Journal shanen's Journal: Her legacy is better than his legacy! 1
Her legacy is bigger than his legacy!
Yeah, the Title is my opening joke. Mom never gets any credit, but everyone has a mother. The real question is about the biggest legacies in American politics. Are you already thinking about presidents? I even speculate that I can guess your top four candidates. (But I may be blinkered by my historian's hat?)
Looking at the situation as it has developed, I've decided to argue for the dark horse, Teddy Roosevelt, and I hope my reason will surprise and amuse you. It's for his negative legacy. He personally prevented the end of the democratic experiment in America. And when democracy does fail, you can safely bet that the leader who does it, probably a president, is going to claim the murder of democracy as a positive legacy with some other label. (Sadly, I think all things must end, even the good ones. I had hoped not to see that one, but maybe it's already happened.)
America has a funny political system, but for non-comical values of funny. Hard-coded into the Constitution is a winner-take-all version of democracy that basically forces one of two stable equilibrium states. The one the American voters seem to have favored most of the time for the first few centuries was two equally balanced parties. Politics often got hot, but they never got too violent. If might ever made right, then at least it managed to look like an honest election at the time. Power really did change hands rather peacefully. (But do I need an annotation about the consequences of elections?)
The other equilibrium arising out of winner-take-all dynamics would be a permanent single-party state. That seems to be the rising fashion in many parts of the world these years, even without the winner-take-all mechanisms of the American Constitution. But America tried it first and Teddy Roosevelt was the guy who said "No, thanks." He ran as the Bull Moose and prevented the GOP from becoming the permanent ruling party of America. (Is there an expert on Teddy's psychology "in the house" who can assess his actual intentions at the time?)
Times have changed. A lot. I actually got here by considering the various negative legacies of TFG ("The Former Guy" AKA "He whose name need not be mentioned again"). First major pandemic of the 21st Century? Or is it going to be the end of democracy as we knew it? Only the historians will know for sure, and it ain't history until all of the actual participants and witnesses are safely dead. (But TFG was most "successful" in a faked reality show about his biggest failure of each week. He was the "boss", but he never fired himself. Maybe those videos will be his legacy? A real master has real apprentices who become even greater masters. TFG has none. (And now we have the bizarre situation of Putin, where "the master has become the student"?))
But I guess the titular joke means I'm really arguing for Martha Bulloch, the mother of Teddy Roosevelt. And I had to websearch to find her name (and was saddened to learn she died so young, when Teddy was less than 30 and his highest position had been in the New York State Assembly).
What about clones? (Score:1)
> Mom never gets any credit, but everyone has a mother.
Until cloneing becomes a thing.