Ed Kilgore: Making Calculations, Making History

Ed Kilgore is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly. He is is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, and a Special Correspondent for The New Republic.

One of the truly interesting things about the reaction to the president’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage (sorry if it annoys anyone that I’m writing about this yet again, but it is the dominant story of this week, affecting nearly every other political “story”), particularly among those who were pleased with it, is the constant alteration between narratives emphasizing its highly tactical and perhaps even accidental nature, and narratives placing it as extraordinarily important—even magnificent—from the perspective of history. This is particularly noticeable among LGBT writers, who often seem to pause in the midst of analyzing the event dispassionately or even cynically, to marvel at how it has affected them....

I’d observe that this isn’t the first, or second, time that a complicated progressive politician took a historic step in a calculated way from what might be at least partially interpreted as mixed motives. The Emancipation Proclamation, after all, contradicted years of prior statements by Lincoln that he never intended, even after the beginning of war, to tamper with slavery in its southern homeland. He got to his ultimate position in no small part, moreover, because he was convinced it would help win the war. But he also knew he was making history, and did.