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As I mentioned in my last post one of the books I read last month was Alone: Britain, Churchill, and Dunkirk: Defeat into Victory, by Michael Korda which covers the beginnings of World War II from the surrender of the Sudetenland up through the retreat from Dunkirk. As I mentioned one of the things that struck me the most from reading the book was the assertion that before the war France had a reputation as the “world’s preeminent military power”. And that in large part the disaster which befell the allies was due to a severe underestimation of German military might (after all, hadn’t they lost the last war?) and a severe overestimation of the opposing might of the French.
As someone who knows how that all turned out (France defeated in a stunning six weeks) the idea that pre-World War II France might ever have been considered the “world’s preeminent military power” seems ridiculous, and yet according to Korda that was precisely what most people thought. It’s difficult to ignore how it all turned out, but if you attempt it, you might be able to see where that reputation might have developed. Not only had they grimly held on for over four years in some of the worst combat conditions ever, and, as I said, eventually triumphed. But apparently the genius and success of Napoleon lingered on as well, even at a remove of 130 years.
Because of this reputation, at various points both the British and the Germans, though on opposite sides of things, made significant strategic decisions based on the French’s perceived martial prowess. The biggest effect of these decisions was wasting resources that could have been better spent elsewhere. In the British case they kept sending over more and more planes, convinced that, just as in World War I, the French line would eventually hold if they just had a little more help. This almost ended in disaster since, later, during the Battle of Britain, they needed every plane they could get their hands on. On the German side, and this is more speculative, it certainly seems possible that the ease with which the Germans defeated the French contributed to the disastrous decision to invade Russia. Particularly if the French had the better reputation militarily, which seems to have been the case. Closer to the events of the book, the Germans certainly prioritized dealing with the French over crushing the remnants of the British forces that were trapped at Dunkirk. Who knows how things would have gone had they reversed those priorities.
This shouldn’t be surprising, people frequently end up fighting the last war, and in fact the exact period the book describes contains one of the best examples of that, the Maginot Line. World War I had been a war of static defense, World War II, or at least the Battle of France, was all about mobility. Regular readers may remember that I recently mentioned that the Maginot line kind of got a bad rap, and indeed it does, and in particular I don’t think that it should be used as an example for why walls have never worked. But all of this is another example of the more general principle I want to illustrate. People’s attitudes are shaped by examples they can easily call to mind, rather than by considering all possibilities. And in particular people are bad at accounting for the fact that if something just happened, it’s possible that it is in fact the thing least likely to happen again. The name for this, is Availability Bias or the Availability Heuristic, and it was first uncovered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Wikipedia explains it thusly:
The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that occurs when people make judgments about the probability of events on the basis of how easy it is to think of examples. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that, “if you can think of it, it must be important.” The availability of consequences associated with an action is positively related to perceptions of the magnitude of the consequences of that action. In other words, the easier it is to recall the consequences of something, the greater we perceive these consequences to be. Sometimes, this heuristic is beneficial, but the frequencies at which events come to mind are usually not accurate reflections of the probabilities of such events in real life.
As I was reading Alone, and mulling over the idea of France as the “world’s preeminent military power”, and realizing that it represented something of an availability bias, it also occurred to me that we might be doing something similar when it comes to ideology, in particular the ideologies we’re worried about. From where I sit there’s a lot of worry about nazis, and fascists more broadly. And to be fair I’m sure there are nazis out there, and their ideology is pretty repugnant, but how much of our worry is based on the horrors inflicted by the Nazis in World War II and how much of our worry is based on the power and influence they actually possess right now? In other words, how much of it is based on the reputation they built up in the past, and how much is based on 2019 reality? My argument would be that it’s far more the former than the latter.
In making this argument, I don’t imagine it’s going to take much to convince anyone reading this that the Nazis were uniquely horrible. And that further whatever reputation they have is deserved. But all of this should be a point in favor of my position. Yes they were scary, no one is arguing with that, but it doesn’t naturally follow that they are scary now. To begin with, we generally implement the best safeguards against terrifying things which have happened recently. Is there any reason to suspect that we haven’t done that with fascism? It’s hard to imagine how we could have more thoroughly crushed the countries from which it sprang. But, you may counter, “We’re not worried about Germany and Japan! We’re worried about fascists and nazis here!” Well allow me to borrow a couple of points from a previous post, where I also touched on this issue.
