It’s about as brain dead as anything I’ve ever seen.
Truman is what I call a "High Thesis" President. That is, he took the FDR Thesis of Unity as his lodestone and ran with it. He didn’t create anything new, politically. He just pushed what he had.
This is not a criticism. I’m a big Harry Truman fan. But we live in a time when the assumptions under which we have lived for a generation, which I call the Nixon Thesis, are falling apart.
The social divides, the urban-suburban divide, the racial divide, the
religious divide, these are luxuries we can no longer afford.
- The GOP "Reagan Nostalgia" bit is one proof of this.
- The President’s own low poll numbers are further proof.
- The crowds showing up for Obama, even before he says anything of interest, are proof of this.
- Yet more proof comes home every day, in coffins, from Iraq, where
we’re fighting a "Cold War" activity 18 years after the fall of the
Berlin Wall.
What we need is someone who will build us a new set of assumptions. Not
just policy assumptions, but political assumptions. A new majority view which can be opposed and moderated by a new minority view. A new way of conducting politics. A new media world as well.
Before Nixon the
political world was divided between business and labor — it isn’t any
more. Before FDR the political world was divided between progressives
and populists — it isn’t any more. Before McKinley the political world
was divided by class and region. Those days are done as well.
It is time, now, to end the Nixon era. I come to bury Nixon, not to praise him. We don’t need a Ford. We need a Lincoln.
What are our new political myths? What values arise from those myths?
How will you translate those myths and values into new power to solve
our new challenges and address the new era in which we find ourselves?
Harry Truman used FDR’s myths and values. He lost support after every
election. He lost Congress twice. He was barely elected heading a
deeply divided party.
We don’t need that aggravation right now. We’ve got that aggravation right now.
We need for someone to express the Internet Thesis, or something like
it. We need a Lincoln, a Roosevelt, yes, maybe even a Nixon.
If we don’t get one, one will be created for us by events yet unforeseen, or the country will just go to hell. But I don’t expect hell.
Somewhere in this new political field a new era is waiting to be born. Don’t give us hell. Tell us, instead, that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, nameless, unreasoning,
unjustified terror which paralyzes
needed efforts to convert retreat
into advance.
That’s what we need to hear. And that’s where we need to go, into a new world, without fear as our guide, with hope and optimism.
Oh, my. First people cry out for Barack Obama, a GenXer who might make a great post-Crisis president but is surely not ready for prime time yet. Then they call for another Truman, who was another post-crisis president. Are they trying to do an end-run around the crisis that is most surely impending even as we speak? “Declare victory and go home”? I’m sorry – before you have the baby, you have to go through childbirth, people.
Oh, my. First people cry out for Barack Obama, a GenXer who might make a great post-Crisis president but is surely not ready for prime time yet. Then they call for another Truman, who was another post-crisis president. Are they trying to do an end-run around the crisis that is most surely impending even as we speak? “Declare victory and go home”? I’m sorry – before you have the baby, you have to go through childbirth, people.