U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media in Washington, D.C., on Thursday.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters
George Santayana was probably wrong; those who cannot remember the past aren’t necessarily doomed to repeat it. Mark Twain was probably wrong, too; history may not repeat itself, but it probably doesn’t rhyme either. Karl Marx also probably was wrong; history doesn’t repeat itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. And Henry Ford was probably wrong as well; history isn’t more or less bunk.
Still, there is something a bit eerily similar about this era and the 1960s in the United States.
Assassinations by gunfire. Turmoil in the streets. Broad re-evaluation of the role of government. Deep disquiet about the future of American culture. Generations going off in wildly different directions. The advent of law-and-order talk. A sense that things – everything – have gone awry. A revival of the words civil war.
The current age is not a repeat of the earlier period of turmoil and upheaval. There may be, as Shakespeare suggested more than four centuries ago, a tide in the affairs of humankind, but those tides do not rise and fall on unchanged political, social and cultural sands. Those sands change, they are constantly shifting, continually taking on new shape, regularly transforming the contours of the broader landscape.
But comparisons with previous eras are not without value.
Examining the role of collective security in geopolitical affairs in the light of the founding of, in order, the League of Nations (1920), the United Nations (1945) and NATO (1949) provides perspective on the current reshaping of the European power structure, fueled by the way Donald Trump seems to be open to disengaging, or pulling back, from current transnational alignments.
Exploring the ascendancy of Vladimir Putin in the context of the czars, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, has value in assessing the nature of Russian leadership. Looking at the contemporary spurt of Canadian nationalism, the response to Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about acquiring Canada and imposing punishing tariffs, is useful in terms of the legacies of the rebellions of 1837, the constitutional independence of 1867 and the 1965-1967 burst of countrywide pride in the period of the Maple Leaf Flag and Expo 67.
Likewise, America in the 1960s and the 2020s – as long as we don’t take it too far. Because in seeing the surface similarities between the two eras, we also see the profound differences – and thus may come to understand our own age with more clarity.
The assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., for example, provide context to this week’s assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk (and to the two assassination attempts on Mr. Trump, the shootings of the Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses, and the killings of the Israeli embassy employees in Washington). They may be expressions more of very different deep cultural changes and the persistence of American gun culture as much as an exact replication of another time.
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The re-evaluation of the role of the central government in the lives of Americans may be a repeat phenomenon – it happened in 1829 under Andrew Jackson, in the early 1900s under Theodore Roosevelt, in the 1930s under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, after the Lyndon Johnson period of the 1960s, again under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. But the underlying conditions of each of these, especially the overhaul of the role of government in the mid 1960s, were significantly different, reflecting periods of economic and social life as different as the onset of industrialization (Jackson), the concentration of economic wealth and power (Theodore Roosevelt), global economic depression (FDR), racial and economic ferment (Johnson) and government bloating and ineffectiveness (Reagan). A similar re-evaluation occurred in Canada with the Joe Clark and Stephen Harper reactions to centralized government, but the two occurred in vastly different Canadas and lasted for vastly different spans of time.
Similarly with turmoil in American streets. Mass protests of the sort that opposition to Mr. Trump spawned occurred in the Civil War period (in New York City, over the draft); in the civil-rights era (over segregation and voting rights); in the women’s suffrage movement (over gender equality); during the Vietnam war (in reaction to a military quagmire and questions about geopolitical strategy regarding the spread of Communism); and throughout the period following the Roe v Wade decision legalizing abortion (involving the question of biological choice and related issues of feminism). But the cause of these mass demonstrations were as different as the secession of 11 Southern states and the rights of women to control their bodies.
The apparent echo of the law-and-order refrain similarly is misleading. Richard Nixon’s and Donald Trump’s call for respect for uniformed law-enforcement authorities and campaigns against crime share political opportunism, but the Nixon efforts came after explosions of riots in, among many others, Detroit, Los Angeles and Newark, while the Trump anti-crime drive comes at a period of general decline in crime.
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What may be different are the way Mr. Trump, in less than eight months in office, has changed the nature of the presidency (though here there are whiffs of FDR) and raised disquieting questions about the survival of democratic values (though Andrew Jackson, in a period of immature political parties and nascent ideologies, and the presidencies of FDR, from the left, and Richard Nixon, from the right, presented vague similarities). But these examples provide perspective on the past rather than prescriptions of the future.
The value of all these examples – of all these apparent similarities – is context.
They tells us that there is a strain of violence in American political life. They remind us that the country is continually re-evaluating the role of government in the broader society. They teach us that dissent is a sturdy American tradition. They prompt us to recall that presidential overreach is a persistent danger. They instruct us that successive generations have views often in reaction to, and in collision with, their predecessors.
And they inform us that, from the telegraph to the telephone to the iPhone; from primitive corduroy roads to railroads, airplanes, and highways; from movable type to typewriters to word processors; from the quill-pen manifestos of the American Revolution period to the mass paperbacks of the Second World War to the Kindle; from blood-letting to antibiotics to chemotherapy to gene editing and therapeutics; and from mainframe computers to the desktop to the Apple Watch to AI, tinkerers, technological visionaries and scientific and medical researchers have created more sweeping transformation than political figures and social-change activists, with the possible exceptions of Washington, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, FDR, Martin Luther King…and Donald Trump.
It is well, of course, to recall Winston Churchill’s view, expressed almost 85 years ago in his remarkable eulogy to his rival Neville Chamberlain, that “history with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”
And some broad perspective might be found by adapting the language that John F. Kennedy employed in the “Meaning of Courage” passage that the Massachusetts senator used to close his 1956 Profiles in Courage: The stories of past events “can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration” – and they can provide sober perspective. But they cannot fully explain contemporary events. To think they can is, as Henry Ford might say, bunk.