We Are the Company We Keep

The United States, the nation democracies the world over once looked to for guidance, strength, and leadership, has abandoned its moral high ground for a partnership dictators, oligarchs, and rogues.

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Image generated using Deep AI

Historians William Strauss and Neil Howe’s generational theory of “the fourth turning” argues each generation is comprised of four 20–22 year “turnings,” or cultural attitudes about society. Four turnings make up a saeculum, Latin for “a long human life” or “a natural century.”

Meticulously tracing historic events, Strauss and Howe delineate how the most consequential societal-shaping events have predictably adhered to this 80-year cycle.

For example, 80 years after the American Revolution the United States was gripped in the Civil War. 80 years after that saw the end of the second world war.

From that point to now has been — that’s right — 80 years.

In the 1930s, as fascism was consuming Europe — and even threatened to take over here — we elected a president, Franklin Roosevelt, who could have used the presidency’s awesome power at a time of great national weakness to join the authoritarian trend, and flip the United States to an autocracy.

He alluded during his first inaugural address to sweeping governmental reforms he intended to implement:

It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

We normally only focus on the “all we have to fear is fear itself” slogan at the beginning; rarely do we remember the part about “broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency”.

Instead, Roosevelt used his “broad executive power” to expand government’s potential to strengthen democracy, creating America’s middle class, which thrived for 40 years until Ronald Reagan declared war on the New Deal when he pronounced in his first inaugural address that government isn’t “the solution to the problem; government is the problem.”

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A decade ago the suggestion we could slide into fascism was the province of fringe conspiracy enclaves.

Now it is no longer hyperbole.

A decade ago the suggestion we would be abdicating our responsibility in helping preserve global liberal democracy we fought to defend with our allies would have been unthinkable.

Yet last week, we did it.

The United States of America, the nation democracies the world over once looked to for guidance, strength, and leadership, has abandoned its moral high ground for the cheap, kleptocratic partnership of dictators, oligarchs, and rogues.

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We’ve all heard the saying, “We are the company we keep”.

By sidling up to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, we are not only alienating ourselves from our traditional allies that have always had our backs when times got tough; we are throwing away nearly 250 years of everything we have every fought and stood for.

Since we’re deciding now we’re all in with the bullies, blackguards, and thieves, does that make us — the American people — by association, also bullies, blackguards, and thieves?

Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger asked a variation of this on his Substack page last week after the felon pretending to be the US president called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” and claimed Russia should be expected to keep the land stolen from Ukraine because “it cost them alot of lives to get it.”

[A]s I watch the behavior of our political leaders, the comments of an ever-increasingly unhinged Trump, and the growing indifference of many Americans toward our role in the world, I have to ask a painful question: Are we now the bad guys?

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The answer, sadly, is yes.

Former Rep. Kinzinger added:

This isn’t just about Ukraine or NATO. Trump’s cozying up to dictators like Putin and China’s Xi Jinping reflects a deeper trend — one where we seem more enamored with strongmen than the ideals that once defined us. We see it in how some on the right openly admire Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian grip on Hungary. We see it in the bizarre reverence Trump and his allies have for Putin — some even wearing shirts that praise the Russian dictator. We see it in the growing disdain for democracy itself, with Republicans at both the state and national level working to restrict voting rights, undermine free elections, and criminalize dissent.

Alexander Vindman explained:

Trump going to the Kremlin — as there are some reports of him agreeing to visit Russia — is the exact opposite of achieving a peace deal. It’s talking just to talk. It doesn’t actually advance the efforts of peace. You don’t want to necessarily break all communications with Russia, but you do not reward Russia with a visit to the Kremlin and normalizing relationships. It does not advance the effort. It’s appeasement. And it’s in the worst tradition of the mistakes that we’ve made over the course of the past 30-plus years.

