopelessly right-wing were wrong before Election Day, but more demonstrably false afterward, when the country’s polarization, liberal vitality and democratic volatility could no longer be overlooked, no matter how deep one’s prejudice toward Netanyahu or Israel. And Netanyahu will have to listen to the real Israel, middle Israel. The electoral math will allow him to form a right-wing-religious coalition -- but the people’s will demands a broader, more centrist government.
Neither America’s inauguration nor Israel’s election could obscure the deep divisions in both countries, their persistent problems, and one common challenge facing U.S. and Israel, that even polite Canada is starting to share -- today’s toxic partisanship. As a historian, I know that partisanship and mudslinging have old pedigrees. But democratic toxicity ebbs and flows. Moments of deep, dysfunctional division alternate with moments of majestic unity. In addition to whatever issues fragment individuals in the three countries, the modern media’s 24/7 news hysteria, the emerging blogosphere’s anything-goes nastiness, and our individuated, often selfish, advanced capitalist societies are giving politics today a particularly sharp, uncooperative edge.
It is easy, when examining these three allies, to criticize constantly, despair deeply and discount the inauguration’s magic, Election Day’s power, and the daily miracles that make the United States, Israel, and Canada members of today’s embattled minority of smooth, safe, functioning democracies. As we learn from each other to appreciate the good and try limiting the bad, we should remember the words of the great American diplomat, then Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who, when seeing the Soviet Communists and the Third World dictators gang up on America, Israel and other democracies in the 1970s, often cheered on by authoritarian leftists in the West itself, defiantly, inspiringly said: “It is past time we ceased to apologize for an imperfect democracy. Find its equal.”
Gil Troy is a history professor at McGill University and the author, most recently, of Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism. This was adapted from an op-ed in the Montreal Gazette.
HNN Hot Topics: Presidential Inaugurations
From the Globe and Mail (Toronto), Jan. 20, 2013
As Barack Obama drafts his second inaugural speech, he should remember the speeches that made him president. He should ponder the vision of multicultural nationalism in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote. He should revive the controlled but righteous indignation in his 2008 address on race relations that defused the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy. And he should tap into the lyrical patriotism that made his first victory speech soar. He also should ignore his first inaugural address -- which replaced the eloquent, electrifying, inspiring “Yes We Can” candidate he was with the technocratic, overwhelmed, sobering president he has become.
The contrast on Inauguration Day 2009, between his restrained speech and the crowd’s near messianic expectations was striking. Fans hailed Mr. Obama for recognizing the challenges. But after four years of pedestrian appeals to Americans as sensible “folks,” Americans need less schoolmarm and more romance, less presidential cod liver oil and more rhetorical bubbly.
True, Mr. Obama’s sober response was logical. When succeeding Franklin Roosevelt as president in 1945, Harry Truman said he felt as if the “moon and stars” had fallen upon him. Mr. Obama telegraphed similar combinations of humility and fear -- and has continually emphasized his constraints. After the Sandy Hook massacre, reflecting many Americans’ frustration with Mr. Obama’s caution, this time regarding gun violence, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked: “Where have you been?” Mr. Obama answered, characteristically, by mentioning “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, an auto industry on the verge of collapse, two wars.” He then said, “all of us have to do some reflection on how we prioritize what we do here in Washington.”
Mr. Obama’s prioritizing prudence is reminiscent of Martin Luther King’s initial stiffness when speaking at the August, 1963, civil rights march. The singer Mahalia Jackson, who had heard him mesmerize crowds before, yelled, “tell them about your dream Martin.” Mr. King did -- and made history.
Mr. Obama must now let loose, offering the lyrical leadership Americans crave -- and which they originally hired him to deliver. Americans want a public educator and consensus builder, not a technocratic grind.
Mr. Obama should use moments like the Newtown massacre to channel public indignation into action. He should learn from eloquent predecessors like Mr. King, and like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former Harvard professor and America’s Ambassador to the UN who denounced the 1975 Zionism is racism resolution, even though his boss Henry Kissinger ordered him to be less confrontational and it was not clear that attacking the UN would be popular with Americans. Mr. Moynihan’s moment also made history. “An issue of honor, of morality, was put before us and not all of us ran,” Mr. Moynihan explained.
This politics of patriotic indignation should mix with a grandeur of moral imagination. Unlike Mr. Obama, John Kennedy ignored the hopes his presidency generated. In 1962, when briefed about new ideas mobilizing young African Americans, Mr. Kennedy asked “where are they getting them?” His adviser Louis Martin exclaimed: “From you!” Still, only in June, 1963 did Mr. Kennedy define civil rights as “primarily” a “moral issue,” as “old as the Scriptures” and “as clear as the American Constitution.”
