These days, non-fiction book titles – and subtitles – can be extremely hyperbolic, promising a great deal more than they deliver. But the title of Lee Harris’s Lincoln, Roosevelt, Trump: Three Profiles in World-Historical Leadership actually undersells the contents. For this isn’t some lazy rehash of three presidencies: it’s one of those exceedingly rare books that take on a huge swath of history – in this case, American history from the Puritans to the present – and, by tracing one or more recurring patterns, clarify, to a remarkable extent, the social, economic, and political developments of recent years. Even those of us who’ve made a career of examining these developments carefully, and who’ve reflected upon some of the historical parallels that Harris adduces, haven’t done anywhere near as elegant and thorough a job of putting it all together as he does.
In particular, as his title indicates, Harris foregrounds the likenesses among Lincoln, FDR, and Trump that make all three of them “world-historical figures” – a label, borrowed from the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), that has a specific meaning. It doesn’t just mean great person – or unusually virtuous person. It means someone – Hegel’s own paramount example was Napoleon – who, challenging establishment norms, brought about significant and lasting changes in the world. Yes, several presidents other than Lincoln, FDR, and Trump made significant differences as well, and Harris gives them their due: Washington, by leaving office after two terms, established an invaluable precedent; Jefferson, by purchasing Louisiana, took the first step toward America’s transformation into an unconquerable transcontinental empire; and Jackson, by robustly wielding his veto power and closing the national bank, strengthened the power of the executive, thereby making it easier for Lincoln, decades afterwards, to do what was necessary to save the union.
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