Alexei Navalny, Russia’s best-known and most indefatigable Kremlin opposition figure who died in an Arctic penal colony Friday under as yet unknown circumstances, might best be viewed as the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” of Russian politics.

Mr. Navalny’s life was often a sharp illustration of the hopes, frustrations, and limits faced by the first post-Soviet generation under the nearly 2 1/2 decades of Vladimir Putin’s rule. At every stage, he pushed the limits. He enjoyed some unusual successes, and was punished in ways both predictable – as through the Kremlin-controlled legal system – and bizarre, such as via his 2020 poisoning with an exotic nerve agent and now his sudden untimely death.

Very little is known about Mr. Navalny’s demise, which according to prison officials happened quickly after he returned from a walk in the maximum-security prison above the Arctic Circle known as Polar Wolf, where he had recently been transferred.

The prison is notorious for its harsh punishment regime, including solitary confinement, about which Mr. Navalny had complained repeatedly on his social media accounts. On the other hand, he was a relatively young and healthy man, and there had been few indications of ill health.

“Navalny was a real opposition leader, and such leaders are not welcome in Russia. Our system does not need them,” says Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general and, more recently, opposition deputy of the State Duma. “With his passing, there is practically no one left. To quote the poet Alexander Pushkin, ‘Some are far distant, some are dead.’”

Evgeny Feldman/AP/File

Mr. Navalny (center) heads to attend a meeting in Russia's Central Election Commission in Moscow Dec. 25, 2017, after submitting endorsement papers necessary for his registration as a presidential candidate. But the commission barred him from running due to a prior conviction in an embezzlement case that critics called politically motivated.

Rise and fall

Mr. Navalny was a young lawyer who dabbled in liberal and nationalist politics at the dawn of the Putin era. He gradually grew dissatisfied with established parties and began cultivating his own largely youthful following for a political agenda that was always hard to pin down, but was definitely anti-corruption, anti-authoritarian, and anti-Putin.

Unlike older Russian politicians, he was a master of social media and a brilliant blogger. His political stardom began to rise amid the mass protest movement that emerged after disputed Duma elections in 2011 and Mr. Putin’s return to the presidency the next year.

He made a major impact when he ran for mayor of Moscow in a snap election held in 2013. It was the only time the Putin-era system of “managed democracy” ever allowed Mr. Navalny on a ballot, even though he’d just received the first of many criminal convictions. He shocked many by winning 27% of the votes against the Kremlin-anointed acting mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, who got 51%. It was characteristic of Mr. Navalny’s unrelenting style that he repeatedly challenged the result, in court and in public speeches.

Mr. Navalny, like many in Russia’s increasingly marginalized opposition, believed that Kremlin power was a weak facade and might be toppled by protests from below. In the run-up to the 2018 presidential elections, he organized street demonstrations that hit 100 Russian cities and put him on the map as Russia’s premier opposition figure. He made a special outreach to Russia’s Putin-era youth, though his efforts to radicalize them appears to have brought no lasting impact.

Pavel Golovkin/AP/File

Police officers detain Mr. Navalny during an unauthorized rally in Lubyanka Square in Moscow Dec. 15, 2012.

By 2020, it seemed that the Kremlin had contained the Navalny challenge, tolerating his activities that, though irritating to authorities, did not seem to create serious problems in the streets or in the carefully managed elections at various levels. Then, while on an organizing trip to Siberia, he fell deathly ill and was evacuated to Germany, where it was determined that he’d been poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok.

After his recovery, Mr. Navalny again demonstrated his tough, irrepressible character by declining a life of comfortable exile and returning to Russia with an appeal for people to take to the streets to overthrow Mr. Putin. He was arrested upon his arrival and subjected to a series of criminal sentences, an ordeal which ended with his death at the Polar Wolf prison colony.

What was the motive?

What baffles many observers is not the predictable repression of Russia’s state machinery, which reliably put Mr. Navalny out of political action more or less permanently. Rather, it is the capricious nature of his death, which, like the earlier Novichok poisoning, would seem to bring the Kremlin few benefits.

