When Democracies Grow Up Too Late
World War II stands in the American mind as a time when we were united. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, in the wake of Hitler’s declaration of war upon us, even ever-fractious Congress voted unanimously to declare war on Hitler and missed unanimity in the declaration against Japan by just one vote.
We were inspired by the resolute stand of Britain, alone and majestic in its resistance to atavistic barbarism, its cause magnificently broadcast to us by the man called by its people to voice their roar.
This we remember — but we often forget how divided we were before December 7. Even just three months before that fateful day, with Europe aflame, with Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Oslo, Prague, and Vienna already conquered and with German panzers driving deep into Russia, America was far from united. In Congress, the vote to keep our army preparing for what was coming passed by a single vote. Without that, we would have been even worse prepared than we were when Japan struck.
As well, the national mindset was wildly erratic. Though public opinion surveys showed both great revulsion at the Nazis’ barbarous persecution of its Jews, an overwhelming majority opposed offering asylum in America to the Nazis’ victims. In another measure, the greatest media star of the day (upwards of 30 million weekly, one-third of the population) was Charles Coughlin, whose hatred of Jews was the center point of his message and of his star persona.
And while no bet is certain, this one touches on the core of what has made us great.
This unfocused mindset was rampant across the Western democracies. Before the war, Churchill’s anti-Hitler message was dismissed as being a mere symptom of a desperate quest for attention by an unstable politician past his prime. Historian Piers Brendon wrote that in the face of Hitler’s threat, both left and right in Britain showed signs of toxic immaturity:
As late as November 1936 the Labour MP Sir Stafford Cripps declared that although defeat by Germany would be “a disaster” for capitalists, it would be no “bad thing for the British working classes.” A couple of years later Harold Nicolson encountered three young peers in his club who stated that “they would prefer to see Hitler in London than a Socialist administration.”
We are not here talking about the “Hitler” so often referenced today, which is simply a name applied to someone with whom one disagrees or are running against; the same with other terms that applied in full to Hitler and his gang, such as “Nazi” and “racist.” Those words are used because after the war, they represented what we universally agreed upon was despicable evil.
But that strong signification came through the sacrifice and suffering of millions, the worldwide victims of Hitler’s evil. An immense deposit, filling those words with immense meaning.
True enough, those words have been debased by those who use words the way a spendthrift writes checks, kiting along, hoping to gain power and immunity it brings before his insolvency becomes common knowledge. But those people were immature, not in the face of a bogus threat, but in front of the very real one, the one whose name was capable of misuse because it really did convey fearsome horror, not the bogus evil evoked by later demagogues. And this reminds us that we, too, must guard against blundering into similar foolishness.
This foolishness had a price. No one identified that price better than Churchill:
One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.
In Churchill’s words from another place, what was present instead was “unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature” in Britain, France, and America, which allowed the truly wicked to rearm, and so turned a preventable crisis into a global catastrophe. The war was going to be fought anyway; the only question was — on whose terms.
QED? Not yet, as applicable as that seems to today. Historical examples do not yield us algorithms that apply fully and cleanly to each new situation. We are inclined to become lazily formulaic.
But the unprecedented algorithms that so help us today also hurt us in unprecedented ways. They cannot simply inject us with wisdom. Blessedly, our humanity is not so reducible. Surrendering ourselves to AI algorithms as we are still cleaning up the messes made in young lives by the far less powerful algorithms of social media into whose hands we delivered our children 15 years ago, and by the TV that babysat the generation or two before.
On the website of Hillsdale College’s Churchill Project, Justin Lyons wrote:
It is by reflecting on decisions as actually made by human beings — with all the irremovable uncertainty about the future — that useful judgments are possible. Churchill wrote that it was on this basis that he wished his own share in the conflict to be judged.
This is wisdom. It is not in the narrow certainties of “cookbook mathematics” (as my memorable high school math teacher contemptuously used to call algorithms) that we will find wisdom. It is found rather in a realism more profound and basic — we must act consequentially even though we do not have — nor may may ever have — certain knowledge.
The real Churchill did an extraordinary job of describing the reality of making the gravest decisions in the fog of events. He revealed his own struggle as well as his own, deeply felt calling. He was, as Lyons put it, “a great statesman struggling to come to grips with immense difficulties and dangers within the always doubtful horizons of human decision.”
Churchill looked at the long sweep of European and world history and did his best to figure the trends that sweep revealed into his decision-making. His dedication to Western civilization drove his decision making. With that at stake, he realized he could not hide behind the limits that always define our lives but had to inspire the world nonetheless to compel victory. He challenges those who hear his message today to do the same.
It should not surprise us to find here today the same kind of immaturity that benighted Britain and America before the supreme showdown of World War II. It is again a confrontation with a diabolical regime with messianic pretensions and an arrogant willingness to bet everything on exploiting our immaturity.
Why should we, too, bet on our immaturity? When we finally realized what was at stake with Hitler, the West did not fail. It should ground us in sober hope to remember that the leftist fool Brendon quoted, Cripps, later became an important member of Churchill’s wartime cabinet, serving in several large roles.
It is likely, though no way certain, that those anonymous lords Nicholson heard in his club also served with adult distinction in the cause. So too in America, the great majority of the isolationists joined the war effort and contributed mightily. How many of Charles Coughlin’s listeners were among the tens of thousands of GIs who, on Eisenhower’s orders, marched through the newly liberated concentration camps in 1945, and saw the results of the hatred to which Coughlin hitched his career?
There is reasonable hope that the same sort of thing will occur as events proceed today.
America has been vastly more powerful than the mullahs. And so, for nearly half a century, Americans as a whole have not felt much urgency about confronting their threat forthrightly. Foolishness being an ever-present temptation, we have been in no rush. But prudence as well reminds us that we have a responsibility to see that any actions we take in response to a threat should bring about more good than ill; we do not wish to pave our own road to hell.
Like Churchill, like Reagan at his “take-down-this-wall” best, Trump is seeing the sweep of history of those who pulled off an unholy marriage of Nazism with apocalyptic Shi’ite messianism. Trump does not pretend “Death to America” means anything other than what it says. He knows those who say it have patiently worked to bring it about for decades and are our deadly enemies. He sees how well over the years the mullahs learned to play our wishful thinking, our immaturity, and our foolishness
He has seen as well how the mullahs have blinded themselves to our strengths. Under the curse of hubris, they think of us only in terms of the caricatures of their ideology. They do not know how we change and repent and renew ourselves. They have staked all their chips that they can bluff us until it is too late and they have the impregnability nuclear armaments and an overwhelming arsenal of ballistic missiles would confer.
Seeing this, mature enough not to paralyze himself by waiting for impossible certainty, Trump has taken direct action against the whole of the mullahs’ enterprise. Trump has bet that the wisdom of this country will prevail over its foolishness and that, choosing maturity, we will rise to the occasion as we did before.
And while no bet is certain, this one touches on the core of what has made us great. When that is the bet, I’ll put my chips down too. I have no doubt many more American are doing the same, and as in World War II, we will come to a renewed sense of unified purpose.
And due to learning from Churchill’s very human example, we will be spared the cataclysmic damage that not acting in time cost us then. After binding the wounds and comforting the bereaved, as we must in even the smallest conflict, we may then both celebrate and solemnly resolve never to let it go as far as we did this time, as well.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
Head of State, Not Head of Faction