New Orleans      In the heated rhetoric and daily ups and downs of the US election season, maybe it’s worth stepping back for a minute and trying to get some perspective.  We’ve tried to do that recently talking to Bob Creamer about his book, Nuts and Bolts:  The Formula for Progressive Electoral Success, Max Boot’s Reagan:  Life and Legacy, and William Cooper’s How America Works and Why it Doesn’t on Wade’s World.   All of them had something to add, but, honestly, not much of it was comforting.,

Creamer’s book was, as advertised, a very detailed “how to” guide from a political insider with a plethora of campaign insights and tips, some of which we’ve shared .

Max Boot is a historian, and Reagan has been a tough nut to crack for historians.  He was legendarily hard to know, including to family and friends.  He was also very situational and pragmatic, according to Boot, and not as dogmatic as some of his policies, like his draconian views on welfare, might have indicated.  He was a hands-off manager, who wasn’t interested in the details.  Boot assures us that in the late years of his term, he wasn’t senile, even though age was catching up with him and eventually caught him.  Boot is also clear that despite the decades in which he was the iconic Republican touchstone until Trump took over the party and any firm reckoning of its principles, Reagan paved the way for Trump in both style and substance.  There were similarities in their rise through the media and their political wiles.  Among many things we might lay blame on Reagan’s doorsteps from PATCO to the Iran Contra scandal to the retreats on welfare and the safety net, paving the way for Trump now should be on the list.

William Cooper is a lawyer and journalist, not as well-known in his field as either Boot or Creamer, but deserves some credit for trying to remind any willing to listen that there are fundamentals about America that have to be understood in our history, including about the US Constitution.  His brief book is a reminder for the so-called “originalists,” that the constitution was the result of compromises and was designed to fix problems that had arisen from the birth of the nation in 1776 until it was written in 1789.  The dysfunctional competition of the states, the lack of a federal financial system, and other problems left a young nation teetering.  Some of the compromises, especially the concession to the southern states on slavery and counting slaves as 3/5ths of a person on representation, even without voting rights, are part of the terrible legacy we still live with now.  There’s no brief for arguing that Christian Nationalism is embedded in any of the founding documents, quite the contrary.  Some on the right might scratch their heads as well learning that one of Thomas Jefferson’s key sources and influences was Algernon Sidney, whose book, Discourses on Government, inspired revolutionaries deeply, despite the fact that he was executed in 1683 for an attempted assassination of King Charles II.

All three of these folks in books and interviews would argue that its hard to take the country down, and we should take a deep breath.  At the same time, all of them offered little relief as they looked at this election before us.  All of them saw Trump as aberrant and dangerous to democracy and America itself, and offered no comfort in that regard.