"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
This familiar quote is attributed to George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher. In a 1948 speech at the British House of Commons, Winston Churchill paraphrased the quote as “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
I am beginning to think the Santayana quote may be more accurate, at least for many Americans today. If they personally can’t remember events from the past, they don’t believe they actually happened. They don’t believe the parts of history they don’t want to believe and thus don’t learn from them. And if they don’t learn from past mistakes, they are condemned to repeat them.
The following is an excerpt from an October 21 post by Heather Cox Richardson, Professor of American History at Boston College.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-21-2024
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On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.”
On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about “the enemy from within,” specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as “bad people.” Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that broke the 2019 story of Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.
In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.
By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.
Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.
In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” [Dorothy Thompson a journalist who had lived in Germany during the 1930s] wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle.
“But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”
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In 2020 I wrote a series of posts about the upcoming elections that I called, The American Covenant. https://www.johnikerd.com/.../the-american-covenant...
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In his first inaugural address, George Washington affirmed his belief that the Constitution had been written under the protective care of God. He stated, “Every step, by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation, seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency.”
His remarks conveyed a belief that the words in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution had been divinely inspired. He continued, “It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official Act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the Universe… that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the People of the United States, a government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes.”
President Washington affirmed a covenant between God and the American people: “I dwell on this prospect with every satisfaction which an ardent love for my Country can inspire: since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained.”
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The nation has since faced a series of crises and conflicts as the American people have struggled to fulfill the ideals expressed in Washington’s inaugural address and the other founding documents of the nation. One such time was during the Civil War, during which Abraham Lincoln honored those who had died to preserve the Union in the battle at Gettysburg.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure…. [W]e here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Today, we are confronted with a crisis of confidence in governance that has ripped the social and political fabric of our nation and threatens its very survival. In less than two weeks we will know whether the people of this nation still respect the “indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.”
In less than two weeks we will know whether this great nation of the people, by the people, and for the people will endure or will perish from the earth. In less than two weeks we will know whether the majority of the people in the United States of America have learned from history or if our nation is condemned to repeat it.
John Ikerd
Notes:
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man.
https://www.axios.com/.../mark-milley-trump-fascist-bob...
https://thecycle.substack.com/.../what-really-happens-if...
https://www.cnn.com/.../trump-enemy-from.../index.html
https://www.cnn.com/.../trump-military-enemy.../index.html
https://www.axios.com/.../axios-am-cbf2afd0-6dc1-11ef...
https://time.com/archive/6761718/the-press-cartwheel-girl/
https://www.loc.gov/.../documents/Dorothy-Thompson_Cott.pdf
https://lessonsfromthefounders.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/289/
https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/.../gettysburg.htm