“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana remarked, and young people today know so little about the past that they are well and truly doomed. The teaching of history has been replaced by indoctrination for progressive activism, as Jane Shaw has recently explained, which means that the more “educated” a young person is, the less they are likely to know about the past. There are patterns in history, and the more we study history, the more easily we recognize the repetition of these patterns. In the last couple of weeks, my bedtime reading has been Martin Gilbert’s history of the First World War, a book I’ve already read twice, but one thing about good books is that you can enjoy re-reading them at intervals of five or 10 years.
At any rate, while re-reading Gilbert’s book, I took note of a certain pattern that some people with bad memories are condemned to repeat:
Few things are more likely to precede defeat than the conviction that you are on the verge of victory. One hundred years ago, in the spring of 1917, Germany had every reason to believe that it would triumph over its enemies in the First World War. France had been bled white in repeated attacks on the German army’s fortified lines, England was suffering from shortages of both munitions and military manpower, and Russia was descending into a revolution that would, within a year, enable Germany and its Austro-Hungarian allies to shift enormous numbers of troops and guns to the Western Front. Yet the entry of the United States into the war on April 6, 1917, proved to be the counterweight that shifted the balance. By the autumn of 1918, the fond hope of Germany victory had been exposed as a delusion. The ultimate result of the Kaiser’s war was the destruction of the Kaiser’s empire, and of much else besides.
What is true in war is true also in politics. Hubris is nearly always the precedent to unexpected defeat. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory; less than four years later, LBJ could not even win his own party’s nomination for re-election. In 1972, Richard Nixon was re-elected in a landslide; less than two years later, he was forced to resign from office. More recently, after George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election, some imagined that this victory was the harbinger of a “permanent Republican majority” — a GOP electoral hegemony based on a so-called “center-right” realignment — but two years later, Democrats captured control of Congress and in 2008 Barack Obama was elected president. Obama’s success in turn led Democrats to become overconfident, and Hillary Clinton’s supporters believed they were “on the right side of history,” as rock singer Bruce Springsteen told a rally in Philadelphia on the eve of the 2016 election. Unfortunately for Democrats, history disagreed. . . .
Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.
