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David French

By David French

Opinion Columnist

Because we forget history, we forget that the American experiment cannot succeed without constant, courageous leadership. Our nation is not inherently good, and our high ideals are often eclipsed by our baser nature. This has been true since our founding, and it is true now.

We also know that if American ideals depend on a single party for their protection, then that effort is doomed to fail. It’s not that America is one election from extinction. Our nation is not that fragile. But it can regress. It can forsake its ideals. And millions of people can suffer as a result.

I’m writing those words in the context of a presidential contest that already represents a national failure. Even if Kamala Harris wins on Tuesday, there should be relief, not lasting joy. The United States will have come within an eyelash of electing a man who tried to overturn an election to cling to power.

While Donald Trump’s individual actions were unprecedented, the idea that a critical mass of Americans would embrace a demagogue should not be a surprise.

Last week I helped host a fireside chat with Susan Eisenhower, the founder of and expert in residence at the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College. She’s also Dwight D. Eisenhower’s granddaughter. During our conversation, she told a story that I’d forgotten — one with direct relevance to the present moment.

In the aftermath of World War II, there was intense interest in General Eisenhower’s potential political career. He’d never voted before he left the Army in 1948. Both parties courted him, but the Republican Party needed him.

By 1952, the G.O.P. hadn’t won a presidential election since 1928, it had just lost a campaign it was certain it would win (remember “Dewey Defeats Truman”?), and Senator Joseph McCarthy was already deep into the Red Scare.

To make matters much worse, the Republican Party’s prewar isolationism was asserting itself again. In 1951, shortly before Eisenhower took command of NATO, he met with the Republican senator Robert Taft. In her book about Eisenhower’s leadership, “How Ike Led,” Susan Eisenhower notes that Taft was a favorite for the next Republican presidential nomination, and General Eisenhower wanted to solicit Taft’s support for the Atlantic alliance.

Taft, however, indicated he was opposed to NATO. As Susan Eisenhower wrote, “Herbert Brownell, later Ike’s campaign manager, mused in his memoirs that everything would have been different if Taft had agreed to Eisenhower’s request to support NATO.”

One shouldn’t argue that Taft’s position was the only thing that influenced Ike. There was a grass-roots campaign to persuade him to run, but had Taft supported NATO, Eisenhower writes, “Ike would most likely have given no more consideration to the idea of running for president.”

But if Ike chose to run, why did he choose to run as a Republican? He was opposed to McCarthyism. He was opposed to isolationism. And both those positions were deeply embedded in the Republican Party.

The answer, Eisenhower told me in a phone call, was “sustainability.” The nation didn’t just need to prop up NATO for four more years. It needed a degree of bipartisan consensus. If American national security strategy depended on the same party winning every election, it was inherently unstable.

Ike was also influenced by a different Republican senator, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts. In 1949, Lodge wrote an influential article in The Saturday Evening Post called “Does the Republican Party Have a Future?”

Lodge worried that the Republican Party had been “presented to the public as a rich man’s club and as a haven for reactionaries” (sound familiar?) But Lodge also wrote that “democracy required a two-party system, and that depended on the revitalization of the Republican Party.”

It seems almost incredible, looking back, that isolationism was arising once again. After World War I, the victorious Allies tried to create international institutions that would prevent future world wars, but America refused to participate. The Senate rejected the League of Nations, America retreated to its borders, and the remaining Allies lacked the will to resist the rise of Adolf Hitler, even when he was at his most vulnerable.

At the same time, however, there were reasons for American fatigue. More than 400,000 Americans........

© The New York Times