American Samizdat: Character and Courage

The Republican Opposition to Trump

Experience is a vital teacher if one will learn from it well: people are mistaught and mistaken all the time. History is experience writ large, so we try to learn from it, too, but recorded history is not lived history. The most vital lessons of history are the lived lessons, but one has to choose to live them. Everyone lives through history, swirling and eddying and erupting all around us. One has to live in history to truly learn from it.

In 1956, then Senator John F. Kennedy, already aiming at the U.S. presidency, published a work of popular history, Profiles in Courage, that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. In the book, Kennedy profiled eight U.S. senators who over the course of American history had acted courageously from conscience, from John Quincy Adams, who over foreign policy broke with his father’s Federalist Party, which had appointed him to a vacant Massachusetts senate seat, and subsequently lost reelection, to Robert A. Taft, who criticized the Nuremburg Trials for app…