Today in my politics of history course we discussed how historical thinking features in political rhetoric.

I asked student to read two political speeches:

Trump’s inaugural address (Jan 20, 2017)

and

Biden’s inaugural address (Jan 20, 2021)

A few observations…

Both speeches unfold in the context of dark days. In both speeches, the president addresses the nation at a moment of crisis.

For Trump, it’s American Carnage. Betrayal of ordinary people by Washington elites. Wasted resources spent in foreign lands to prop up undeserving others. Decaying infrastructure. Crap schools. Crime ridden cities overrun by gangs.

For Biden, it’s the lethality of COVID, a crashed and strangulated economy, the anguish of Black Lives Matter, and the Jan 6 effort to overturn the results of the election in an ugly and hateful outburst of political violence.

But here’s a key difference:

For Biden, there is really nothing new in the appearance of these overlapping crises. The country has been through comparable travails: Valley Forge, Civil War, Great Depression, Vietnam and the struggle for Civil Rights, 9/11.

America has been severely tested before. Not once, but many times.

For Trump the crisis is unprecedented and sudden. American history is a story of triumphs, glories, winning, and virtue. Until it wasn’t. A mixed race president dragged us down from that perch and dumped us into a state of decay and disrepair. Trump had gone at other Republicans during the run-up contention, but in his inaugural address, blame rests almost solely on the shoulders of un-American, self-interested others, that is, people like Obama (who sat behind him during the speech).

So what to do? How does the country navigate out of its difficulties and regain its lost traction?

Here, the two speeches differ, and, really, we glimpse two wholly different visions the USA and its history.

For Trump: salvation lies in the past. Make America Great Again presumes that America can be restored to its former glory by turning the clock back and restoring a previous order. The speech is punctuated by nostalgic cliches.

For Biden, there can be no going back. Even if there is inspiration to be taken from our past (he invokes, e.g., Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation), there also are injustices and iniquities there which fall short of our ideals and aspirations. The crooked timber of the past can be used for instruction or even inspiration, but it cannot deliver by itself the straight mast which our ship requires to navigate the current storm.

We must go forward. But how?