We've Seen This All Before

 

Reporters are interested in the now, what’s happening this day, this hour, this minute.

Sometimes there’s room to look back, to see how things started, or to shoot extra video showing where the truck that smashed into the crowd came from.

But, we mostly expect to see the “what happened” part right up front. That’s the whole point of news.

Now that I’m a retired reporter - you don’t ever stop reporting, you just stop being paid to do it - I’m getting more and more interested in how things got the way they are, and if they ever happened before. So, let’s look at the massive support Donald Trump is getting and try to see if it will matter five or 10 or 50 years from now.

Short answer is it just might. After all, we’ve been down this road before.

Let me explain. It happened well over a century ago, but don’t let that put you to sleep. There’s an important lesson here.

Just imagine. State after state voted to leave the Union. Most of the best officers in the U.S. Army resigned, to go fight with their states against the Army they had served.

Lincoln was elected. War broke out. Four years of fighting and 300,000 dead - more than all the deaths in all the nation’s wars to that point. And Lincoln was assassinated and reconstruction began, punishing all those states that Lincoln had wanted to come back as equals - you know, with malice toward none, with charity for all.

Well you know the rest of the sad story. Blacks were elected to office across the south, then chased out. No one was punished for their part in the war - Robert E. Lee became President of Washington University and after he left the school was re-named. It is now Washington and Lee University.

The Ku Klux Klan was organized, and lynching of blacks became common throughout the South, fueled in part by a dynamic movie in that new form of entertainment. Audiences across the nation cheered as southern whites donned robes and masks and rode out to defend gentle maidens, and “Birth of a Nation” made its way into cultural history, to be bookended decades later by the nation’s most-read novel - Gone With The Wind, with Clark Gable as the dashing and heroic lead when it became a film in 1939. It became the industry’s most successful movie when it was released.

What does this all have to do with us? Well, it was the myth. The Lost Cause. The myth that the South didn’t really lose the Civil War, that it was only betrayed by weak politicians. That all those Southern soldiers were only fighting for the noble idea of independence and freedom, not for the right to enslave hundreds of thousands of blacks who were denied those things.

Let them vote? No, impose poll taxes. Redraw election districts. Use violence. After all, the South didn’t lose. Keep minorities in inferior schools, or from taking good jobs, or make them ride on the back of the bus. Just remember, we are only keeping a noble cause alive.

After all, dreams die hard when they become part of a cultural identity.

Which, if you think about it, sounds just like Donald Trump and his chorus of Congressional Republicans.

He didn’t lose. He was betrayed. He will rise again. No, wait, that’s Jesus, not Donald. He will never rise again, because he will never go down. He will live forever in our nation’s political life - after all, he has all that money, and all that power. Trump didn’t lose, he was just betrayed by the very people some of his traitorous advisors told him to put on the Supreme Court.

Think it was the only time? Well, back in the 1930’s, in the depths of a world-wide depression, things were really tough. And, nowhere were things worse than in Germany, which had been saddled with paying the debts of the nations that won World War I. There seemed no way the county would ever get out of that trap.

But, a leader came along who grabbed the attention of the German people. The country hadn’t lost the war, he told them. Germany was betrayed. Betrayed by the Jews. Betrayed by the Communists. Betrayed by those politicians who ran the nation and kept things from getting better.

You may remember the name. It’s not fashionable to compare Trump to Hitler, but they share the same dream. We didn’t lose. We were betrayed.

A lot of politicians in Germany saw that Hitler was very popular, and agreed to let him run the country. They thought they could control him, let him get the votes of the people, and then direct him from behind the scenes. A lot of businessmen thought the same thing, and for a while they got richer and richer. And Germany got more and more powerful.

Then some very bad things happened. Germany lost World War II. A complete, humiliating defeat. And, the dream died. So did millions of Germans.

Now in the United States, some officials are taking down statues of Confederate generals and talking about renaming all those military bases named for traitors who fought against the United States in the Civil War.

Others are objecting. They talk about preserving our history, but don’t like the “revisionist” history that points out the flaws in our national heroes.

It will be interesting to see how many Republicans play this out to the very last card. I hope, for their sake, they realize the leader of their party is just bluffing, and getting very rich while doing it. They don’t have much more time to do it.