Make America America Again.

• Author: Bresler, Robert J.

AS ONE WHO HAS STUDIED politics most of my life, I have developed a keen appreciation of its limits. Rather than a driving force in history, politics floats on forces beneath the surface or rides the crest of the wave. The currents beneath are the powerful engines of change, the cultural and economic dynamics that drive the way we live. At first, these forces seem imperceptible, and they can be beyond control by the time they are visible.

Politicians can be the most vain and delusional of human animals. The deluded operate under the illusion that they can control the currents of change and disruption. They proclaim slogans, "make the world safe for democracy," and "make America great again," as though history listens to such dictates.

The wise understand the limits of their power and avoid such proclamations. Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower, unappreciated by the intellectuals of their time, managed to avert rhetorical flourishes while guiding Administrations that provided relative peace and stability.

Solid political leadership need not be irrelevancy. When visible forces threaten calamity, prudent and determined leadership is required. Abraham Lincoln realized our Union must be saved and slavery abolished. Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that the defeat of Adolf Hitler needed the survival of Great Britain and provided essential aid and support. Ronald Reagan saw the weakness of the Soviet Empire and the dangers of an escalating nuclear arms race and managed the decline of both. None of these extraordinary leaders claimed to remake society or restore some imagined greatness.

Today, a wave of disruption is tearing at the threads of our stability and capacity to accept political differences--and we have been burdened by a pair of presidents with grandiose ideas about their ability to tame cultural and economic forces that neither have the intellectual nor temperamental capacity to understand. Donald Trump was going to "Make America Great Again." Given his grandiose multi-trillion dollar programs, Joe Biden, with the infelicitous phrase to "Build Back Better," would turn the U.S. into a flaccid European welfare state.

With a country in turmoil, Trump, and now Biden believe some combination of political fixes will turn the tide--as if it were that easy. How, as one writer asked, do things collapse gradually, then suddenly? Is this what is happening to us?

The political center has been eroding for some time, following the collapse of the...