“The peak of Navalny’s popularity was in 2021, when he returned to Russia, and his name was on everyone’s lips,” says Denis Volkov, director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only independent polling agency. “His approval rating in those days was around 20%. After his arrest, and his disappearance from TV screens, his rating began to decline. By January 2024, it was less than 1%.”

Andrew Lubimov/AP/File

Mr. Navalny; his wife, Yulia, (right); daughter, Daria; and son, Zakhar, pose for the media after voting during a City Council election in Moscow, Sept. 8, 2019.

It will be widely assumed that the Kremlin ordered Mr. Navalny’s death, and there seems no doubt that Mr. Putin ultimately owns the whole sordid story.

But many Russians will believe, as they did during the earlier episode of Novichok poisoning, that Western intelligence agencies are somehow to blame.

“This death of Navalny comes at the worst possible moment for Putin, who is running for reelection and absolutely does not need this kind of publicity,” says Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser. “What we are witnessing is a murky undercover battle of secret services, and Navalny was just their pawn.”

It remains unclear what Mr. Navalny’s legacy will be, as he joins a list of Putin opponents who have met grisly and often inexplicable ends over the past two decades.

“Navalny became a symbol of the democratic part of the opposition, and his death doesn’t mean the opposition will disappear,” says Alexander Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Center, which tracks extremist trends in Russia. “Indeed, it suggests that our authorities are at a dead end.”

When the news broke last February that a train carrying 100,000 gallons of hazardous chemicals had derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, sending black plumes into the sky for days, lawmakers on Capitol Hill sprang into action. Less than one month later, Ohio Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown introduced the Railway Safety Act in the Senate. 

The bill, which was co-sponsored by Ohio Republican J.D. Vance, as well as two other Democrats and two other Republicans, would “finally hold big railroad companies accountable” said Senator Brown. Among other things, it proposed more detectors to signal when a train’s wheel bearings were overheating, more thorough inspections, and measures to help officials on the ground respond to a derailment more effectively. 

“Congress has a real opportunity to ensure that what happened in East Palestine will never happen again,” said Senator Vance, who grew up in a hardscrabble Appalachian community – an experience he chronicled in his bestselling book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Newspaper editorial boards called the bill “smart” and “the right thing to do.” “It is a welcome development to see Republicans and Democrats uniting to push freight rail to change,” wrote The Washington Post. 

Three weeks later, the House of Representatives had its own version of the legislation, spearheaded by two Naval Academy graduates from opposite sides of the political aisle. By May, the Senate committee that oversees transportation approved the bill. Hopes ran high that it would soon come to a vote.

Nine months later, it still hasn’t.

As President Joe Biden makes his first official visit to East Palestine today, what once seemed like a promising bipartisan package of noncontroversial safety measures now appears to be indefinitely on hold. 

This is the story of how a piece of legislation, sparked by disaster, can overcome the partisan divide in Congress, gather enough momentum to appear to be on the verge of passage – and then stall out. It would be convenient to blame it on polarization. Or lobbyists. Or gridlock. But it’s more complicated than that.

Peeling back the layers provides a revealing look at what it takes to reach compromise in Congress on something as seemingly straightforward as protecting communities from toxic train derailments. If all Democrats supported the bill, along with the seven Republican senators who have indicated support, that would still be two short of the threshold needed for passage. And while there’s broad consensus among lawmakers that preventing another East Palestine-type disaster is a worthwhile goal, there’s less agreement over whether this legislation strikes the right balance among safety, cost, and efficiency.

“You want to enhance safety, but you don’t want to create a regulatory burden that actually reduces how much freight can move and make it more expensive,” says Sen. John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican who says he’s open to supporting the rail safety bill, depending on the final form it takes. “They’re still trying to figure this out.”

Gene J. Puskar/AP/File

Portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed the night before burn in East Palestine, Ohio, Feb. 4, 2023.

