RESCUED THEN BUT NOT NOW?

In need, this republic has always found or generated truly outstanding leaders. Whether that has been owed to the inner genius of a democratic people or to providence, or to just what, one can speculate.

There was first of all that extraordinary collection of individually flawed but collectively wise thinkers and doers who led us to independence and managed to establish this nation despite all our differences. Recognizing how to consolidate and when to compromise, they bequeathed us a model of citizenship and a requirement that power be answerable, the right standards for a mass society that would result from the industrial revolution and the technological exploision.

George Washington was a figure of such recognized integrity and dignity that he was twice elected without opposition to our top office when lasting arrangements had to be put into place. While the Jeffersonian tea-partiers called him a tyrant, he gave us a firm and flexible central government and demonstrated that our institutions would function well if run intelligently and with humility.

Andrew Jackson took on the dislocations caused by rich business interests with a dose of populism while countering the fractiousness of a nation of sovereign states by leaving no doubt that there would be hangings and military action in response to attempts at nullification or secession. The frontiersmen who followed him had in them the toxic individualism that still afflicts us, but in those days it was offset by the now-depleted belief in equality that is one of our healthiest legacies.

The breaking up of the country into two competing camps with incompatible worldviews brought forward Abraham Lincoln with his determination to reunify it and his instinct for the reconciliation of estranged neighbors. Paired with him in odd synergy was Pennsylvania's radical Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who went farther than anyone then or later in enshrining in law the same rights and opportunities for all citizens, regardless of race or social standing. These two, working sometimes with and sometimes against one another, made modern America possible.

Social evils perpetrated by corporations protected by campaign contributions and outright bribes led to the emergence of a vigorous progressivism in the early twentieth century. Wisconsin's "Fighting Bob" La Follette, a governor and senator of rare effectiveness, and William Jennings Bryan, who merged the Populist party into the Democrats and spoke for a victimized and neglected rural America, boxed an essentially conservative and big-business-worshiping President Theodore Roosevelt into pushing reforms.

With too many abuses and insufficient regulation, Laissez-Faire America collapsed into a Depression that finally made possible some fundamental changes in policies and attitudes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wealthy squire and advocate for everyday people, evoked a degree of confidence that averted our slide into ill-considered social adventures while experimenting with forms of relief and public enterprise. He reduced these efforts during his second term, believing that they had succeeded, a mistake that brought back the Depression amidst skepticism that it could be ended. But his exceptionally knowledgeable and able leadership carried us to victory in a world war, and his plans for a postwar alliance of many nations that could adapt to conditions and head off further wars set us on a course that we have halfway maintained and halfway forsaken.

With World War II impending, the country was sharply divided between isolationists and internationalists, the latter headed by the president and eager to buttress our allies against Germany and Japan by means short of war lest their collapse leave us more exposed. Almost miraculously, the Republican party, largely a bastion of isolationist sentiment, nominated for president in 1940 the dark horse Wendell Willkie, a fervent internationalist and an outspoken liberal. Magnetic and persuasively sincere, Willkie wrought greater unification of opinion to ready the country to defend itself. His subsequent tour of nations on behalf of FDR and his visionary book One World contributed importantly to public appreciation of the equal worth of people everywhere and to acceptance of what a viable postwar order must entail.

Dwight David Eisenhower, hugely popular as a general, steered the Republican party away from the temptation to repeal the New Deal, using his authoritative and fatherly persona to displace that aim with sensibly centrist attitudes and moderate, flexible policies. Thus a showdown was postponed, buying the country time in which to see what approach would work best, demonstrating how it could profit from a high tax rate on the rich and the refusal to precipitate an arms race or engage in elective wars. While those lessons were not learned, they can still be looked to if we one day decide to have a rational opposition.

Steeped in postwar cynicism and corrupt arrangements, we were awakened to the prevalence and the political influence of organized crime and to the rapacity of the pharmaceutical industry by the labors of Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator with an instinct for publicizing rottenness and an implacable refusal to be bought off or scared off or shunted off.

John F. Kennedy showed that the presence of a crisis is not necessary for our government to upgrade its ways and re-address how things are, invoking an ideal of excellence and peopling this work with business and academic eminences of realism and brilliance. A crisis did, however, soon arrive, with pressure for civil rights coming to a head amidst organized resistance. The advent of Lyndon Johnson enabled the Congress and the country to take the necessary steps to implement the equality we were long pledged to and also to begin a campaign against entrenched poverty that lifted a million Americans into the middle class, serving as the basis for the prosperity we enjoyed till recently. (Johnson's legacy was greatly impacted by the divisive and futile Vietnam war, which allowed right-wingers to often employ cultural "wedge" issues to win by turning Americans against one another, a condition that has endured to this hour and that may be the main factor in our present woes. )

Today our economy has come apart and we are in a new Depression (For what in the name of Denial is a "Great Recession"?), resulting from Congress's systematic imposition of an astonishingly unequal allocation of wealth, and from unjust "free trade" agreements, and from the turning over of regulatory functions to representatives of the industries regulated. The executive branch is paralyzed and the opposition is blindly refusing us the chief means of reversing this situation, which is large-scale income redistribution. Continuation of the existing trends promises a level of devastation likely to exceed that of the 1930s Depression and to sink the rest of the world along with us.

It seems that nothing can be done to halt this terrible denouement, although common sense is enough to tell us what we should be doing. Such leadership as exists is issuing not from our elected representatives but from the spontaneous mass movement Occupy Wall Street. There is probably a severe limit to what it can accomplish in the absence of another, complementary form of popular initiative.

When we have been saved so many times from so much, is it possible that no one with the instincts of a leader will offer us the democratic means of remedying our situation, one as ominous and as reparable as any of them? That question comprises the background from which I look for a presidential candidate who can rally us to do what we must to secure our future: another Washington or Jackson or Lincoln or La Follette or FDR or Willkie or Eisenhower or Kefauver or Johnson.

Well, maybe our luck has finally run out. Maybe we have outlived our capacity for tapping into something beyond self-deception and small-mindedness. Maybe we are due to suffer hideously and all of humankind with us because we have not appreciated what we should be and what options are always ours.

Nothing says that that can't be so. And the time is short for a new leadership to declare itself, if it is to come for the 2012 elections, after which will probably be too late.

Looking about us, one could despair. Looking back, one sees a heritage of great leadership and great hazards overcome. Looking ahead, one sees a question mark.

So we go on waiting and watching and wondering. And if you pray, praying for your country would be a good idea.