Since finishing my book on Moore’s Law (for delivery on the Amazon Kindle after Thanksgiving), I’ve begun a new project.
It’s called 1933. (This is not it. It's a history by Philip Metcalfe I've been using in my research.)
It’s an alternate history novel. It’s based on the idea that FDR, and the people around him, understood the threat of Hitler from the start and acted against it.
That era had a lot in common with our own. Manufacturing was acting on the economy as Moore’s Law is acting on ours. Efficiency created more supply than bankers could create demand for. A few wealthy men presided over a society of millions of fearful people who couldn’t keep up with the pace of change.
The most charitable thing I can say about Donald Trump is that he wants to make Warren G. Harding great again. His policies are identical. Fealty to Wall Street, corruption, laziness, isolationism. He even uses the phrase Harding used to describe this – America First. Democrats, by contrast, have a Harry Truman view. They have learned from the Hitler era, and the long Cold War following it, about concepts like collective security. From 1947-1990, we used all our strengths, overt and covert military action, but also the “soft power” of diplomacy, our economy, technology, and liberty, to take down the Russians. Moore’s Law, and everything that came with it, began as a Cold War activity.
Now Trump’s throwing all of that on the fire.
It’s almost impossible to conceive a world where World War II did not happen. But it began quite suddenly. Hitler gained power as Chancellor in late 1932. By the middle of 1933 democracy had been dismantled, Jews were being brutalized, the first concentration camps were being built. Hitler, and his henchmen, were completely transparent about their aims. They accomplished those aims, and this led Germany down the road toward its complete destruction.
This time the monster is inside the house.
Trump abuses immigrants just as Hitler did the Jews. He claims complete authority, says he’s above the law. He claims he can’t be investigated by anyone, let alone put on trial. No one can have any evidence of possible wrongdoing. No one may talk.
The continuing mystery isn’t about what Trump is, but why, even now, so many people believe in him? For the same reason Germans bought Harding and Hitler.
As we’ve seen, House Republicans continue to push discredited conspiracy theories. It’s the kind of upside-down-ism Goebbels would have loved. Conspirators will conspire until they’re all taken down.
What about other Republicans? They’re acting like “Good Germans.”
Democrats blame Fox News and the “right wing fever swamps” of sites like Breitbart. They blame the Mercers and the Murdochs. They blame Facebook.
But people want to believe the lies. Who are these people?
The Trump base consists of Moolah, Mullahs and people I’ll call Red Hats, the equivalent of Hitler’s brownshirts.
The Moolah includes tycoons who care about nothing but themselves. New Yorkers like Leon Cooperman, Californians like Peter Thiel, Texas resource billionaires like the Kochs. They have bought up much of our media industry.
There have always been such people. They backed Andrew Mellon’s hard money policy in the 1920s. Many cozied up to Hitler himself. The marks of Ford, GM, and IBM were all over the German war machine, and all over the Holocaust.
The Mullahs are evangelical Christians who see Trump as the culmination of their policy dreams. They want a Fundamentalist State. They expect the Spanish Inquisition. They believe government can force people to act as they want, even think what they tell them to think.
Hitler’s ideologies were burned away after the War, but they were powerful in their time. They were also made in America. Slavery and Jim Crow are the Holocaust. The genocide of the Indians made Lebensraum. Eugenics was an American invention.
In 1933, black Americans were still being lynched, not just hung until dead but castrated, tortured, and burned alive. Not just strong black men, either, but women and children as well, throughout the South. Anti-semitism was also alive in the America of the 1930s. The idea of “improving the race” by “sterilizing the weak” was a thing. Here.
Others were willfully blind. Bankers lent to Hitler even while telling FDR he was bankrupting the U.S. They took the profits of hard money and put them in Deutschmarks. This “America First” attitude remained powerful right until Pearl Harbor. To read most historians, we’re just lucky the carriers weren’t in port when the Japanese attacked. The Man in the High Castle might have been a documentary.
Americans like Charles Lindbergh, and Father Coughlin, had policy reasons for turning a blind eye. They didn’t see the whole Holocaust. They ignored what they did see because it didn’t fit into the picture of larger aims.
In America today, liberals write with horror about how firm the “Trump base” is. They ignore the fact that racism has always existed here, that anti-semitism has always existed, that the lesser angels of bigotry and hatred of “the other” have been as free to grow here as our better angels. When they were kept in check, as they seemed to be during the Obama years, we laughed at them. Even Barack Obama and Joe Biden seem to feel that, if shown the error of their ways, Republicans will be nice again.
This is a delusion. The war among our angels is the story of America. We’ve excused coups, land grabs, and the systematic abuse of entire peoples as collateral damage in the name of “freedom.” Don’t believe me? Read a Texas history book.
After the war, we break out the old nostrums. “For ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding.”
In times of peace we say these things with an air of self-satisfaction, as if it’s something from the past, as if truth will automatically overcome lies. Then we wait, until change overtakes us, and the lesser angels re-emerge.
Here’s the bigger problem. Moore’s Law tells us that change is going to keep overtaking us, faster and faster, and that if we don’t do a better job of adapting, we’ll all die.
The lesson here is that you must fight for truth, in all sorts of ways, and every day, or it will be lost.
If our children learn nothing else from the Trump era, make sure they learn this.
