Donald Trump's assault on the nation's founding democratic promise has handed the political left a perfect opportunity to reclaim its legacy, argued historian Harvey Kaye in an analysis published in Zeteo on Saturday.
Kaye, professor emeritus of democracy and justice studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, wrote that the nation is marking its 250th anniversary even as "Donald Trump and his minions" pursue their "reactionary ambitions" – a timing he called "nothing less than ironic, as if history were playing a cruel joke on us."
“Hardly the grounds for a grand celebration. And yet, the 250th comes at the perfect time for the Left,” Kaye wrote.
“Indeed, rather than dismiss or scorn the occasion as we may be wont to, we progressives, populists, and democratic socialists should step up and embrace it. For are we not also finally seeing the beginnings of a real democratic surge – a surge that might actually lead to taking back the Democratic Party from the neoliberals and billionaires?”
Kaye called on Americans to remember they are "heirs to the promise and project of the American Revolution," invoking Thomas Paine's declaration that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again."
Kaye pointed to past national crises – the Civil War and the Great Depression – as models for how Americans previously responded to authoritarian threats, writing that each generation made the country "radically freer, more equal, and more democratic than ever before."
“Reminding ourselves of all of that, and sensing the democratic possibilities that are emerging, let us toast the 250th with words from the man who first turned us into radicals,” Kaye wrote.
“Angered by misrepresentations of the American Revolution in a history published in 1782 by the famed French writer, Abbe Raynal, Paine replied, ‘It is yet too soon to write the history of the Revolution.’”