How 38 cars went off the tracks

On Feb. 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern train was traveling westbound through the clear, cold night, when an alarm alerted the three-person crew that a wheel bearing was overheating. The train had passed in three detectors in 30 miles, and records show that the temperature had been steadily rising. 

But the second and third detectors were 20 miles apart, and by the time the train passed the last one, it had far exceeded the temperature threshold for triggering an alarm. As the crew sought to slow down the train, an automatic emergency brake engaged, and 38 cars went off the tracks. Eleven carrying hazardous materials caught on fire, and the flames spread to another dozen cars. Fearing that five cars carrying vinyl chloride could explode, officials intentionally burned off the substance.  

As residents were evacuated, first responders sought to contain the fires without initially even knowing what substances they were dealing with. The Environmental Protection Agency came in to address air, water, and soil contamination. State officials estimated that 38,222 minnows died, along with 5,500 other aquatic animals such as crawfish. No one was killed, but residents complained of feeling sick, even months after they were told it was safe to return. 

As many of East Palestine’s allies see it, the disaster put this small community of 4,700 people – which has a per capita income of $30,000 and a 10% college graduation rate – in an unfair fight against powerful interests with deep pockets. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has said it reminds her of Hinkley, California, whose residents she famously advocated for in a lawsuit against Pacific Gas and Electric Co. over groundwater contamination.

Rep. Chris Deluzio, the Pennsylvania Democrat who sponsored the House version of the bill, recently told the Pennsylvania Capital-Star that politicians were bending to pressure from the railroads.

“We’re coming up on a year, and I can’t even get the Republican leadership to get us a hearing,” Mr. Deluzio said earlier this month. “They’re doing the bidding of the big railroads here at the expense of the good people I represent and our neighbors in Ohio and folks like us who live close to these tracks all over the country.”

What’s in the bill

The Railway Safety Act would, among other things, add more “hot bearing detectors” along the tracks and improve emergency procedures, so that first responders would know right away what substances they’re dealing with and are better prepared to contain any spills or fires. 

GOP Sen. John Thune, the former state rail director for his native South Dakota, praised those measures in a May 2023 meeting of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. He also said some additional inspections could help, but overall he argued that the bulk of the bill would not address the root causes of the crash.

“This bill should have been about safety reforms relevant to the derailment in East Palestine, but now it’s been expanded to a stalking horse for onerous regulatory mandates and union giveaways,” said Senator Thune, who noted that the cost of regulation put railroads out of business in his home state in the 1970s, leading South Dakota to levy a tax on citizens so that the state could get the industry back up and running.

Critics point out that Mr. Thune has been the No. 2 Senate recipient of railroad lobbying dollars since 1990 and once served as a lobbyist for the industry. 

Gene J. Puskar/AP/File

A black plume rises over East Palestine, Ohio, as a result of a controlled detonation of a portion of the derailed Norfolk Southern train, Feb. 6, 2023.

Indeed, from the outset, industry groups urged senators to modify the bill, which went through substantial changes before being passed out of committee. But the railroad industry is pushing for more. A particular point of contention: measures they say are less about ensuring safety than about benefiting unions – a key constituency for Senator Brown, who faces a tough reelection battle in Ohio this fall.

A Bloomberg editorial last summer called the bill a combination of “pre-existing policy preferences repackaged as a response to tragedy” arguing that mandating “pointless” labor costs would hurt railroads’ ability to innovate in ways that could more effectively boost safety. 

Among the provisions that Republicans and rail interests have taken issue with is one that mandates a two-person crew for “high-hazard” trains. Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation think tank in Washington, says the railroads see that as “a gratuitous giveaway to the unions who have been advocating the two-person rule since long before East Palestine, and which the railroads say would never pass objective cost-benefit analysis.” 

Moreover, Mr. Davis adds in an email, “Railroads are irate that they just finished spending billions of dollars installing computers on all their trains that apply the brakes in case the human forgets (Positive Train Control), and now they are being told to add an extra human to watch the computer watch the first human.”

