When They Go Low, We Go High

by Philip Collins

  And tonight, despite all the hardship we’ve been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting. America, I believe we can build on the progress we’ve made and continue to fight for new jobs and new opportunity and new security for the middle class. I believe we can keep the promise of our founders, the idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what you look like or where you love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or young or old or rich or poor, able, disabled, gay or straight, you can make it here in America if you’re willing to try. I believe we can seize this future together because we are not as divided as our politics suggests. We’re not as cynical as the pundits believe. We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are and forever will be the United States of America. And together with your help and God’s grace we will continue our journey forward and remind the world just why it is that we live in the greatest nation on Earth. Thank you, America. God bless you. God bless these United States.

  Ever since Barack Obama was lifted to the presidency of the United States on a high tide of language, politicians have wanted to be like him. They should pause and consider the ways in which they are not like Barack Obama. There is, in fact, almost no end to the ways in which they are not like Barack Obama. First, they are not president of the United States. Second, they do not have his gift for language. Third, they do not have his voice. Fourth and most important, they are not a black president in a nation still scarred by slavery, the silent subject of the Gettysburg Address. Obama touches on that question in the meritocratic section of this passage, and it is granted the greater force because he is saying it. A black man becoming the president of the United States of America is one of the greatest stories ever told in all the annals of politics.

  Martin Luther King’s vision has not yet been achieved in full, but it would take a hard heart to suggest that Obama’s presidency is not one act in the drama of his dream. This is the context when Obama speaks and it lends historic weight to his every word. None of this would apply if your task is to present the strategic objectives to the sales team or if you are on in the just-after-lunch slot discussing council tax at the annual conference of the Local Government Chronicle. Important a topic as that is (and it is), it has a register of its own which is not the same as that of a victorious president in the world’s most powerful democracy. The lesson here is: respect your occasion. If you pretend you are speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and have the ear of the world cocked for your words, you do not elevate your subject; you diminish it. Obama can do this because of who he is and the context he speaks in. If the ending reads on the page as slightly boilerplate Obama, it works in the hearing. Hope is not always an audacious emotion to evoke. It can sound vacuous if it is not attached to the power to realise it in the world. Without pragmatic politics, hope is a wish-list. Which makes the defining point. The finest political hopes are those of an elected president of a free country.

  THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESSES

  On the centenary celebration of the Gettysburg Address on 19 November 1963, the sitting president of the United States was indisposed. He was required to fly down to Texas to appear in Dallas with Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. Instead of speaking at Gettysburg, as he had been requested to do, President John F. Kennedy sent a message that read: ‘On this solemn occasion let us all rededicate ourselves to the perpetuation of those ideals of which Lincoln spoke so luminously. As Americans, we can do no less.’

  Kennedy’s place at Gettysburg was taken by a famous resident. Dwight D. Eisenhower had been stationed in Gettysburg during the First World War as the commander of the US Army Tank Corps Training Center. After the Second World War he had bought a 189-acre farm on the site where, in 1952, he held a picnic to open his campaign for the presidency. During his time in the White House, Eisenhower would often spend the weekend in Gettysburg, shooting skeet and inspecting his herd of Angus show cattle. It was here, in the farm that became known as the ‘Temporary White House’, that he recuperated from his heart attack in 1955 and here that he received the world’s dignitaries.

  In 1961, General and Mrs Eisenhower retired to Gettysburg, where the ex-president began work on his memoirs. He was called upon to perform this one last major service, though, to stand in for his successor President Kennedy. President Eisenhower used his centenary address to summon the noble destiny and unity which had inspired Lincoln. Though Lincoln’s words retain their power to move, said Eisenhower, ‘the unfinished work of which he spoke in 1863 is still unfinished; because of human frailty it always will be’. The task was to pass on, as best we could, the legacy bequeathed by Lincoln: ‘a nation free, with liberty, dignity and justice for all’.

  Despite the solemnity of the occasion and the gravity of his words, President Eisenhower’s speech has been lost to posterity because three days later the man who should have made the speech at Gettysburg, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. The bullets in Dallas completed a gruesome symmetry around the most famous speech in the political canon. Both the man who was never meant to make the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln, and the man who was but didn’t, John F. Kennedy, were assassinated, almost a century apart.

