Mad Dog has stumbled upon a dusty book in the Hampton public library (a taxpayer supported institution) which, Heaven help us, got him thinking and wondering.
Mark Mazower, a professor at Columbia University, wrote the book: "Dark Continent," about Europe's twentieth century. He speaks English (born there), German, French, Italian and Greek, so he's in a position to write about Europe.
Thus far, only halfway into it, the big surprise for Mad Dog has been the idea that fascism and communism did not so much rise up, as simply replace democracies, which preceded them.
Fascism was an opportunistic infection, or more accurately, a saprophytic infection, as it were, establishing itself amidst the collapsed ruins of failed democracies.
In fact, the idea of democracy did not well up from the pent up desires of Germans, Romanians, Hungarians, Estonians and Greeks, but it was imposed on nation states as part of Woodrow Wilson's messianic exhortation to make the world safe for democracy.
This brought to mind a conversation Mad Dog once had with a Saudi prince, a very Westernized, erudite and cosmopolitan man, who smiled and confided, "You know, not every people wants or even likes the idea of democracy."
Churchill, of course, said that democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for all the others which have ever been tried, and Mazower's post mortem surely exposes the first part of that couplet.
Of course, part of the problem is that shorthand word, "democracy." What does that word even mean? Rule by the people?
"The people?" Who, on earth would they be?
In large, industrialized countries it is not practical to have people dropping their day jobs to meet and decide all the issues and administer all the efforts to sustain production of goods and services, provide health care, build and maintain transportation and communication, provide for education and training, in short, to do what large, successful societies need doing.
So we have "republics," that is, we elect people to do all that for us, our "representatives," our hired guns, to do all that stuff so we can do what we want and need to do, manufacture stuff, provide medical care, build towns and cities, and places for mass entertainment and systems for mass communication.
"A Republic, madam," Franklin said, "If you can keep it."
Mad Dog has been devouring every book about the Weimar Republic he can find, seeing, of course, parallels, echoes, origins to our present day America. Mad Dog thought if he could understand the disease process as it played out in Germany, a country not unlike America, he might understand the disease, the brain worm afflicting America.
So Mad Dog began with "Before the Deluge," Otto Friedrich's easily digestible essay which is so accessible Linda Ronstadt read it and recommended it to Jackson Browne and it became au currant. If you are looking for entertaining treatments, you could not do better than "Babylon Berlin," that estimable and highly accurate TV series, or, for that matter, "Cabaret," which is based on Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin," the most literate and artful treatment Mad Dog has found. Peter Gay's "Weimar Culture" details the fecklessness of the advocates of a liberal democracy. Eric Weitz's "Weimar Germany," takes you through a kaleidoscope of the experimentation in architecture, music, drama, educational innovation alongside the politics of that brief inter war interlude, that failed experiment we call Weimar.
But what he missed is that what was going on in Germany was only the most famous and visible example of what was happening all over Europe, from Hungary to the Baltic states, to the Balkans, and, in a twisted way, in Russia.
Which is to say, people all over were trying democracy, and parliaments, and these governments were failing miserably, seriously and truly and people all over Europe lost faith in unwieldly, messy democracy. They just wanted something that would work.
("Mussolini made the trains run on time.")
When Wilson declared the whole reason for World War One was, or should have been, to make the world safe for democracy that was more than aspirational, however deluded.
World War One was a catastrophe, millions dead, a vector for the great influenza epidemic which killed far more people than battles did, and which reached beyond the battlefields to every bedroom, kitchen and parlor. Post war Europe was a wounded, diseased animal, in need of intensive care.
Arguments rage, even today, about it's causes--John Reed said it was simply a matter of two big empires (Britain and France) being simply unwilling to cut Germany in on the take, and that America got dragged in because American bankers (J.P. Morgan, in particular) had lent so many billions to the Brits and French, they could not afford to let Germany win.
One thing which is pretty clear, is that that war did overthrow monarchies/oligarchies/autocracies in Germany, Austria and Russia, and a bunch of other smaller countries, like Hungary, Serbia, Latvia, and attempts were made to replace all those strutting princes in their elaborate, ridiculous, bemedaled, bejeweled costumes, with parliaments, representative bodies of men (not women) wearing dark wool suits.
The problem was, none of that democratic reform worked, or it didn't work well enough.