Advocates for a two-person crew, with a conductor as well as an engineer, liken the safety benefits to those of the airplane practice of having a pilot and co-pilot.
According to an analysis by Public Citizen, Norfolk Southern increased its federal lobbying budget by 30% last year to $2.3 million, retaining 41 federal lobbyists, including more than two dozen former staffers in Congress, the White House, and various federal agencies. 

Moving forward 

While the bill was stalled and being scrutinized by lobbyists, many of the parties involved in the derailment and its aftermath continued to move forward. 

Carolyn Kaster/AP

Marina Davis sits on her front porch with her dog Hunter in East Palestine, Ohio, Jan. 30, 2024. Ms. Davis did not evacuate after the derailment and lives just outside the 1-mile evacuation zone.

The railroad industry says it has been independently taking steps to address some of the problems exposed by what happened in East Palestine. According to the Association of American Railroads, the industry increased detectors on key routes, lowered the temperature threshold for requiring inspections or removal of a car with hot wheel bearings, and partnered with state fire associations to expand access to AskRail, an app 2.3 million first responders can now check to determine what type of hazardous material a train is carrying. 

Norfolk Southern has continued to pay out, announcing a 33% drop in fourth-quarter profits and estimated costs of more than $1.1 billion related to the derailment – including $836 million for environmental-related costs and $381 million for legal costs and community assistance. The company also says it had spent $1 billion on infrastructure in 2023, including installing 108 hot box detectors.

The EPA has continued to visit East Palestine, issuing monthly updates on clean-up activities, which to date have included removing 350 million pounds of contaminated soil for off-site disposal and taking thousands of air and water samples.

Senator Vance returned to East Palestine on the one-year anniversary of the derailment, donning a hard hat as he toured the clean-up area and calling on the Biden administration to conduct long-term health screening for residents. And Senator Brown has continued to visit not only East Palestine but also other communities around Ohio that were affected by Norfolk Southern derailments. He says he is still pressuring the Senate to bring his bill to a vote.

“We aren’t going to let them dismiss another vibrant, heartland town as collateral damage,” said Senator Brown last month on the Senate floor. “Each one of these communities is another reason why we must get this commonsense bill across the finish line and hold Norfolk Southern accountable.”

In December, he finally got the legislation placed on the legislative calendar, but there’s still no guarantee when – or if – it will come up for a vote. 

The Railway Safety Act is currently one of 334 pieces of legislation waiting to be brought to the floor.

Troy Sambajon/The Christian Science Monitor

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul speaks to reporters at a Monitor Breakfast in Washington, Feb. 16, 2024. The Texas Republican made the case that aid for Ukraine aligns with America’s national security interests.

Republican congressional supporters of Ukraine – and of getting billions more in U.S. military assistance to the besieged European democracy ASAP – are in a quandary. 

How can they heal the divides in the House Republican majority over Ukraine in short order to win a “yes” on $60 billion in fresh Ukraine security assistance that the Senate has already approved? Pressure is growing for the deal to close before Ukraine runs out of the munitions it needs to stave off a freshly advancing Russian army.

“At the end of the day I do think a majority in the House will pass this [Ukraine aid],” Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, told reporters at a breakfast on Friday, hosted by the Monitor.

While there are some members who “can’t be persuaded,” he says, proponents like himself will have to redouble efforts in the coming days “to make it palatable” enough to win over skeptics and get the aid passed.

That could include revisions to turn the aid package’s economic assistance piece into loans, as well as a stepped-up campaign to educate the American public that as much as 80% of Ukraine’s military assistance actually stays here at home and creates jobs through contracts with the domestic military production industry. 

Chairman McCaul’s prediction: One way or another, a Ukraine aid package will pass by April. 

A global thinker with a world vision mirroring the “peace through strength” approach of Ronald Reagan, Mr. McCaul says this moment is not unlike the run-up to World War II, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine and belligerence toward the Baltic states and other former Soviet republics echoing Adolf Hitler’s swallowing up of much of Europe.