Decades later, even when Mr. Obama helped pass landmark health care legislation, he failed to define the issue clearly. His phrasemakers’ toolbox always seems locked, his sense of drama muted. When confronting Republicans, even when faced with fiscal cliffs and uncontrolled guns, “No Drama Obama” often seems more miffed than mad, more politically inconvenienced than morally indignant.
Americans do not just want melodrama. America needs a muscular moderate, an artful orator, to capture the moment, forge a national consensus, and brand it effectively. Abraham Lincoln did it in his second inaugural by envisioning a Reconstruction based on “malice toward none.” Franklin D. Roosevelt mixed indignation with imagination in his second inaugural when he tackled the problem of “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Ronald Reagan played off decades of anti-Soviet pique when he insisted, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” while Bill Clinton defined his second term as more affirmative than negative in building his “bridge to the twenty-first century.”
Americans have had enough fiscal cliffs and Republican-Democratic brinksmanship; they now want, they now need, clear new horizons and all-American statesmanship. America’s past offers Obama the precedents. America’s present offers Obama the agenda. America’s future will benefit if he can rise to the occasion rhetorically during this inaugural address and substantively during his second term.
Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and the author of eight books, including Moynihan's Moment: America's Fight Against Zionism as Racism, just published by Oxford University Press.
Historical mythology treats it as one of America’s shining moments. Amid a searing civil war, the saintly president freed America’s slaves with the stroke of a pen, and a moving commitment to equality, which went into effect one hundred fifty years ago. In fact, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862, slated to go into effect January 1, 1863, is more prose than poetry, more a cautious state paper than a sweeping declaration. Historian Richard Hofstadter scoffed that it had “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.” Indeed, this limited document only freed “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States.” There is, however, a deeper lesson here. Much of Abraham Lincoln’s greatness -- and his effectiveness -- stemmed from such caution. The remaining slaves in the Union were freed eventually and -- thanks to Lincoln -- inevitably. But even during America’s great Civil War, Abraham Lincoln remained rooted in America’s centrist political culture, preferring an incremental pragmatism to zealous extremism.
A passionate nationalist, committed to America’s founding documents and defining ideals, Lincoln became a leader seeking balance at a time of turbulence, a man of measure tempering a politics of passion. Lincoln ably balanced his Western populism with an Eastern go-getterish ambition, his homespun frontier sensibility with more polished statesmanlike eloquence, a lawyerly commitment to constitutionalism with a progressive commitment to change, the fight for union with the crusade against slavery, the proslavery border states with the abolitionist New England states, the need to triumph with the hope to heal. Lincoln functioned as the great American gyroscope in a critical time, steadying his reeling nation. Yet rather than worshiping an outdated status quo, Lincoln propelled the nation forward, understanding that the revolutionary changes America needed were best implemented slowly, thoughtfully, deliberately -- or at least as deliberately as possible. His modest statement in 1864 captures it beautifully: "I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me."
The statement is wonderfully, constructively, disingenuous. If Lincoln had been as humble as he liked to sound, he never would have entered politics. Moreover, he would not have been so effective. A master yachtsman, Lincoln rode the winds roiling his country, sailing forward where he wished to go -- while attributing setbacks or slowdowns to natural forces beyond his control.
Abraham Lincoln’s story further suggests there may have been other, less bloody, ways to end slavery. Lincoln, the American leader who actually freed the slaves and saved the union, often clashed with the abolitionists and the radical Republicans. Both groups denounced him so fiercely he dismissed them as “fiends.” The story of Lincoln’s presidency and of the Emancipation Proclamation reaffirms the importance of presidential center-seeking, while acknowledging the constructive tension that can result from radical outsiders demanding change, especially when fighting a monstrous injustice such as slavery. Still, for this system to work, and for democracy to progress, the leader must channel the intense energies of the fanatics, transforming their high voltage vision into lower wattage practical policies suitable for domestic consumption.
* * * * *
The Civil War proved much harder to win than Lincoln expected. In spring 1862, General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac failed to reach the Confederate capital of Richmond via the Virginia Peninsula. The defeat demoralized the Union.
Ironically, the Peninsula campaign setback liberated the president. The Confederate Army was using slaves on the battlefield to cook food, dig trenches, build fortifications, staff hospitals. This freed more Confederate soldiers to fight. Many slaves were running farms, helping the rebel homefront too. By defining the issue of freeing slaves as a “military necessity,” Lincoln could emancipate slaves in the rebellious territories by using presidential war powers. On July 13, 1862, Lincoln told Secretary of State William Seward and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles that emancipation was "absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” On July 17, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, freeing the slaves of those rebelling against the government. This Act, which violated the Republican platform’s promise that Congress would not end slavery, further emboldened Lincoln. As a politician, he read the shifting political winds. As a lawyerly chief executive, he said the president should free the slaves as a war measure rather than having the Congress act precipitously, and, he feared, dishonorably.
