Surviving the Ugliness of It All
I’ve been crisscrossing the country almost constantly over the last five months. When I ask people about politics, the feeling I hear most often is exhaustion. People are just tired out from the endless national crises, their dread of the 2024 presidential campaign, the ugliness of it all. Many people I talk with seem passive, discouraged, and are trying, mostly in vain, to shut out the political noise. It’s almost as if people have been so beaten down by the last decade, they’ve lost the self-confidence to wish for more.
In these circumstances I turn to two leaders who knew something about projecting hope in exhausting times: Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They offered two very different versions of national self-confidence.
Churchill’s strongest sense was his romantic attachment to Britain’s past. At a time when it was fashionable to scorn the pompous Victorians and dismiss the ancient grandees like the first Duke of Marlborough, Churchill believed in the whole pageant of British history with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy. In the stentorian 18th-century cadences of the historian Edward Gibbon and the essayist Samuel Johnson, he painted a heroic portrait of that nation of shopkeepers and saw Britain’s current troubles in light of its glorious past.
In 1940, his romantic vision gave moral shape to contemporary terrors. Under his guidance, the British people came to see themselves as the phlegmatic and resolute defenders of their island home, the latest in a great line of underdog warriors. His invocations of their common past united a class-riven nation.
His confidence was not of the plucky, upbeat type. He offered instead blood, toil, tears and sweat. Like many past-minded people, his sensibility was tragic, aware that history is a procession of depravity, conflict and war, and that no generation is spared its traumas. But his historical frame of mind did give him an unshakable sense of who Britons were and what Britons must do.
He was not built to be a bobber and weaver, to shimmy in tune with passing trends. His confidence had a defensive but stalwart nature. To stick oneself down, to never waver, to be willing to fight on forever and ever, to project a rocklike firmness that turned out to be contagious. In a magnificent 1949 essay on Churchill, Isaiah Berlin noticed that Churchill idealized his fellow Brits with such intensity that he lifted “a large number of inhabitants of the British Isles out of their normal selves and, by dramatizing their lives and making them seem to themselves and to each other clad in the fabulous garments appropriate to a great historic moment, transformed cowards into brave men, and so fulfilled the purpose of shining armor.”