“I have serious concerns about where we are today and the possibility of a major-scale world war like my dad’s generation
[fought],” he says. Russia’s war in Ukraine, he says, is Exhibit A.

“Mr. Putin’s intentions are very clear,” says Mr. McCaul, the representative of Texas’ 10th Congressional District, which stretches from Houston to Austin, since 2005. 

Noting his meeting with reporters is taking place against the backdrop of the apparent prison death of Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny, Mr. McCaul says, “It’s a sad day. I hope out of this death will come something to send a message to the world and to the American people about who Mr. Putin really is.”

Despite that dark picture of where the world stands, Mr. McCaul also sees the moment as presenting opportunities to reassert the kind of strong and inspiring American leadership practiced by President Reagan.

Those opportunities range from Ukraine – where he says American support that allowed Kyiv to win the war would be a defeat not just for Mr. Putin, but for all the world’s “evil dictators” – to Pacific Island nations facing an increasingly aggressive China, and even to the Middle East.

Set to travel to Saudi Arabia next month, Mr. McCaul says a deal on diplomatic recognition between Israel and Saudi Arabia – one that was advancing before the Hamas terrorist attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza – would constitute a “true paradigm shift in the Middle East.” The result would be Arab countries and Israel “aligned against Iran and its proxies.”

Other highlights from the Monitor Breakfast interview:

How do you counter those in your party who say we have to secure our own border before worrying about Ukraine?

There are some [Republicans] I don’t think can be persuaded because the narrative is so strong, the “brainwashing,” if you will, that we have to choose between our southern border and Ukraine. I don’t agree with that. It’s a false dichotomy choice. We’re a great nation; we can do both.

You may be an admirer of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, but your party is seeing a resurgence of the isolationism Mr. Reagan opposed. What explains that?

The reason we had isolationism in the late 1930s is because we had World War I. They didn’t want to die in a European war again. We have a very young membership in the Congress now. A lot of them never even lived through the Cold War. What they do have a personal experience with are these “forever wars” [of] Iraq and Afghanistan. They don’t want us to get pulled into another ... “foreign entanglement.” The [Biden] administration has failed to explain why this [assistance to Ukraine] is in our national security interest.

Donald Trump is making known his opposition to further aid for Ukraine. Does winning the fight for additional assistance require getting a nod from the former president?

He’s got a lot of control over my party. There’s no question about it. ... [But] he was the first president to put lethal aid into Ukraine. ... You can’t forget that. He’s probably thinking about, “Do I want to be the guy who comes in to fix the problem, or was I the guy who ... advocated for its implosion?”

Iran is one factor, but why else do you say the stakes are so high in the effort to secure a diplomatic agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia?

The first phase [of a Saudi deal] would be a security agreement with the United States, which would involve weapons sales. I would prefer to sign off on that rather than have them buy that from China. ... I would rather win over the Arab nations to the United States’ side, rather than China’s influence and Russia’s. If we don’t do this, there’s a lot at stake.

Would you consider serving in a second Trump administration, say as secretary of state, secretary of homeland security, or director of the CIA?

The track record’s been interesting with former Cabinet members [at which point a chuckle ensues from Mr. McCaul]. I’d have to have a serious conversation to make sure I could advance my world vision.

More than any other American president, Abraham Lincoln has been considered a source of wisdom for subsequent generations. New books on Lincoln reliably appear every February to coincide with Presidents Day, joining an already vast library.

This year brings two excellent studies of the 16th president that explicitly look to him for insight into questions currently besetting the American republic. Allen C. Guelzo’s “Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment” explores Lincoln’s vision of democratic government, while Harold Holzer’s “Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration” centers on Lincoln’s handling of an issue that was as divisive in the antebellum period as it is today.

Interestingly, there is little overlap between the two books. “Our Ancient Faith” is a slim, meditative volume whose primary focus is slavery and the Civil War. “Brought Forth on This Continent,” meanwhile, is a broad examination of immigration’s impact on 19th-century politics. Holzer notes that the subject has been neglected by historians precisely because of the overwhelming significance of race to the cataclysmic events of Lincoln’s time.

