Lately I have tried to recall what presidential election was void of the classically hyperbolic "turning point" rhetoric, most recently on display during Jon Huntsman's self-draft, in which he declared with no little degree of doomsdayism that "Everything is at stake. This is the hour when we choose our future."
Naturally every hour chooses the future in one way or another, but we get Huntsman's drift: In the 2012 year of choice, we face Elysium or Hades. It's one or the other. Just as we did in 2008, and 2004, and 2000 ...
One can advance in this backward trip into the utterly forgettable 1920s' elections or even the more distant, more forgettable late 19th-century presidential snoozers, in which for instance adjustments to the tariff of a few percentage points here and there were campaigned on as momentous, earthshaking matters of national identity and existential righteousness. (Quick: Who saved us in 1884? Who, four years later, rescued us from salvation? And who re-saved us in 1892?)
I confess a delightful cause and effect behind these musings. Over the weekend I was reading the eponymously magnificent The Education of Henry Adams, in which, by page 280, he cried out in horrified resignation:
The political dilemma was as clear in 1870 as it was likely to be in 1970. The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century fabric of a priori, or moral, principles.
A trifle too Kantian for my taste, but as with Huntsman, we get Adams' drift. Behind him, due to our "moral" choices, there lay steady goodness; ahead nothing but "likely" doom, unless of course we chose a deviating path.
Did we? Not really. Soon we'd experience a great depression, and 40 years later an even greater one; we were still to see Teapot Dome, Watergate, global wars and Vietnam and Iraq. Hells, all.
Am I suggesting that 2012 will make no difference? Certainly not. Should we be on a road to perdition, our choice of a Romney or Pawlenty as driver would (partisan alert) unquestionably accelerate our journey, whereas the reelection of President Obama would once again forestall the barbarians. Then again, we have -- have we not? -- been forestalling the barbarians every four years since 1788.