Charlie Sykes, one of those ubiquitous talking heads on cable news shows, appearing on MSNBC this week made what struck me as a novel and unusually visionary comment about these troubled days.
He postulated a notion of the history of this quarter century in stunning terms. What if, he suggested, Harris-Walz wins in November, as now appears possible? What would Trump-Vance be left with?
Going forward, history would be changed from any earlier trends in a profoundly fundamental way. Instead of Trump’s own vision, the grotesque Project 2025 blueprint for a dystopian, fascist society, or something less drastic but still not positive, as many pundits suggest, maybe it will be far different.
Sykes offered the vision of times as one in which Trump would be a mere asterisk, or better, a brief parenthetical note sandwiched between two monumental strides in our history. So, we have the incredibly revolutionary achievement of putting the first Black man into the White House for the first big step, then we have a brief but scary interlude and then a resumption of the Obama trend with the election of not only another Black president, but our very first woman!
Likewise, it is not a flight of fancy to posit that the surge of anti-women laws and decrees will be similarly plunged into the garbage can of history.
How do you like that vision, Trumpsters? While your man stumbles and mumbles, and rages, his way into sad oblivion, “the arc of the moral universe” will resume with ever more resolve and passion its bend toward justice!
So let’s be reminded that the famous quote of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” as he asserted, does so, as he made sure we knew, by virtue of a lot of elbow grease from good people. It doesn’t happen on its own.
In this context, give President Biden his indispensable role in our history. This life-long dedicated public servant will have accomplished more in his one term as president than almost any other U.S. president. I think he’s right up there toasting Lincoln and FDR, contributing to, in a huge way, and reflecting the arc of the moral universe. Who would have thought that perhaps his most consequential action would be something he chose not to do, rather than to do.
I have absolutely no regrets that I held out, along with a lot of other people I respect, against the massive pressure brought to bear on Biden to drop out earlier this summer.
There was no doubt in my mind that the momentum was being fueled by enemies of democracy. I was not wrong. Had those folks working behind the scenes to exploit fears and honest concerns by many true Democrats prevailed, they would have driven the Democratic alternative to Trump into sheer chaos and disarray. Their hope was that by right about now, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, that the Democrats would split into warring factions among themselves, and that the result would be a bruising convention where Democrats would attack each other furiously in pursuit of a nominee.
That terrible scenario, however, did not come anywhere close to materializing. It turned out there was an absolutely seamless transition from Biden to Harris, executed within the first hour after Biden’s announcement of withdrawal, and still in complete force to this day. Nobody, except for the engineers responsible for this, had any clue it would happen.
The Trumpsters and related enemies of democracy were shrieking in glee when they heard Biden was dropping out. But, without knowing for certain, I suspect that Nancy Pelosi and Biden himself had been working overtime to produce the remarkable result we’ve seen.
I was at the Democratic National Convention in New York in 1980 when deep division in the party led to a crushing defeat for President Carter that November. The election of Reagan then opened the door for the mainstreaming of the noxious politics of the far right that have plagued us since.
I feared what happened to the Democrats I saw then would happen again this year. It didn’t.