2024: The New 1948?
How 2024 Could Create a Better America
Like I said in my last post, 2024 is a year of choices. And the choice will be much different from that we made in 2016. Will we elect a narcissistic insurrectionist former president who wants to extinguish his perceived enemies like “vermin,” or a fundamentally decent and empathetic elder statesman with a strong working-class background?
That is what this election is about. True, Donald “Immigrants Are Poisoning the Blood of Our Country” Trump is a grave threat to our democracy and the world, President Biden is not, and that might be enough for some people. But Biden is also someone that has shown a willingness to change, to reconsider past decisions, and to listen.
Let me put it this way: if President Biden is given a decisive governing mandate in 2024—and if his coalition of Democratic voters put the pressure on him to enact a truly transformative agenda—then the Biden presidency might just change American history forever.
As longtime political journalist, commentator, and author Fareed Zakaria put it, we Americans “are far too pessimistic about the future.” Like he said in his most recent column, our economy recently “grew an astonishing 5.2 percent in the third quarter of 2023.” And—again, I have mentioned some of this in my last post—"[i]nflation is dropping sharply, real wages are up, and manufacturing employment is currently experiencing a boom.”
Yet, I repeat, Americans are just not feeling it. Mr. Zakaria finds our sense of despair “perplexing”; I do not. Coming off of a major pandemic that has upended everything we used to know about “the economy” is enough to make everyone feel out of sync. After all, our everyday lives seem of sync, our idea of normal seems out of sync, and that just makes our politics seem all the worse.
If you can believe it, though, there was another time in American history just like this one: 1948. In retrospect, 1948 was a very good year for many Americans. It would soon come to mark “the dawn of postwar [American] economic prosperity” (It was also the year that then-President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which ordered the desegregation of the military, so it wasa relatively good year even for racial justice).
However, to the people living in 1948, it was a terribly confusing year of high prices, low unemployment, and a do-nothing Congress. To top it all off, a historically unpopular Democratic president—presiding over an extremely fractured and divided Demcoratic Party—was running for reelection. In fact, the then-president was so unpopular that many called on him to just “quit.”
Does all this sound familiar? Because it should. And to President Biden, I say this: follow President Truman’s lead. Be aggressive. Hold this current Congress accountable for talking the talk on inflation and not walking the walk. Remind the American people about every single piece of legislation that Republican obstructionists have blocked.
Legislation that would have changed the lives of single mothers and their children, elderly people in need of care, the many soon-to-be victims of police brutality, the many soon-to-be victims of climate change (both in our country and around the globe), and the many college students that did not need to drown in astronomical levels of debt.
But, Mr. President, should also remind them that this is not the end of the story, unless we let it become the end of the story. We can move forwards or backwards. We can correct the injustices of the past or we can let them consume us. We can unite around a new and better America or we can continue on our path of division and political violence.
It is all up to us. Do we want to go back to the supposed “good old days” of January 6 or do we want to keep marching on towards a better future, like we did in 1948?