“We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great.”
—Andrew Cuomo
Greatness, alas, eludes Andrew Cuomo, the misspoken son of an eloquent father who axed any chance of his own elevation with a few very ill-chosen words. His mistake was confusing perfection with greatness, as perfection itself is an impossibility, bound to appear at that mythical moment when each and every unique individual has the same equal chance at advancement, and gets precisely the fate he deserves. This will never occur, as no country on earth will ever be perfect, but this doesn’t mean greatness is lost. Greatness consists of the pursuit of perfection, of steps being made in the proper direction, and it happens to be that a very large share of those steps taken were done by Americans, on American soil, or by the force of American arms. None of these solved all the problems completely, but all served as links in the chain.
Greatness was at the rude bridge that arched the flood, at Philadelphia where the Declaration was drafted; at Philadelphia, where the Constitution was drafted; at Truro Synagogue in the state of Rhode Island, where President George Washington went to assure the parishioners that this was one country with no state religion and no religious test to be president; when abolitionists refused to permit the expansion of slavery, at Little Round Top and battlefields like it; at the invasion of Normandy, which liberated a continent; with the civil rights movement, which finally did what the Civil War couldn’t; and at South Carolina in 2016, when the Confederate flag was removed from the grounds of the capital by the state’s female governor, who was the daughter of Indian immigrants, with descendants of Strom Thurmond and Jefferson Davis cheering her on. Many people remained sick, poor, and unhappy, acts of injustice and cruelty went on every day, but no one can doubt that these things vastly expanded the ranks of the free and the happy, and that Americans, in the aggregate, and sometimes in the particular, can have every right to be proud.
Cuomo’s words recall his comments in 2014, when he said that pro-life adherents were “extreme conservatives” who had “no place in the state of New York,” a rather harsh stance he was forced to walk back but which scratched a deep itch in the base of his party, one that had been festering there for some time. Thirty-four years ago, his father Mario saw nothing great in the United States under Ronald Reagan, which he described solely in terms of its negative qualities, at the Democratic convention in 1984. As his son did to the idea of American greatness, he described Reagan’s “shining city” as a deception and fraud: “A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch … but there’s another part to the shining city … where … there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble … more and more people who need help but can’t find it … elderly people who tremble in basements … people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn’t show.”
Cuomo père went on to trash the whole of the Reagan agenda, the military buildup, the missile shield, the supply side economics, as “greed and stupidity” that would lead to war and disaster. And every last word that he said about Reagan was wrong. “Reaganomics” led to expansive prosperity, and his “macho intransigence” led to the end of the Cold War barely a year to the day after he had left office, when the Soviet empire crumbled in Europe. Reagan, along with Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, are recognized today as the trio that ended the Communist menace, as Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had won World War II. In the 1980s, there were three electoral wars between the proponents and skeptics of American greatness, and greatnesss won all of them, three times running up totals of more than 400 electoral votes. At the Republican convention in 1984, ex-Democrat Jeane Kirkpatrick would rake her old friends over coals as the “Blame America First” guilt-ridden contingent, that had strayed much too far from the party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy. One of the promising things in the upcoming midterms is the influx into the Democrats’ ranks of many war veterans, who, if they win, may reshape their party into one that, unlike the Cuomos, understands greatness again.
