The 1944 Game

Where are we in terms of confronting the Trump Crisis, the great political challenge of our lives?

In terms of my parents’ generation I’d say we’re in 1944. In terms of their ancestors, it’s 1864.

We’ve passed the turning point. The death of George Floyd, the botched response to COVID-19, and the Administration’s response combined to help us turn a corner, as when the graph of the Georgia pandemic peaks at a great height and seems to turn. They were D-Day.

But we haven’t won yet. And we’re exhausted now, just as we were then.

My family is especially pessimistic. They see Trump controlling the agenda, they see his acolytes running police and the military, they fear the 2020 election won’t happen. These are reasonable fears.

But we had similar fears back in the day, easy to see by just looking at what people were doing at the time.

Movie goers remember 1944 for Going My Way,” with Bing Crosby,  or Meet Me in St. Louis, with Judy Garland, movies where the war had little or no role. It’s also remembered as the year of Bogie and Bacall, in To Have or Have Not.  Film noir, created mostly by German emigres, was rising even as the war ground on.

But most films that year were still propagandistic war stories . Today’s kids are told of “D-Day,” but people at the time didn’t believe in victory was until after the “Battle of the Bulge,” which took place around Christmas. U.S. papers spent most of their coverage on the Pacific, which remained a hard slog until Hiroshima.

There were no movies in 1864, but the situation was still critical. Coincidentally, the issue then was also around an election. Abraham Lincoln had to run again and, for most of the year, he was the underdog. The decision came with the taking of my town, Atlanta, by Union forces in September. But when kids read about the war today it’s all about Gettysburg and Vicksburg, which took place in 1863. Just as when they read about WWII it’s about D-Day, not the Bulge.

That’s the point. History changes how events played out because history knows how the story ended. Those who are living inside the story don’t know that.

We’re at a similar point now. Like the Nazis and Confederates, the Trumpists still have a sting. People are still dying as Trump and his acolytes become more desperate. The people who are losing are aware of this history. That’s why they wear Nazi face masks at the Walmart and bring Confederate flags to NASCAR races. No one is fooling anyone, on either side of the great divide.

That’s why it helps to have some knowledge of history in approaching the day’s news.

Analysts lost in the eternal now don’t do that. Right-wingers still think the situation can be salvaged, or that liberals will over-reach, providing another opening. Liberals worry about a Trump coup d’etat, and about whether the Senate can be taken. Election Twitter is still treating this as just-another election, one where no minds will be changed.

None of that is true.

We are now in the 12^th year of the modern crisis, the decision point. And we’ve been here before.

The Civil War didn’t become inevitable until 1852, and the Republican Party that fought it wasn’t founded until 1854. World War II is even easier to date, since 1932 represented the convulsions that brought Hitler and FDR to power amidst the Great Depression.

History also offers a guide to what needs to come next. That is, an opportunity. The struggle for democracy doesn’t end with a Biden victory. November 3 won’t be V-T Day. The struggle only enters its final phase then. And then only in America.

Most of the world today is still ruled by dictators, one-way men (note that they’re all men) bound up in religious, ethnic, or ideological hatreds of some “other.” They’re focused on the obsolete business models of resources, control over what’s in the ground and the physical bodies of people. Whether they’re Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, MBS, or Jair Bolsonaro, they all sound the same. Destroy the “other,” however defined, and things will get better, they say.

We know they won’t. Their approach is entirely wrong. There is no “other.” There is no “them.” There’s only us. This is one world, filled with one species, and we all face the ultimate existential crisis, one that can only be fought in one way. With unity, and with science. That’s how we beat COVID-19. It’s also how we beat climate change.

After both 1864 and 1944, the subject changed but the struggle went on. We never completely wiped out the remnants of racism or Naziism. But they did go underground for two generations. We gained breathing space with which to address more important questions, the growth of America in the first instance, a new world order in the second.

The task of our children is even bigger. Even after America is won again, there will remain a world to win. Even after the world is won, there will remain the existential threat of climate change and all that must be learned, quickly, to save this species while our home planet, which we all Earth, continues orbiting the sun and the galactic core.