A Traitor to His Class

 The above is the well-chosen title of H.W. Brands’s biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The idea was that Roosevelt, who came from Old Money, behaved in an unexpected way, given his high-class background. His wife, Eleanor, could dabble in extreme left-wing causes, because that was a result of her education, and she was a woman, after all.

      But I think that FDR’s life represents the history of the United States of America in the twentieth century pretty well.

    I think that the first thirty or forty years of the twentieth century there was real threat of a Communist Revolution throughout the world. It should not have happened in Russia first, as it did (Even Marx said so), but rather in an already industrial society, like England or Germany.

    So there was a lot of pressure on FDR to show that democracy would naturally provide all that communism could (like that we could all care for each other—Social Security—and that workers would have some say in what happened to them, through a robust culture of trade unions), and that the many social programs naturally arose from our representative government. The whole Cold War was about this: Whether Communism or Capitalism would prevail in the world. It looks like Capitalism is winning at this point, but not the good kind, where we took care of each other. The bad kind. Fueled only by selfishness. The Republican Party kept this secret to themselves, and waited, mostly patiently, for the world to skew right, as is now happening. And now they are selling Capitalism in its worst form.

    I should say right now that conservatism, by nature, is beautiful. It is about preserving something very valuable. By those lights, I am a conservative. But, it turns out that the conservatism the American Republicans were hiding, was not really conservatism but something else. Pure selfishness.

    I should also clarify that I don’t think people around the world are so much different. I mean that there are not some “good” Americans versus some “bad” Soviets, or German Nazis or some other evil nationality. Conversely, I don’t think that persecution makes poor people good, versus we have-it-all Americans being evil or blind. If we Americans suffered like the Syrians or Ukrainians now suffer, we would behave just like them, and we’d continually wonder why the world was not listening to us. We all want order. We all want the trains to run on time. Just like folks who voted for Hitler. Who would have voted for him in the US. Many of whom will make the moral imbecile, Trump, the “president” who doesn’t even know how the American government works, our next president.

    If you,  for any reason, plan to vote for Trump in the upcoming election, please unfriend me right now on any social media platform we share. We will not get along. And I am tired to hell of explaining.

    I agree with the author of one of my favorite novels, LIFE AND FATE, Vasily Grosman, that the history of the world is not about great evil battling great good. I (and he) think it is about great evil battling a tiny kernel of good. Continually surprised that that little, weak, motherfucker eternally arises, and surprised, too, that, small as it is, it is indestructible.

  We have no choice but to take the side of that tiny kernel of good. We need to be willing to die, if necessary. It’s just the history of the world, after all.