The MAGA movement is the descendent of foul ideologies and hypocrisies that were thought long vanquished in the United States by a majority of Americans, including me. The rise of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States has triggered a national crisis in America, not because he won, but rather because he lost. This is elemental towards understanding this moment of danger.
Laurence H. Tribe and Dennis Aftergut wrote an important essay framing this moment through the lens of Munich and the lessons of appeasement. The fundamental observation is framed around the terms of the extortion that were presented by Adolf Hitler to Neville Chamberlin, an honorable man, who wanted peace. Tribe and Aftergut put it this way: “Hitler successfully bargained for something that wasn’t his (a piece of a neighboring nation) by agreeing to yield something that didn’t belong to him (the territory of other neighboring nations, which he agreed not to invade).”
The events at Munich prefaced humanity’s greatest recorded catastrophe — a global war that ended in the destruction of the Axis powers, which embraced a doctrine of racial purity, military conquest, imperialistic nationalism and ideological evil. The victory over Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan remade the world and established the United States of America as the dominant economic, military and cultural power on Earth. When the war was won, the United States was a nation of 132 million people. It was simultaneously the world’s greatest democracy and an apartheid state in which black Americans lived under a rigid system of race-based laws that oppressed their freedom, dignity and humanity. Those laws were called Jim Crow, and they were the immoral and unjust laws of the American South. These laws were ended by the Civil Rights movement and the passage of the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.
These were elemental towards the creation of the vast, powerful, pluralistic modern American society of 330 million people. At long last, the overwhelming majority of the American people believe that the words of the Declaration of Independence that assert “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are broadly viewed as applying to all people. This, of course, is a very different standard than universally shared. The Civil Rights Act came 25 years after the Munich agreement of 1938, a blink of an eye in the story of humanity and a period of time that corresponds almost exactly with the lifetime of President Biden.
Seventy-nine years before the Munich agreement and the rise of the United States to a position of unrivaled global power, the nation stood on the edge of an abyss and epic bloodletting. The terrible Civil War that would destroy the evil of American slavery and reconsecrate the purpose of America was still ahead for the American people on January 7, 1861, when the London Times wrote an explanation about the cause of South Carolina seceding from the Union that had been created from violent revolution against the authority of the British Crown 85 years earlier.
It is a reminder about the great contestation that has long raged between freedom and tyranny. It is a reminder that democracy and liberty are not the same. It is quite possible that democracy could imperil liberty in America today, as it did in 1861. It is as equally possible that the difference would be as confusing today as it was then.
Kari Lake is running for governor of Arizona. She is a political extremist who is currently being appeased by her opponent, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who refuses to debate her. Katie Hobbs is an honorable person. But, like Chamberlin, deluded. The moment requires confrontation. This moment of crisis requires clear understanding of both the danger at hand and the danger ahead. Let’s lay it out with help from a long-dead journalist who can help us see clearly today what he could not have imagined then. When this was written, the writer was keenly aware of what was happening and understood the meaning of America.