American liberalism is haunted by the past. The same political tendency that once prided itself for its focus on the future now looks squarely backwards at all times, gesturing at an endless number of lost futures to prove its current worth. Its argument, even if stated quietly, is always clear: that even if history says that you can’t trust the latest Democrat promising to deliver universal healthcare or a fair economy to follow through, it also tells you that electing even the most milquetoast liberal over any conservative would have prevented all of the major crises we are grappling with today from occurring. It’s tenuous, it’s unfalsifiable, it’s frustratingly repetitive, and it works. Even after the Democratic Party’s reputation reached all-time lows during the Biden administration, only a miniscule fraction of the left-wing electorate chose to back alternative options like the Green Party in 2024. Even the most radical of all voters, it seems, are convinced by the argument that we’d all be safely brunching if Hillary won, living in a wholesome solarpunk fantasy if Gore won, and out there in some kind of Star Trek spacefaring society if Reagan was defeated in 1980.
How actually true is this? That is the question that this series has sought to answer, starting in Part I with the instances where the alternative historographies were the most clearly off the mark. It is not true, for instance, that the election of a President Hillary Clinton would have nipped Republican far-rightism in the bud, or even that a President Henry Wallace could have prevented the Cold War. Such truths are important to understand as our endless historical what-ifs continue to dominate left-of-center American politics. But for every case where such mythologizing is wrong, there are also cases that stand as genuine historical hinge points, where some of the most important developments in this country’s history really did come down to random chance.
These are the cases that this section will be about. To properly understand this country and the possibilities of its politics, those of us on the left must be as clear and honest about the cases where one person being in one place at the right time could have changed things for the better as we are about the cases where it wouldn’t have. So, which of the would-be presidents of the past actually could have been good ones? Which major disasters in our history that seem as if they were set in stone really were only products of random chance? And when all is said and done, who stands alone as the Greatest President We Never Had?
B Tier
Al Gore 2000
Here it is: the big one.