We are 8 years removed from the last generational crisis, but the underlying issues of that crisis have not yet been dealt with.
Welcome to the 1940 Game: Rise of the Demagogues.
In 1940, the demagogues were organized. Germany, Japan and Italy were on the march. France was overrun and Britain was invaded. This made it easy for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was eligible for a third term, to pivot from being “Doctor New Deal” to “Doctor Win the War,” although there remained Republican isolationists, and even some who questioned the premise of democracy, against whom he fought a propaganda war with help from German refugees and British patriots like Alfred Hitchcock, whose “Foreign Correspondent” remains a classic of the genre.
This time, the demagogues are not nearly so organized, which makes them (if anything) more dangerous, because we’re not on to the game. History records that the 1940 Game began in 1919, with the Treaty of Versailles, and only ended with the United Nations and Marshall Plan, a different kind of peace that also, unfortunately, became lost in the Cold War. The Greatest Generation that won that war and learned those lessons has now almost entirely passed from the scene, which is what makes this crisis necessary.
The 2016 Game, by contrast, began with us. It began with the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, whose blowback became the destruction of Syria and its refugee crisis, followed by the rejection of immigrants by ultra-nationalists across Europe and the United States.
Democracy has lost more ground in the last few years than at any time since the years of Hitler’s rise. Egypt, which tried democracy, is now an absolute autocracy under Abdul al-Fattah Sisi, a Mubarak clone. So is Turkey, which was a functioning democracy for decades, but has now closed the door to freedom under Teygip Erdogan after his people saved him from a coup. The order of Europe shudders under the reign of wannabe despots in Hungary and Poland, the rise of ultra-nationalists in Germany and France, the rejection of Europe over immigration by Great Britain.
Donald Trump has simply brought the war back home.
Trump is of a peace with all the other ultra-nationalist demagogues of our time. He openly admires their avatar, Vladimir Putin. He calls Putin strong despite the fact that Russia’s economy today is not much bigger than Canada’s, that its living standards are collapsing and its life spans decreasing, that its brain drain keeps accelerating, and that its kleptocrats are taking every dime they can out of the country.
Trump’s appeal is similar, in the appearance of strength without its reality. And his program is the same as his ultra-nationalist brethren, like UKIP’s Nigel Farage (who spoke at a Trump rally). Closing the door on immigrants, on trade, and on anyone who stands for either. He does not see his political opposition, the Democratic Party, as legitimate. He promises only to make everything “great” without offering anything that hasn’t either been tried (and failed) or is so vague as to be mere word salad.
Donald Trump is the greatest threat to liberty the world has faced since Adolph Hitler. He doesn’t have to be Hitler to represent such a threat. He merely has to stand against freedom, and gain power over the world’s leading democratic country, so he may pervert and destroy freedom from within.
How did we come to this point? We came to it by the same route we came to in the 1940 crisis, through our own fecklessness, our own mistakes, and a war-like attitude that began to manifest itself in that year and that has had our country in an almost-continuous state of war since December 7, 1941.
Think about it. World War II was followed by the Cold War, openly fought in Korea and Vietnam, clandestinely fought around the world. Victory there was followed almost immediately by the 1991 Gulf War. Even before then, of course, there was “Charlie Wilson’s War,” in which we funneled arms to Afghanistan and set the stage for 9/11.
When any nation is attacked, its natural impulse is to respond in kind. Dick Cheney used that impulse to start the Iraq War, a war based on lies, on the Bush family’s hatred for Saddam Hussein, and America’s fear of terrorism (which Iraq had nothing to do with).
Even Trump admits that war was a mistake, but no one has yet taken responsibility for all that has followed in its wake — the Arab Spring, the Syria civil war, the Refugee Crisis, and the Rise of Demagogues who, with our tacit endorsement, promise to end the last at the cost of a generation’s efforts to breathe free.
What the Obama Administration has tried to do, in its foreign policy, is manage a gradual retreat from active conflict in the Middle East, while still retaining some influence on events. The collapse of Qaddafi, now condemned by Trump, was not a mistake, but it wasn’t followed-up successfully. Trump’s attack on what we did in Libya, including his constant hearkening to “Benghazi,” in which, it’s now clear, the Administration sought to retain some influence over events there and prevent the nation’s breakup, shows him, once again, on the side of demagogues, and shows him to be an enemy of liberty.
Democrats have not felt emboldened to challenge Trump on this key point, but it’s really the Rhineland Occupation of our time. Our retreat from Libya created the equivalent of a Spanish Civil War in Syria, and allowed like-minded demagogues to rise across the region, at the expense of freedom.
If I can fault Hillary Clinton for anything in this campaign, it’s her inability, or unwillingness, to defend the Administration’s failed policy of encouraging freedom in the Middle East. We should have stood more strongly with the people of Egypt, with the people of Libya, but that’s made exquisitely difficult by the fact there are no “good guys” we can stand with in Syria with any hope of ultimate success.
Breaking the knot there requires acknowledging the failure and expressing a willingness to partition the country along sectarian lines, with other powers acting as protectors among the various ethnic groups, while emphasizing this as a temporary fix, designed to separate the combatants and bring peace to the country. The model should be Cyprus , which is now making tentative efforts at reconciliation between Greeks and Turks a half-century on, but which at least has had a half-century of peace in the meantime.
Yes, that’s a hard sell. Yes, that’s complicated. But here are some things that are not complicated. Freedom is not complicated. Democracy is not complicated. Liberty is not complicated. Our values are not complicated.
Through this political campaign we will once again either nobly save, or meekly lose, the last best hope of Earth. If America falls to a demagogue, even an ignorant one like Donald Trump, the survival of freedom and democracy on this planet can no longer be guaranteed.
Thus it is, that in November, we all play the 1940 Game.
