I moved to the United States in 1999. I thought the America of the late ’90s was the America of the 220 or so years before that. I was wrong, as that period, with its relative peace and unity, was the exception not the rule. Twenty-five years later, I am still learning a lot about this country of ours.

This is why I want to highlight two columns this week reminding us about past political events that may inform our understanding of the current moment. The first is today’s column by George Will in the Washington Post, called “Don’t despair, ‘normal’ U.S. politics are abnormal. Happy Fourth!” It’s packed with information about the 19th-century political landscape.

Will starts by noting that many people would like to go back to more normal politics than we have today (guilty as charged). But normal, he explains, may not be what we have in mind. He cites the curator of the politics collection at the National Museum of American History:

On this July 4 commemoration of the grandest day in humanity’s political history, Americans wonder whether their politics will ever again be normal. Jon Grinspan has a strangely reassuring message: Normal is abnormal. . . .

And he ends:

In Germany, Italy and elsewhere, uniformed, torch-bearing marchers were coming. But America, Grinspan notes, “experienced a twentieth century generally calmer than the nineteenth.” On this less-than-happy national birthday, if you pine for normality, be careful: Which one?

The second article is “Democrats Have More to Fear Than Fear Itself,” by Chris Stirewalt. This one reminds us that there is a precedent that Democrats could have followed, that of the last term of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He writes:

In 1944, Democrats nominated and Americans elected a president who was very nearly dead. . . .

Ten days before the president accepted the Democratic nomination in July 1944, the president’s medical team diagnosed him with acute high blood pressure and congestive heart failure and said he would likely not survive another term in office. But doctors were saying what those around the president, and probably Roosevelt, already knew. He looked terrible—seeming 20 years older than his 63 years—and was wasting away. The diagnosis was kept from the public, but it was obvious to the party bosses who came in contact with the president.

That’s what led to the scramble, wonderfully recounted in Benn Steil’s book The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century, to dump Wallace, the sitting vice president. The public-facing argument for making the switch for Missouri Sen. Harry Truman was about politics, with race watchers saying that the ultra-progressive Wallace could cost Democrats in the Deep South. There were reports, too, about bad blood between Wallace and the other members of the administration.

But the real reason the bosses—and Roosevelt—knew the switch was necessary was that Wallace, a Stalin admirer who had been thoroughly duped by the Soviets on a trip through Siberia, could not be allowed to assume the presidency upon FDR’s inevitable demise.

The new world order for after the war that Roosevelt was working himself to death to try to establish would be wiped out by a Wallace presidency that let the Soviets have their way with Europe.

The switch paid off, as Roosevelt died some four months after his inauguration, and Truman finished the war and held the line with the Soviets.

Stirewalt warned Democrats not to think the current moment aligns with the past. He writes, “The problem Democratic bosses faced in 1944 was in managing success. The one they confront now is in avoiding a generational catastrophe.”

Important lessons.