The “strong man” theory of history has fallen out of favor with modern statistics-obsessed scholars. But I sincerely believe that a “wrong man” theory of history will prove just the ticket for anyone who tries years from now to explain what brought us to our current rendezvous with chaos.
Trump’s fetish for divide and dominate, divide and intimidate, has bottomed out the cultural and racial divides in this country and left the ninety-nine percent, especially those of color, extravagantly vulnerable to social injustice, the ravages of the pandemic and the economic fallout from both.
Right now we need a healer and unifier as never before, a person of Lincolnesque vision, Churchillian purpose, and Obama-like compassion, to bridge the chasms.
Instead we have a self-absorbed vessel of indecency and cruelty who shirks every duty of care and leadership, and closets himself in an emotional bunker that enables him to deny what is obvious to all – except a Republican Party that makes Pontius Pilate look like a piker.
And what separates this moment from seemingly similar crises in the past – I recall in horror the turbulence of ’68 – is the dog-eat-dog ethos created by the pandemic, the total breakdown in all commonly accepted social contracts.
People who would, in “ordinary crises,” immediately embrace the cause of brutalized African-Americans and any disenfranchised soul have their own backs to the wall because of lost jobs and dreams in this covid-driven meltdown. Our usual reservoirs of patience and generosity are drained, leaving a political landscape as instantly flammable as a dying rain forest sucked dry by climate change.
Now as never before we need a single galvanizing figure who can rally us to the better angels of our nature and join us in a renewed commitment to abolish social inequities in all their loathsome guises and recreate America in its true ideal image.
Where is this singular man or woman?
I despair of finding one in the toxicity of Trump’s Uber-land. But I suspect each of us can find glimpses of such a champion in our own reflection if we look beyond the terror and desperation that too often overwhelm the human heart when the beast in all of us beckons from the wings.