Went down a rabbit hole yesterday, and thankfully caught myself before I got too far down. (This happens every couple of days.)

This particular rabbit hole opened up because of a line in Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, which I started reading as part of my inquiry into tyranny and democracy (all of this relating to my BRE book On Tyranny). After a few chapters of the events between WWI and the rise of Hitler, Churchill has this to say:

It is difficult to find a parallel to the unwisdom of the British and weakness of the French Governments, who none the less reflected the opinion of their Parliaments in this disastrous period. Nor can the United States escape the censure of history. Absorbed in their own affairs and all the abounding interests, activities, and accidents of a free community, they simply gaped at the vast changes which were taking place in Europe, and imagined they were no concern of theirs. The considerable corps of highly competent, widely trained professional American officers formed their own opinions, but these produced no noticeable effect upon the improvident aloofness of American foreign policy. If the influence of the United States had been exerted, it might have galvanised the French and British politicians into action. The League of Nations, battered though it had been, was still an august instrument which would have invested any challenge to the new Hitler war-menace with the sanctions of international law. Under the strain the Americans merely shrugged their shoulders, so that in a few years they had to pour out the blood and treasures of the New World to save themselves from mortal danger. (77-8)

A few things jumped out at me here: First, the reference to the Parliaments in the UK and France doing things that were unwise, but that reflected the wishes of their citizens; and second, the class of American professionals who perhaps recognized that early intervention would have been smart, but whose opinions were shrugged off. Both seem recognizable today. I’m not historian enough to know whether populist leanings were in the air in all three countries Churchill cites the way there are in the US today, but certainly the professional class has been sidelined by the more energetic political movements on left and right today (more obviously on the right, I would say).

The other thing was the momentary counterhistorical “what if”: What if the US had become more involved, earlier? Could the tragedies to come have been avoided? Obviously, no historical event has been as open to counterfactuals as World War Two, and Churchill, being intimately involved in politics and government while it was all going down was as well-positioned as anybody to recognize both what difference it would’ve made and why it didn’t happen. But this reminded me of a much darker what if that went in the other direction.

In 2004, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Philip Roth published The Plot Against America. This novel supposed that Charles Lindbergh had run against FDR in the 1940 presidential election. Lindbergh was the face of aviation in the when that technology was the symbol of American innovation and bravery. Arguably, he was a big part of the reason that aviation captured the imagination the way it did. He flew from New York to Paris in his airplane, The Spirit of St. Louis. He was Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1927. He was handsome, rich from his exploits, the son of a former Congressman. He was also a sympathetic figure, after his infant son was kidnapped from their home. He was also an anti-Semite who was vocal about thinking some races were superior to others. He had opinions about Jewish people that might lead you to believe he was sympathetic with Hitler. Like many of the Americans Churchill was referencing, he was against the United States intervening in any more foreign wars. He never ran for office, but, Roth imagines, if he had, he might very well have beaten FDR.

Roth was born in 1933, so he was a seven-year-old Jewish kid growing up in New Jersey at the time of the 1940 election. His parents were second-generation immigrants—Wikipedia says his mom’s family was from the Kyiv area of Ukraine, if you’re looking for connections to 2025 (though I’d need to check that with a more reliable source if I use it in the essay). In a move that I found fascinating when I first read the novel, Roth wrote The Plot Against America as a memoir of his own childhood in this slightly different timeline. Lindbergh beats Roosevelt, and promptly makes deals with Hitler and Hirohito. A much worse outcome than merely staying on the sidelines as Churchill remembers, and without the prospect of needing to “pour out the blood and treasures” a few years later.

There’s a temptation, with stories like Roth’s, to use them as a proxy for the time you’re living in. Since we all know that history doesn’t repeat but often rhymes, we go looking for parallels. This is the entire point of On Tyranny—that we need to learn the lessons that the 20th Century destroyed so many lives trying to teach us.

This thought is not finished, but I’m going to post anyway. Can’t decide yet whether this belongs in the essay anywhere, even much more briefly than this.