Former president Jimmy Carter, who will be 99 this Sunday, October 1, was only 46 when he first popped up on the national political radar. After declaring in his 1971 inaugural address as governor of Georgia that “the time for racial discrimination is over,” Carter followed through by increasing the number of Black people on state boards and commissions from three to 53, boosting Black employment in state jobs by 25%, and hanging a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. in the state capitol.

Media-wise, such moves secured Carter’s place within an emerging cohort of racially enlightened “New South” governors, including South Carolina’s John C. West and Florida’s Reubin Askew, who were also elected in 1970. Liberal optimists hailed their victories as the undoing of the Republican “Southern strategy” of relying on racially coded appeals to win over once-reliably Democratic white voters angered by their old party’s pro-civil rights stance. By the time Carter won the presidency in 1976, he personified a vision of a risen, racially redeemed South that captured the American imagination in the final decades of the 20th century.

Yet this sunny perception of Carter’s journey to the presidency obscured the reality of how he had managed to take the all-important first step.

Regardless of his actions after becoming Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter had captured that office in 1970 not by thwarting the Southern strategy but by following it very nearly to the letter in repeated campaign appeals to racial and class prejudice. Once they got him where he wanted to be, he quickly disavowed such tactics, which, in his mind, amounted to nothing more than purely pragmatic nods to political reality necessary to achieving his more idealistic aims.

The apparent incongruity between the method Carter employed to become governor and the measures he implemented in office can be traced in part to the way he reacted to the contrasting racial attitudes of his parents. Despite having myriad interactions with Black people as a landlord, grocer, and financier, Carter’s father Earl was no less adamant about their inferiority to whites than any but a tiny handful of his white contemporaries. Ironically, one of these rare exceptions was his wife Lillian, whose sympathy for Black neighbors and readiness to invite them into her home might have prompted more than quiet disapproval, had her husband been a less prominent figure in the community.

Young Jimmy’s awareness of the peculiarity of his mother’s racial views—and the near-ubiquity of his father’s—shaped the distinct blend of realism and idealism that defined his early political career. When his father died in 1953, he resigned his post as a naval engineer, to assume control of the family’s agribusiness enterprises. His budding political aspirations surfaced when he assumed his father’s old seat on the county school board in 1955, only a year after the Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in the public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. With thousands of white Southerners scurrying to join the defiantly segregationist White Citizens’ Councils, Carter stood out as the only white man in Plains to decline membership in the Sumter County chapter. Later, when the congregation of the Plains Baptist Church, where Carter was a deacon, overwhelmingly rejected the idea of allowing Black people to worship there, his family cast three of only six dissenting votes.

Still, despite his efforts to improve Sumter County schools, Carter made no overt effort to encourage compliance with Brown. In his 1992 book, Turning Point, the best he could say for himself as a candidate for state senate 30 years earlier was that he had been “at least moderate” on segregation.

Carter’s first run for statewide office began with his belated entry into the 1966 Democratic gubernatorial primary against former governor Ellis Arnall, a racial moderate of longer standing, and the unrepentant segregationist Lester Maddox. Maddox won, courtesy of his strong appeal with blue collar whites, and with Arnall capturing the bulk of the Black and more affluent white vote, Carter came in a disappointing third. Still, the stinging defeat educated him to a stark reality: Racial moderation was not yet a winning strategy in Georgia politics. Nor would it be in the 1968 presidential race, when race-baiting virtuoso George Wallace easily outdistanced both Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon in Georgia.

Carter took the lessons of both these campaigns to heart when he again sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1970. This time, his chief opponent was former governor Carl Sanders, who had once declared himself “a segregationist but not a damn fool” and generally lived up to his own billing by presiding over Georgia’s grudging but relatively orderly retreat from segregation between 1963 and 1966. Sanders was a senior partner in a high-powered Atlanta law firm, with a smooth, urbane persona. Dubbing him “Cufflinks Carl,” and playing to both racial and class resentments, Carter’s ads portrayed Sanders hobnobbing in air-conditioned comfort with his closet liberal country club pals while the good working folk of Georgia, including a certain peanut farmer from Plains, sweated and strived to make ends meet.

In a naked appeal to Wallace supporters, Carter opposed bussing and defended the rights of white Georgians to preserve racial homogeneity in their neighborhoods. His campaign circulated photos of Black members of the Atlanta Hawks basketball team showering Sanders with champagne, and spread word that he had furtively attended the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. While Carter’s racial machinations won him the endorsement of outspoken segregationist politico Roy V. Harris, more than eight in 10 Black voters opted for Sanders, who barely made it into a runoff election, where Carter bested him by 20% before trouncing his Republican opponent in the general election.

As governor, Carter melded his idealism with a more practical-minded engineer’s approach to problem-solving in an ambitious plan to rid state government of corruption, mismanagement, and waste, although when he announced his presidential candidacy near the end of 1974, he was still better known and appreciated for his efforts to do right by Black Georgians.

His carefully cultivated personal ties to influential ministers and civil rights leaders only bolstered Carter’s standing among Black voters. Yet he knew that his success depended on winning substantial support from Southern whites as well.  To this end, he revamped his old Southern strategy, playing this time to regional rather than racial antagonisms. One of his campaign ads noted that after suffering years of ostracism and indiscriminate stereotyping as rednecks and hillbillies, “only a Southerner can understand what Jimmy Carter as President can mean.” Boasting an improbable duo of advocates in George Wallace and Martin Luther King Sr., Carter picked up more than half the electoral votes he needed to defeat Gerald Ford by carrying all of the old Confederate and border states except Virginia.

Still, despite his earnest courtship, Carter failed to win over a majority of white voters in the South, leaving him all the more indebted to the close to 90% support he enjoyed among Black voters in the region. As the ultimate political realists, they seemed to accept Carter’s pandering to Wallace voters in 1970 as merely a situational concession to political reality necessary to achieving the racially equitable and humane ends he secured upon taking office. Ironically enough, historically high Black participation in a presidential election had been critical to putting a white Southerner in the White House. Meanwhile, reeling from the military failure in Vietnam and the moral failures of the Watergate affair, white voters above the Mason-Dixon line also proved surprisingly receptive to the drawling Carter’s disarming smile, downhome folksiness, and earnest assurances that he would bring honesty and humility back to the White House.

Though he had not been above a bit of political charade along the way, once in office Carter appeared to revert to the somber, moralizing Southern Baptist he had always been at heart. With the economy faltering in the face of soaring inflation, he sermonized from his bully pulpit about Americans’ addictive consumerism and their habit of defining themselves not “by what one does, but what one has.” To hardly anyone’s surprise, his gospel of restraint seemed downright heretical to a generation who saw instant gratification and unbridled acquisitiveness as their birthright. Carter’s habit of foregrounding “pain” over “gain” in laying out the ramifications of his decisions led his vice president, Walter Mondale, to observe that “the worst thing you could say to Carter if you wanted him to do something was that it was politically the best thing to do.” Somewhat akin to Henry Clay, once in office Carter seemed to signal that he would “rather be right than [continue to] be president.”

Beyond the substantial economic challenges he faced, the crowning blow to his prospects of retaining that office was his failed—and now, reportedly, sabotaged—effort to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis; the abortive desert rescue mission with its abandoned, sand-clogged helicopters became for many a metaphor for his failed and inept presidency. He was easily out- distanced in 1980 by Republican Ronald Reagan, whose vows of a military buildup and gospel of permanent plenty played far better than Carter’s calls for sacrifice and self-denial. So much for securing the Camp David Accords, bailing out Social Security, deregulating the airlines, preserving the Alaskan wilds, and a number of other stellar accomplishments.