  Ever since Abraham Lincoln consecrated the spot in 1863, American presidents have repaired to the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to pay homage to the American Republic that Lincoln’s 272 words were designed to save. In 1878, Rutherford B. Hayes hoped that contemplation of the National Cemetery would allow Americans to appreciate those who ‘gave their lives for the Union, liberty, and for a stable, constitutional government’. Beating even Lincoln for brevity, Hayes spoke just 253 words, forty-four of which were in quoting Lincoln’s last sentence. In 1904, in a lesson about applying the disciplines of war to win the liberty of peace, Theodore Roosevelt commended the soldiers who had made their countrymen forever their debtors. On the fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln’s address in 1913, Woodrow Wilson celebrated reconciliation and offered a paean to a nation ‘undivided in interest’. On Memorial Day, 30 May 1928, Calvin Coolidge observed the usual pieties, dwelling on America’s interest in maintaining global peace and depicting the American economy, just prior to the Wall Street crash of 1929, as prosperously content.

  Two years later, in a Gettysburg Address abut the common good, Herbert Hoover issued a warning against demagoguery and said that ‘the weaving of freedom is and always will be a struggle of law against lawlessness, of individual liberty against domination, of unity against sectionalism, of truth and honesty against demagoguery and misleading, of peace against fear and conflict.’ In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt came to Gettysburg to sound a warning, which has extraordinary contemporary resonance, to those who seek to ‘build political advantage by the distortion of facts; those who, by declining to follow the rules of the game, seek to gain an unfair advantage over those who are willing to live up to the rules of the game’. Roosevelt articulated better than most presidents the idea they all took from Lincoln of an America that forswears prejudice and seeks unity in the common welfare.

  Perhaps the finest of the second-order Gettysburg Addresses was given six months before Eisenhower took Kennedy’s place on the rostrum. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson used Memorial Day to make a significant speech about civil rights. Johnson spoke as the grandson of a
Confederate soldier and responded to Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail by offering the black people of America a promissory note. ‘Our nation found its soul in honour on these fields of Gettysburg a hundred years ago,’ he said. To ask for patience now would be to court dishonour and impair that soul. ‘In this hour’, the vice-president went on, ‘it is not our respective races which are at stake – it is our nation … The Negro says, “Now.” Others say, “Never.” The voice of responsible Americans – the voice of those who died here and the great man who spoke here – their voices say, “Together.” There is no other way.’

  Johnson does to a high standard what all American presidents do at Gettysburg, which is to sing a hymn to the Republic. All speakers, taking their cue from Lincoln’s line about America being an experiment, reflect on the fragility of democracy, and they all say that, as long as the citizens remain committed to vigorous work, then a government of the people, by the people, and for the people could yet propel the nation towards greatness. That was, at least, the tradition. Then, on 22 October 2016, Donald Trump, at the time a candidate to be president of the United States, delivered his own Gettysburg Address and did none of this.

  Instead, Trump gave a speech whose chief subject was not the American Republic but himself. It was both daring and egregious. After opening in the traditional fashion, by invoking and associating himself with Lincoln’s battle against division (‘hallowed ground … amazing place’), Mr Trump then proceeded to take the Address somewhere both unprecedented and unpresidential. Trump’s scattergun hit Washington and Wall Street for rigging the game against ‘everyday Americans’. He called his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, a criminal, claimed massive voter fraud without a shred of evidence, denounced unspecified corruption and fulminated against his enemies, home and abroad, real and perceived. He complained bitterly about named media outlets who he claimed were biased against him and which he alleged deliberately fabricated stories to discredit him. He labelled as liars the women who had made claims of sexual assault against him. It was a broadside against all the estates of the realm.

  The worst of the speech is that Trump chose the site of the greatest-ever speech about the virtues of the Republic, to ask citizens not to trust the machinery of their own government. ‘The rigging of the system’, he said, ‘is designed for one reason, to keep the corrupt establishment and special interests in power at your expense, at everybody’s expense.’ Throughout, Trump portrays himself as the only man who can fix the problem of the system that has been broken by the elite: ‘I have no special interests but you, the American voter.’ The speech divides government from people and proceeds to widen the gap with every barb. There is a sort of secular blasphemy in the nastiness of Trump’s drearily inevitable conclusion: ‘We will drain the swamp in Washington DC and replace it with a new government of, by and for the people. Believe me.’ This is government of, by and for the populist.

  Democracy in Crisis

  Anti-politics is the most potent political idea of our time. The finest speeches in the popular tradition have always lent enchantment to politics, and it is salutary to be reminded of their magic. It would be naive, though, to ignore the worrying fact that the glamour has gone. We have mislaid the excitement of Cicero’s battle with Mark Antony, the struggle of Thomas Jefferson to create the new republic, Abraham Lincoln’s heroic attempt to salvage it, and John F. Kennedy’s sense of renewal. There may be little trace left of Barack Obama once President Trump has tweeted his way through a term of office. The land made in broad daylight, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous phrase about America, appears to be fading into the twilight. There is a dangerous claimant to the idea of popular power. An enticing new utopia is advertising its virtues. It is insurgent, protean and elusive and it goes by the misleading name of populism.

