Stop Saying It's 1933, or 1941, or...
What if we are manifesting the worst by assuming it's inevitably on our doorstep?
Mr. Speaker. Madam Vice President. Members of Congress. My Fellow Americans.
In January 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation.
He said, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.”
Hitler was on the march. War was raging in Europe.
President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment.
Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world.
Tonight I come to the same chamber to address the nation.
Now it is we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union.
These were the opening remarks at the 2024 State of the Union Address by President Biden. Likening our country’s moment as on the brink of World War II or Nazi Germany or fascism has become both a Democratic political strategy and a literary cottage industry since 2016. With comparisons to 1933 (election of Hitler) or 1941 (eve of US entering WW2), it can feel like we are both electing or ejecting a series of fuhrers all at once. Yet we Americans are not Germany and we certainly aren’t the new-to-the-stage power we were 80 or 90 years ago.
So are we priming, preparing, or even manifesting these outcomes by consistently fixating on them, without offering much by way of counterfactual and only “resistance?” What comes after the resistance? In the vein of that New Age self-help book, The Secret, are we asking for, believing, and receiving the right things?
I’ve started to wonder how motivating some of these comparisons are, especially because they all led to armed global conflict. It is if we’ve decided we are inevitably on such a path. Yes, there is a lot at stake, no doubt and the comparisons are hard to not make as a means of rallying opposition (especially when MAGA surrogates openly compare certain Trumpian moments to scenes from Leni Riefenstahl films in Nazi Germany). Yet, feeling that you have something to fight for is also difficult when the country has all time lows of institutional faith.
So are these comparisons working as an organizing principle in 2024 when Donald Trump could very well win? In the counterfactual of histories of 1933 or 1941, what could have been done differently to prevent such incursions? What has to change about our spirit to avoid or at least lessen the conflict that exists or feels so prescient?
Does sounding the bell of threats to democracy itself constitute a response to the experiences of anomie, frustration, in-authenticity, dis-junction, inequality and lack of trust in institutions that have brought us here in the first place? Is there a way to shift history and zeitgeist that does not end in bloodshed as in other moments of history? In the words of my friend Andrew Slack, can we “imagine better?”
The Fourth Turning
While historical counterfactuals are something of a pastime on bro podcasts and university classrooms, the fact remains that history has happened as it has happened. Some people have made a pseudo-science out of studying the cyclical nature of time and conflict. I’m thinking of The Fourth Turning a generational theory of Western history posed by William Strauss and Neil Howe — and a prophecy for anyone who has spent time listening to Steve Bannon’s War Room. Bannon has waxed on and on about how we are in a Fourth Turning and that his Traditionalist view of history should soon supplant the liberal institutions that governed the 20th century.
For more context, The Fourth Turning theory of history posits that there are “saeculum” or generational periods of 80-100 years occupied by four different generations and their archetypes. Within that period of time, there are four “turnings” or spirits of the time: "The High,” “The Awakening,” “The Unraveling,” and “The Crisis.” The “fourth turning” or “the Crisis” erupts into violence, disorder, or institutional collapse which ushers in a new institutional and social order, “The High.”
Knowing where you are in history becomes an act of divination almost, as well as a way of making sense of why reality feels so terrible. It’s a way of handling the experience of time. Once you know “where you are in history” and decided it’s “collapse time,” individuals are afforded with the permission to tear apart old orders so that something new can be made. If we all assume we are in a collapse, then can we begin to get a glimpse at what comes after? What ideas, people, and systems are prepared to fill the vacuum of power as a particularly grubby generation of leaders finally relinquishes their seats?
Many ideas for what is next circulate around artificial intelligence and climate change. Silicon Valley is replete with ideas such as “accelerationism,” which in this case, hastens the development of AI to be enlisted in solving world problems. Compare this to the accelerationism that is often used by White Supremacists, insisting on spurring an inevitable collapse of corrupt institutions and a coming race war. There are of course the “Voluntary Human Extinctionists” operating under the motto “Live Long and Die Out.” It feels like we are all racing to discover how it all ends, not how it begins.
Have we been in a Fourth Turning since 9/11? How much longer can the “Present Shock” of compounded existential crises (climate, political, health, emotional, spiritual) maintain our imaginations before we snap? Or before we just take a massive global nap?
What if it is 1850?
As a game, I asked a friend of mine who is an expert in 19th century history what period in American history most resembles this one. He suggested 1850. Now, I’m not an expert of the 19th century so I won’t attribute my “sparknotes” version to him so as not to embarrass him. But I appreciated his provocation.
America had gotten through the Big Panic of 1837, where people killed themselves due to a terrible financial crisis. A cholera outbreak was underway. The Crimean Wars were in full swing. And the civic coreligionist under the name of Transcendentalists, led by folks like Ralph Waldo Emerson, were imagining a country where the divine was in the everyday — akin to our modern “mindfulness” movement (if I’m being glib).
By the time 1850 rolled around, the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, forcing Northern States to return enslaved people escaping the evil racist caste system the South had created. For Northerners, it was a slap in the face — how could a majority of the country vote such a law in place? How could they build meaning in such a godless and immoral world if this had come to pass?
Emerson went around the North delivering a popular speech after the pass of the Fugitive Slave Law. He starts:
The last year has forced us all into politics, and made it a paramount duty to seek what it is often a duty to shun. We do not breathe well. There is infamy in the air.
A sense of grief swept parts of the North. In the subsequent years, organizing occurred out of this grief. Eventually, the country came to arms against itself.
True, in the early 19th century there was a spirit of fantasy that led up to the Civil War, North and South. Both imagined a country that turned out to be impossible. Many who fought in the Civil War did it for “union” or for “states rights” though in many ways, these are cover words for the reality of trying to rid or keep slavery, rid or keep dominance over a certain vision of economics, politics, and culture. Regardless, threads of history rarely disappear.
Does America know what it is fighting for? Globally and nationally? Or do even these battle lines feel so tired and stale that we can’t fight for them?
Too Exhausted for Fascism?
At a Shabbat dinner I hosted this Friday, I spoke to a Mexican friend who had a rough week. He talked to me about SOTU and American politics, offering the conclusion that the American people were far too exhausted for anything even near revolution or significant regime change. “America is too fucking tired for any of the fantasies of revolution people talk about.” Perhaps?
Regardless of the polls that flip-flop in indicating that Americans could elect Donald Trump in 2024, Trump still remains largely unfavorable to well over half of the country. Even if he continues to pack halls for rallies, he represents less “hope” and more of a gamble on “change.” There isn’t enthusiasm, so much as a desire to try something else when Biden seems to represent a very 20th century vision of America in his rhetoric, career choice, and age. Trump is also far from 2016 MAGA energy.
What is the Grand Narrative that will be imposed upon this moment of uncertainty and exhaustion in our history? What is the Grand Narrative we would like to write for the next 100 years? If we are fighting for “Democracy” in America, how is it going to look better than the one that brought us here?
Or will we just let the machines take over because a nap sounds nice right about now?
I’d love to hear the perspectives of historians of these time periods (1850s, 1930s, 1940s) to get their take on the spirit of the times, the average person and their emotional relationship to the state of their countries. Were they exhausted or energized? Enraged or excited? If I get a critical mass, I’ll publish some responses in the coming weeks.