This week I pre-recorded the first interviews about Differ We Must, for which the October 3 release is drawing near; you can preorder the hardcover, e-book, or audiobook from various sellers here.
These initial interviews are exciting, humbling, even a little daunting: you begin to find out from the questions how people have experienced your book. It’s not really a book until someone has read it.
People have asked if I see parallels between the present day and Lincoln’s time—Differ We Must is a short biography, which tells Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who differed with him. The answer is yes, I do, often. The past is never the same as the present, but it resonates, because human nature is the same.
The latest resonance occurred to me shortly after Donald Trump entered a plea of not guilty to his indictment for conspiracy to overthrow his 2020 election defeat.
When I arrived home the TV was on as analysts talked through the court appearance. Something jogged my memory, and I went looking for an old paperback on my bookshelves. It’s a yellow book of essays by Henry Adams, the descendant of two presidents. The title essay was the one I wanted: “The Great Secession Winter.” I had come across it while researching Differ We Must.
Adams writes of the disorienting months from December 1860 to March 1861. Abraham Lincoln had just been elected as an antislavery president, but had yet to be inaugurated. Southern states, one by one, had begun to declare their independence from the Union, effectively rejecting their defeat in a free and fair election. Adams was in Washington at the time, in his early twenties, working as the secretary of a member of Congress, who happened to be his father.
I remembered the essay because it captures the confusion as a large part of the country refused to come to terms with defeat. Once I found the book, my fourteen-year-old read Adams’ opening lines aloud for me so that I could write them down.
When Congress met at the beginning of December the country was in a condition of utter disorganization. A new question had been sprung upon it before men had had time to discover where they stood, or what the danger really was, or indeed whether any real danger in fact existed. In the extreme North the belief was general that the whole trouble was only sheer panic… and it is no fair reproach to any good Republican that he should not have believed it possible for any body of reasoning men to take so wild and suicidal a course as that of the Southern secessionists.
Secession was indeed wild and suicidal, which four years of war eventually proved; but in that Secession Winter, the feeling in the South was different:
The whole country was frantic in its coarse and drunken way with what it called its wrongs, and intoxicated with the prospect of the new Confederacy which was to be founded on slave labor and to draw its wealth from its harvests of cotton. In the city of Washington, there was a strange and bewildering chaos, the fragments of broken parties and a tottering Government… The Southerners were beyond all imagination demented.
Needless to say, many things were different in the Secession Winter of 1860-1861 and the Trumpist Winter of 2020-2021. Trumpism was not the same as slavery, for starters. Also the South was prepared for war, and most Trump supporters were not. The resonance, for me, is the mass delusion—and the disorientation this caused among people who didn’t share it.
In the months leading up to January 6, 2021, even people who knew Trump dismissed his effort to overturn his defeat because his scheme was absurd. We now know from his indictment (as we knew from news reports and public statements at the time) that his own aides and allies were telling him that his claims of fraud were nonsensical, and would never keep him in office.
Because Trump’s plan seemed impossible, some people assumed it wasn’t serious, and questioned “whether any real danger in fact existed.”
One “senior Republican official” appealed for patience in the Washington Post in late 2020. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change. He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
It’s tempting to think that this person must have had years of sad experience in accommodating and enabling whatever the president did. Whether that is true or not, I think that person’s disorientation was widespread. Many people, of course, were utterly alarmed by the “strange and bewildering chaos,” and warned that Trump was capable of anything; but even some who were alive to the threat had trouble making sense of it. The people responsible for the security of the Capitol did not manage to deploy enough forces to repel the January 6 assault that had been planned, to some extent, in plain sight.
Trump’s effort was serious—millions did accept the lies, and eventually some of the believers got people killed—but it was hard to comprehend that it was “possible for any body of reasoning men to take so wild and suicidal a course.”
Part of my memory of that period is of trying to keep myself and others grounded by insisting on basic facts. I co-hosted a radio program each day. It began at precisely 5:00 each morning. Each day we gave the news. The election results were the election results. And the president was trying to overturn his defeat.
I even wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, trying to assess Trump’s place in history as a one-term president. The idea was to keep him in perspective.
Assuming a trial takes place, the court and a jury of his peers will eventually decide whether Trump’s actions amounted to a criminal conspiracy. If Trump wins the Republican presidential nomination, the American electorate will also be able to judge. But the facts of that moment are part of Trump’s legacy—as is the mass delusion, and mass disorientation, he provoked.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must. Several thousand new subscribers have joined in the past month, and I plan soon to open a chat where you can put questions to me or one another.
Steve’s take on these events with his historical references strike a loud chord. All through Trump’s term as president, I couldn’t shake a feeling with him creating daily chaos on national news and I was surprised by the personal effect. A sense of unease way in the background when going about my daily duties and habits but surfacing when listening or reading the news. It was I guess, a kind of disorientation.
As the author of the Timeless & Timely newsletter here on Substack, I appreciate you tying the past to the present to put things in perspective, Steve.
One thing stood out to me in your essay — the phrase Henry Adams used: “he should not have believed it possible for any body of reasoning men to take so wild and suicidal a course.”
The key there is *reasoning* men. It could be easily argued that the people caught up in these moments were temporarily without reason, which is exactly what allowed them “to take so wild and suicidal a course.”
The question now, I suppose, is whether or not some of these conspiracy theorists and ever-Trumpers can be turned from their unreasonable positions.