When a citizen can look up to Abraham Lincoln after Antietam’s battle, he asked the President why the Civil War couldn’t have been prevented. The President paused and said softly, “it had to happen.”

Winston Churchill told a group of bombed-out Londerers the same thing at the start of the Battle Of Britain after losing their homes.

When John Lewis and his fellow freedom riders were nearly beaten to death by a mob of thousands of enraged white Alabamans during a protest in Montgomery, a reporter asked Lewis and Martin Luther King why they were risking their lives.

“It had to happen,” said Dr. King. “We would never get our freedom without it.”

Every period in history is different. We are in our own time with our own issues, but I can’t help shaking the same idea. For all of the fear and weariness and hang-wringing, it seems to me that this had to happen.

Historians and great leaders know that everything that happens, happens for a reason and that whenever human beings gather to govern themselves, there is great conflict and great change.

Americans have become the spoiled brats of the free world. Our sanitized history books cast our history in terms of nobility and justice and opportunity. In 2020, we got a lot of the real story.

We have come to think the process is neat and civil and productive. We are living in the truth – progress and justice are always slow and bloody and difficult.

America in its evolution was glorious and wonderful at times, but bloody and divisive and brutal at times. Donald Trump and his faux patriotism is nothing new,  blowhards and fools have always been a part of our political life. He is just as much a part of the American DNA as racism and inequality.

The rich have been screwing the poor here for years, and that’s why politicians are so eager to control our history and manipulate the poor. History inspires us, but it can also really piss us off.

Churchill said the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Issac Asimov said Anti-intellectualism had been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life of America, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” H.L. Mencken said  Democracy is a form of worship, the worship of jackals by jackasses.

Democracy distinguishes itself to me by being the best system around, which doesn’t mean it is pretty or neat. Democracy is ugly and draining and difficult. It requires constant and often bloody reckoning. That is nothing new.

And many of those conflicts have been a lot worse than this one. The Civil War killed nearly 620,000 men, by far the greatest toll of any conflict in American history.

If the Republic falls, it won’t be the Proud Boys who bring it down. It will be our own laziness and complacency. That, much more than Donald Trump, got us into trouble this time.

I guess the point is, we’ve seen this movie before, and we will see it again.

We may have been at war for years, but we have been relatively and sporadically peaceful and prosperous in my lifetime.  The wars were far removed from my life, something the warmakers learned to do after Vietnam. Young men and women were dying, but we rarely saw it.

Many people were neither rich nor powerful in America of the past generation. A lot of poverty, bigotry, discrimination, sexual abuse, lost jobs, and lifestyles, were boiling the waters.

Most of us were spoiled and took our freedom and relative civility for granted. We lived inside of our own heads, as the Internet took us away from one another and deposited us in chairs looking at screens day and night.

The two political parties had their differences, but they roomed together, lunched together, golfed together. They were friends with one another and worked together when they needed to.

That was how the system was oiled. Nobody wanted to rock that boat.

When some time passes, this period will be seen as another of the painful upheavals that have wracked America since the revolution. For now, it’s just nerve-wracking.

But when I think about it,  Donald Trump needed to happen.

Black Americans were seething over police brutality and economic inequality. The Women’s Revolution had stalled. Fewer than 30 percent of the population bothered to vote. The working-class white economy had collapsed all over the country, manufacturing was nearly gone, so were the union protections that helped create the middle class.

I can’t speak for you, but I was asleep. I wasn’t paying attention to much of anything but my own work and life. In the world before social media, it was easy to stick one’s head in the ground. The government seemed to run more or less smoothly on its own.

Politics never seemed to matter to me. It matters to me now, I’ve learned my lesson. Donald Trump is my political daddy, he smacked me upside of the head and opened my eyes to many things, none of which he meant for me to see.

White working-class Americans had seen their lives diminished, their jobs given away to other countries, their downtowns bled of life and business, their children fleeing to the cities, their communities ravaged by drugs and health problems.

Non-educated whites, once dominant in American life, were being pushed aside by women, immigrants, and refugees.

At the same time, income equality was worsening as the miracle of America – a prosperous middle class – was fading. Women were furious at how men were treating them and abusing them without consequence and how slow their drive to equality seemed to be.

The best jobs for many people were work in vast Amazon warehouses, where computer monitors attached to your ass keep track of how long it took you to pee in the bathroom.

Looking back on it, it seems the only happy people in America were the top five or ten percent. They just got richer and richer. Everybody else was spoiling for a fight.

That is no longer possible. The fight has come to each one of us, from the pandemic to Donald Trump’s cruel and soulless policies.

When I look out at the battleground that America is at the moment, I see all of this in context, and it makes sense.  All of this stirring, so vast and diverse nobody could see it.

Something had to give and pop the swelling Pinata open.

As a reality star, Trump was in the best position to speak to millions of disgruntled people. He was already well known and came along just as the white working class was devastated by the opioid epidemic and the trade deals had upended their lives.

Any one of these groups could have been awakened by their own Trump if the right one had popped up.  Trump beat them to it.

