Yale historian David Blight has an interesting article in The Atlantic this week on how emergencies teach us the importance of government. Blight writes:
In August 1861, several months after the secession of 11 southern states and the outbreak of the Civil War, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass declared that “nations seldom listen to advice from individuals, however reasonable. They are taught less by theories than by facts and events.”
The United States is currently being educated by facts and events. And, as in other times of crisis—war, economic collapse, natural disasters—even those who do not like government are realizing that they need it. Government can protect them; it might save their life and livelihood. Irony will not die in the time of the coronavirus; even many of those who believe the federal government should not intervene in society except for national defense, and would happily privatize most elements of public life, are now straining to have government save society. With this issue, we have a long history.
The times that “try men’s souls,” in Thomas Paine’s phrase, are usually those that test our fundamental ideas and values, or challenge the nations and societies by which we organize ourselves. The coronavirus pandemic is challenging America’s political leaders at all levels, and advocates are pressing them to use their powers in ways that have little recent precedent. It also poses broader questions: What do the people of this republic owe their governments, and what do governments owe their people? For 230 years this has been one of the most significant and fiercely contested questions in our polity. We are now asking it during every waking hour.
All across the country, Americans are responding to the shock of events, and wondering how this public-health crisis and economic collapse hit so suddenly. And we are once again, as in 1861 and 1933, struggling in fear to understand whether our political institutions, our moral imagination, and our leadership are equipped to respond. In whom and in what do we believe? How should we act in our social isolation? Are our institutions of medicine, public health, education, banking, and politics a match not merely for a virus but for the social collapse that has come with its infection?
Individualism runs extremely deep in the American mind and culture. But it is in our most profound crises that we discover, against the suspicions and beliefs of millions, that government can be our friend, even our savior.
Near the end of the Civil War, President Lincoln admitted: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” (How we now yearn for that kind of humility from our leaders in high places.) Those leaders who have been forced to answer the question of what governments owe people in existential crises are tested not only on their courage and intellect, but on whether they are capable of the humility necessary to see a “whole,” as the conflict-resolution specialist Donna Hicks writes, where “everyone matters.”
Hi Patrick…This image of Abraham Lincoln is my Copyrighted work. It is not attributed here, nor was permission requested. That is called Copyright Infringement. Can you please credit me with a LINK? If not, please remove it. Thank you. Sharon Cummings.
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/abraham-lincoln-art-colorful-abe-by-sharon-cummings-sharon-cummings.html
OK, I will remove it. Thank You.