Yet, despite his overwhelming rejection at the hands of American voters, Carter left Washington in 1981 at age 56 with his idealism not only intact but less encumbered by political constraints. His boundless energy also demanded an outlet. By 2002, he had already gained such a reputation as a global peacemaker, humanitarian, and champion of human rights, that awarding him the Nobel Prize for Peace was less a question of “if” than “when.”  With his moral certitude now reaffirmed, he seemed even less concerned with the political consequences of his forthright manner, as he indicated in 2007 by likening Israeli practices in the West Bank to a form of apartheid. Unmoved by the ensuing outcry, Carter soldiered on in his one-man war on human suffering and injustice, even inquiring about his ongoing Guinea worm eradication project after entering hospice care in February 2023.

As the longest-lived of all U.S. presidents, Jimmy Carter hardly stands out as the only one of them who ever sacrificed principle to political expediency. He has no rival among them, however, in dedicating himself upon leaving that office to a higher, more transcendent ideal of human service and remaining faithful to it even as the end of his days draws nigh.

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The move to military imagery was understandable. In response to an unprecedented threat, emergency mobilization on a wartime scale seemed necessary. The politicians also knew that nations tend to rally around military heroes and war leaders, and the charisma and masculinity that they seem to embody. More than half the men elected to the American presidency have either had distinguished military records or led the country successfully in a war.

Yet, today, months after the brash declarations of a war on COVID, the pandemic has shown once again that military-style leadership is poorly suited to the crises that contemporary states most often face. Instead, the most successful responses to COVID-19 have come from women leaders—Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, Angela Merkel of Germany, or Mette Frederiksen of Denmark—who combine public empathy with political skills and technocratic know-how. Is the age of the hyper-masculine, charismatic war leader at its end?

The human tendency to associate charismatic leadership with masculine, military-style heroism is ancient, of course. Long before the modern age, monarchs based their reputations on their military prowess. Those perceived as the greatest and most charismatic—from Alexander the Great to Charlemagne and beyond—were most often leaders who protected their people from conquest and made glorious conquests of their own.

Democracy changed little about this perception. The great revolutions out of which modern democracies emerged were all accompanied by significant bloodshed and were led by generals who became founding fathers: George Washington in the United States, Toussaint Louverture in Haiti, José de San Martín in Argentina, and Simón Bolívar across South America.

In the 20th century, the American presidents seen as most charismatic have had great charm, but also a macho strength associated with international conflict: the war hero and cold warrior John Kennedy, and his cold war successor Ronald Reagan. But the spell they cast has worn off. Importantly, the strategy of treating any intractable challenge as if it were a foreign enemy to be defeated has worked less and less well. Nixon’s “war on crime” and “war on cancer,” Reagan’s “war on drugs,” and George W. Bush’s “war on terror” produced few victories, and often had disastrous side effects.

The reason for the failure of these rhetorical “wars” is clear enough. Military leadership puts a premium on courage, strength, decisiveness, and speed. (An old British joke holds that the mark of a good officer is to make decisions swiftly and forcefully—and if they happen to be correct, so much the better.) Real warfare generally involves an obvious, visible enemy, conspicuous targets, and a clear sense of what “victory” entails. But what did it mean to win a “war” on crime, drugs, cancer or terror? None of these things were going to disappear altogether, and it might take long years before measurable progress was made against any of them. What were the most important targets to attack? In the case of crime or drugs, did it make more sense to focus on policing, on sentencing, on education, on community organization, or on something else entirely?

Without clear answers to such questions, how could the government keep the public mobilized on a “war footing”? The answer, of course, is that it couldn’t.

Despite these conspicuous failures, climate change too is now being described with the rhetoric of warfare. Last year, former U.S. Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a California Republican, came together to announce an initiative they called “World War Zero” to fight for a target of zero carbon emissions. But the news sank with barely a ripple. How do we declare war on CO2?

The COVID-19 pandemic is, similarly, another crisis poorly suited to be treated as a war. “Victory” will happen when an effective vaccine has been developed, produced, and distributed. Beyond providing money to the vaccine developers and preparing manufacturing and distribution facilities, there is little that governments can do on this front except wait for the science.

China, Europe, and New York City have all shown what it means to win an initial “battle” against COVID-19: shutting down society and reducing human interaction to the point that the virus stops spreading and comes close to dying out. During the initial shutdowns, health care professionals, significantly described as standing on the “front lines,” were treated as military heroes of a sort.

But these shutdowns have come at massive economic and social costs. And the shutdowns were followed not with victory parades but by agonizingly difficult choices. How quickly can cities and states open up? How can citizens be persuaded to alter fundamental sorts of behavior over an indefinite period of time? What risks are tolerable in return for rescuing an economy?

In the newest phase of the crisis, it is less evident who the heroes are. Not surprisingly, the politicians most eager to claim the mantle of war leaders have performed poorly and lost public support. Donald Trump has frenetically oscillated between declaring premature victory and insisting that the entire crisis is a hoax perpetrated by his political enemies. Trump, along with Macron and Johnson, has seen his approval levels drop precipitously in polls.

A different sort of charismatic leadership has proven far more effective, with women leaders shining. Ardern, Merkel, Frederiksen, and Tsai Ing-Wen of Taiwan have emphasized compassion and patience, rather than war and victory. They have not posed as commanders dispatching brave conscripts off to the front, but rather as mothers and daughters sharing the fears and privations of their fellow citizens.

Ardern has hosted Facebook Lives from her living room, dressed in a sweatshirt, after just putting a child to sleep, driving home the point that everyone has an equal role to play in containing the virus. Frederiksen, the Danish leader, posted a clip of herself singing Danish pop songs while doing the dishes, injecting much-needed humor into the grim diet of daily news. Each of these women has calmly refused to sugarcoat the threat, or to predict easy victory in the manner of Trump. Merkel shocked her citizens near the start of the crisis when she predicted that 70 percent of Germans would ultimately come down with COVID-19. Most importantly, each of these women has also emphasized the absolute priority of kindness, and of saving lives.

These approaches have had a demonstrable effect, particularly in winning cooperation from the citizenry for wearing face masks and other behavioral changes. As a result, the countries with women leaders have had far lower levels of COVID-19 mortality than countries led by would-be strongmen like Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil. New Zealand, most spectacularly, has effectively eradicated the virus within its territory, allowing normal life to resume. Ardern herself now has the highest approval ratings of any New Zealand Prime Minister in the last century—since the First World War, in fact.

Political charisma is an elusive phenomenon. It is usually spoken of as a personal quality, something people either have or don’t, or as the product of searing experience, as in war. But in fact, charisma is more of a relationship. It depends not just on the leader, but on the public recognizing a special quality in him or her, and feeling an intense attraction as a result. Historically, throughout much of the world, people have regarded masculine military qualities as charismatic. Perhaps, by the time the crisis ends, worldwide understandings of political leadership and political charisma will have changed. The figure of the compassionate mother and nurse may yet come to have greater political appeal than that of the aggressive wartime commander.

The post Seeking a New Kind of Leader for the ‘War’ Against COVID-19 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Even a generation ago, before the internet reached everyone, “one world” was an expression of idealism, signifying easy and carefree participation in a panoply of world cultures, all accessible by way of a flight, a screen, or a just-in-time supply chain. Think, for instance, of the Western vogue for so-called “world music” with its spirit of sentimental and nebulous togetherness: “One world is enough for all of us” went the refrain in Sting’s “One World (Not Three)” on his 1986 live album, Bring on the Night.

But now that the bloom is off globalization’s rose—world connection is just as likely to spur thoughts of climate change, inequality, or the spread of COVID-19 as global fellowship—we would do well to recall the longer, lost history of “one world.” Whether we know it or not, any modern use of the phrase, in both its hopeful and fearful senses, is indebted to the Republican Presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and his 1943 bestseller, One World.