-Looking at the sub-reddits most associated with the far right the number of subscribers to the biggest (r/The_Donald) is 538,762 while r/aww a subreddit dedicated to cute animals sits at 16,360,969
-If we look at the two biggest far-right rallies, Charlottesville and a rally shortly after that, in Boston. The number of demonstrators was always completely overwhelmed by the number of counter demonstrators. The Charlottesville rally was answered by 130 counter rallies held all over the nation the very next day. And the Boston free speech rally had 25 “far right demonstrators in attendance” as compared to 40,000 counter-protestors.
Neither of these statistics makes it seem like we’re on the verge of tipping over into fascism anytime soon. Nevertheless, I’m guessing there are people who are going to continue to object, pointing out that whatever else you want to say about disparity and protests or historical fascism. Donald Trump got elected!
I agree this is a big data point, 62,984,828 people did vote for Trump, and whatever the numbers might be for Charlottesville and Boston, 63 million people is not a number we can ignore. Clearly Trump has a lot of support. But I think anyone who makes this point is skipping over one very critical question. Is Trump a nazi? Or a fascist? Or a white supremacist? Or even a white nationalist? I don’t think he is. And I think to whatever extent people apply those labels to him or his supporters they’re doing it precisely for the reason I just mentioned. All of those groups were recently very powerful and very scary. They are not doing it because those terms reflect the reality of 2019. They use those labels because they’re maximally impactful, not because they’re maximally accurate.
Lots of people have pointed out that Trump isn’t Hitler and that the US is unlikely to descend into Facsism anytime soon (here’s Tyler Cowen making that argument.) Though fewer than you might think (which, once again, supports my point). But I’d like to point out five reasons for why it’s very unlikely which probably don’t get as much press as they should.
- Any path to long standing power requires some kind of unassailable base. In most cases this ends up being the military. What evidence is there that Trump is popular enough there (or really anywhere) to pull off some sort of fascist coup?
- As our prime example it’s useful to look at all the places that supported Hitler. In particular people don’t realize that he had huge support in academia. I think it’s fair to say that the exact opposite situation exists now.
- People look at Nazi Germany somewhat in isolation. You can’t understand Nazi Germany without understanding how bad things got in the Weimar Republic. No similar situation exists in America.
- Even though it probably goes without saying I haven’t seen very many people mentioning the fact that Trump isn’t anywhere close to being as effective a leader as Hitler was. In particular look at Trump’s lieutenants vs. Hitlers.
- Finally feet on the ground matter. The fact that there were 25 people on one side (the side people are worried about) and 40,000 on the other does matter.
I’d like to expand on this last point a little bit. Recently over on Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander put forth the idea that LGBT rights represents the most visible manifestation of a new civic religion. That over the last few years the country has started replacing the old civic religion of reverence for the founders and the constitution with a new one reverencing the pursuit of social justice. He made this point mostly through the methodology of comparing the old “rite” of the 4th of July parade, with the new “rite” of the Gay Pride Parade. There’s a lot to be said about that comparison, most of which I’ll leave for another time, but this does bring up one question which is very germane to our current discussion: under what standard are the two examples Alexander offers up civic religions but not Nazism? I don’t think there is one, in fact I think Nazism was clearly a civic religion. To go farther is there anyone who has taken power, particularly through revolution or coup, without being able to draw on a religion of some sort, civic or otherwise? What civic religion would Trump draw on if he was going to bring fascism to the United States? I understand that an argument could be made that Trump took advantage of the old civic religion of patriotism in order to be elected, but it’s hard to see how he would go on to repurpose that same religion to underpin a descent into fascism, especially given how resilient this religion has been in the past to that exact threat.
Additionally, if any major change is going to require the backing of a civic religion why would we worry about patriotism which has been around for a long time without any noticeable fascist proclivities, and is, in any case, starting to lose much of its appeal, when there’s a bold and vibrant new civic religion with most of the points I mentioned above on it’s side. Let’s go through them again:
- An unassailable base: No, social justice warriors, despite the warrior part, do not have control over the military, but they’ve got a pretty rabid base, and as I’ve argued before, the courts are largely on their side as well.
- Broad support: It’s hard to imagine how academia could be more supportive. In fact it’s hard to find any place that’s not supportive. Certainly corporations have aligned themselves solidly on the side of social justice.
