It's Time For a Harry Truman Moment

President Harry Truman

It’s easy to forget, at this late date, how wildly unpopular President Harry Truman was in 1948. Having inherited the Presidency accidentally, only 89 days into FDR’s fourth term, Truman was considered a bench-warmer, holding the Oval Office until a better candidate became available. The famous “Dewey Wins” photo happened because Truman’s defeat was considered a foregone conclusion, despite FDR’s lingering shadow.

This perception wasn’t entirely unfair. A longtime darling of the Kansas City political machine, Truman got nominated for Senator as a compromise candidate, and was so surprised by his Vice Presidential nod that his first response was reputedly: “Oh shit.” He initially showed no temperament for executive action, and dithered terribly. Historians attribute Truman’s chronic inaction for the Democratic Party’s widespread losses in the 1946 midterms.

But when Republicans nominated Thomas Dewey, a Northern semi-progressive, for President, Truman saw his opportunity. Truman had recently converted to antiracism, and desegregated the military by executive order. Dewey pledged an antiracist Republican platform. So Truman called the Republican-dominated Congress back into session to vote on bills essentially supporting Dewey’s racial policies. The Republicans’ inability to vote on their own platform probably got Truman reelected in 1948.

Watching events unfold following this week’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, feels like watching a prewritten script stumbling toward an inevitable ending. While conservative voices offer crinkum-crankum “thoughts and prayers” tweets, progressives insist somebody needs to do something, but feign helplessness against intransigent bipartisan indifference. It’s hauntingly familiar, and it’s currently poised to result in the usual outcome: a multiparty agreement to do nothing.

Nineteen children under age ten were slaughtered by one shooter with a military-grade rifle. Many bodies were so badly mutilated that the only hope of reliable identification is through DNA matching. Though the Uvalde Unified School District has its own six-member police department, the shooter received no meaningful interference until he’d racked up a double-digit body count. Clearly the standard responses—waiting periods, increased security, “red flag laws”—didn’t work.

President Joe Biden

This only compounds the threats to young people’s future. Children today will face social and economic dislocation caused by Global Warming; the only question is what, not whether. Our democracy is under assault by groups that repeat conspiracy theories which originated in neo-Nazi circles. Our middle class is disappearing, and soon a majority of Americans won’t be able to afford health care, assuming SCOTUS hasn’t banned it all anyway.

America hasn’t passed new climate legislation since 1991; all of the twenty hottest years on record have happened since then. We haven’t had an budget since Barack Obama’s first term, and have funded basic functions like national defense and road repair by short-term spending bills. Meanwhile Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema keep promising that bipartisanship will happen any day now, despite overwhelming evidence that the parties speak different languages.

Our two major political parties are hemorrhaging right now. Republican policies are deeply unpopular, particularly as they’ve increasingly become mere Trumpist whims, yet unless something happens, they’re likely to sweep this year’s midterms. That’s because the Democrats have descended into bickering and inaction. The big-tent party means Democrats can’t agree on almost anything, and handle policy disagreements by punting every ball further down the field.

Now is the opportunity for a Harry Truman moment. The Biden Administration, suffering from almost exactly the same accusations of dithering inaction that plagued Truman in 1948, can simply force Congress to vote on something, anything. Slamming an omnibus bill on Congress to protect our children’s future will require Congress to take some position, any position, as we move into the general election campaign. Make them do something.

It won’t work, of course. Just like Harry Truman’s civil rights reforms crashed in 1948, anything Biden pushes will collapse now. The point, sadly, isn’t to accomplish anything; it’s to get incumbents on record, in their home states and districts, taking positions on issues that Americans care about, particularly ensuring children have a future. By making working legislators take concrete, specific sides, we can potentially reforge the New Deal coalition.

Politics in 2022, like in 1948, isn’t working by existing rules. The way we’ve done everything previously is failing now. We can’t naively rely on bucolic nostalgia for days when legislators made things happen by back-room log-rolling sessions. Joe Biden needs to learn the lesson that Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton all learned, eventually: “politics as usual” is almost always an illusion.

If we want to get anything done, force legislators to take a concrete position in public.