If you’ve heard of Willkie, it’s likely because of his 1940 campaign for president against Franklin Roosevelt. A relative newcomer to politics, Willkie was drafted by business-friendly Republicans because he opposed FDR’s New Deal. He is often celebrated for his decision not to side with the so-called “isolationists” in the Republican Party—some of whom claimed the badge of “America First!” to resist American involvement in another European war.

Willkie is also revered for what happened after he lost that election. Instead of remaining in opposition, Willkie stepped up to support Lend-Lease, the President’s effort to send American war supplies to Britain. Willkie, it is said, helped FDR prepare America to save the world from fascism.

These stories, while powerful, actually slight Willkie’s true significance. He should be remembered more for his particular vision of “one world.” Specifically, Willkie argued for “one world” as a global call for a world free of the racism and imperial exploitation fostered by nationalism. His ideals may appear naïve at first, but they might give us some idea of what a visionary globalism is still good for in a time of resurgent nationalism and planetary fragility.

Willkie was not the first to use the phrase “one world.” Writers and thinkers had previously used it to describe how the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, the airplane, the stock market, and the radio all shrank space and sped up time, bringing far-flung places and cultures into greater contact.

These forces unleashed chaos and disintegration, too, as war and conquest swept the globe. Nationalist leaders rose, offering stories of shared purpose and common destiny as balms for disruption. But nationalism marked territory with myths of blood and belonging, sparking competition for patches of soil on the map.

By contrast, internationalists countered nationalism’s primal pull with rational plans for cooperation between states. Fashioned properly, internationalism would ride the new networks of global communication and finance and transportation. It would have to, the internationalists said, or the future held only war and privation.

Willkie became an internationalist early on. Born in 1892 in Indiana, his first political inspiration was President Woodrow Wilson, hero to many internationalists for his call to “make the world safe for democracy” and his advocacy of the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. Much to Willkie’s dismay, however, many Americans, bitter about World War I, rejected the League, and the U.S. never joined.

As he built a career as a lawyer for the power industry and activist in the Democratic Party (he wouldn’t switch parties until just before the 1940 campaign), Willkie hoped for an American internationalist revival on more equitable terms than even Wilson, a racist and imperialist, imagined. But as the Great Depression deepened and war spread in Asia and Europe again, Willkie and other internationalists believed that nobody could now doubt that full international cooperation was necessary—and inevitable. In that spirit, Willkie supported Lend Lease in 1940. He also visited Britain in 1941, during the last days of the Blitz, and his genial, iconoclastic personality did much to lift spirits there.

By the late summer of 1942, the U.S. was in the fight, but active only in the Pacific. While the U.S. supplied aid and munitions to European Allies, the Nazis held Western Europe and occupied great swathes of Russia. Several American journalists working in Kuibyshev—the Soviets wartime capital—cabled Willkie to suggest he visit the beleaguered country to boost morale. Working with Roosevelt again, Willkie planned a much bigger undertaking: a closely watched, seven-week, 31,000-mile flying journey around the world that would take him to 13 countries on five continents.

The journey followed recently opened and occasionally un-scouted air lanes over Africa, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and China, a route that skirted Axis-held territory—well within range of enemy aircraft—and brought Willkie face to face with everyone from Soviet factory workers and Siberian peasants to Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Charles de Gaulle. Millions followed his route via the papers and newsreels, discovering a world that had become, as Willkie would later put it, “small and completely interdependent.”

FDR saw the trip as a fact-finding mission and a morale-building effort. But his former opponent made it much more than that. Across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Willkie discovered, the war was not just a struggle against Nazi fascism and Japanese militarism, but potentially a colossal turning point in world history. A whole generation of anti-imperial nationalists saw a war fought for democracy and freedom as a chance to persuade the great European empires to finally relinquish their hold on the globe.

This meant the U.S. was at a crossroads too. America would become the next great power—but what kind of power would it choose to become?

Here, in the midst of worldwide terror and destruction, Willkie discovered a fleeting opportunity: The United States had a chance to lead the planet to a new era of cooperation—but only if it would truly embrace its own ideals in an effort to end colonialism and colonial thinking. To win a lasting peace and a future of global cooperation, Willkie came to believe, Americans would have to accept a more cooperative relationship with the rest of the planet.

“There are no distant points in the world any longer,” Willkie announced in his book describing his journey. The volume was initially going to be called One War, One Peace, One World, but Willkie soon realized that the last third said it all. A planet shrunk by aviation and total war was unified by technology, and could be brought together politically, too, if only Americans would put in the work. The U.S., he argued, had to forego “narrow nationalism” or the “international imperialism” practiced by the European powers. Americans had to choose instead to support “equality of opportunity for every race and every nation.”

Millions read One World—some called it the fastest-selling book in American history to date—even though it was critical of America and the West. In fact, one of the chief lessons of his trip, he argued was that the linked forces of racism and empire were hampering the Allied war effort. “The moral atmosphere in which the white race lives is changing,” he wrote, conveying the demands he heard across the globe. People everywhere were “no longer willing to be Eastern slaves for Western profits. The big house on the hill surrounded by mud huts has lost its awesome charm.”

Americans were not exempt, either. The U.S., Willkie wrote, had long “practiced inside our own boundaries something that amounts to race imperialism.”

However, Willkie was less critical of American imperial power. In general, he saw the United States as crucial to a global solution rather than part of the problem, a perspective that suggests how Americans tended to discount the negative impact of their power abroad. The idea of “one world” would become broadly influential during the war years, but a current of resilient nationalism would eventually undermine his hopes. Willkie’s bid for the 1944 Republican nomination never got off the ground. He argued for a fully democratic structure for the United Nations—one that would give smaller nations equal power and open a clear path to freedom for colonized countries. But FDR’s preferred plan—dominance by the Great Powers in the Security Council—won the day.

Tragically, Willkie never saw the U.N. convene. He died, unexpectedly, in October 1944 at only 52.

Before long, “Willkie” began to seem like a name from another time. One World has often been recalled as an oddity of wartime life, a naïve statement of wishful global harmony, and Willkie was remembered as an almost-President who helped Roosevelt save democracy in 1940. But if Willkie’s own name has faded, the phrase he made popular lived on, inspiring a host of global visions down to our own time.

“One world or none!” declared pacifists, world government advocates, and anti-nuclear activists in the 1940s and ’50s. Anti-imperialists like Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru of India claimed it as a slogan, too, as they harnessed the U.N. to help usher colonialism off the world stage. Later it resurfaced as an environmentalist credo, echoed by the early astronauts who first saw the Earth from space. “When you’re finally up at the moon looking back at the Earth,” Apollo 8’s Frank Borman mused in 1968, “all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people.”

With the precipitous globalization of the 1980s and ’90s the idea came rushing back. Global capitalism, some argued, was leveling barriers to opportunity everywhere. But this new “one world” felt like a threat to others. One World, Ready or Not, announced journalist William Greider in his 1997 expose of the borderless world of free trade and finance. Greider observed that Willkie’s idealism had been replaced by “the manic logic of global capitalism,” which would doom local industry and community and drive inequality to new heights.

Since then, of course, the perils of “one world” have swamped any lingering promise the phrase once held. Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center, the resulting “war on terror,” the financial crisis of 2008, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic: all spring from the precarious state of a planet in which all of us are inescapably joined in a web of communications, market transactions, greenhouse gasses, possible pandemics, migration routes, and interlocking political alliances, resentments, and inequalities. Globalization, we are told, continues to lift more people out of poverty than it immiserates, but that’s statistics, not perception.

When another political outsider—like Willkie, a former Democrat from the world of business—took the presidency by storm in 2016, he promised to turn back the clock, invoking the name of his predecessor’s bête noir. “From this moment on,” Donald Trump declared at his inauguration, “it’s going to be ‘America First.’”