Lincoln’s Cabinet members disagreed so strongly about when and how to emancipate the slaves that friendships had ruptured. Here, Lincoln demonstrated how he mastered his headstrong advisers. The president knew what he wanted to do. He had learned to lead not consult endlessly. Further debate would only intensify the rancor and add to the confusion.
On July 22, 1862, Lincoln read the draft of his Emancipation Proclamation to the Cabinet. He was informing his advisers, not soliciting their opinions. Lincoln wanted to read the announcement a few months before the New Year, to give Confederates until January 1 to end the rebellion, or watch the slaves go free. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair of Missouri warned Lincoln the Border States might bolt. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton rejoiced, however, hoping to mobilize three and half million freed slaves for the Northern effort -- or at least neutralize their contributions to the South.
Secretary of State William Seward feared such a declaration following a defeat. Lincoln might look desperate. Wait “until the eagle of victory takes his flight” Seward advised, then “hang your proclamation about his neck.” Lincoln would tweak his plan not reformulate it. Followed Seward’s advice, he waited until the Union repulsed the Confederation invasion at Antietam on September 17. The 23,000 casualties made for the bloodiest one-day battle in American history -- but a major Northern victory.
Seward’s strategy worked. President Lincoln’s patience was rewarded. The proclamation, published September 23, was well-timed. The conversation within the North had progressed, the pressure had grown enough, so that Lincoln did not appear to be an extremist. Lincoln knew that the abolitionist governors in Massachusetts and elsewhere had grown restive, hesitating to send more troops. With the war now being fought for liberty and union, with Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s forces stopped in Maryland, Northern idealism and confidence surged.
Lincoln’s plodding path to Emancipation had nurtured Northern public opinion. The Chicago Tribune gushed, “From this proclamation begins the history of the Republic, as our Fathers designed to have it.” From England, the philosopher John Stuart Mill contrasted Lincoln’s initial reluctance with the growing public consensus that emancipation was necessary “for the effectual prosecution of the War.”
Even this partial Proclamation infuriated many Democrats, especially those in the still-slaveholding Border States. Democratic legal experts condemned the president’s “radical departure” from American respect for property and over seventy-five of pro-slavery jurisprudence. The Democratic Chicago Times charged that the Proclamation made the war “a contest of subjugation” -- exactly what “abolitionism has designed from the outset.” The opposition justified Lincoln’s rhetorical and constitutional caution. The Union was not strong enough, and Washington, D.C. remained too vulnerable, to risk losing any more states. Only the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 would abolish slavery throughout the United States.
In a nation torn between the politically untenable poles of perpetuating an evil institution and abolishing it immediately, Lincoln had done the seemingly impossible -- he had forged a middle path. Step by excruciating step, earning credibility along the way, even while frustrating some, Lincoln led the skeptical North from fighting a war just for union to fighting a war to end slavery too. The president demonstrated his pragmatism here, focusing on the fixable day-to-day realities rather than sweeping and daunting abstractions. Lincoln understood that radical surgery would have shocked the body politic and would not have held. “If he does not drive as fast as I would,” the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy observed in 1862, “he is on the right road, and it is only a question of time.” By improvising a path to emancipation, Lincoln assured slavery’s absolute abolition, even among the loyal Border States, once the Thirteenth Amendment finally passed.
At a time of deep national trauma, Americans needed a strong chief executive, grounded in righteousness but not self-righteous, a muscular moderate, able to lead but able to listen. As he grew confident in office, Lincoln grew more candid about his tactics. When ideologues clashed in Missouri in 1863, Lincoln refused to take sides in a “pestilent factional quarrel” that had long bewitched him. “I could wish both to agree with me in all things; for then they would agree with each other, and would be too strong for any foe from any quarter,” he said wistfully. Failing that, he added forcefully: “I hold whoever commands in Missouri, or elsewhere, responsible to me, and not to either Radicals or Conservatives. It is my duty to hear all; but at last I must … judge what to do and what to forbear.” “The conservative Republicans think him too much in the hands of the radicals;” one Harper’s columnist wrote admiringly in the summer of 1863, “while the radical Republicans think him too slow, yielding, and half-hearted.” In liberating the slaves, even while limited to the rebel territory, Lincoln had liberated himself as a leader.
Balanced, prudent, moderate, Abraham Lincoln was a great and good man whose genius, like George Washington’s, lay in that ineffable, unquantifiable quality called judgment. Harvard’s great romantic poet, James Russell Lowell, in 1864 praised Lincoln as eminently suitable to lead a democracy, where “a profound common-sense is the best genius for statesmanship.” Lincoln’s good judgment, his common sense, his democratic humility, pragmatism, and humanity, not only saved the Union in the nineteenth century, it offers a model of liberal nationalistic leadership we would do well to follow today.
