1945

Maybe it's because I just taught the failure of the Versailles treaty, or more like it's the news, but I find myself thinking about the end of World War II, and how certain things were assumed then that we are in the process of forgetting.

First, we assumed - in the smoldering firelit of Dresden and Hiroshima - that wars were no longer feasible as a means to an end.  Therefore, we must prevent wars.  Europe and Japan, in particular, imbibed the lesson that nationalism leads to toxic national policy and eventually war.  For 75 years, they have worked to bleed nationalism from their country's politics. Now, we see the rise of nationalism in certain countries - especially Russia and China - and we see the rise of ethnonationalism in countries like Britain and the US. These historical lessons are bad ones, but our blindness to our past leaves us exposed to repeating the errors of our great-grandparents.

We also created structures to try and prevent war.  The UN and NATO, in particular, yoked humanity to a common goal of mutual defense.  NATO created a frightening tension with the Warsaw Pact, but that tension "worked" to prevent war.  Similarly, Bretton Woods created a system of open trade and global economics that smoothed the competition between countries. Those systems are now derided by the Populist Right and Left.  They ignore the reality that trade wars precede shooting wars.  That you don't shoot your customers, and therefore the more we hold in common, the less likely we are to go to war.

The lesson from the Internet Age is the balkanization of the human experience and a turning away from the great liberal faith in shared institutions. Yes, the institutions are flawed, some terribly so.  And institutions are hard to change, so the terribly flawed ones stick around longer than they should. But the anarchic global politics of the 1930s leads in horrifying directions.

I've struggled to decide whether Trump is truly the threat he seems to be or whether we are trapped in the immediacy of his uniquely horrible personality.  The Twitter hysterics that predict the election will be cancelled if it looks like he will lose, for instance.  The litany of issues is impossible to fully catalogue, but here's a stab at some of them: children in cages, corruption, environmental short sightedness, poor treatment of people of color, anti-gay bigotry, anti-immigrant bigotry, fascists marching in American cities, emboldened white supremacists, isolationism and turning our backs on our historical allies.

Here's the catch: all of these things represent realities in our past.  Was America really a democracy under Jim Crow?  Have we ever fully lived up to our ideals? Haven't we always been suspicious of "foreigners"?

One of Barack Obama's finer rhetorical touches was his idea that the promise of America lay not in our perfection, but in our desire to create a more perfect union out of a flawed one.  Obviously, Trumpism is terrifying, but more so for this idea that we will completely undermine our democratic institutions.  We have flirted with fascism before.  We beat it then, but not easily and not all at once.

I worry that paralyzing fear will consume us.  How can we be angry without being afraid?