1858
“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” – Abraham Lincoln, September 2, 1858
One hundred and sixty two years ago, at the crest of another national crisis, Abraham Lincoln described the American people. It was during the Senatorial election of 1858, and Lincoln was the candidate of the new Republican Party. Republicans were not quite an “abolitionist” Party, but they tended towards limiting and ultimately ending slavery. As Lincoln said, only a week after his “fool the people” phrase:
“I have no doubt that (slavery) would become extinct, for all time to come, if we but re-adopted the policy of the fathers by restricting it to the limits it has already covered–restricting it from the new territories”.
Lincoln was running against his Illinois rival, Stephen Douglas. “The Little Giant”, standing 5’4” a full 12” shorter than Lincoln, was the incumbent. He already had served in the United States Senate for eleven years. During that time, he made his name as a man who could reach the middle. His best-known legislation was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, allowing the people of the territories themselves to vote to determine whether to be slave or free states, a concept called popular sovereignty. This altered the almost forty-year old “Missouri Compromise”, the agreement that drew “a line” across the nation: north free, south slave.
Who’s the Fool
Lincoln lost the Senate election, and Douglas returned to Washington as the Democratic Senator from Illinois. But over the next two years “popular sovereignty” created division, the Dred Scott Decision emboldened the South, and the era of compromise finally ended. Lincoln and Douglas would compete again, this time for the Presidency in 1860. And this time, it was Lincoln who won. We know the rest of that story.
So the question is: were the American voters of the 1850’s, fooled to vote for compromise, or were the voters who voted for or against slavery the fools? Lincoln would say that in 1860, the American people stopped being fooled. However, Lincoln earned less than 40% of the popular vote in a four-way election.
Modern Fools
I believe in another Presidential characterization of American people: the “righteous might” of Franklin Roosevelt. For the past several years, our citizens have had to learn to deal with a “fire hose” of Internet information, some of it real, and lots of it faked. What we thought of as “true fact” in 2012; we now understand was faked by those with an axe to grind, a joke to tell, or even by foreign agents.
It still goes on today. We are told that “Wayfair” is selling children as furniture on its website, that wearing masks is the ultimate infringement on our First Amendment right to freedom of expression, and that President Obama abandoned testing of COVID-19.
But there is a change. The “fake news” is now an Internet “sport”. We are titillated by the rumors, the marshaling of disparate facts to create a believable argument. But we don’t really buy it anymore, just as we stopped believing that President Obama was somehow born in Kenya, not Hawaii. We were fooled “some of the time,” but we are reaching that “all of the time” moment.
Fools of 2016
And in that way a large minority of Americans was “fooled” by Donald Trump. Some believed that he was a successful businessman. We now know, that he squandered billions on bad deals, so much so that no American bank would touch him. Some believed that Trump understood the “common man”. We know now that Trump’s only interest was in mouthing the words that gained him votes. The “common men” cheering at the rallies, were only fodder for Trump’s version of “fake news”.
There were those Americans so disenthralled with the concept of Hillary Clinton as President they took whatever alternative was offered. They are still there, chanting Benghazi and Pizzagate, full-whole fool swallowers of the Internet conspiracies. Or there are those who cannot imagine that a woman can fill the role. They aren’t the fools of the Internet, but rather stuck in a misogynistic era of the 1950’s, that Trump likes to harken back to as “the good old days”.
And finally there were those supporters of the Grand Old Party, who stepped up and supported the “R” on the ticket even though they had doubts. Now their doubts have been fully justified. Whatever else that can be said about President Trump, his maladministration of the COVID-19 pandemic has left America broken. His continued strategy of pretending it’s going away, playing us a fool, simply makes our condition worse.
Righteous Might
The American people have been “…fooled some of the time”. A small portion remain fooled now, the “all of the time” crowd. But all of the American people are not “fooled all of the time”. The time has come for them to rise up in their “righteous might” to change the course of our nation, and our history.
Or, as George W. Bush and The Who said:
“We won’t get fooled again”.