- Drawing strength from earlier set-backs and tragedy: Hitler was undoing the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles and the weakness of the Weimar Republic. Whatever you think about the grievances of poor white Trump supporters there are nothing compared to the (perceived) wrongs of those clamoring for social justice.
- Effective leadership: This may in fact be the only thing holding them back, but there’s a field of 24 candidates out there, some of whom seem pretty galvanizing.
- Feet on the ground: See my point above about the 130 counter rallies.
To be clear, I am not arguing that social justice is headed for a future with as much death and destruction as World War II era Nazis. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future, perhaps it will be just as all of its proponents claim, the dawn of a never ending age of peace, harmony and prosperity. I sure hope so. That said we do have plenty of examples of ideologies which started out with the best of intentions but which ended up committing untold atrocities. Obviously communism is a great example, but you could also toss just about every revolution ever into that bucket as well.
Where does all of this leave us? First it seems unlikely that nazis and fascists are very well positioned to cause the kind of large scale problems we should really be worried about. Also, there’s plenty of reasons to believe that our biases would push us towards overstating the danger, on top of that. Beyond all that there is a least one ideology which appears better positioned for a dramatic rise in power, meaning that if we’re just interested in taking precautions at a minimum we should add them to the list alongside the fascists. Which is to say that I’m not trying to talk you out of worrying about fascists, I’m trying to talk you into being more broad minded when you consider where dangers might emerge.
Yes this is only one, and probably reflects my own biases, but there are certainly others as well. At the turn of the last century everyone was worried about anarchists. As well they might be in 1901 they managed to assassinate President Mckinley (what have the American fascists done that’s as bad as that?) And there are people who say that even today we should worry more about anarchism than fascism. Other people seem unduly fascinated with the dangers and evils of libertarianism (sample headline, Rise of the techno-Libertarians: The 5 most socially destructive aspects of Silicon Valley). If there is a weaker major political movement than the libertarians I’m not aware of it, but fine, add them to the list too. But above all, whatever your list is and how ever you make it, spend less time worrying about the last thing and more time worrying about the next thing.
I will say that out of all the things to worry about bloggers carry the least potential danger of anything. Though maybe if one of us had a bunch of money? If you want to see how dangerous I can actually get, consider donating.
I think part of how this over concern about past problems happens is through over-fit of historical models. We say, “all prior examples of fascism were arrived at in the following way…” We then guard against that because our models say that’s what we should guard against to prevent dictatorship.
Some minority will say, “yes, but the model isn’t broad enough or sophisticated enough to really capture the danger”. But in the end the coup comes from a completely different direction than anyone expected. Dictators can read the public pondering as well as anyone. They’ll make sure they say all the right things and call their movements all the right names to make them sounds like the enemies of the dictators. Then they take power.
I agree with the sentiment about not focusing over much about the last crisis, to the detriment of the next crisis. I’m not sure more thinking about it will solve the problem. Maybe the best we can do is build strong institutions and civil society that’s less susceptible to capture?
Certainly reducing the current fixation on fascism will not allow us to correctly predict the next crisis, but I do think it distracts us from doing the kind of things you talk about (strong institutions and a civil society). In fact I would even go so far as to argue that the over-reaction to the threat of fascists has lead to lots of people proposing steps that will weaken institutions and make society less civil…
Got myself reading some broad history, The last book finished was The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan and Europa: How Europe Shaped the Modern World by Julio Crespo MacLennan. The second book has a lot of rehashing from the first, but with a concentration on Europe. Anyway this leads me to a quibble and a point to begin with:
Quibble: Hitler’s invasion of Russia was not a lark, not some random impulse play. It was driven by the logic of a ‘Greater Germany’. Hiter’s plan was to treat Eastern Europe the way the Americans & Europeans treated the Indians, except worse. His adviser mapped food production drawing lines between areas that produced surpluses and those that consumed more than they grew. The former would be colonized by German farmers while the later would be left to fend for themselves with the expelled populations added to them. The ultimate aim after that was to turn south and capture access to the Middle East and Asia with warm water ports. Perhaps Hitler would have approached the Russian invasion differently had the attack on France been much harder, but make no mistake that was the point. Capturing Paris and having photo ops next to the Eiffel Tower was not Hitler’s endgame.
