When future generations of Americans tell the story of the nation, they will have to fit Trump into the main line of the story. And that means the story itself must be rethought.
Trump diverted millions of public dollars to his own businesses, and was returned to office anyway.
He was proved in court to have committed sexual assault, and was returned to office anyway.
He was twice impeached, and was returned to office anyway.
He was convicted of felonies, and was returned to office anyway.
He tried to overthrow an election, and was returned to office anyway.
For millions of Americans, this record was disqualifying. For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed, and the United States will be a different country because of them.
[…]
Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The nation that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways, the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; the nation that generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often than they have chosen wrongly—but the wrong choices are part of the story too, and the wrong choice has been made again now.
“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause,” T. S. Eliot observed in a 1927 essay (here he was writing about the arguments between philosophical Utilitarians and their critics, but his words apply so much more generally). “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”
So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.