The soul of the nation
In case you’re wondering, the winner of the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Iowa caucuses were Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz, respectively. In other words, not only is this midwestern foregathering in the frozen snow not a reliable predictor of the next president of the United States, it isn’t even a reliable predictor of the winner of the next Republican presidential primary.
That’s the good news. In other words, it portends nothing ominous that it’s a near certainty (in the wee hours of Tuesday, Greenwich Mean Time, as I write this) that Donald Trump will win this odd little quadrennial straw poll. The bad news is that a majority of Americans in the Republican Party nevertheless regard Donald Trump as a legitimate candidate in the first place.
This is America in 2024. Nearly one hundred years ago, in April of 1924, Adolf Hitler began his sentence in Lansdowne prison. He had been imprisoned for staging an insurrection against the Weimar Republic in Germany. In the eyes of many he was regarded as a hero. In the eyes of others he was regarded as a villain. Either way, he used his trial to make speeches. Those speeches were lovingly recorded by the German press.
In other words, if we are prepared to affirm that the Iowa caucuses predict nothing good for Trump, what are we to say about Trump in prison? Historically, prison did Hitler a world of good, politically speaking.
No, we must not call upon history to tell our tale, we must call upon our own resolve. While history is replete with cautionary tales, it’s a lousy predictor of future events. The future is in our hands.
Even so, we have the right to mourn the undeniable fact that the cautionary historic tale of one hundred years ago was not learned very well, or at all, by too many Americans. The proof of this rests in the fact that, despite his use of rhetoric straight from Hitler, Trump was able to carry the Iowa caucuses by a majority. We have long understood that millions of Americans are MAGA. It’s still shocking to see it writ large in Iowa.
This is the sad state of affairs in America today. Trump’s utterances are as effective now in rallying our worst impulses as they were in the original German one hundred years ago. Some Americans, ensconced in their armchair privilege, are as prepared to condemn whole peoples based on irrelevancies such as their national origin, their religion and the colour of their skin in 2024 as they were in 1924. Human social evolution sometimes moves at glacial speeds too slow to be noticed.
The election of 2024 is more than just a presidential election, it is a referendum on the soul of the nation. The extent to which Joe Biden wins will tell us much about the state of the health of that soul. I will stand up with each of you to fight for that soul, to vote for that soul, and yes, to even pray for that soul. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.