Point: It’s quite clear from history that things often play out in counter-intuitive ways. The Portugal and Spain dominated the New World, Not Britain. Unlike Britain, they got the ‘good stuff’. The ‘riches’, recall was to find a route to China and India where spice, silk, porcelain and tea would provide traders with huge riches. Portugal got there with trading posts around the world. Spain got huge amounts of gold. Later on Spain got rich with huge sugar plantations, which became more valuable than spices as Europeans got better at keeping food fresh and developed a sweet tooth. England got the runt of the new world. Tobacco in the southern colonies was ok as a cash crop, but not gold or sugar. The north barely had furs, and quite frankly the only reason the north got some settlement was that there was still hope someone would find a northern passage thru it to China.
Yet in the end it was the UK and its colonies that dominated. Likewise in terms of civilizations China was more sophisticated, better run and advanced than any of the European powers. It was a push to even get China to allow Europeans to set up trading outposts near China. Yet a hundred years or so and China discovered itself unable to defend itself against European powers. (see Opium Wars).
So in terms of whether Nazis are something we should worry about. Well I would say:
1. Small groups can end up pivoting society. Nazis did not have broad popular support, but as they gained power they created fellow travelers. Academics who previously respected Jewish colleagues and had disdain for Nazi thuggishness pivoted and fired respected professors and signed onto sham ‘greatness theories’. Ask yourself now how ‘moderate republicans’ are doing controlling Trump’s worse impulses? Would Republican Senators vote to release Trump’s taxes, something he promised to do and for which no real argument has been offered not to? Hmmm.
2. Outright fascists have been given an outsized prominence in this administration. I will grant you, this has ended up becoming something of a clown show. See, for example, the recent ‘social media’ summit that excluded Facebook and Twitter but had a host of B level alt-right ‘influencers’ running around the White House lawn calling people ‘punks’. The Republican party has descended from a party of ideas into a party of scams so rather than doing anything with power, they have been a bit like a few too many fat people at the donut shop on national free donut day. But should we trust that ideas never matter and government by Professional Wrestling type farce will forever be harmless?
3. These movements do seem to have gained momentum around the world. Trump’s exceptional inability to manage may in fact be a self-defeating factor here universal to all populists. In order to rise as a leader on a platform of ‘alternative facts’ and inability to be honest, you will not be able to manage well once you get power. But that’s a statement of faith. The Founders did not assume a demagogic tyrant would automatically be incompetent at maintaining power. In fact they assumed such a character would and tried to set up numerous formal and informal safeguards and trip wires.
This leads me to another issue I have. This is like people who say “global warming won’t make life extinct.” Yes 10,000 nuclear bombs couldn’t make life extinct on earth. Getting rid of the sun and letting earth’s surface temperature drop to -250 degrees wouldn’t make life extinct. That, however, is missing the point. We’d like to enjoy human life and not be cheerful so long as there’s at least a few microbes shivering near a thermal vent under a frozen ocean.
The Nazis were to Fascism what Elvis was to Rock-n-Roll: the go to example if you knew nothing about the subject but hardly the only practitioner If you think you know all about Rock because you know Elvis, you’re missing a lot. There were fascists before and after Nazi Germany. What the Nazis did, was not done by every fascist nation. (For example, Franco in Spain had no interest in killing all Jews). Things can get pretty bad and ‘whatabouttism’ shouldn’t be the standard we set for ourselves.
So what is fascism if it doesn’t (necessarily) mean gas chambers? Interestingly NYT had a piece on nearly forgotten novelist William Glass, who seems to have written a difficult to read novel in 95 that is getting some more attention now.
““Fascism is a tyranny which enshrines the values of the lower middle class, even though the lower middle class doesn’t get to rule. It just gets to feel satisfied that the world is well-run. It likes symbols of authority and it likes to dress up. It likes patriotic parades.””
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/books/review/william-h-gass-tunnel-trumps-america.html
If we use this as a working starting point, how many things are checked off? Has the lower middle class ruled more in the administration of populist alt-right types? Are many hedge fund managers claiming to be plumbers on their resumes so as to not sink their chances for an appointment? Is the center of policy focus running things well or creating a feeling that things are ‘well run’ (“blah nasty immigrants are being stuffed in tight buildings with poor hygine, serves them right! ” or how many times have you heard a variation of “well if liberals are upset about it that makes it worth it”?).
Of course you are free to have faith that America has a strong system that would never let such bad things happen. But recall what Jesus said to Satan when he suggested he jump off a cliff since the angels would catch him.