*Sigh*

Prepping Owen Wister's classic The Virginian for my "Myths of the American West" course, I pause over this, in the 1911 Re-Dedication [to Theodore Roosevelt in his Bull-Moose incarnation] and Preface:

After nigh half-a-century of shirking and evasion, Americans are beginning to look at themselves and their institutions straight; to perceive that Firecrackers and Orations once a year, and selling your vote or casting it for unknown nobodies, is not enough attention to pay to the Republic. If this book be anything more than an American story, it is an expression of American faith. Our Democracy has many enemies, both in Wall Street and in the Labor Unions; but as those in Wall Street have by their excesses created those in the Unions, they are the worst; if the pillars of our house fall, it is they who will have been the cause thereof.

Imagine that: the Republican Wister decrying the half century of mainly Republican corruption and/or incompetence--basically every president between Lincoln and Roosevelt (most of them Ohioans! including our own Bob's great-grandfather (fruit doesn't fall far from the tree, does it?)), whose post-Rooseveltian presidency led LaFolette and Teddy to form the Bull Moose Party--and the fecklessness of the American electorate who sell out their faith every four years.

Wister thought the decline of the Republic was about to end, with the election of Roosevelt to a third, non-consecutive term:

I believe the pillars will not fall, and that, with mistakes at times, but with wisdom in themain, we people will prove ourselves equal to the severest test to which political man has yeat subjected himself--the test of Democracy.

He was wrong, of course. The Democrats swept the election with Wilson who in his second term famously did not keep us out of war. But the Republic staggered on, with more or less erect pillars until recently. I wonder if Wister'd be so optimistic now.