The Tides of American History

Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg, Chancellor of the German Empire, and wit.

Otto von Bismarck is supposed to have said “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.”

Time and again, it looks true. Speaking as a Canadian, I am necessarily astonished in some dark recess of my consciousness that this mad reckless experiment in unchecked mob rule, without benefit of monarchy or the continuity of legitimate British authority, has somehow not yet collapsed.

Yet it seems as though, every time, just as they are about to make a perfect hash of it, some improbable figure emerges and pulls it all off. Beginning, of course, with George Washington, a mediocre soldier and by all accounts no intellect, who should by rights have died at Great Meadows in 1754.

Trump begins to look like such a figure. His presidency looks as though it might be transformational.

And, that said, hasn’t an odd pattern emerged? Every forty years, counting backwards, as one always should in Wonderland, America seems to get a transformational president out of nowhere.

Mount Rushmore, helpfully modernized by a Trump staffer in a tweet.

2020—Trump, the reality TV star who had never held public office.

1980—Reagan, who won the Cold War, rewrote the book on government economics, and restored American optimism. A movie actor; reputedly, again, not very bright.

1940—FDR, who won the Second World War, defeated Nazism, guided the US through the Depression, rewrote the book on government economics, and transformed the modern American left. By tradition, he should have been leaving office in 1940.

1900—Teddy Roosevelt, who ushered America into the Industrial Age and established it as a world power, and initiated the new government creed of “progressivism.” Not to mention conservationism. An accidental president, who assumed office through assassination.

1860—Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery, defeated the Confederate secession, and essentially founded the Republican Party. Just a backwoods lawyer with little formal education.

Definitely something going on here, isn’t there?

There even seem to be lesser bumps at the twenty-year interval. 2000 was Bush 43 and the war on terror. 1960 was Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. 1920 was, roughly, Wilson, the First World War, the Fourteen Points, and the abortive League of Nations. These off-year intervals seem to begin with promise of greatness, but somehow they are aborted.

The one essential figure in American history? The founder of the illuminated line of imams?

But walking back before 1860, it breaks down. 1820? Should have been transformational. That was the presidency of James Monroe. A good time, by all accounts, “The Era of Good Feelings,” and American hegemony asserted over the entire New World with the “Monroe Doctrine.” But still—does Monroe stand out in the proximate company of Jackson or Jefferson?

Perhaps in those days, God was busy elsewhere. Or perhaps the rhythm changed with the Civil War.

Or, perhaps, there was some glitch or reset in the matrix somewhere between 1820 and the Civil War. Everybody knows there was a reboot of Western civilization in 1848. That might have been it.