Trump is not alone, of course. The worldwide retreat into nationalism is spurred by both inequality and xenophobia. And it denies what Willkie—were he still with us—would surely say: We are one world made out of many creatures—human and nonhuman—living together on a single fragile earth.

The post When Americans Fell in Love With the Ideal of ‘One World’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To get the conversation started, Brand asked the panelists to offer their predictions on what the Mueller report may eventually reveal when it is released. By and large, the panelists offered a sobering take, based as much on current political realities as the report’s possible content. Michaels said he would like everyone to calibrate their expectations, and that the report, when it is finally issued, could be simply a summary of what’s already been discussed. There’s “a good chance that we won’t be shocked by anything,” Michaels said, because “we’ve been constantly bombarded with scandal after scandal.”

Aberbach also echoed this concern, adding that even if the report showed wrongdoing, the political circumstances that worked during Watergate—in particular the fact that Gerald Ford (who replaced Spiro Agnew) was widely respected by both parties—do not exist with Vice President Pence.

Harriger said that “it’s clear already without Mueller’s Report,” just based on the indictments and what’s been discovered elsewhere, that the Russians were trying to interfere with the election. Whether there’s enough evidence to prosecute a crime, she said, is a different question than whether bad things happened. She cautioned that because we are so focused on getting “the big fish”—in this case President Donald Trump—that we “may be missing the bigger picture.”

One of the key points of Mueller’s investigation is assumed to be Donald Trump’s possible obstruction of justice after he fired former FBI Director James Comey. Harriger explained that there are three elements that have to be proven in an obstruction of justice case. There needs to be a guilty act; in this case Trump’s firing of Comey would suffice. There also must be a “corrupt purpose,” and this aspect, Harriger believes, could be difficult to prove. The final element is that the act must interrupt or attempt to interrupt a proceeding of some sort, and Trump’s firing of Comey could very well have been an attempt to derail the FBI’s Russia investigation.

What about any of the explosive things Trump has said on the record—like his infamous interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which he said that he, at least in part, fired Comey because of the Russia investigation? Do any of these statements help bolster the obstruction of justice case? “I don’t think that’s enough,” Harriger said, explaining that there has to be evidence from other people.

If there is, for example, evidence that the Trump campaign knew the Russians had hacked the emails of the Clinton campaign days before Trump’s public statement at campaign rally in which he invited the Russians to hack into Clinton’s emails, then that public statement could be used to help build a case. However, because Trump has often contradicted himself and made numerous inflammatory statements, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what he’s said and when. “It’s an irony,” said Aberbach, “that his bad reputation in many ways is a strength in this particular setting rather than a weakness.”

The way the Trump administration has turned both cultural and legal precedents on their heads, the panelists agreed, complicates the legal picture. While the Mueller investigation has already led to numerous indictments for those who served on Trump’s campaign and his administration, the question of whether the President could also be indicted remains unresolved. While the Justice Department has maintained that a sitting president cannot be indicted, or can only be indicted after impeachment, that interpretation of language in the Constitution, Michaels explained, “is not [obtained] in a court of law … but it was an independent judicial determination.” Considering this, it’s likely the Department of Justice will point to the long-standing legal practice observed by previous administrations that we don’t indict a sitting president, but “that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the last word,” he said.

With talk of impeachment mounting, Aberbach expects that there will at least an attempt at impeachment—as the Democratic leadership in the House has signaled. However, he warned that impeachment could actually further rally Trump’s supporters, in the way that President Bill Clinton’s support grew after his impeachment. The panelists agreed that the decision on whether or not to move forward on impeachment in the House will be made on political grounds, as Democrats will have to consider if impeachment will actually strengthen the president’s base.

If Trump is indeed impeached—something that the panel thinks is unlikely given that it would require a vote from two-thirds of the Republican-dominated Senate—would he be able to pardon himself? This is yet another legal question with no precedent, and Michaels cautioned that if Trump were to pardon himself, it would be litigated potentially for the remainder of his natural life.

The panelists found the current state of the courts—a branch of government that offers an important check to executive power—particularly troubling, as they have become more and more divided along party lines. Trump has now appointed two Supreme Court justices as well as numerous judges in the lower courts. Michaels said this moment is so disconcerting because “the nomination and confirmation process has become so political.” Judges are now labeled “Obama judges” or “Clinton judges” if they issue opinions that strike down Trump’s executive orders, like his so-called “Muslim ban.” And what does it mean for the future of the Supreme Court, Harriger asked, if Trump continues to talk of “his court?” With the increase in the number of conservative judges appointed to the Supreme Court who seem to favor an increase in executive power, there is a chance that executive power will be allowed to grow further.

Ultimately, there are no easy answers to the many complex legal questions swirling around Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and administration. However, this lack of tidy answers could be seen in a hopeful light. The questions contemplated over the course of the evening introduced “an essential dilemma,” of our time, Aberbach said. The checks and balances and intricacies of shared power that strengthen our political system, he explained, rest on “an assumption … that there is a certain set of norms that the [politicians] are supposed to follow.” And perhaps the most disconcerting thing about Trump’s time in office is that “he has violated many of these norms in a way that no one else has,” he said.

When the conversation turned to the 25th Amendment, which makes provisions for shifting power when the president is incapacitated, the panel joked that they had “more bad news.” The process of removing a president is, by design, extremely difficult.

To sum up, Brand said, the answer to the three questions posed by the discussion—impeachment, indictment, and the 25th Amendment—are: “No. No. And no.”

In the end, the panelists put their faith in the power of the ballot box. They stressed during the question-and-answer session that by voting for candidates—whether they be running for president or a seat in the House or Senate—who declare a commitment to the checks and balances built into our constitution, voters can help restore faith in democracy.

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All presidents run up against the limited power of the office. To some extent, Trump’s efforts have been stymied by institutional limits on presidential powers and the separation of powers that are built into the American Constitution. The U.S. Presidency was designed to be limited by the courts and Congress.

But the forces that have been holding some of Trump’s changes at bay go well beyond the separation of powers. They reveal something about the nature of power itself and the impotence of self-proclaimed strongmen like Trump when they fail to properly grasp it. Power is not strength. It can never belong to a single individual, nor can it be a feature of a particular office. It is a phenomenon that rises up—and dies—with a group. As soon as the group disperses, power also disappears.

Hannah Arendt, political philosopher and scholar, in 1969. Photo by Associated Press.

The sharp distinction between power and strength comes from the work of Hannah Arendt, the German-American political thinker who was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Strength, Arendt explains, is a function of the instruments one can literally possess and hold, whether these are the muscles one has or the instruments one wields. Strength helps an individual act. Power, though, is something entirely different; Arendt defines it as the human ability not just to act, but to act with others. And as such, power can arise only from within a broad, plural, group of people encompassing differences both big and small.

The distinction between strength and power becomes even starker when contrasted with violence. Arendt explores these distinctions in her 1970 essay On Violence, which she wrote against a backdrop of violent student movements around the world and the glorification of violence by thinkers like Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre. Responding to what she saw as a dangerous conflation of power and violence, Arendt argues that the two are antithetical. Violence, for Arendt, is closely related to strength: It is an instrument that augments strength. But while violence and strength certainly command obedience (it’s difficult, to say the least, to dissent at the barrel of a gun), we shouldn’t confuse either with power, Arendt explains—nor can we conflate obedience with legitimacy. A strongman made even stronger by his possession of the instruments of violence is not, Arendt shows us, more powerful or more authoritative.

American democracy presumes power and resists strength. Resting on the will of the people, our republic was designed to do away with government as the “rule of man over man”—a government that, Arendt notes, the American founding fathers thought “fit for slaves.” Institutions and offices of governance have no power of their own; they are manifestations and materializations of power, which lies only with the people. Thus, if it is to be an office of power and not violence, the Presidency, as much as Congress, needs numbers of people. Without the people, the Presidency loses that “living power” that prevents it from petrification and decay.

