Rick Perlstein, impeachment, and invoking ideals of the past

This is an informed commentary from historian Rick Perlstein, who specializes in the history of the conservative movement in the US, Rick Perlstein on the History Behind the Impeachment Inquiry Amanpour and Company 11/15/2019:

This is a notable excerpt:

... one of the things that Nancy Pelosi who's done some great things over the years and I respect her a heck of a lot has said is that she, when she was talking about how, you know, maybe Trump would just impeach himself and we didn't want to push this thing, the only way she wanted to pursue an impeachment inquiry is that they could somehow convince Republicans with the weight of the facts, because otherwise it would be too divisive.

Well, you know, the civil rights movement was divisive.

The suffrage movement was divisive.

Justice is divisive.

You know why it's divisive?

People who don't want justice are going to make us think and I think we're in one of the exitential movements for the nation where we're facing a choice.

Either we get own to brass tacks and fight for the values that the nation was founded on or we worry about divisiveness. [my emphasis]

Rick's reference to "the values that the nation was founded on" especially caught my attention, because he's using the very flawed past to point to shared aspirational ideals that can and should be applied to the very flawed present.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was great at doing that, on polemical, political, religious, and philosophical levels. Franklin Rossevelt's famous 1936 "Rendezvous with Destiny" speech is a classic example of invoking the struggles, aspirations, and accomplishments of the past to create a left-populist political framework. I'm continuously frustrated to see how difficult it seems to be the left and center-left to do that today, despite excellent models like MLK and FDR.

Since conservatism tends to look to restoring the past or preserving existing conditions, or at least to "make haste slowly" toward progress, it may be inevitable that the right will be more comfortable praising an idealized past than the left. But that doesn't mean people on the left have to just give up on the effort!