Princeton University historian Guelzo, the author of more than a dozen books on Lincoln and his times, establishes at the outset that his latest is an explicit response to the dire state of American democracy. He writes in a brief preface that he has long “taken consolation” in Lincoln, “who gave democracy a new lease on life and a fresh sense of its purpose.” He continues, “To all those who have despaired of the future or whose lives have been ruined by the failures of the present, I offer this man’s example.” 

The author proceeds to establish that both before and during his presidency, Lincoln’s actions were guided by his ardent faith in democracy, which he saw as, in Guelzo’s words, “the most natural, the most just, and the most enlightened form of human government.” (The book’s title comes from Lincoln’s reference to democracy as “my ancient faith.”) Only in a democracy, Lincoln observed, could somebody like him, formerly “a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy,” aspire to reach the highest office in the land.

Guelzo notes that in his speeches and writings, Lincoln had more to say about what a democracy is not than about what it is. A country with masters and slaves, he insisted, fell short of a true democracy. Since childhood, Lincoln had believed that slavery was wrong. He was vocal in opposing the growing view in the South that slavery was not just a “necessary evil” but a “positive good.” In a speech before he became president, he noted acidly, “Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.” 

Critics of Lincoln have often painted him not as a lover of democracy but as a tyrant, pointing to his suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Guelzo concedes that the wartime president did encroach on civil liberties by, among other things, arresting political dissenters and shutting down unfriendly newspapers. But as part of his vigorous defense of his subject from the “Lincoln-haters,” the author argues that while in some cases Lincoln strayed too far from democratic ideals, his temporary actions “were not civil cataclysms.” And he suggests that they pale next to Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, which the president believed would revitalize American democracy.

Finally, Guelzo reasons that we should be reassured by the fact that the United States has already weathered a period of extreme polarization. He confidently concludes that it is “comforting that these frustrations are not novelties, however much they feel like them, and that the American democracy has endured, risen, and surmounted them once, and will do so again.” 

Like Guelzo, Holzer is a prolific Lincoln scholar. His latest book opens in 1863 with the president urging Congress to establish “a system for the encouragement of immigration.” Nearly 10 million Europeans had arrived on American shores between 1830 and the start of the Civil War, but the conflict had slowed the tide. Lincoln, who called immigration a “source of national wealth and strength,” wanted the government to take active measures to attract foreigners to fill war-related labor shortages in agriculture and industry.

As the author demonstrates, however, many of Lincoln’s fellow citizens did not share his positive view of immigration. In fact, early in his political career, Lincoln’s Whig Party was home to a vocal nativist, anti-Catholic faction. “Not all Whigs were nativists,” Holzer explains, “but nearly all nativists were Whigs.” Lincoln did not belong to this intolerant sect. But he did refrain from publicly rebuking the nativists, as he feared driving them out of the party.

Holzer deftly summarizes the complicated politics of the antebellum period, including the rise of the secretive, nativist Know-Nothing movement, the collapse of the Whigs, and the formation of the anti-slavery Republican Party. (Lincoln was the first Republican to be elected president.) While the pro-slavery Democratic Party, favored by Irish Americans, warned its Irish voters that Lincoln’s party would prioritize Black people over foreign-born white citizens, the Republicans attracted German immigrants who were generally strong supporters of abolition.

German and Irish immigrants became the two largest foreign-born contingents fighting for the Union side when war broke out, with 175,000 German men and 150,000 Irish men enlisting. With soldiers from Poland, Italy, Switzerland, and elsewhere, Holzer calls the war a “multiethnic crusade.” (Lincoln only permitted Black men to enlist after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863.) 