But power is not just numbers. The distinction between power and strength is not merely a preference for majority rule. Being powerful isn’t, as political organizers would often have us believe, about speaking with one voice. Power is predicated on plurality. For Arendt, the assemblage of different, if not opposing, opinions and identities is the very thing that gives power to a movement. Arendt describes plurality simply, if a little enigmatically, as “the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” What she means here is that power demands more than the many, or even the majority or everyone, acting together. The group must comprise individuals who meaningfully differ in their opinions from one another such that there are others with whom one acts. It is in acting “in concert” with those who hold different opinions that the power created by a movement remains with the people. If the group can be summed up by one opinion or identity—white working class, conservative, immigrant—the group is no better than an undifferentiated mob that might be swayed to carry out the orders of a dictator. It is no better than a potential instrument of violence.

That potential clarifies the first weeks of the Trump presidency—for both his supporters and his opponents. People have questioned Trump’s legitimacy on a number of grounds: He lost the popular vote, Russia may have interfered in the election, he lacks experience in government. But in some ways the biggest long term threat to his legitimacy lies in his lack of power. By reducing the office to his dictates as a “strong leader,” Trump has signaled that he might see the Presidency more as an instrument of strength than a manifestation of power. His assaults on anyone who questions his decisions, from the press and the judiciary to his own federal bureaucracy, portend a President for whom governance looks suspiciously like the imposition of strength from above that the Founding Fathers sought to eradicate. When Trump revels in the possibility that he might rule solely through the strength of his leadership, he threatens to strip the American political sphere of the various perspectives that make it a constant source of power and legitimacy. He threatens the very power of American democracy.

Through this lens, it is not clear that those who support Trump have much to celebrate, no matter how ardently they may share his views. In acceding to this kind of ruler, we undermine democracy as a system of self-rule and undermine our own power as a people to govern. Indeed, many support Trump precisely because he is “strong” and presumably willing and able to take over the reins of governance from the people. As efficient as strong leaders may be in affecting change, we must be cognizant of what we are giving up in complying with this kind of rule.

At the same time, those who oppose Trump shouldn’t take their own democratic credentials for granted. Power has high standards. Numbers are not enough—not the numbers of the popular vote or the unanimous decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (captured by Hillary Clinton’s “3-0” tweet). The burgeoning anti-Trump movement will only become a powerful force in American society when it is a coalition of different opinions that come together for a public good beyond any particular interest. If the opposition can capture plurality, it not only enacts the kind of American society it purports to embrace, but also can serve as a legitimate, democratic force of governance. Its power and legitimacy will come from that fact that such a group can claim to speak and act as a true public—a group of diverse opinions, interests, and identities. Because, as Arendt tells us, what is at stake in politics is not one’s own life and the particular interests one holds, but the world itself.

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Yet all of the day’s formalities fail to cover up certain strains that often accompany this public ceremony. For alongside the pageantry, our inaugurations also expose some of the biggest tensions that define the American presidency—and show how our democracy has survived to repeat the ritual for the nation’s 45th commander-in-chief.

First and foremost, presidential inaugurations are, of course, markers of peaceful transitions of power—a method of handover that’s been more exception than the rule in the course of human history. They’re also celebrations for an elected office that is particularly American.

At the founding of the republic, monarchs led nearly every other nation. Even as democratic systems began to spread, most countries adopted parliamentary systems where legislatures chose prime ministers to head their governments (often alongside a ceremonial head of state, à la the U.K.’s Queen Elizabeth II, expected to hover above the partisan fray). But the U.S. presidency falls somewhere between—a head of government that assumes office on behalf of a political party, yet is expected to be a unifying head of state for all Americans. A strong singular executive who’s also balanced by two equally powerful government branches.

George Washington taking his oath of office as the first president of the United States. Courtesy of National Park Service.

As our first elected president, George Washington was conscious that he was setting precedent for this new position as head of a republic. He had already resigned his command of the Continental Army a few years earlier, despite calls for him to keep his wartime powers and rule the nation as a dictator or king. Yet he and his supporters also saw how his vast prestige could help support a fragile new government. So instead of simply taking his oath of office, the only Constitutionally-mandated element of an inauguration, they turned Washington’s ascension to the presidency into a show—one that helped publicly reconcile the compound, if not contradictory, roles bestowed on America’s top post.

The result blended the trappings of European monarchs they thought would give the office legitimacy with heavy nods to the presidency’s democratic foundations. In many ways, the inauguration looked like a coronation. His swearing in was turned to spectacle, complete with throngs of adoring lookers-on, invocations of the divine, and a gun salute.

But the new president also took care to keep the ceremony from looking too much like a crowning. Washington wore a plain brown suit to the affair, which was held at Federal Hall in the then-capitol of New York. He used his inaugural address (likely written with the help of James Madison) to praise the republican model of government, and to show humility at the task “to which the voice of my country called me.” And, of course, he drew attention to the president’s solemn pledge to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Washington also set another powerful precedent eight years later: After two elected terms, he retired. His refusal to cling to control provided reassurance to those who feared the power of a single executive. It also set the stage for peaceful, regular transitions for centuries to come.

A wide angle view from the Capitol balcony as President Ronald Reagan, visible at center, addresses the nation following his swearing-in ceremony in Washington. Courtesy of Associated Press.

After Washington, most of America’s other presidents decided to keep up the pageantry of the inaugural inauguration too. In 1797, Oliver Ellsworth became the first chief justice to administer the oath of office when he swore in John Adams. Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural was also the first to take place in the new capitol of Washington, and his second featured the first parade. James Madison had the first inaugural ball in 1809. And in 1981, Ronald Reagan shifted the ceremony from the Capitol’s East Portico to its West Front, allowing more of the public to witness the event from grounds of the National Mall.

Beyond being celebrations of the American way of democracy, inaugurations also seek to provide a show of stability during contentious transitions. But divisiveness can still undermine democracy’s big day. Between Abraham Lincoln’s election and inauguration in 1861, seven southern states declared their secession from the Union and began forming the Confederate States of America. Rumors spread of plots to prevent Lincoln from reaching the capitol to ascend the presidency, so the president-elect disguised himself and took a night train through pro-slavery Baltimore to reach Washington on time. Artillery companies guarded Capitol Hill and sharpshooters lined his Pennsylvania Avenue route on Inauguration Day. Despite the drama, Lincoln used his first address to strike a conciliatory tone, telling Southerners, “We are not enemies, but friends.” It was all for naught. Within six weeks, the Civil War had begun. But America did have a properly sworn-in president at the helm.

Thomas Nast’s cartoon, published in the New York Illustrated News, March 23, 1861, captured how different audiences received Lincoln’s address. Courtesy of the Smithsonian.

Even in the absence of a secessionist movement, partisanship can undercut aspirations for inaugurations to be celebrations of one united country, as opposed to one victorious political party. In 1829, Andrew Jackson’s new presidency marked a stark, populist departure from those of incumbent John Quincy Adams. Following a bitter election fight, his inauguration became more victory party than reconciliation. The outgoing president Adams didn’t show. But, fitting the new everyman order, a rowdy crowd of over 10,000 supporters did. The White House was so overwhelmed that servants reportedly started placing tubs of punch and ice cream on the lawn to draw well-wishers out of the mansion. Ronald Reagan’s 1981 inauguration also marked a dramatic, though less raucous, ideological shift. Though he included a bit of bipartisan language in the day’s address, it’s best remembered for political lines like, “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Famously, Jackson threw an inauguration party at the White House where guests refused to leave and to be lured outside the building by tubs of ice cream and whisky punch. Engraving by Robert Cruikshank, sometimes referred to as Isaac Robert Cruikshank. Courtesy of White House Collection.

