Gotham Diary:
Reckless Disloyalty
17 June 2013
It has been thirteen years since I set up my first Web site. That feels like a long time, and certainly much has happened. Thirteen years is plenty of time for things to happen. And yet, it really isn’t so long. I’m not actually thinking about my life on the Internet here. What I’m thinking about is that I’ve been in power, first at Portico and then at The Daily Blague, longer than Hitler was in power in Germany. He came and went that quickly.
As I say, twelve years is plenty of time for myriad catastrophes to befall millions of people. As governments go, though, the Third Reich was short-lived, more comparable to Savonarola’s religious despotism in Florence in the 1490s, or to the much more mild-mannered Interregnum in England in the 1650s, than to the dynastic monarchies that ruled Europe for centuries. It wasn’t — the Reich — much of a government. Of course it wasn’t: it was a regime supported by a hatred of government. It was a madness, an epidemic of recklessness that ran its disastrous course in little more than a decade.
Thoughts of the Third Reich are prompted by a fortuity of readings. Yesterday, I finished Frederick Brown’s For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus, and then, in the evening, I picked up Jeremy Adelman’s biography of economic thinker Albert Hirschman, Worldly Philosopher, precisely at the point where the collapse of the Weimar Republic inspired Hirschman to leave his family in Berlin and to settle in France — at the ripe old age of seventeen. It was very much like reading two versions of a well-known fairy tale. Or perhaps it was exactly the opposite of that, for, when you read two versions of a fairy tale, you note the discrepancies, the differences in tone and detail. In yesterday’s readings, the differences in tone and detail between fin-de-siècle France and Germany thirty years later didn’t amount to much. Even before I re-opened Adelman, I was haunted by the conviction that disgust with the Third Republic made many, many French people itch for something like Hitler’s fascist regime. Well, they got their wish.
***
For the Soul of France is THE book to read about the Dreyfus Affair, for the simple reason that it recreates, over the course of two hundred fluently concise pages, the context in which the scandal was brewed. Having steeped the reader in the big stories that preceded the Affair — the two financial imbroglios (l’Union Générale, de Lesseps’s Panama Canal company); the rise and fall of General Boulanger, and also in the vile, intemperate language of Catholic apologists, often priests, in the partisan press, Brown is free to run through the stages of Dreyfus Affair, and its important sideshow, the Zola trials, with brisk dispatch. At the center of everything is the insistent anti-Semitism that, in those days, knew no shame. Here is Henri-Martin Didon, a Dominican attached to the Collège d’Arcueil, in a commencement speech delivered in the summer of 1898:
We must equip ourselves with coercive powers, we must not hold back, we must brandish the sword, smite, terrorize, cut off heads, impose justice. … Armed force thus employed is no longer brute strength but sainted energy put to beneficent use.
By this point in the book, the reader does not need Brown to spell out the targeting of the Jews implicit in this attack. Vincent de Paul Bailly, the Assumptionist editor of the Catholic chain of newspapers, La Croix, wrote,
Free thought, standing in the dock with Zola, acts as an attorney for Jews, for Protestants, for all enemies of the Church, and the army must, despite itself, fire away. … On all sides, people clamor for a strongman who would rrisk his life to tear Franch from the clutches of traitors, from the sectarians and imbeciles who are handing them over to the foreigner … Ah! Who will deliver us from this pack of brigands?
Father Bailly might well have been editorializing in early-Thirties Berlin. He strikes the same note of derring-do that decorated Nazi puffery.
The German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) rampaged against signs of “un-German spirit” and welcomed Nazi speakers to their rallies. It was these students who stormed the University of Berlin’s magnificent library in May 1933 and proceeded to ignite tens of thousands of volumes at the Opernplatz, in front of the law faculty and around the corner from Hegel’s old office.
By then, Hirschman had left the University (and Berlin) for Paris.
***
One can only hope that the bee in my bonnet will make some honey. It is at any rate clear to me that the disarray in anti-Dreyfus France and Nazi Germany owed a great deal to the lack of a loyal opposition. The opposition to the Third Republic, as the remarks of Fathers Didon and Bailly make clear, was not loyal. Catholic nationalists did not respect the political constitution of the Third Republic, but openly undermined it, as the strange career of Georges Boulanger makes clear. (Boulanger is another figure of Third Republic history whose antics are impossible to understand without a grasp of the tenor of the times.) This was an opposition that sought to restore to crown and church the control of France. It was reactionary, but only in the sense that the victim of a terrible illness is reactionary in seeking to restore his health. They believed, just as the Nazis believed and the Tea Party Republicans believe, that the government is diseased, possibly too diseased to prop up. They believed (and believe) that the government itself can be a vector of infection. They constituted (and constitute) the opposite of a loyal opposition.
Inclined to be sanguine about the near-term future of the United States, despite everything, I must confess to a persistent chill of misgivings, occasioned, it seems, by reading and then thinking about George Packer’s The Unwinding. There is no loyal opposition in this country, either, at the moment, and that frightens me, because it is the role of the loyal opposition to rein in the recklessness of the party in power. Democracy does not work if it is merely majoritarian; minorities quite naturally come to believe that the government is one of foreign occupation, and that’s enough to shred the civil fabric, violently or otherwise. The party that gets to run things because it wins a majority of votes must nevertheless learn to listen to the party that doesn’t, and that party, in turn, must learn how to talk to the party in power. This conversation is the true seat of democratic government, and it is clearly not taking place in today’s Washington.