FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS AGO.

Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural address in March 1933 has been in the news lately, simply the latest political football. I'm struck by the timing: it was that famous 87 years from Independence to Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and the next 87 years would take us to 1950 and the Great Power Saeculum, complete with nuclear weapons and a polio vaccine in development.

What, though, is the state of contemporary fear?  Reason's Jacob Sullum contemplates the decisions a successor to Franklin Roosevelt, the current governor of New York, must make. "The fear, the panic, is a bigger problem than the virus." Don't issue the shelter order, people might take actions in anticipation of such an order. "Because you watch things like that all day….Somebody says something, and then it's on the screen right away. 'Oh my God, I'm going to be locked in my home. I better go to the store and buy stuff.'" Issue the order, then you might destroy the civilization in order to save it, and the health providers might be overwhelmed all the same.  Read the article in full for the nuances and qualifications.  Reflect, though, dear reader, on this. "In the face of all that uncertainty, public officials may imagine they are erring on the side of caution. But that is true only if you ignore the negative impact of aggressive interventions."  As of Sunday night, the governor is equivocating: a ukase is not a shelter in place order.

Consider as well, dear reader, the adjectives President Roosevelt used to describe the fear in that speech: unreasoning, paralyzing.  With the distance of those four score and seven years, it is easy to see the highlight reel and cue "Happy Days Are Here Again."  There was, at the time, no such thing as consensus.  Townhall columnist Tom Tradup treats the hostility between the current president and the legacy press as something new.  "Helpful consumer tip for snowflakes in the Beltway press corps: if you keep playing your dopey game of 'Poke the Bear' with this president, don’t be surprised if you get a few claw marks when he stands up to you."  As long as there's no place to go, let it snow (oh, wait, that's just tonight's prolonged winter) find some online archives of Chicago's Tribune from 1933, or see what your search engine gives you for "Martin, Barton, and Fish;" or contemplate the open hostility between High Society and that parvenu Franklin.  For that matter, were the famous fireside chats a way for a president to bypass the traditional gatekeepers by putting his own material out on the radio?  For extra credit, once the travel bans end and the trains resume service, take a ride to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and examine, carefully, the gallery of editorial cartoons.  Think George W. Bush or Barack Obama got handled roughly by the caricaturist?

For additional perspective, what Angelo "Ruling Class" Codevilla notes when he writes, "Those who fault the Trump Administration’s response to the virus would be a lot more credible had they not spent the past three years blaming him for everything imaginable. Also, their credibility would rise to threshold level were they not so obviously inconsistent in their advocacy of domestic shutdown and of open external borders," is that sometimes there is loyal opposition, and sometimes there be copperheads.  But who will write the history has yet to be determined.

His concluding sentence, however, could be applied with equal force to the Depression era, or to secession and nullification.  "Thus they are showing that the virus of partisanship has already hurt America far more than the coronavirus ever can."