Bill Kristol and Andrew Eggers, wrote in The Bulwark:

Trump is also preparing to throw our European allies, many of whom want to stand with Ukraine, under the bus. Thus his administration has expressed a willingness to entertain the longstanding Russian demand that the United States remove troops from the frontline NATO countries most threatened by Russia. Such a move would effectively mark the end of NATO, which Trump, once again following Putin’s lead, would presumably welcome.

1987 Newsweek article

Former British Conservative Party chairman Chris Patten stated, darkly, to the New York Times’s Nick Kristof:

We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values — largely put in place by America since the Second World War — which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity. . . . I love America and was once happy to regard its president as leader of the free world. Not any longer. Where are the American values that I used to admire?

libquotes.com

Author and political commentator Thom Hartmann explained this week in his piece titled “Yes, We’re the Villains Now — And It’s About to Get Worse”:

We are now on the side of the royal ideology of absolute power held by that one man, the [British] King, whose soldiers imprisoned, tortured, and murdered so many of our nation’s Founders.

John Darkow, Columbia Missourian via CagleCartoons.com

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Could it, actually, get worse?

Oh, yes.

A lot worse.

We will only witness the collapse of our democracy if we allow it.

While people are standing up all over America demanding their lawmakers — republican and Democratic — stand up to the traitors in the process of chipping away at our institutions piece by piece, most are still carrying on like all of this is normal, if they even know about it at all.

Former Rep. Kinzinger, a rare breed of old-school Republican (hence why he was voted out of Congress), argues:

There was a time when supporting democracy abroad and standing up to authoritarian bullies was a bipartisan principle. But today, a frightening number of Americans have bought into the idea that America’s moral leadership doesn’t matter anymore. They see foreign policy as a zero-sum game — if we help Ukraine, we somehow lose. If we stand up for human rights abroad, we’re wasting resources. If we defend democracy, we’re being “globalists.”

This shift isn’t just concerning — it’s dangerous. The world is watching. Our allies in Europe and Asia are questioning whether they can count on us, whether America still means what it says. And our adversaries — Putin, Xi, and every dictator with territorial ambitions — are licking their chops, waiting for America to fully turn inward, to abandon its role as the leader of the free world.

For example, why isn’t there collective outrage over not one but two Trump loyalists flashing Nazi salutes?

Where is all investigative reporting on the not-so-obscure neo-Nazi allusions circulating around the right-wing-osphere?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1882406209187409976

Instead, we have an intimidated corporate media twisting itself into knots attempting to explain it away like it’s just how politics is done today.

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This is also something we have seen before and ignore at our peril.

Milton Mayer was a journalist, reporter for the Associated Press, the Chicago Evening Post, the Chicago American, and The Progressive.

In 1955, he published a seminal work titled They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–45 in which he analyzes how Adolf Hitler came to power and got away so long with his maniacal agenda in a modern, civilized, cultured twentieth-century Germany.

He wanted to know what ordinary men, “not men of distinction,” felt, thought, and experienced, as their country slipping into darkness, how incrementally their nation devolved into fascism.

What he found was they just wanted to live their lives, and they did the best they could, realizing too late freedoms they once enjoyed eroded right under them. But because it happened gradually, few noticed, or, if they noticed, few said anything lest they seem paranoid. Slight disturbances did not appear to many to be that dire.

In chapter 13, Mayer quotes one of 10 men he befriended:

Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others will join you. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone. You speak privately to your colleagues”but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist’. And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and can’t prove it. Your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.

Another stated:

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted,” that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these “little measures” that no “patriotic German” could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

Mayer concluded:

Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany — not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted — or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.

I came home a little bit afraid for my country, afraid of what it might want, and get, and like, under combined pressure of reality and illusion. I felt — and feel — that it was not German Man that I met, but Man. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.

If I — and my countrymen — ever succumbed to that concatenation of conditions, no Constitution, no laws, no police, and certainly no army would be able to protect us from harm.

We are sowing the seeds of world war three for which we will be on the wrong side with our former allies unified against us.

After all, it’s been exactly 80 years.

Right on cue.

Maybe we should refer to those still unable to acknowledge this as members of the “Not-see” party.