I don’t really equate the truth, but in five or ten years, angry conservatives will view her in the same way progressives see Trump.

Even today, the far-right views Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the same way the left views Trump – as a demagogue who would undermine their lives and freedom and pose a great danger to the Republic.

Socialism became the new bogeyman, along with the old one,  angry Black people.

In fact, Trump is already campaigning on the premise that Ocasio-Cortez is a friend, who is controlling Joseph Biden Jr.  And that black protesters will doon be burning down their precinct houses and assaulting their women.

Progressives find that absurd, the right believes it all.

This was essentially the same way Southern whites and blacks saw one another during the Civil Rights struggles, which went on for decades. Sadly, race is still an enormous factor in our political life.

But maybe it isn’t so sad. Maybe it’s about time we all had this talk.

The reason Trump constantly invokes the specter of invading Black hordes to working-class whites and suburbanites –  is because this argument, along with police brutality, is more than 300 years old.

And has almost always worked.

Just read the new biography of John Lewis by Jon Meacham.

This is what many Blacks mean when they say racisms is woven into the DNA of American life. Because it is. It is not unpatriotic to say so, it is the essence of patriotism.

Five years ago, the progressive movement was stalled,  divided, and confused. They thought they had their own Prince when Obama was elected president.

But he stoked the white rage that had been building for years, and that resulted in Trump’s shocking victory. While progressives thought the Messiah had come, tens of millions of white Americans saw a slick Black man who was too big for his britches.

Until Trump came along, they kept it to themselves.

Trump turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to the progressive coalition. He brought black and whites, moderates and leftists, educated whites and Latinos, suburban women, and Black Lives Matter together. He united all of them in the struggle against him.

He lit up the women’s movement, black and white.

Non-educated working-class whites and Trump overestimated their power and underestimated the new,  younger, and the vastly more diverse American ethos.

If  Trump had been just 20 percent more moderate, he would have been one of the most consequential and successful Presidents in a century. He couldn’t even be one percent.

He never even tried to build his following into a coalition and beyond its angry current range. Why he refused is a puzzle for biographers and historians. I can’t explain it, other than accept the obvious truth: he is not a healthy human. He can’t give up his rage and grievance.

And yes, and somewhat to my surprise. He really is a racist.

What I also see is a women’s movement on fire,  Harvey Weinstein in jail, suburban women bristling at blatant racism and patronizing and clueless old white men, MeToo, BLM.

I see suburban moms on the move, “radical” lefties gathering around the moderate, centrist, presidential candidate, Latinos organizing to reject Trump’s ignorant and authoritarian immigration policies and centrist, independent, and many Republican and moderate voters willing to give the Democrats another chance.

Mostly, I think, people are sick of him. He is over, at least in this incarnation. But I think him for his service.

I am an Ocasio-Cortez fan, but it should be noted that she could never have done that in this election year. I wouldn’t be against her in a few years though.

Gays are registering in record numbers, and the next generation of activists is out in the streets marching – most peacefully –  for a kinder and gentler society.

Trump may have stacked the courts with arch-conservatives, and they may slow down the progressive movement, but they can’t ultimately stop it any more than Trump could or can.

The people Trump has so defiled and offended are the future, the new and evolving America. He is not a big enough man to stop them.

Trump has called out to this new America, the real America, and woke them up. And boy, are they awake. It is difficult for many people to transition from fear and discouragement to the new possibilities rising out of the ashes and traumas of 2020.

All over the country millions and millions of people who never voted before are registering to vote.

This country was asleep and is now awake. A record number of Americans are planning to vote, are paying close attention. The people who try to suppress them and their vote will regret it down the line.

. An unstoppable groundswell is beginning to build for Joseph Biden, and Donald Trump has signed up as his secret campaign manager, making one inane and self-destructive move after another.

I can tell you I needed Trump to happen. He inspired my work with refugees and the elderly. He is the Godfather of the Army of Good, which centers around my blog and has done incalculable good for four years now.

He taught me it is better to do good than fight about it.

He taught me I don’t have to be a saint to be good. He taught me to express myself honestly and authentically without resorting to hatred and argument.

I needed that, and as I pay attention, I see that many other people needed it as well. This new time is coming.

It sounds almost sappy to say it, but I see this conflict as being one of love versus anger and hatred, as almost every awful conflict in American history has been.

These movements challenging Donald Trump are most often about love: love for freedom, love for our children, love for Mother Earth, love for the poor, and refugees.

Love is on the ballot; love is on the news, love is being fought over on the streets. The Greeks believe suffering was followed by rebirth and renewal.

There is nothing to fear in that.

This, I believe, is why Donald Trump had to happen.

—

“When love awakens in your life, in the night of your heart, it is like the dawn breaking within you. Where before there was anonymity, now there is intimacy; where before there was fear, now there is courage; where before in your life there was awkwardness, now there is a rhythm of grace and gracefulness; where before you used to be jagged, now you are elegant and in rhythm with your self. When love awakens in your life, it is like a rebirth, a new beginning.”

— John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book Of Celtic Wisdom.