  Democracy is in the midst of a crisis, but then it always is. As a system founded on the absorption and the negotiation of dissent, democracy invites sceptical voices. David Runciman, in The Confidence Trap, has pointed out that an excessive sensitivity to crisis, along with the ability to adapt their way out of the mess, are the twin characteristics of successful democracies. However, just because democracies have adapted their way out of messes before does not mean they will necessarily do so again. Just because politicians have hit upon the words in the past does not mean that they will do so in the future. The developed democracies face in strident chorus a threefold crisis of prosperity, of fear, and of confidence.

  The crisis of prosperity is an anxiety about a future that the West appears to be losing. The fractious American and European politics of our time is in part explained by imminent economic decline. The West now has a potent rival in China. President Trump’s electoral slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, conceded the point. Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, has noted that, when America was growing at its fastest, living standards were doubling every thirty years. China has doubled its living standards three times in the last thirty years. But the threat is greater than the sheer numbers, and China is more than an economic rival. It is an affront to the very modus operandi of Western capitalism. Max Weber was the first serious thinker to note that capitalism thrived best under the conditions created by liberal democracy. The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, by contrast, attribute their economic success to the tight control possible in a regime with no need to fret about the whims of the people. It seems to be working. The 2013 Pew Survey of Global Attitudes showed that 85 per cent of Chinese were ‘very satisfied’ with their country’s direction. The number in the United States was just 31 per cent.

  The growth of China threatens to break the monopoly that the democracies have enjoyed over capitalist prosperity. Just as this lesson was sinking in, developed capitalism suffered a self-inflicted crisis of its own. Financial hubris, which allowed the complexity of financial products to run ahead of the human capacity to regulate their effects, created a generational bust. For two decades in the USA and one in Britain, real wages have stagnated. In the USA, median net worth for every group except the wealthiest 10 per cent fell between 1998 and 2013. Working-class Americans experienced a decline in their net worth over that time of a staggering 53 per cent. Meanwhile, the richest 10 per cent of people got 75 per cent richer. The republican bargain, in which hard work receives its merited reward, seemed to have been breached. It is not surprising that the idea took hold that capitalism and liberal democracy were loaded in favour of the privileged. It is not surprising that only one in four voters in the bottom two social classes in Britain believe democracy addresses their concerns well.

  The crisis of shared prosperity has created a climate of cynicism. At the same time, an even more basic threat has thrown the efficacy of liberal democracies into question. There is no more important task that the state takes on in the name of the people than to ensure safety. The apparent incapacity of liberal democracies in the face of external threat is creating a serious crisis of fear. The experience of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was intensely damaging. Two invasions ostensibly designed to replace a tyrant with the will of the people collapsed into military disaster. The Left now regards the Iraq invasion as proof that democracy is a code for American imperialism. The Right concluded that even dictatorial stability is preferable to the chaos of change.

  The struggle to conclude a successful military adventure in the name of the people was one more apparent indication that the writ of the West would no longer run. The institutions created out of the ruins of the Second World War – the United Nations, the European Union and the Bretton Woods financial institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – appear bereft of power and irrelevant to the crises engulfing the world. Successive problems, in Ukraine and in Syria, appear to have passed power from the hands of democrats to eager tyrants. Russia and China are devising their own rules for the world diplomatic order.

  Most potent of all, people in the liberal democracies have been subject to the fear of te
rror. In The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad described the invisible but palpable fear that governs a society under the threat of terrorist attack. The threat is all the more potent for being essentially invisible. The prospect of terrorism comes from no state, although states may turn a blind eye to its perpetrators or even sponsor them. It is a threat that can be activated by radicalised zealots, many of whom are reared in the comfort of free liberal democracies. Although one of the virtues of these democracies is that they tend not to rush towards a threat by negating the liberties that make them targets in the first place, there are always two temptations, to which some of their number may be yielding. The first is to blame a set of outsiders, usually these days the whole community of Muslims. The second is to repudiate some of the freedoms of the open society in the quest for a gilded cage of better security.

  The crises of prosperity and fear make common cause to produce a crisis of confidence. After a century of progress, democracy appears to be in retreat. The fledgling democracies are struggling. Since the introduction of democracy in 1994, South Africa has been ruled by one party, the African National Congress, which has become progressively more self-serving. Turkey, which once seemed to combine moderate Islam with prosperity and democracy, is lapsing into corruption and autocracy under a leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has begun to tear up the secular liberalism on which his nation’s constitution was founded. In Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia, opposition parties have boycotted recent elections or refused to accept their results.