Democrats Have a Chance (and the Duty) to Reclaim America’s Past Greatness

By Joel McNally

When Joe Biden announced his presidential candidacy, no one knew when he accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee a year later it would no longer be safe for 50,000 people to gather anywhere in Donald Trump’s America.

Trump’s failure to organize a national strategy to protect Americans in an international pandemic left the U.S. with the highest death toll in the world, still rising toward 150,000 fatalities even before an expected second wave surge in the fall.

Trump’s public health disaster led directly to economic disaster, wiping out seven straight years of economic growth under President Barack Obama and Biden, and three more under Trump. The successful U.S. economy crashed, leaving tens of millions jobless in a plunging national depression.

Every American’s life has been upended in ways Trump’s supporters couldn’t have imagined when they elected an unqualified, self-obsessed TV celebrity. Trump never intended to use the presidency to benefit anyone other than himself. He simply delighted in all the new opportunities for self-aggrandizement and personal corruption to increase his own wealth.

The Highest Aspirations

Biden idealistically embraces the highest aspirations of America’s founders. He launched his campaign with Thomas Jefferson’s words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” “We’ve heard it so often,” Biden said, “it’s almost a cliché. But it’s who we are. We haven’t always lived up to those ideals; Jefferson himself didn’t. But we’ve never walked away from them before.”

With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it

Biden contrasted Jefferson’s words with Trump’s after Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists terrorized Jefferson’s hometown of Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. Armed militants combined celebrating Trump’s election with protesting Charlottesville’s plan to remove statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from its downtown. They waved Confederate flags and swastikas, using the flagpoles to beat African Americans. One self-proclaimed Nazi intentionally drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters killing a young woman and injuring dozens of others.

“That’s when we heard the words from the president of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of this nation,” Biden said. “He said there were ‘some very fine people on both sides’… With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it."

President of the Confederacy?

Three years later, Trump still vows to stop the removal of more than 1,500 statues of treasonous Confederate generals who fought the United States to protect slavery as if he were running for president of the Confederacy. Trump is intensifying the divisive, racist rhetoric that worked for him politically four years ago. But the U.S is a very different country now in the wake of the real-life American carnage created by Trump himself.

The winning platform for Democrats coming out of Milwaukee’s safely scaled-back convention will simply advocate doing everything any competent administration would do to protect the lives and economic futures of millions of Americans struggling to survive Trump’s failure to effectively respond to cascading national crises.

But elections aren’t just about the past. They’re about the future and Democrats can reach back into history for the roadmap. They envision Biden as the experienced, stable leader of a transformative “F.D.R. presidency.” The nation’s worst crises have produced America’s greatest Democratic presidents.

But elections aren’t just about the past. They’re about the future and Democrats can reach back into history for the roadmap.

Refocusing Government

In the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt refocused government on providing economic opportunities for every American and a safety net for hard times. John F. Kennedy coolly stared down Russian aggression, forcing our most threatening adversary to dismantle nuclear missiles 90 miles away in Cuba. Lyndon Johnson passed civil rights and voting rights laws, Medicare and Medicaid. Obama reversed what was then our second worst economic crisis with a massive stimulus and nationally subsidized health care sought by progressives for decades.

Protecting and expanding affordable health care remains the Democrats’ most politically popular issue with Trump’s Republicans still fighting before the Supreme Court to destroy all its benefits including guaranteed coverage for pre-existing conditions.

Trump’s open racism also has become a liability for Republicans. An overwhelming majority of Americans were appalled by a video of police slowly murdering a handcuffed black man begging for his life and support ending violent racial inequality in American policing.

Biden wants history to look back on Trump’s presidency as a horrible aberration that doesn’t reflect the true character of the nation. He calls the election a battle for the soul of America.

Americans who love their country want to believe in its fundamental decency. The worst year for America any of us can remember is the perfect time for Milwaukee’s unconventional Democratic National Convention to connect with safe gatherings of supporters all over the country eager to do everything they can to make America great again. Like it was back in the days when we had great American presidents.

Joel McNally was a critic and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal for 27 years. He has written the weekly Taking Liberties column for the Shepherd Express since 1996.