Dick Goodwin’s Example Can Set Precedent, If We Follow It
I had planned on publishing something earlier this week, but everything I wrote felt too self-pitying to publish. I have no answers to what happened last week — nobody does — other than that the consequences will be dire, and that we have lost the order that has governed the world since the end of WWII, nearly 80 years ago.
This 80-year mark aligns with the key theory of sociologists William Strauss and Neil Howe, whose book The Fourth Turning is a favorite of Steve Bannon’s. Simply put, Strauss and Howe theorized that every 80 years, American society reaches an inflection point — the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and WWII — that threatens the health of the nation. Historians and sociologists have debunked this idea in the past, but in my newfound grief for this nation, I have wondered if Strauss and Howe were right: or rather, if an ex-friend of mine who hocked this theory like a miracle tonic was right.
I have little desire to name this ex-friend (really an ex-online acquaintance) because I have called her out previously and don’t need her finding this. To make a long story short, she went from being a Hillary Clinton supporter to a far-right Trumper with off-the-charts transphobia and a paint-by-numbers essay format that she recycles every week: Protect kids from trans people + Democrats control Hollywood + My haters are Salem Witch Hunters + Fourth Turning = Trump Forever. It’s all nonsense: but I’ve been stuck on the Fourth Turning part.
In one of her recent “essays” (I’m not offering a hyperlink, it’s not worth your time) she wrote:
“By the end of the war, America was settling into its own kind of utopian vision. Everything that led up to the war ended and soldiers came home, they birthed the Baby Boom and tried to make things seem normal…After that, the counterculture revolution exploded forth. The Fourth Turning explains these cycles like the seasons. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. The Winter part? That’s where we are now…I see evidence of the Fourth Turning everywhere I look.”
She goes on to cite YouTube videos, TikTok, podcasts, and all the things that we now know have radicalized young men, and that this Fourth Turning, such as it is, will make our society better by rejecting liberalism in favor of a new American culture that embraces the authoritarian wankings of a new dictator in order to destroy the liberal “utopia” that they have tried to hold on to since Obama left office in 2017.
If her monomaniacal obsession with the Fourth Turning has any credence at all, it’s in the fact that Gen Z men broke for Trump by a big margin, and even some young women, too. This is the nail in the coffin for the theory that racism will just die off with previous generations: as long as there are Joe Rogans and Joe Rogan-knockoffs to give people someone else to blame for their lot in life, there will always be racism, sexism, and all other kinds of isms.
And this isn’t necessarily limited to the conservatives. If the far left and the far right agree on anything, it’s in a long-awaited retreat from that international order, which has existed to protect nations from falling under tyranny. Granted, the old order didn’t always work out: growing up amidst the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq turned many of my generation against the idea of intervention. Even when intervention was necessary, like in Syria, public backlash prevented Obama from properly mitigating the damage Assad did. And even if some of the protestors against the United States’ support of Israel advocated a productive change in our relationship with the state, the antisemitism that emerged from the more extreme of them revealed a disturbing belief that only by cutting off ties from it entirely could the United States regain any moral standing.
For much of the last week I’ve worried that my ex-friend was right in predicting the Fourth Turning’s arrival on behalf of evil rather than good, even though she mostly cared how it would affect the Academy Awards (spoiler alert: it won’t). Is it possible that the 80-year mark that awaits us will be led by young people who desire to impose a new isolationism on the United States that mirrors their own?
The obvious answer is of course not. You don’t cede ideological ground to your enemies amidst a war of ideas over right and wrong. But only through touching base with one of my heroes, the late Dick Goodwin, could I turn away from that despair.
Dick Goodwin, for those who don’t know, remade America through the power of his words. As a young lawyer, he led the investigation into the TV quiz shows, as depicted in Robert Redford’s excellent film Quiz Show. After that, he went on to work in the Kennedy Administration, writing speeches on the campaign trail and working on the Alliance for Progress program to foster partnerships with Latin American nations, winning the admiration of no less than Che Guevara. As an aide to Lyndon Johnson, he would write LBJ’s speech to Congress introducing the Voting Rights Act, in which he said, “we shall overcome.” And he was instrumental in convincing Bobby Kennedy to run for President in 1968, although the tragic end to that campaign led to Goodwin’s exodus from politics.