Yet just as many inaugurations are remembered for presidents-elect who tried to smooth bumpy handoffs. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson, who was the first president to come from a different party from that of his predecessor, tried to strike a unifying tone in his inaugural address, declaring, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.”

More recently, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama negotiated what is considered to be the best-managed presidential transition—and did so amid an economic crisis, post-9/11 national security concerns, two ongoing wars, and a particularly historic handover. Larger forces also brought together the outgoing Herbert Hoover and incoming Franklin D. Roosevelt for the good of the country. Though the two men openly loathed each through their rocky transition, they kept up appearances by sharing a lift to the new president’s inauguration. Hoover mostly scowled as FDR tipped top hat to the crowds. But he honored the tradition that, with rare exception (assassination, resignation, natural death, and a few 19th century cases of animosity), the outgoing president has always made some sort of symbolic show on Inauguration Day. It’s perhaps the ceremony’s most powerful, if occasionally awkward, symbol of the peaceful passage of power.

The Rockettes perform during the Celebration of Freedom Concert on the Ellipse on Jan. 19, 2005. The Rockettes have been assigned to dance at President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration this month. Photo by Chris Gardner/Associated Press.

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I recently learned that, in the second grade, I was part of presidential history.

Every morning during the 1980-1981 school year, I walked the five blocks between my family’s home in southwest Pasadena and Allendale Elementary School, where I was in Beverly Thomas’ class. Sometimes I went back in the evening to play in the Little League at Allendale Park, adjacent to school.

The round trip seemed unremarkable then, as I passed homes and dumpy apartment buildings. But just last month, my hometown of Pasadena announced that my path had crossed with greatness. The city installed a plaque on the sidewalk outside one of those dumpy apartment buildings I used to pass—an ugly place at 253 Glenarm Street. The plaque explains that an Occidental College sophomore occupied one of the apartments in 1980 and 1981.

The occupant’s name was Barack Obama.

This revelation—that the president of the United States was once my neighbor—might seem trivial. But it has had a powerful impact, making the California news and drawing a crowd of more than 200 people for the plaque’s December dedication. Seizing on this public relations momentum, my own state senator, Anthony Portantino, has proposed renaming a portion of the 134 Freeway, connecting Pasadena with Glendale, the “President Barack H. Obama Freeway.”

A plaque is seen in front of the Pasadena residence where Barack Obama lived during his sophomore year at Occidental College. Photo by John Antczak/Associated Press.

I still live less than two miles from the sidewalk plaque, and coach my kids in the same Little League where I played. And so, while I’m not a big fan of the president, I’ve found myself stopping at least a half dozen times to see the plaque over the holidays. The draw is some combination of childhood nostalgia and the deliciously incongruous 21st century updating of the president-from-a-log-cabin story. Plus, I’m never alone—there always seem to be other curious locals in front of the otherwise forgettable apartment building.

But I must confess I also find the plaque—and my own interest in it— embarrassing, in an “Aren’t we behaving like small-town hicks?” sort of way. And, for the record, I felt that embarrassment even before my in-laws, visiting from Chicago, a city somewhat familiar with the president, made fun of the plaque when I took them to see it.

Obama, after all, left us as fast as he could, transferring from Occidental to Columbia University in New York City after that sophomore year. And the plaque is the product of a conversation between Obama and a city councilman in which the president said he’d loved Pasadena—but could only remember that the street he’d lived on started with a G. (A search of phone directories and utility records identified the address, according to the Pasadena Star-News).

So why is my hometown holding so tightly to such a thin connection to a president? There’s our strong commitment to celebrating African-American history in a city with one of California’s oldest African-American communities (Jackie Robinson grew up in Pasadena). It’s also understandable that Californians are clinging to a president for whom we voted twice, particularly at a time when we’re confronting a president-elect that most of us see as a threat to the republic.

But that doesn’t justify our state’s lack of caution in celebrating Obama so robustly and so quickly, even before he leaves office. There are already two schools named for Obama in Los Angeles, and another in Oakland; more are likely on the way. The town of Seaside, near Monterey, gave its Broadway Avenue a second name—Obama Way—six years ago. And scientific researchers even named a lichen they discovered in the Channel Islands after the president. (The fungus is officially called Caloplaca obamae).

Such celebrations seem excessive because the president hasn’t exactly reciprocated them. The president didn’t dote on California with half the passion Bill Clinton once did. Obama came to our state mostly to raise money and play golf. And he didn’t always have our best interests at heart. He attacked Silicon Valley for not collaborating with his administration on mass surveillance of questionable legality. He turned down our recession-era requests for financial assistance that would have prevented the worst of the state budget cuts. And he deported an awful lot of our undocumented neighbors.

A woman takes a picture of the plaque in front of the Pasadena residence where Barack Obama lived during his sophomore year at Occidental College. Photo by John Antczak/Associated Press.

At the very least, high honors for this president should be seen as premature. It’s always dangerous to name things after living people, and he is just 55 years old, with—potentially—decades to screw up his reputation here. Depending on what his successor does, Obama’s legacy may soon seem rather ephemeral.

So why not hold off on renaming more schools or roads for him?

Yes, the stretch of the 134 Freeway in question is near Obama’s alma mater. But that’s too big an honor for a guy who spent such little time here in his youth—and was here only long enough to tie up traffic as an adult. It’d be more appropriate to name that bit of freeway for Mildred Pierce, the title character of the novel and 1945 film noir, whose daughter, a bratty social climber, dreams of leaving drab Glendale for higher social status in Pasadena. (Perhaps the president, who loves film and literature, might prefer that as well).

In spite of that note of caution, I must confess that I feel differently about the sidewalk plaque in my old neighborhood. Yes, the plaque—or, as some of us locals prefer to call it, the Obama Monument—is hokey. And yes, if you have friends from Pasadena, you may have to get used to us bragging that Obama was once our homie.

But I say we swallow our pride and keep the plaque (and maybe even have T-shirts made). It’s a sweet little reminder that sometimes history is hiding just around the corner, and living in a really shabby apartment.

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You can see that war footing—and the appeal for deference—in the open-ended “war on terror,” declared by President George W. Bush in 2001 and continued by President Barack Obama under less grandiose rhetoric. That notion that we’re a nation under siege has emboldened the president and the Congress to expand the national security state—think of the new Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and all the government surveillance programs we keep learning about—at the expense of individual liberty and privacy. To critics of these enhancements of government power and America’s “wars of choice”—including me, a historian and retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel—the typical response went something like this: “Don’t you get it? We’re at war!”

That said, the rhetorical goal is not to mobilize the American people fully for war, on a World War II scale. Rather, in this post-draft America, presidents exhort the public to leave the fighting, and even the thinking about war, to others, to the professionals. Again, the government asks more for deference than sacrifice. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001, George W. Bush famously encouraged Americans to visit Disney World, to go shopping, and otherwise to enjoy life. At the same time, U.S. presidents have become unstinting in their praise of the military, alternately describing it as the greatest force for human liberation in history (Bush again) or the greatest military in all of human history (Obama).

Isolation from war’s burdens and costs, augmented by hyperbolic praise of the U.S. military, serves a powerful rhetorical purpose. It preempts, deters, and silences criticism of official government and military actions. It empowers the cult of the expert, as matters of war are advertised as being beyond the grasp of ordinary citizens. Information about war is kept classified or otherwise withheld from the people in the name of national security. In the U.S. media, retired generals and admirals interpret military actions and wars for the people, ensuring ordinary citizens are kept on message. And that message is clear: citizens are to support “our” troops, but otherwise to keep out of wars, which are not “ours” to own in any significant way.

