Are We at a Turning Point in History?

“Predictions are difficult to make—especially when they’re about the future.” That line, attributed in various wordings both to the legendary baseball star and noted mangled-phrase-maker Yogi Berra and to Danish physicist Niels Bohr, often comes in handy. Historian Lawrence W. Levine reminded us with his book The Unpredictable Past that predictions are even difficult to make about the past. The most perilous predictions, however, are those about the present.

Casting off caution, I make this prediction about the present: We have reached a major turning point in American politics. I suspect that in the future the spring of 2005 will be seen as one of only a half dozen or so critical moments in our history when the political balance in the United States shifted decisively.

What’s more, the event that will prove decisive in that realignment of American politics did not occur in this country. Rather, it happened in Asia. And, not in that part of that continent, Southwest Asia, where most American attention has been focused. The crucial American political event happened last week in East Asia, specifically in Korea. Nor was it anything to do with North Korea and its increasingly dangerous nuclear weapons program.

No, what will come to be seen as the most important political event in the United States in many years involved a very different sort of nuclear program in South Korea: The announcement in May that Hwang Woo-suk of Seoul National University has succeeded in removing the genetic material from the nuclei of human eggs, replacing it with DNA from the skin cells of diseased patients, and producing stem cells that are genetic match for the patients.

It is apparent that the success of Dr. Hwang’s team has the potential to be one the most important developments in the history of medicine. What is less apparent, but equally true, is that it has the potential to be the decisive event in changing the course of American politics.

President George W. Bush wasted no time in adding to the advantage the event gives his political opponents by acting as predictably as Bull Connor did when he played into the hands of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement by using dogs and fire hoses against peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham in 1963. Saying he opposes the use of federal money “to promote science which destroys life in order to save life,” Mr. Bush pledged that if proposed legislation restoring federal stem-cell funding reaches him, “I will veto it.”

We find ourselves at a crossroads: Will the United States go the way of large portions the modern (in truth, anti-modern and ante-modern) Islamic World into religious know-nothingism or return to our nation’s Enlightenment roots and progressive thinking?

Our choice is simple: follow the path of dogma and reaction that currently holds sway in much of Southwest Asia or the way—which has long been the way of the West—that is now propelling East Asia, that of embracing science and progress.

There is little doubt that Americans, who have long been noted for their common sense, will make the right choice. That choice will produce a decisive political realignment.

Genuine politically realigning moments have been very rare in our history. The emergence of Jeffersonian dominance at the start of the nineteenth century, the rise of Jacksonian Democracy in the late 1820s, the Civil War, the economic depressions that began in 1893 and 1929, and the upheavals of the 1960s, culminating in 1968, stand out. The last four of these fall into two very different categories. The civil wars of the 1860s and 1960s both led to long periods of Republican dominance at the presidential level. The later decades of both centuries, the Republicans followed a similar strategy of running as the “anti-sixties party,” linking the Democrats with the Southern Rebels of the 1860s and the cultural rebels of the 1960s. Yet in both cases the Republican dominance was very slight. The reality was that the upheavals of the 1860s and 1960s produced a rough political balance that slightly favored the Republicans. The only two events in more than a century and a half that have produced realignments creating long periods of genuine dominance for one party were the two worst economic depressions in our history. The one that began in 1893 occurred with the Democrats in control of the presidency and both houses of Congress. That which began in 1929 happened with the Republicans in complete control. Blaming the party in charge, voters in each instance moved decisively and lastingly to the other party, creating a period of Republican ascendancy from the 1890s through the 1920s and of Democratic dominance from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Political turning points are often hard to recognize. Sometimes events that seem certain to have a redefining impact on political allegiances turn out not to do so. Sometimes a turning point proves to be, as historian G. M. Trevelyan said of the Revolutions of 1848, a “turning-point at which modern history failed to turn.” In terms of political realignment, the attacks of September 11, 2001 now appear to have been such a non-turning point. Results of the 2004 presidential election almost matched those of 2000. The horror of 9-11 certainly had a political impact. Without it, it is unlikely that George W. Bush would have been reelected. But the attack did little to shift the political balance.

The “Culture War” that Republicans have so adroitly turned to their political advantage has always been largely illusory. On a map, Hollywood and Haight-Ashbury appear to be a continent away from Wall Street and Madison Avenue. In fact, the locales are right around the corner from each other. The hedonism preached by the Counterculture and Hollywood has long been virtually indistinguishable from that pushed by corporate America and its advertisers.

It is the side that becomes linked to extremism that suffers. For decades Republicans have succeeded (with, to be sure, the assistance of many Democrats) in linking the Democratic party with what has been painted as the extremist position on one side of the putative war. Now, the weighted shoe of extremism is clearly on the other foot. Those who would stand in the way of the promise of saving and improving millions of lives in the name of being “pro-life” reveal themselves to be extremists by any reasonable definition.

The nation had already been brought to the tipping point by a series of extremist stances by prominent Republicans: the exploitation by Tom Delay and so many others of Terri Schiavo, Texas Senator John Cornyn suggesting that violent attacks on judges are an understandable reaction to their “raw political or ideological decisions,” Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn calling for impeaching judges who make decisions “Christians” do not like (Sen. Coburn’s Chief of staff went a step farther, declaring, “"I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!”), Rev. Pat Robertson saying that Federal judges are a more serious threat to America than Al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terrorists. The list goes on.

But it is now the divide over stem-cell research at a time when its promise for untold benefits has become so clear that brings into focus much more clearly than anything in the past how far from the mainstream of common sense the religious right has pulled the Republican party.

When the Democrats win in 2006 and 2008, they should send thank-you cards to Hwang Woo-suk.