War and the American Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr

Author:Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. [Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

HAS DEMOCRACY A FUTURE?

The twentieth century was no doubt, as Isaiah Berlin said, “the most terrible century in Western history.” Two world wars carried death and destruction to the far corners of the planet with 160 million people killed in violent conflict and millions more killed by the monstrous whims of dictators. Churchill spoke of “the woe and ruin of the terrible twentieth century.” The chronicles of human wreckage—the Holocaust and the Gulag Archipelago—haunt us still.

But this terrible century had, or seemed to have, a happy ending. As in melodramas of old, the maiden democracy, bound by villains to the railroad track, is rescued in the nick of time from the onrushing train. As the century drew to a close, both major villains had perished—fascism with a bang, communism with a whimper.

A season of triumphalism followed. Two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant argued in his Idea for a Universal History that the republican form of government was destined to supersede all others. At last the prophecy seemed on the way to fulfillment. Savants hailed “the end of history.” “For the first time in all history,” President Clinton declared in his second inaugural address, “more people on this planet live under democracy than dictatorship.” The New York Times, after careful checking, approved: 3.1 billion people live in democracies, 2.66 billion do not. According to end-of-history doctrine as expounded by its prophet, Francis Fukayama, the world could look forward to “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

For historians, this euphoria rang a bell of memory. Did not the same radiant hope accompany the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century? This most terrible hundred years in Western history started out in an atmosphere of optimism and high expectation. People of goodwill in 1900 believed in the inevitability of democracy, the invincibility of progress, the decency of human nature, and the coming reign of reason and peace. David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, expressed the mood in his turn-of-the-century book The Call of the Twentieth Century. “The man of the Twentieth Century,” Jordan predicted, “will be a hopeful man. He will love the world and the world will love him.”

Looking back, we recall a century marked a good deal less by love than by hate, irrationality, and atrocity, one that for a long dark passage inspired the gravest forebodings about the very survival of the human race. Democracy, striding confidently into the 1900s, found itself almost at once on the defensive. In the second decade, the Great War, exposing the pretension that democracy would guarantee peace, shattered old structures of security and order and unleashed angry energies of revolution—revolution not for democracy but against it. Bolshevism in Russia, Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, militarism in Japan, all despised, denounced, and, wherever they could, destroyed individual rights and the processes of self-government.

In the fourth decade, the Great Depression came along to expose the pretension that democracy would guarantee prosperity. A third of the way into the century, democracy seemed a helpless thing, spiritless, paralyzed, doomed.

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