Repeating the past

Twenty years ago - in 1998 - I kept having a recurring line push its way into my consciousness:  "We have to repeat the 30s."  I won't say I didn't think much of it, because I did. It was so insistent.  I imagined that there was a second part to the statement:  "so we can get it right this time."  By "right", I mean prevent another world war and holocaust. But I think I may have been adding that part myself.  After a few years into the Obama administration, the thought subsided, and I figured it had been mistaken - or maybe avoided somehow.  Now, I think it was just a couple of decades early.

There's an interesting article in The Atlantic by an American born woman who married a Polish politico about how authoritarian regimes take hold in polarized countries; here's an excerpt:

This is not 1937. Nevertheless, a parallel transformation is taking place in my own time, in the Europe that I inhabit and in Poland, a country whose citizenship I have acquired. And it is taking place without the excuse of an economic crisis of the kind Europe suffered in the 1930s. Poland’s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession. What’s more, the refugee wave that has hit other European countries has not been felt here at all. There are no migrant camps, and there is no Islamist terrorism, or terrorism of any kind.

More important, though the people I am writing about here, the nativist ideologues, are perhaps not all as successful as they would like to be (about which more in a minute), they are not poor and rural, they are not in any sense victims of the political transition, and they are not an impoverished underclass. On the contrary, they are educated, they speak foreign languages, and they travel abroad—just like Sebastian’s friends in the 1930s.

What has caused this transformation? Were some of our friends always closet authoritarians? Or have the people with whom we clinked glasses in the first minutes of the new millennium somehow changed over the subsequent two decades? My answer is a complicated one, because I think the explanation is universal. Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.

Before I continue, here’s a parenthesis, and a reminder: All of this has happened before. Profound political shifts—events that suddenly split families and friends, cut across social classes, and dramatically rearrange alliances—do not happen every day in Europe, but neither are they unknown. Not nearly enough attention has been paid in recent years to a late-19th-century French controversy that prefigured many of the debates of the 20th century, and has some clear echoes in the present.

  The Atlantic

Continue reading.

Also: The Atlantic project Is Democracy Dying?

I once read a heart-rending book- Love Thy Neighbor - about the terrible wars in the Balkans in the 90s questioning how it could be possible for once friendly neighbors to turn on and brutalize each other.

We don't have much in our history as humans to make us think we will ever evolve. But I have dreams. And, maybe, "so we can get it right this time" could still happen. But it's not looking good.

UPDATE 11/4:  Peter Maas recently tweeted about how this applies to America now.