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In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln said, We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. To disenthrall means to free from bondage, to liberate.

This column presents two studies of democracy in action. The global crisis, triggered by the COVID pandemic, calls to mind an earlier existential crisis for our nation. Both, as it happens, come to a head during the Easter season: Lincolns tragically but magnificently, Donald Trumps miserably, in a slow motion dance with death.

In 1776 the founders of our country based their claim to being a new nation on the startling proposition that all men are created equal. Eleven years later the Federal Convention drafted and sent out to the states for ratification a Constitution that counted five enslaved persons in a state as equivalent to three free persons.

By the early 1860s, the incompatibility between our founding documents could no longer be ignored. Either all persons were created equal, or it was OK to give some people more weight than others.

In March 1861, Lincoln was inaugurated president. Almost immediately the nation plunged into civil war.

In 1863, at Gettysburg to dedicate a cemetery for the Union dead, Lincoln never used the word slavery. We the living, he said, must highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

By the time the war was over, Lincoln was no longer mincing words. In his Second Inaugural Address, he eloquently summarized what the Civil War was about.

Fondly do we hope fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant. Five days later, on Good Friday, an assassin shot Lincoln. On Easter Sunday, in churches throughout New England and the mid-Atlantic and mid-western states, Lincoln was mourned as a martyr and hailed as a savior of the Union.

Summing up, historian Jill Lepore writes, A great debate had ended. A terrible war had been won. Slavery was over. However, she added, a more dire reckoning was still required. The war left millions of men, women and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved and buried in unmarked graves. No president consecrated their cemeteries or delivered their Gettysburg Address; no committee of arrangements built monuments to their memory.

A century and a half later, Donald Trump became our president. By early May 2020, a global pandemic was raging: over 1.3 million Americans were infected, more than 80,000 had died. Itwas not just a public health crisis. The nations economy was also crashing: more than 20 million people were out of work; oil at times was fetching less than zero cents per barrel.

To understand how we got to such a state, we must once again confront our nations original sin racism.

Trump in 2016 lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, yet he won the presidency due to the way we count votes. The so-called electoral college was part of a deal struck at the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787. Delegates representing slave owners in the five Southern states insisted on the 3/5th rule. Enslaved people did not vote, but the effect of the 3/5th rule was to give owners of enslaved persons an increment for each slave in their state.

In 2016, the Federal Conventions deal with slave-owners delivered the White House to a brazen racist, whose incompetence and vanity imperils us all. He dithered when a new virus emerged in China and while it spread around the world. He failed to seek guidance on the dangers of the virus or to heed the warnings of his advisers and other authorities about the vulnerability of our economy.

At one of his daily briefings, he called the pandemic unprecedented, displaying spectacular ignorance about the history of life on this planet. When criticized for such errors, he blamed the media, purveyors of fake news, and dared them to contradict him. The most reputable among them refused to take the bait, but his drumbeat of lies and misinformation ravaged public discourse.

The weakened economy led to other dangers. As tax revenues plummeted, mayors, governors and other local officials struggled to meet their responsibilities with sharply diminished resources. The federal government is encouraged by Keysian theory to use deficit spending as a fiscal stimulus, but state and local governments have no such option. They must somehow contrive to balance their budgets.

Now Trump is encouraging protesters who demand that restrictions designed to keep the virus in check be withdrawn immediately so that the nation can get back to work. When public health experts insist that a hasty lifting of these regulations risks a resurgence of the pandemic, Trump complains about remedies that are worse than the disease.

The United States is proud to be a democratic nation. We need to remember, however, that history is not forgiving to nations just because they have chosen to be democracies.

What then does democracy require? It requires political leaders that are honest, like good scientists, willing to admit what they do not know; smart, capable of finding a viable path forward through complex problems; eloquent, able to frame and deliver compelling narratives; and possessed of a sense of humor, able and willing to deliver self-deprecating anecdotes.

Democracy also requires followers citizens who are demanding, able to find and encourage leaders that are worthy of their trust, and wiling to dismiss the rest; and able themselves to sort through the din of public controversy and willing to rise above the nonsense.

These requirements, of leaders and followers, set a high bar for a democracy. May the Lord temper the wind before shorn lambs.

Read more:
Guest columnist Don Robinson: Lincoln, Trump and the demands of democracy - GazetteNET