American History Lessons

In Americans knowledge of their history, let alone world history, I have little faith.

Steve Schmidt has more hope than I do (and is even splenetic about Trump than I am) in his American history can't be erased by Donald Trump and JD Vance.

The days ahead in America will be brutal and the crisis will worsen.

Yet, the ending is not in doubt.

It can’t be.

The country has always produced its Donald Trumps and Pete Hegseths, and every other version of a Trump minion.

What those people underestimate is that it has also produced people like Medgar and Myrlie Evers and James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. They are not forgotten.

The Forgotten Dystopian Vision That Explains Trump’s Canada Obsession (The New Republic) has me doubting MAGA's interest in history as more than their own inbred fantasies.

We’ve been here before. In the spring of 1941, as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe, American conservative James Burnham published a book outlining his vision for a new global order: a post-democratic world centered around a few powerful blocs he called “super-states.” These great powers would exercise complete dominion over their designated regions while locked in perpetual rivalry with each other. The United States, Burnham thought, should “draw a ring” around the Western hemisphere, securing the Panama Canal and reducing Canada to “a satellite.” This new order would be governed not by international law but by personal dealings among the great powers, who would control the sovereignty of weaker states and suspend it as they wished.

And if that scenario sounds familiar:

George Orwell used Burnham’s bleak vision as the geopolitical setting for 1984, in which three giant autocratic empires live in a state of permanent conflict. And now, the real-world global order is starting to take on a disturbingly similar shape.

But then the rest of the article does point out how little Trump knows or cares about history. It was not 19th Century Great Power diplomacy that made us great, but Wilson's ideas that became the cooperative system we have lived under since 1945.

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