The war rhetoric of recent U.S. presidents is intended to turn Americans into unthinking spectators who are encouraged to root for the “home team” without considering the methods or the final score. In this, U.S. presidents, aided by a compliant media, have largely succeeded.

President Obama, awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, is a master of polite euphemism applied to war and its horrors. He replaced the Bush/Cheney “war on terror” with the quotidian-sounding “overseas contingency operations.” Instead of boasting of killing terrorists, Obama talks of them being “taken off the battlefield,” mainly by Hellfire missiles fired from drones. In 2014, talking about torture by Americans prior to his presidency, Obama got downright quaint when, speaking for the U.S. government, he said, “We tortured some folks.”

Like his predecessors, Obama has worked to keep the American people sidelined from wars. For this he is rarely criticized by the political left. He draws fire mainly from the right, from militarists like former Vice President Cheney. In a speech before the American Enterprise Institute in May 2009, Cheney condemned Obama for using words “that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and the terrorist enemy.” America, Cheney declared, was at war with terrorists and other “killers and would-be mass murderers.” Yet Cheney himself resorted to euphemism when he repeatedly invoked “enhanced interrogation techniques” (such as waterboarding) in place of torture.

Cheney, for all his dissembling about torture, did put a finger on a problem: America’s collective acquiescence in the temporizing of language when applied to war-making. Cheney stares unblinkingly at euphemisms like “enhanced interrogation,” which cloak the reality of bodies being slammed against walls and water being poured down people’s throats. Americans’ eyes glaze over when their government uses terms like “collateral damage,” a euphemism for killed and wounded, rather than honest descriptions of innocents blown to bits or babies crushed under rubble.

The purpose of such deceitful language is plain, as George Orwell explained in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language:”

Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification … People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

This last point is essential. The U.S. government refuses to give a full accounting of the horrific costs of perpetual war, knowing full well that if it did, U.S. citizens would be far less likely to support war efforts.

Consider the official military names for America’s wars. “Operation Enduring Freedom” took us to Afghanistan, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” to Iraq. “Freedom,” not war or invasion, is the key word. That U.S. troops could be an alien and invasive presence in foreign countries is denied by the very construct that they are freedom-bringers.

The costs of war, especially to innocents, are rarely mentioned in America. The Obama administration recently issued its “drone report” on civilian casualties on a Friday afternoon, July 1, just before the July 4 weekend, a tried and true method of minimizing coverage by the mainstream media. According to human rights groups as well as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, that report significantly undercounted the number of civilians killed in U.S. drone strikes, yet few seemed upset with this “accidental and regrettable” collateral damage.

For the last half-century, America has been constantly at war. Vietnam. The Cold War. Military interventions in Grenada, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, and across the globe. Why all these wars? And why all the warrior rhetoric? As Orwell noted in 1984, for the purpose of maintaining government authority, “All that is needed is that a war should exist.”

Couple Orwell’s insight with President Obama’s tepid rhetoric on war—his studied lack of emotional mobilization—and a pattern emerges. Constant warfare is America’s new normal, business as usual. At the same time, detachment from war’s realities serves to obscure the repetitive, Groundhog Day nature of those wars and their lack of progress. In this way, a constant state of war, real and rhetorical, is spoiling our democracy, as James Madison predicted it might two centuries ago.

In seeking to neutralize dissent about war with euphemisms, America’s presidents are abetting violence both here and around the world and prolonging wars with costs borne mainly by foreign peoples who cannot use a cloak of words as shelter from its deadly realities.

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This debate is not a new one in American history. Even before the Cold War fears of nuclear warfare, back in the 1930s and 1940s, a similar debate erupted about a different set of security fears and what was then called “home defense.”

During the Roosevelt years, liberal democracies everywhere felt threatened by the rise of the twin absolutist ideologies that were gaining ground across the globe: fascism and communism. News of atrocities committed in the name of these isms—in Ethiopia, China, Spain, the Soviet Union—frightened Americans. Many Americans wanted to join the fight against fascism overseas, while plenty of others embraced isolationism. But all feared the possibility of aerial bombings, chemical and biological weapons, and a panic that could install a dictator in the White House.

Fear-drenched messages resounded nationwide. Radio dramas such as Archibald MacLeish’s “Air Raid” featured sounds of children screaming as bombs whizzed through the air. Americans read about new “super-bombers” that soon could fly non-stop across the Atlantic and bomb U.S. cities. Theories about how we could be attacked also seeped into the culture: What if the Nazis set up bases in Iceland or Bermuda?

In January 1939, FDR said the world “has grown so small and weapons of attack so swift [that] the distant points from which attacks may be launched are completely different from what they were 20 years ago.” By the spring of 1940, as Hitler’s Wehrmacht rolled across the French countryside, FDR declared that, in essence, isolation was a prescription for national suicide.

“Civilian Defense in Detroit.”

New Deal liberals, previously consumed with trying to expand the safety net to curb capitalism’s sharp edges, began to grapple with citizens’ obligations to democracy in times of crisis: How should civilians work with government to keep themselves and their communities safe from enemy attacks? Should Americans be militarized to prepare for war? Should individual liberties be abridged in the name of protecting America in its hour of need? How should “home defense” help keep civilians calm and maintain their morale? Finally, should home defense improve people’s lives by combatting malnutrition, poverty, joblessness, and despair?

In May 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD)—the precursor to today’s Department of Homeland Security.

There were two competing, bold, drastically distinct liberal visions for what home defense should mean in the lives of Americans. The debate set Eleanor Roosevelt’s social defense vision against New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s brand of national security liberalism. Eleanor Roosevelt was the OCD’s assistant director, the first First Lady to have an official role in an administration; La Guardia was its director while also serving as mayor.

The two of them argued over the classic trade-off between “guns” and “butter.” For La Guardia, the need was to militarize society, whereas Mrs. Roosevelt endorsed “guns” but not at the cost of sacrificing a continued focus on social programs. La Guardia and his supporters were willing to trample on civil liberties, while social defense liberals like the First Lady made more of an effort to defend individual rights and even made a stab at protecting Japanese-Americans from the racist hysteria sweeping the nation after Pearl Harbor.

The First Lady adopted a broad conception of home defense. Her vision featured a government-led and citizen-powered movement to make Americans “as much interested today in seeing [citizens] well-housed, well-clothed, and well-fed, obtaining needed medical care and recreation” as in military security. She insisted that the country had to live its values. In wartime, she argued, “every place in this country must be made a better place in which to live, and therefore more worth defending.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, center, acting as assistant director of civilian defense, at a 1941 conference on “women’s activities in civilian defense.”

To Mrs. Roosevelt, World War II was not only a struggle to defeat fascism militarily. It also required a wartime New Deal to secure a better future by mounting a national effort to attack Americans’ unmet human needs.

The First Lady was charged with overseeing volunteer participation in home defense. She helped recruit more than ten million volunteers, including an estimated three million who performed some type of social defense role. Citizens working through their government fed women and children, provided medical and child care, trained defense plant workers, led salvage campaigns, improved transit systems, planted victory gardens, and helped women learn about nutritious diets. Her campaign helped make it acceptable for liberals to champion big government both in terms of military affairs and social democratic experimentation—a government devoted to both guns and butter.

La Guardia, whose New Deal partnership with FDR had modernized and humanized the nation’s most populous city, embodied the “guns” and anti-civil liberties side of the debate. He worried about social disorder. Watching Rotterdam, Paris, and London being bombed from his perch in City Hall, La Guardia thought that American cities could eventually meet the same fate. Incensed that the administration hadn’t yet established a home defense agency, the mayor lobbied the White House until FDR signed the executive order in May 1941 and tapped La Guardia to be his home defense chief.

