American Politics Got You Down? Reading History Can Help.
By: Jon Ward
Tags: Christmas Gifts, Books, Politics, History, 2016 Election

Reason #3 of “12 Reasons CAMELOT’S END makes a great Christmas gift”

It is both unfashionable and difficult to look backwards. Progress move forwards, into the future.

And there is little time in 2019 to catch one’s breath. The never-ending story (argument), always available on cable TV and Twitter and Facebook, is bewitching and addicting.

There are some who have chosen to look away. It may be that most people have done this.

Hopefully they are reading history, and then applying that perspective to our modern times.

“The story and the study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future,” wrote Barbara Tuchman in her essay “The Historian’s Opportunity.”

But, she added, it “flashes beacon lights along the way.”

And, she said, history “is a useful nostrum against despair.”

History won’t save us. But it can help us.

We already know that reading places our mind in what Nick Carr called a “contemplative” mode, which repairs the damage done by the stress of the digital age, allows us to consider our lives and the world around us from a place of wisdom, and enables us to become more fully human.

Reading history is like hiking up to a mountain top with a majestic view of the countryside. We can see the big picture.

But that metaphor doesn’t fully describe the ways in which history helps us see the present more clearly. We see what has happened before: the sequences of events. This led to that and that led to this. We understand better why things are the way they are.

And we see that others have faced challenging times, and often the way forward for them was just as uncertain and scary as it sometimes is for us.

One of the things I realized while working on CAMELOT’S END is this: the way we elect presidents in America is pretty new.

I worked on the book during the 2016 presidential campaign. I was watching a Republican Party that did not want to have Donald Trump as its nominee, but unable to stop him.

If you don’t believe that the GOP didn’t want Trump, consider these four facts. First, nearly two third of the Republican primary voters cast their ballots for someone other than Trump. He got only a third of the vote in the primary. Second, very few Republican leaders at any level — federal, state or local — wanted him. Third, when Republicans arrived in Cleveland for their convention, only 900 of 2472 delegates — 35 percent — were estimated by Trump’s own campaign to be loyal to him. And fourth, in the fall election only about a third of Trump’s support came from voters who said they were excited about voting for him. The rest said they were either voting against Clinton or that he was the lesser of two evils.

I’ve written extensively elsewhere about how a person such as Trump was able to capture the Republican nomination, and how the primary process — not the general election process — is where reformers should be looking.

What I want to point out here is that it was my study of history that changed my perspective on our current way of doing things. It wasn’t until I dug into the history of the nominating process that I realized, ‘Oh, it hasn’t always been this way.’ In fact, it changed just before I was born in 1977.

It used to be that parties took more control of their nomination process. They are private associations. They are not the government. They don’t have to be democratic, and in fact their job description requires a mixture of democratic forms and less democratic forms if they are to fulfill their task in a competent way.

It was through studying history that I came to understand: one of the main jobs of a political party is to run a primary process that produces a competent, responsible and qualified candidate for president who can stand before all the voters of the United States for election in a national election.

History hasn’t given me or anyone else a secret key to unlocking how we should reform our system now. The light it sheds are more like the flashing beacon lights that Tuchman described. But it has helped me and others to ask questions we weren’t before. That’s a first step.

You can buy CAMELOT’S END here.