Timely, unsettling, reading

Leading up to the election, I had tried to avoid any more heavy reading about things that might be related to it. Then a new book came in at the library that I’d put on hold, so I picked it up and read it.

The book was Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment, by Allen C. Guelzo. It’s a fine book, but unsettling reading in these unsettling times.

          The jacket reading provides a good description:

          Abraham Lincoln grappled with the greatest crisis of democracy that has ever confronted the United States.

While many books have been written about his temperament, judgment, and steady hand in guiding the country through the Civil War, we know less about Lincoln’s penetrating ideas and beliefs about democracy, which were every bit as important as his character in sustaining him through the crisis.

          Allen C. Guelzo, one of America’s foremost experts on Lincoln, captures the president’s firmly held belief that democracy was the greatest political achievement in human history.

He shows how Lincoln’s deep commitment to the balance between majority and minority rule enabled him to stand firm against secession while also committing the Union to reconciliation rather than recrimination in the aftermath of war.

In bringing his subject to life as a rigorous and visionary thinker, Guelzo assesses Lincoln’s actions on civil liberties and his views on race, and explains why his vision for the role of government would have made him a pivotal president even if there had been no Civil War.

Our Ancient Faith gives us a deeper understanding of this endlessly fascinating man and shows how his ideas are still sharp and relevant more than 150 years later.

“Sharp and relevant,” you say?

The author himself notes: “It may seem uncanny that so many of our current frustrations with democracy were actually encountered by Abraham Lincoln a century and a half ago. … He, too, endured a political environment polarized between extremes that had little hope of reconciliation.

“Uncanny, yes, but also comforting that those frustrations are not novelties, however much they feel like them, and that American democracy has endured, risen and surmounted them once, and will do so again.”

It is comforting that a well-grounded historian can feel comforted on the eve of an election that is so contested that bitter polarization will continue for ages, no matter who wins. But it is small comfort because the time seems so fraught with danger.

And am I reminded that though the Civil War was long ago, the issues that caused it are still with us, as divisive as ever.