Here I am, once again bearing a torch against despair. There are some realities that might lighten your mood or shift it into resistence (a lot better than despair), one of which is Lawrence Tribe’s talk with Ali Velshi on MSNBC.
Tribe talked reality about our Constitution and our constitution as a democratic republic. I was hoping a constitutional scholar would do this, if only to reassure us that Trump can not be an autocrat with powers to do anything. Listen to Velshi and Tribe; you’ll feel a lot better about our future.
Then, a suggestion from me: read history. Any history. It’s remarkably soothing. My own soother is A History of the Modern World, by R.R. Palmer and Joel Colton. It’s the third edition and is dated 1965 so some terminology is slightly antique. Also I feel they spent way too much time on Napoleon (and the French Revolution, too). I switched into speed-reading mode until Napoleon was dumped on St. Helena.
But what’s terrific about reading world history is you come to understand whatever is going on now has gone on before, many times, and has gone away, as many times. And over the course of thousands of years, we human beings have improved our civilizations.
It’s been agonizingly slow going. I mean, the first five or six thousand years (give or take a millennium) were grotesque and repetitive. The old story was basically about borders — invasions of, shifts of, retreats from, and wars over. War, war, war and men, men, men waging wars.
Those border shifts, as represented with black and white maps (a lot of cross-hatching), were impossible to reckon with or remember.
Every once in a blue moon some monarch would have a bright idea: maybe the people should be allowed to participate in some way in their lives (aside from being soldiers and getting maimed and dead). And there’d be a moment of enlightenment, until some one said something the monarch didn’t agree with and bam! End of that.
It’s been a major relief to encounter the Age of Enlightenment and to get to know the enlightened men and how they thought. (Sorry, it was always men, but the enlightened ones were philosophising and writing pamphlets instead of making war, so that’s better.)
The other night, I found myself reading and re-reading a couple of paragraphs which seemed to address what we’re living through right now, in a section entitled “The Advent of the ‘Isms’,” among which are Romanticism, Classical Liberalism, Radicalism, Republicanism, Socialism and Nationalism.
The paragraphs I appreciate, though, come under the sub-heading, Other “Isms.” To me, these terms which delineated politics more than two-hundred years ago clarify our own sides today in the Battle of the Isms. I am clear which side I belong on. Which side are you on?
Liberalism, radical republicanism, socialism, and nationalism were after 1815 the political forces driving Europe onward toward a future still unknown…Conservatism, too, remained strong. Politically, on the Continent, conservatism upheld the institutions of absolute monarchy, aristocracy, and church, and opposed the constitutional and representative government sought by liberals.
If we change the names of those institutions — absolute monarchy, aristocracy, and church — to fascism, plutocracy and…well, it’s still church, isn’t it? we are still facing and fighting the same conservatism unto this very day in America.
…conservatism built upon the ideas of Edmund Burke, who had held that every people must change its institutions by gradual adaptation, and that no people could suddenly realize in the present any freedoms not already well prepared for in the past. This doctrine lacked appeal for those to whom the past had been a series of misfortunes.
No kidding. I think it’s why we had a Civil War.
I’m reminded of something my father, an ex-radical, taught me a long time ago: if any political leader tells you that an election is not possible at this time because (1) the people aren’t yet educated for it and, besides, (2) he’s so obviously popular no election is required to affirm his position of power…well, that is a person who has just defined himself as a dictator. Burke’s philosophical snottiness is anathema to Americans.
Conservatism sometimes passed into nationalism, since it stressed the firmness and continuity of national character. But nationalists at this time were more often liberals or republicans. “Monarchism” was conservative, and even reactionary.
This advisory regarding nationalism struck me hard. It’s sharply inapplicable to the United States. No matter how many people — white supremacists, in particular — parrot language about fighting for our national character, our true national character is…what? I’d say we reject any such unified concept. We are not of one national character. We are of many, and growing.
…Deeper than other “isms,” a feeling shared in varying ways by people of all parties was the profound current of humanitarianism. It consisted in a heightened sense of the reality of cruelty inflicted upon others.
For us liberals, yes. Because, unlike conservatives, we have empathy.
So things change, and labels change. But the majority movement toward a better future, and the minority counter-movement back to a bad past seem to stick around.
That’s what I’m learning in my history book.