According to the author, Irish soldiers were committed to the Union side “as long as federal war goals remained fixed on defending the Constitution and the flag and restoring the Union, not on eradicating slavery.” Ironically, the Lincoln who promoted European immigration came close to losing reelection in part because of lack of support from both Irish and German voters; Irish Americans had long opposed emancipation, fearing that freed African Americans would compete with them for low-paying jobs, while German Americans faulted the president for moving too slowly to free those who were enslaved.

Both authors are admiring of their subject, but not unreservedly so. Guelzo notes that Lincoln did not support political and social equality between Black and white people and that he “can be judged too passive and acquiescent in the racism all around him.” In a similar vein, Holzer observes that Lincoln was unsympathetic toward Native Americans and that his expansive view of immigration largely excluded those from Asia and Spanish America.

The authors seem to disagree on one particular point, however. In considering Lincoln’s increasingly progressive policy stances, Holzer argues that the 16th president “evolved on immigration, just as he would evolve on the issue of Black freedom and rights.” Guelzo, for his part, rejects the idea that Lincoln significantly transformed during his lifetime, referring to “useless tropes like growth or evolution to argue that, over time, Lincoln changed for the better.” Guelzo instead sides with historians who believe that Lincoln’s character remained consistent – that shifts in external conditions, more than any internal conversion, enabled his most righteous achievements.

If nothing else, such scholarly debates should help ensure a steady stream of Lincoln books for years to come.

AP

Models present dresses by Central African Republic fashion designer Ketura Kimono Milca a fashion show in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, June 24, 2023. The objective of the show was to deliver a message of peace during a period of high tension between the DRC and Rwanda.

In the 30 years since it was torn apart by an ethnic genocide, the tiny nation of Rwanda in central Africa has sought to be a model of reconciliation, forward economic thinking, and – lately – leadership in the global transition to green energy.

Now it seeks to become a cultural hub showcasing a mental transition driven by younger generations of Africans who reject being defined or restrained by their continent’s troubled past. That idea is at the heart of an ambitious arts festival opening today in Kigali, the capital.

The Kigali Triennial reflects “the broader question of rebound, of rebirth after the genocide,” the organizers wrote. “As elsewhere in Africa, where many decolonizations have failed, it is a question of knowing how to start again, as Africans ... to let people know that these young people have something to say to the world, in a radically new way.”

In just 26 years, 1 in 4 people on the planet will be African. The continent’s rapid growth – its population is on track to double by 2050 – marks a youthful contrast to the graying trends in Europe, Asia, and the United States. The generations of Africans born after the Cold War, apartheid in South Africa, and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda hold dramatically new views of themselves and their place in the world.

Better educated than their parents and impatient with faltering governance, they are harnessing technology to advance innovation and assert confidence, optimism, and dignity. A 2023 survey by the Higher Education for Good Foundation, based in Geneva, found that African youth desire a sense of purpose and achievement more than material success.

“It feels like the opportunities are unlimited for us right now,” Jean-Patrick Niambé, a hip-hop artist from Ivory Coast, told The New York Times in October.

African sensibilities are spreading globally. From 2018 to 2023, the number of African or participants of the African diaspora at the Venice Biennale for architecture grew from two to 89. The 2022 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the field’s most prestigious award, was from Burkina Faso. The Brooklyn Museum featured a fashion exhibit last fall featuring the works of 40 designers from 20 African countries. 

The 10-day festival in Kigali draws together the works of more than 400 artists from 25 African countries (and a few from Europe and the Middle East). They represent a broad range of creative expression – in painting, drama, filmmaking, literature, fashion, sculpture, dance, music, and gastronomy.

The Rwandan government hopes that the festival will be a catalyst for economic growth. If it is, it may be due to the deeper purpose of art to stir the higher tones of thought that enrich human achievement with purpose.

“We can’t continue to live in this strangulation of economic and mental poverty where all our resources are being exploited,” said Niyi Coker, a Nigerian filmmaker and director of the School of Theatre, Television, and Film at San Diego State University. “We are defining ourselves ... and telling our own historical truths.” The next generation of Africans, he told iBand Magazine, should “have a story of who they are and where they are coming from.”