Just reading about the Paris conference where new countries were drawn up, where people like Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam were ignored, where Russia was simply rejected for being Bolshevik, where the Middle East was served up as an oil resource for the "great powers" and where Africa and Asia were viewed as dark continents filled with sub-humans, one gets the idea the whole enterprise of post war reconstruction was not reconstruction at all, but simply a twelve course meal devoured by Britain, France and America, and to some extent, Italy.
So the unsolved problems of 1918 festered and ate out Europe like a spider wasp, devouring from within.
The fact is, government of the people, by the people and for the people is doomed, because, well, maybe 40% of the people are well meaning, industrious, cooperative, but 30% are selfish, indifferent, just plain stupid and 30% are just flat out insane.
Right here in Hampton, even at the peak of our giddy interlude, when Obama was in the White House saying articulate things, entertaining and inspiring us at the White House Correspondents' dinner (an overlooked but revealing exercise in American culture), and making decisions, we could see the cracks in the body politic expanding and admitting the destructive elements.
Obama, faced with the threat of Islamic fundamentalist groups determined to make the 9/11 attacks a weekly event, sent killer drones to execute the bad guys, without trial or due process, which opened the door to Trump bombing whatever he wants.
Political correctness morphed into public meetings where speakers announced their pronouns before they even began to read their texts, where any woman accusing any man of unwanted sexual advances was to be "believed," as in "believe the woman," and the men fired, jailed and disgraced, where college boys were expelled from school by star chambers because they stood accused of date rape, and these boys often were not allowed to confront their accusers or even speak in their own behalf, because to allow the accused man to speak would be too "traumatizing" for the female accuser, where a young man who was a middling competitive swimmer as a male, at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, started setting records and winning championships as a woman, having undergone trans sexual surgery, but having also undergone a male puberty which benefited him greatly and nobody even asked, "Hey, why do we have women's sports separated from men's sports anyway?" And we had local folks in Peoria, who were not yet ready for drag queens learning that their kids had seen a drag queen performance at their elementary schools. And we had affirmative action in schools and for public contracts which established racial quotas and dismissed the idea of a "level playing field" as inadequate because it did not produce the desired results. Small wonder displaced White males began to howl. They might not be smart, but at least they were White. And who needs democracy, anyway, when you've got Amazon, Google, X, Apple watches, Microsoft, Facebook and Infowars?
But most of all, the reigning liberal "elite" was unwilling to hear the opposing point of view; no wonder when the opposition got power, they were inclined to return the favor.
And the opposition, the White Christian Federalist Society, Russel Vought, Stephen Miller mob were ready. It wasn't that they succeeded so much as the liberal lobby failed and someone would inevitability fill the vacuum--nature abhors a vacuum. They were, if you'll permit another image, the cockroaches picking through the debris after the apocalypse of ideas.
In short, one wing of democracy got ahead of the social and cultural norms embraced by a lot of White, Christian, religious folks in Iowa, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania. What and who exactly was being "represented"?
And mix into that brew the race and class factors and you've got Donald Trump.
All those good ol' boys in Alabama, the entire Confederacy and its diaspora in the Mountain West, were still reeling from the idea of having a Black man sleeping in the White House and they were growing alarmed that the points they got for simply being White in Mississippi would no longer accrue, and they were just looking for something and someone to latch on to.
For Rome, it was the Vandals, the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths; for America it was the Vulgarians. (See the shit dumping video, the gold ladened Oval Office and the destruction of the East Wing.)
The perplexing thing is America didn't have Germany's problems or Europe's problems when it rejected democracy and representative government and went full on cult autocracy. The Weimar Germans, the post war Hungarians, Serbs, Austrians, Estonians were dealing with starvation, hyperinflation and devastating unemployment, which the Reichstag and the various parliaments responded to with paralysis.
The American economy was roaring under Biden. Inflation was down, despite all the noise saying otherwise. Health insurance was a problem but it was no worse than it had been. Unemployment was almost de minimis. World trade was humming along. NONE of the post war conditions which set up wounded Europe were extant in America, and yet democracy, the liberal experiment imploded.
Somebody was not happy. Enough somebodies were not happy that America went full Weimar unto Third Reich.
Americans looked at Congress and said, "Nope. Not me. Those liberals are for them, they, not for Me!"
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| Mark Mazower |
It wasn't that Trump had something to offer; it was that government for the people, by the people of the people failed.
It was not E Pluribus Unum. It was E Unum Pluribus.
Out of our unity, we shattered into pieces because the glue which held us together failed.
So, today, we have the East Wing demolished.
Next target: The Lincoln Memorial.
You heard it here first.
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