As part of my grieving process over Trump’s first election, I read Goodwin’s memoir Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. In that book, he talked about the America he came of age in, and how he gained a vision of a better world through his independent spirit and boundless curiosity. A few months after I read the book, I was fortunate enough to spend time in Concord, Massachusetts with him and his wife, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
This experience had a profound impact on my life. At that moment, I was drifting. I had planned on working in the theater full-time, but Trump’s election had made a career in the arts look small. Like me, Dick loved theater and literature, and imbued his work with that love. Although he was slowing down at this time, his memories were intact. He could recite whole passages of literature from memory — while at dinner, I heard him recite the entirety of “Casey at the Bat” with an ease that would put that poem’s original performer, the vaudevillian DeWolfe Hopper, to shame. We discussed our mutual love of Shakespeare, during which I asked him why no other writer could match his insights into character, to which he responded “I think Shakespeare had a genetic mutation” — an unprovable assertion, but as good an explanation as any into the unexplainable nature of talent. I came away from that experience determined to follow in his example to make this country better than its basest nature.
This week, I began reading Doris’s latest book, An Unfinished Love Story, about her life with Dick. The book begins with his decision to finally go through his boxes of memorabilia from his years with the Kennedys and LBJ. He said to her:
“‘My eighty-year lifespan occupies more than a third of our republic’s history. That means our democracy is merely three ‘Goodwins’ long.’
I tried to suppress a smile.
‘Doris, one Goodwin ago, when I was born, we were in the midst of the Great Depression. Pearl Harbor happened on December 7, 1941, my tenth birthday. It ruined my whole party! If we go back two Goodwins we find Concord Village roiled in furor over the Fugitive Slave Act. A third Goodwin will bring us back to the point that if we went out our front door, took a left, and walked down the road, we might just see those embattled farmers and witness the commencement of the Revolutionary War.’
He glanced at the newspapers and went to his study on the far side of the house. An hour later, he was at my door to read aloud a paragraph he had just written:
‘Three spans of one long life traverse the whole of our short national history. One thing that’s a look backward over the vicissitudes of our country’s story suggests is that massive and sweeping change will come. And it can come swiftly. Whether or not it is healing and inclusive change depends on us. As ever, such change will generally percolate from the ground up, as in the days of the American Revolution, the antislavery movement, the progressive movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, the environmental movement. From the long view of my life, I see how history turns and veers. The end of our country has loomed many times before. America is not as fragile as it seems.’”
The Revolution. The Civil War. WWII. Eighty years. Plenty of Americans at these times supported the British, the Confederacy, and the Axis, and they may have seemed like a majority. When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, he only received 40% of the vote. That means 60% of the eligible voting population of this country voted for the factions of the Democratic Party that ran competing candidates. Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot in most of the Southern states, and South Carolina seceded the month after his election. Based on these statistics, you’d be right to assume that the majority of this fledgling nation supported slavery and the Confederacy. But even if they did, they were still decimated on the battlefield. The Union’s victory, fragile though it was, led to a new perception of what society could be, if only enough people were willing to stand up against an order that denied the most vulnerable populace of their humanity.
America is not as fragile as it seems. No one will deny we look real fragile right now. Whether Dick might revise those words today is impossible to say. What can be said is that if we can move forward, we must hang on to the belief that an impassioned group of citizens, regardless of whether they’re a statistical minority in the war of ideas, have the power to bend the rest of this nation to their vision.
I’ll grant Strauss and Howe the point that 80 years is a good mark for inflection points, even if it’s a broad one. But those who will argue that it will take us down the road to authoritarianism will always lose to the Dick Goodwins who drag them kicking and screaming towards the light. If you want to muse on whether the 80-year argument has any merit, always choose the theories of an esteemed speechwriter over the alcoholic Substacker. You’ll choose right every time.