La Guardia brandished a new form of national security liberalism that prioritized military over social defense (and individual rights) in times of crisis. Under his vision, a government-civilian partnership would militarize civilians’ lives. He proposed requiring big city workers to volunteer as firefighters and learn how to handle a chemical weapons attack. He recommended distributing gas masks to 50 million civilians, putting a mobile water pump on every city block, and establishing five volunteer fire brigades for every city brigade. A fourth military branch composed of civilians would prepare cities to endure air raids.

La Guardia relied on fear to sell his message. He could come off like Orson Welles (creator of “War of the Worlds”) on steroids. If the public was fearful, he reasoned, it would be inspired to mobilize in its own self-defense.

While he did aid FDR in sowing a war mindset and alerting Americans to the Nazi peril, he also dispensed with civic niceties and civil liberties. In contrast to Eleanor Roosevelt’s reaction to Pearl Harbor, La Guardia asked citizens to spy on other citizens, shuttered Japanese-American clubs and restaurants, called his media critics “Japs” and “friends of Japs,” and ordered Japanese-Americans confined to their homes until the government could determine “their status.”

America’s leading urban reformer pushed liberalism in a novel direction, as he fought to use the federal government to militarize civilians in order to maximize their safety. Ultimately, social defense took a backseat to military security during the Cold War. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John Kennedy launched a range of domestic reforms aimed at strengthening the home front socially and economically, yet military security—loyalty oaths, nuclear arsenals, evacuation drills—typically took priority over social defense. The kind of far-reaching wartime New Deal envisioned by Eleanor Roosevelt was never enacted during the Cold War. Even Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” was cut short partly due to the demand for “guns” during the Vietnam War.

The trade-offs are evident even today. Liberals argue with conservatives and among themselves about the proper balance between individual freedom and national security. Equally controversial, social reforms to improve life at home are locked in conflict with steps to keep us physically safe. This is not just a question of resources. It boils down to how we see ourselves as citizens of our democracy. Some liberals, for example, argue that “nation-building right here at home,” as President Obama suggested in 2012, is as important as cracking down on suspected terrorist threats or planting democracy in the Middle East.

All of these debates are traceable to the struggle among liberals to alert citizens to the war on “two fronts”—at home and abroad—during the Roosevelt years. As long as America has enemies overseas and threats from within, the fight over the best balance between guns and butter and between military security and civil liberties will remain central to America’s national identity—an enduring legacy of the campaign by liberals such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia in World War II to liberate Americans from the grip of fear.

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There is a clear pattern, a back and forth, that my co-authors and I identified in researching for our book, The Party Decides. While rule changes may give the upper hand to voters for a few presidential cycles, elites will always try to find ways to stage this voting process in their favor.

At this summer’s conventions, both parties are reconsidering the rules of the presidential selection process, after Donald Trump’s divisive triumph on the Republican side and Bernie Sanders’ strong Democratic challenge raised questions about the fairness of procedures. But no matter what reforms to the selection process that parties may pursue, the back-and-forth struggle between elites and the voters will likely continue.

Today, the nominating process is itself the product of reforms that didn’t alter this dynamic. Presidential elections now consist of both primaries—where residents simply cast their ballots in the area designated to them based off their address—and caucuses—where voters gather openly to decide which candidate to support.

This mix of primaries and caucuses is relatively new to American politics.

In the early decades of the Republic, members of Congress got together to decide presidential nominations. The rest of the nation was totally frozen out of the process. In the early 19th century, reforms designed to make the process more representative led to national party conventions. These gatherings enabled leaders from across the country to take part in the momentous decision of nominating a potential president. The convention system lasted for more than a century until there was a reform movement put in place to increase participation even further.

The modern presidential nominating process wasn’t born until 1968. The Democratic Party—like the rest of the country—was deeply and sharply divided over the war in Vietnam, when party leaders meeting at the convention in Chicago decided to select the sitting vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to take on Richard Nixon in November. There was rioting in the streets and shouting in the convention hall. The problem was not just that Humphrey was intimately associated with the Johnson administration’s hawkish military policies in Southeast Asia. What drew the ire of many was that Humphrey had failed to compete in any of the primaries and caucuses that nominating season. He was plucked from the wings and foisted upon the party in a very undemocratic fashion.

In 1968, this type of political movement could occur because primaries and caucuses were not binding. In the aftermath of that bitter convention, Democrats created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to democratize the nominating process. They decided that, starting in 1972, candidates who won the most votes in each contest would receive the most delegates from that state, conferring significantly more importance on the primaries and caucuses. Additionally, the candidate who amassed a majority of delegates—2,383 for Democrats and 1,237 for Republicans—would automatically become the party’s nominee. While McGovern-Fraser was a Democratic Party committee, Republicans followed suit and the two parties had in place extremely similar procedures by 1976.

The goal was to wrest the power to nominate away from the party bosses and give it to the people—and that is exactly what the McGovern-Fraser reforms succeeded in doing. Candidates for president were now essentially required to submit themselves to the voters in order to be crowned their party’s nominee. Democratic Party elites, seeing things slipping away, in 1982 convened the Hunt Commission to reform the process yet again. This time they sought to regain some of their influence by mandating that 20 percent of the delegates would not be bound by voter preferences and therefore would be able to choose whomever they wanted to support come convention time. These superdelegates only exist on one side of the party divide however, as the Republicans did not choose to emulate the Democrats this time.

One irony of this back and forth is that America’s presidential nominating process is among the most open and democratic in the world. Most other political parties worldwide do not have any sort of primaries, and many that do limit rank-and-file participation in a variety of ways. Also, some parties screen candidates and, without elite support, one cannot even run for the nomination.

But still, the litany of complaints about our system is long: The primary process goes on forever. It is too expensive for non-elite candidates. Iowa and New Hampshire, two relatively unrepresentative states that lead off the proceedings, have disproportionate influence on the final outcome. The votes of many citizens essentially don’t count because in most instances the contest has been wrapped up before their states’ scheduled primaries and caucuses.

Of course, if your preferred candidate is ultimately victorious, the complaints tend to be muted. But supporters of the losing candidates are often quite vocal in their disparagement of the system—and 2016 was no different in this regard.

If you look at the Democratic race, it was clearly a case of the party deciding for Hillary Clinton before the voting began. Clinton quickly locked in virtually all of the elite endorsements, making her the strongest frontrunner the modern system has ever witnessed. Clinton also benefited from the overwhelming support of those infamous superdelegates. And finally, the Democratic National Committee initially scheduled a relatively small number of debates and broadcasted most of them on Saturday nights, minimizing the potential damage to a Clinton campaign that had huge systematic advantages. Despite running under a legal and ethical cloud for most of her campaign, and facing a powerful insurgency led by a surprisingly charismatic challenger, Clinton prevailed in the end and became the first woman ever to be nominated by a major political party for president.

On the Republican side, the lead-up to the primaries and caucuses as well as the ultimate outcome could not have been more different. Party elites clearly would not or could not decide on a preferred candidate during the invisible primary period, splitting their support among several broadly acceptable aspirants including Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. This opened the door for Donald Trump to capitalize on a populist anger simmering among the Republican primary electorate. Trump won his party’s nomination without any elite support going into the primaries and caucuses and prevailed despite most party elites preferring anybody but him.

One can already see countervailing pressures on the two major parties resulting from the drama of 2016. Sanders supporters are calling to abolish superdelegates and change states’ primary processes to make them more accessible. And Republican leaders will seek to gain a firmer grip on their nominating process to avoid the debacle that has been Donald Trump’s unlikely candidacy. In fact, we saw this play out earlier this week as anti-Trump forces in Cleveland tried to force various procedural roll call votes as a way of, if not stopping Trump, embarrassing him and his supporters.

No matter the reforms, the struggle between elites and voters will go on.

The post Americans Have Been Fed Up With the Presidential Nomination Process for More Than 200 Years appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.