The announcements that Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos have been indicted by a federal grand jury on various charges, including conspiring against the United States, money laundering and lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) deepens the current cynicism about politics, politicians and the Trump administration in particular.

According to the Washington Post, seven out of 10 Americans see the country being as sharply divided into warring political camps as during the Vietnam war 50 years ago. The division and inability of the Trump administration to pass any major legislative initiative about immigration, healthcare and now possibly federal taxes, despite Trump’s repeated promises about making America great again, create doubts about democracy’s effectiveness as a system of government.



Quick guide What you need to know about the Trump-Russia inquiry Show Hide How serious are the allegations? The story of Donald Trump and Russia comes down to this: a sitting president or his campaign is suspected of having coordinated with a foreign country to manipulate a US election. The story could not be bigger, and the stakes for Trump – and the country – could not be higher. What are the key questions? Investigators are asking two basic questions: did Trump’s presidential campaign collude at any level with Russian operatives to sway the 2016 US presidential election? And did Trump or others break the law to throw investigators off the trail? What does the country think? While a majority of the American public now believes that Russia tried to disrupt the US election, opinions about Trump campaign involvement tend to split along partisan lines: 73% of Republicans, but only 13% of Democrats, believe Trump did “nothing wrong” in his dealings with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. What are the implications for Trump? The affair has the potential to eject Trump from office. Experienced legal observers believe that prosecutors are investigating whether Trump committed an obstruction of justice. Both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton – the only presidents to face impeachment proceedings in the last century – were accused of obstruction of justice. But Trump’s fate is probably up to the voters. Even if strong evidence of wrongdoing by him or his cohort emerged, a Republican congressional majority would probably block any action to remove him from office. (Such an action would be a historical rarity.) What has happened so far? Former foreign policy adviser George Papadopolous pleaded guilty to perjury over his contacts with Russians linked to the Kremlin, and the president’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and another aide face charges of money laundering. When will the inquiry come to an end? The investigations have an open timeline.

Current events remind some people of Winston Churchill’s famous observation that democracy is the worst possible system – except for all the rest. Or maybe it’s just like all the rest. What makes it particularly distressing is the view that this is not an aberration but rather the “new normal”.

It might help Americans to remember that we have been through these periods of disillusionment before.

In the 19th century, the country was torn apart by the civil war. More than 600,000 residents of the north and south perished in the fighting (and this in the era before machine guns, lethal long-range artillery, aircraft and atom bombs that killed tens of millions in the two world wars). At the time, Americans struggled to believe that the United States could ever function again as a unified nation.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the durability of democracy once again seemed doubtful. The split between rural fundamentalists and urban modernists, between recent migrants to the United States from eastern and southern Europe and older assimilated Americans found expression in the National Origins Act of 1924, a discriminatory immigration act.

The so-called Scopes monkey trial in 1925 over the teaching of evolution in high school biology classes, which pitted religious reformists and secularists against fundamentalists, and the famous Sacco-Vanzetti murder case, which saw two Italian-American anarchists executed in a highly contentious case, convinced Americans that the country was permanently divided.

The country found momentary relief in the 1928 election of Herbert Hoover, who seemed to promise a new era of prosperity that would dissolve social tensions. But the onset of the Great Depression, with the stock market crash in 1929 and the downward spiral of the economy in 1930-1932, stimulated renewed fears that free enterprise and democracy in America were over. Hoover lamented the absence of a joke, a song or a story that could lift the pall of pessimism that had descended on the country.

The election of Franklin D Roosevelt in 1932 proved to be the palliative that gave people hope. His fireside chats and many legislative initiatives not only lifted the spirits of the country, but also humanized the American industrial system and brought the country into the 20th century.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Public Works Administration workers fill a gully with wheelbarrows of earth during the construction of the Lake Merced Parkway Boulevard in San Francisco, in 1934 under President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Photograph: New York Times Co./Getty Images

His introduction of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration; the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the National Youth Administration, social security, the Public Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the wages and hours law, setting minimum wages and maximum hours and the dam-building that promoted conservation and economic expansion all helped achieve this turnaround.

FDR’s determination to bring representatives of recent immigrant groups – Catholics and Jews, southern and eastern Europeans of every stripe – into the mainstream of the country’s life, while attending to the needs of white rural southerners, largely healed the divide of the 1920s.

He was much less attentive to the abuse of African Americans by racists guilty of lynching. But the benefits to black Americans from the New Deal alphabet agencies shifted the loyalty of black voters from the Republicans to the Democrats. It was all a prelude to the unity of the country that marked its response to Pearl Harbor and the struggle to win the second world war.

The struggle to maintain national unity dissolved again in the cold war, with conservative complaints that Democrats had fallen short in defending the country’s national security against communist advances across Europe and Asia.

Accusations about Roosevelt’s appeasement of Stalin at the Yalta Conference in February 1945 and Harry Truman’s failure to save China from Mao Zedong’s communist takeover, underscored by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s charges of subversion by US government officials and anger over the stalemate in the Korean war once again demoralized the country. It was a prelude to the bitter struggle over the failure in Vietnam.

The tensions now over Donald Trump’s alleged collaboration with the Kremlin to assure his victory in the 2016 election and the charges of administration corruption echo the run-up to Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.

We of course don’t know where the current divide will end. While it certainly looks like another moment in the repeated history of America’s domestic struggles, it is a familiar enough battle to reassure downcast citizens that we have a resilient democracy that will generate another period of national cooperation and advance. Or at least, we can hope so!

Robert Dallek is the author of several books on presidents and politics. His new book is Franklin D Roosevelt: A Political Life.

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