Good morning,
Happy Belated Veterans Day (I can’t believe I forgot to mention it last week). We owe a debt to prior generations who fought for our freedom, fought against slavery, fought against Communism and Fascism, and sometimes fought in wars whose objectives were unclear. But they all did so pursuant to an oath to serve. In some sense, I feel that this week we made a downpayment on that debt by turning away many of those who diminished our political discourse, undermined our institutions, and made a mockery of our democracy. While too many of these folks got through to victory than I would like, the message was loud and clear. You cannot fool most of the people most of the time. And contrary to how it appears on the Internet, Americans aren’t as stupid as…well…Herschel Walker.
PERSPECTIVE
We often forget the momentous events that preceded us, the lessons from which should inform our behaviors and command our attention. Over 100 years ago, the “War to End all Wars,” which broke the fragile peace in Europe that stood nearly a century prior (since the Treaty of Vienna in 1815), was a bloody slaughterhouse that took the lives of countless young people and changed Europe forever. Ironically, it was another treaty—The Treaty of Versailles—that provided fertile soil in which the fascism of the 1930s could grow, leading to the Second World War.
Since the end of that conflict, we have lived with relative peace in Europe in the over 75 years since. That peace has been interrupted by Putin’s belligerence, perhaps because he wants to reassemble the Soviet empire, perhaps because he sees himself as a modern-day version of the greatest Tsars (although certainly not Peter the Great!), or perhaps because he sees this as a means to consolidate support among the Russian people and distract them from the country’s corruption, economic struggles, and uncertain future. On that last front, I’m not sure how well he’s doing, as more and more Russians can see the bitter price paid for a war on someone else’s soil—that someone else never having posed a risk to the motherland. Since his adventures in Georgia and the taking of Crimea, which were largely unanswered by the West, we now see a brutal war against citizens that will set back Ukraine for decades. And if you’re Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia (much less, Poland), you have to be worried.
These times, with a mounting “to do” list of major problems, all in the context of a fractious body politic fueled by hate, discord and disinformation, seem dire. Yet there also are marked improvements in the world, in the delivery of energy, relative peace globally, some slow movement on climate change, great advances in medicine and science, a space program daring to explore the universe, reduced poverty (particularly child poverty), and reduced violence (yes, that’s right). It’s not all bad, but it’s happening all at once—the good and the bad—and it often feels overwhelming.
But these are not the first days of vast changes. There were other periods of momentous change…
SEMINAL HISTORICAL MOMENTS AND BRILLIANT WRITING
There are times when one reads a few selected paragraphs and is impressed that an idea can be conveyed in a creative, humorous, and elucidating manner. Earlier this month I read one such paragraph, by James Parker in his review of the book Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, by Katherine Rundell:
“If you were a gentleman in Elizabethan London, a gentleman of more or less regular means and habits, your typical day went something like this: You rose at 4 a.m., you wrote 14 letters and a 30-page treatise on the nonexistence of purgatory, you fought a duel, you composed a sonnet, you went to watch a Jesuit get publicly disemboweled, you invented a scientific instrument, you composed another sonnet, you attended the premiere of As You Like It, you romanced someone else’s wife, and then you caught the bubonic plague and died.”
“They packed a lot in, the Elizabethans, is my point. Maybe posterity, considering our own age, will judge that we are packing a lot in, with the fascism and the COVID and the melting glaciers. Maybe. But there was a peculiar paradoxical ugly-beautiful density to life as the Elizabethans lived it. The Reformation was just behind them; the civil war was coming; Elizabeth, the virgin queen, may have been semi-celestial, but her subjects lived in a police state. They had a passion for virtue and a genius for cruelty. They had wonderful manners and barbaric inclinations, lovely clothes and terrible diseases. They oscillated madly between the abstract and the corporeal. And among his contemporaries, nobody oscillated more madly than John Donne.”
OUR CURRENT MOMENT
Parker has a point comparing inflection point of Elizabethan times with our own. There is a parlor game going around among commentators, imagining where we are in comparison to other historic eras. Is this pre-Civil War America? Are there parallels to the advent of the First World War, sparked by an assassination in a second-tier capital city at the wrong time? Are we reaching the end of the “second gilded age” or are we on the cusp of the Russian revolution? Are we in 1930s Weimar Germany, living high on the hog, polar opposite political parties and ideologies at war, engaging a populace of anger and grievance, willing to accept almost anything?
We are at a place of remarkable scientific and medical advances, a spread of information and technology that we have a hard time controlling, while we are faced with questions about the future of the planet. And then there is the American political landscape. In earlier times, it felt in America like there was some common agreement on where we go as a nation, while people disputed how to get there. Today there seems little agreement on where to go—although the recent elections seem to suggest a place of conspiracy theories and lies might not be among the options.
ARMED TO THE TEETH
All of this is against the backdrop of massive amounts of weaponry. On the local level, the Supreme Court has determined that there is virtually no limit to the ownership and carrying of weapons, the type of effectiveness was unimaginable to the Founders’ generation. On the international level, weapons of massive destructive capability are in the hands of the likes of North Korea and Vladimir Putin. Iran is well along the road and, deal or no deal, they likely soon will have the weapon and delivery system to alter the relative stability in the Middle East and beyond.
As if this weren’t enough, democracy seems in the descendancy around the world. Italy, burned already by the fascism of the 1930s and 40s, seems unfettered in its election of a hard-right admirer of Mussolini’s style of government. And Sweden—SWEDEN!—that bastion of a liberal political environment in a social-democratic economy—has elected a right wing leader. Meanwhile, here in America, there is a plausible chance authoritarian Donald Trump could again be president and, whether he is or isn’t, the mechanisms of elections in some states will be firmly in the hands of the political branch of state governments, with restrictions on the ability to vote (which has the effect of disenfranchising countless poor and minorities). Minority government by an increasingly right-wing party that views elections as the purview of partisan legislatures with wildly gerrymandered districts, seems our future. A single election will not change that.
THE FUTURE OF POLITICS
It will take a sound trouncing of the Republican party of today, putting to rest the Trump-ist conspiracy-fueled parade of lies and sycophants to a perceived “base” that is aggrieved, before that party can again participate in the public forum of ideas. And this will need to be coupled with a reduction in the “woke” gotcha-politics that has alienated much of a sympathetic society that doesn’t want its words parsed each and every time they speak, before there is any sort of movement toward a semblance of political peace and cooperation.
There is talk of a “national unity party.” It succeeded once before, with Abraham Lincoln drawing the more progressive Democrats away from the harder-line of that party to vote along with the Republicans. Teddy Roosevelt came close to a third party (not quite “national unity”). Perhaps the moment has come for such an experiment in setting collective wellbeing and the preservation of our democracy as the essential principles of governing. Jury’s out…
THOUGHTS OF DE TOCQUEVILLE
Beyond the musings about the Elizabethan period, here are some of the thoughts of de Tocqueville, who cast a dispassionate eye on America a long time ago, but the words ring true today in several areas of concern:
Restrictions of freedom
“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” -- Alexis de Tocqueville
Obtuse rules that benefit the few
“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” -- Alexis de Tocqueville
Lack of Principle
“There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.” –Alexis de Tocqueville
Have a good day,
Glenn
From the archives:
Rather than a Unity Party, as I have noted before, No Labels, the bipartisan organization that birthed the Problem Solver’s Caucus in the House and the G-10 (or 20?) in the Senate, is forging ahead with their plan to have the ability to run a bipartisan unity ticket for president/vice president in 2024, assuming two extreme candidates. A precursor to a third party or just a shock to the system in an attempt to liberate more moderate elements within each party? Who knows…