Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian and leading public intellectual, kept a diary that closely documented the latter half of the twentieth century. In it, he gave a clear and emotional response to a wide variety of events both political and personal. Some of the most touching sections related to Schlesinger’s responses to political assassinations. He had been a close adviser to John F. Kennedy and wrote of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and its aftermath. But it was the death of Robert F. Kennedy that he took the hardest. Upon Robert’s death, he wrote:
“I cannot bear to think what this latest horror shows about the direction in which this nation is moving… we have now murdered the three men who more than any other incarnated the idealism of America in our lifetime. Something about our social ethos has conferred a kind of legitimacy on hate and violence. One shudders at future possibilities.” (Schlesinger, Journals, 292-295)
Schlesinger’s lessons
Schlesinger was a master of political conflict. He carefully documented and told the story of the type of conflict that matters most to many liberals today: the ways in which liberal presidents take power and exercise their power for the greater good. Schlesinger wrote definitive biographies of Andrew Jackson and Franklin D. Roosevelt in which he told the stories of intellectuals and how they shaped and directed the policies of presidents. But Schlesinger also wrote books about less traditional forms of political conflict, such as interpersonal violence, the lies that perpetuated the Vietnam War, and the conflicts on the left over race and gender.
The lessons of Schlesinger resonate today. We have grappled constantly with the questions that Schlesinger built his career researching and discussing. We frequently use terms that he invented, such as “activist judge” and “the imperial presidency.” We debate the legacy of FDR, the role of communists on the left, and the legacy of multiculturalism. One of the nation’s newest political magazines, The Vital Center, is named after one of his books.
Schlesinger did not need the terror of assassination to drive home his beliefs of political conflict. They were imparted to him by his father and namesake, who was a longtime historian who wrote a book on the newspaper wars prior to the American Revolution. Schlesinger’s ideas were reinforced by his years at Harvard, when he recoiled at the workings of the Communists then popular on campus. Schlesinger ended up dropping his first publisher due to claims of communist ties when he was in his twenties.
What Schlesinger believed
For Schlesinger, ideology and the means of obtaining power were in many cases separate. It is easy to read a work like The Vital Center and assume that Schlesinger was a centrist, one who would prefer modest tax credits to a government-run program. But this reading would be short-sighted. The book itself contains calls for expanding the welfare state and confiscating the property of the wealthy. Schlesinger openly supported class conflict and spoke favorably of a plan to confiscate large estates (The Vital Center, 172-176). He would return time and again to outright socialist ideas over the next few decades.
But Schlesinger did draw the line at the way political parties should enact their reforms. Parties should play according to the accepted operating rules of a democratic society. Free, open debate and the rule of law were preferential to the use of force and propaganda. Unlike many liberals of his time or today, Schlesinger believed that the left could be guilty of these transgressions as well as the right. It was the left who allowed communists into the body politic and accepted hateful fringe ideas from 1980s academics, both of which derailed the liberal programs that Schlesinger believed in so fervently.
Conclusion
The lessons of Schlesinger are clear from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. The specifics of the shooter’s motive do not matter. Political violence has only strengthened the former president. Democrats now talk of his victory being almost assured. The shooting helped garner sympathy for a man hated by half the country. His party’s national convention was praised throughout the country despite the harsh rhetoric of many of its speakers.
The shooting also cowed many of the same people Democrats need to win elections. Democrats must win over substantial parts of the kinds of people who watch Morning Joe, a show that did not air in deference to Trump and the attempt on his life. They must win over people like Jack Black, who was so horrified by the callous indifference to the shooting from his bandmate that he cancelled an entire tour. The party’s base is people who want to win elections by legitimate means, not violent revolution.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. died in 2007, long before the most recent rise of Trump. But he lived and worked through decades of political strife and violence. He saw the rise of fascism and the workings of totalitarian communism. Schlesinger blazed a path forward for how liberals should act and the proper rules to follow for winning elections. It would be wise to heed his words as the Democratic Party heads into what are surely uncharted waters.