The Nazi Alternative Universe

We’ve been watching the excellent HBO mini-series The Plot Against America.  It’s a gripping, well-acted, and very difficult to watch story that is part of the “alternative history” genre.

In the show, Charles Lindbergh — still a hero to millions for his solo flight across the Atlantic years before — decides to run for President in 1940 on an isolationist platform.  Lucky Lindy barnstorms across the country in the Spirit of St. Louis, giving the same short speech about America’s choice being between Lindbergh and war.  Lindbergh surprisingly defeats FDR, and the result is catastrophic for American Jews generally, and one Jewish family in particular, as the country slides into a cozy relationship with the Nazis, fascism, and virulent anti-Semitism.  (And I haven’t had the chance to watch the last episode yet, so no spoilers here.)

It’s a difficult show to watch, of course, because no one wants to see the kind of America depicted on the show — but as I watched I found myself thinking about the role of Nazi Germany in the alternative history genre of fiction.  So many books and shows revolve around “what if” questions in which the Germans win World War II — The Man in the High Castle is one recent example — that it almost seems as if Nazism was responsible for the creation of the alternative history genre in the first place.  And it’s interesting that, of all of the potential turning points of history, World War II seems to be the source of far more interest than others.  There might be alternative histories written about “what if” worlds in which, say, the British won the War of 1812, or the Kaiser emerged victorious in World War I, but if so there aren’t many of them, and they’ve remained in obscurity.  The Nazis, in contrast, always seem to take center stage.

Why, exactly, do the Nazis command so much more interest and attention?  Part of it is that their creed and philosophies were so murderous, hateful, and outlandish that it’s hard to believe that they controlled a country and were able to launch and fight a global war, and implement the Holocaust, less than 100 years ago.  There’s a certain amazement about the fact that it happened, and that the Nazis actually existed in an era of automobiles and planes and telephones.  That still-shocking realization gives a powerful narrative punch to alternative history stories about what might have happened had those terrible, soulless murderers won, even 80 years after the Nazis were hurled into the dustbin of history.

Whenever I see or read an alternative history about a Nazi triumph and what it would have meant for the United States, I’m always reminded of a quote from Tom Wolfe in the ’70s, when he observed that “the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”  In short, people have long loved to predict that America is teetering on the brink of fascism and totalitarian repression.  World War II, perhaps, was the closest those predictions came to being realized.  Part of the reason that the Nazi alternative history genre is so crowded may be that the Nazis are a storytelling device that allows people to imagine that fascist America that has for so long been predicted, but has never come to pass.

I doubt that The Plot Against America will be the last alternative history in which America has fallen in World War II and fascism reigns in the former land of the free and home of the brave — and that’s OK.  Depictions of what a fascist America might look like helps us to keep our guard up.  That’s a big part of the reason that the “dark night of fascism” has never landed on our shores.

 

Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself

I read an interesting article the other day about how to get the economy back up and running — and, not incidentally, about understanding why the economy ground to a halt in the first place.  The article contends that it really wasn’t governmental shutdown orders that did the significant damage — it was fear.

Once people started to accept that the coronavirus really was serious and dangerous, and not just some grossly exaggerated boogeyman like so many over-hyped diseases of past years, they stopped doing what they were doing — even before government orders took effect, and even as to conduct that government orders still permit.  And when the American consumer, the primary cog in the greatest economic engine in the history of the world,  decides to change course, as a group, the consequences are profound.  The dominoes started falling, businesses saw sharp drop-offs in orders, and the unemployment rate ratcheted upward to levels we haven’t seen since the Great Depression.

And that’s where we are.  There’s still a lot of fear out there — among some people, at least — and that needs to be dealt with as part of the reopening process.  The author of the piece linked above contends that what we really need to deal with that general sense of fear is widespread availability of protective masks, and also widespread availability of reliable COVID-19 testing.  The masks may have a good effect toward preventing transmission of the disease when people are out in public, but they also may just make people feel safer, more secure, and more willing to go out to a store rather than ordering everything they might need through Amazon Prime.  Masks thus may have a tangible public health effect, but also a kind of calming placebo effect.  Some of the other steps that governmental guidance has outlined for reopening businesses — like having people coming to work take their temperatures — also seems like it will help to build confidence that going out in public doesn’t involve crushing risk.

The testing is equally important, because it might finally provide us with the data that will give us a real sense of just what the coronavirus is, how many people have it or have already had it, and what its mortality rate truly is.  And while it might be fun, politically, to castigate our political leaders for not having millions of tests readily available for a disease that was totally unknown until a few months ago, I don’t see the value in playing the blame game.  Once most testing is done — and particularly more random testing of the general population, rather than testing only those people who already are in extremis physically — we’ll have a better sense of the real risks of a return to normalcy.

For all of the scary headlines about mounting death tolls, there are tantalizing indications in some of the general testing of certain populations that has been done that the coronavirus is far more widespread that health authorities have believed, and that the vast majority of the cases don’t cause serious health issues.  According to the CDC website, accessed today, the people who are really at risk seem to be senior citizens — especially those in certain nursing homes — and people with significant, pre-existing medical conditions, like respiratory illness, compromised immunity systems, or morbid obesity.  If general testing is done and it confirms that the real risk of coronavirus is limited to certain vulnerable populations, then we can step to provide protections specifically designed for those populations — and people who don’t fall into those high-risk populations can start to go about their business.  That concept, not incidentally, will require the news media to accurately report boring test data, rather than focusing on death counts.  When scary headlines are producing lots of clicks and website traffic, that might be asking for a lot.

One of our greatest Presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, famously told the American people in the midst of the Great Depression that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  That admonition seems apt as we move into the post-shutdown phase of the Great Coronavirus Crisis of 2020.  If we’re going to get the economy going, help people who have been thrown out of work, and bring the unemployment rate down, a lot of frightened people are going to have to conquer their fears and accept the risks inherent with doing things like shopping and eating in public.  Having better data — and better reporting of data — will help.

A Further Response to UJ

I responded to part of UJ’s comment below, but his last question deserves a longer, more thoughtful response than a “reply” allows.

I’m not sure that the New Deal made the Great Depression end any sooner; some historians think the Great Depression really didn’t end in America until World War II. (Indeed, some people were afraid that, after the War ended, the country would sink back into depression again.) I do think, however, that some of the programs that were adopted as part of the New Deal (like Social Security) and the public works that were created during the New Deal (like the TVA and the WPA, which built the federal courthouse here in Columbus and many other public buildings across the country) were useful and necessary. I also think FDR did a good job of trying to instill and sustain hope in many people who were desperate and downtrodden, and that is an extremely important part of political leadership. Whether the New Deal programs worked or not, they helped to make people believe that the government cared. In that sense, the New Deal programs probably helped America avoid some of the political upheavals that occurred in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and other countries.

So yes, if I had lived during the Great Depression and been out of a job, I would have wanted an activist President like FDR. At the same time, I think you can give hope without indulging in the kind of runaway deficit spending we are now seeing. If we could be assured that the vast majority of the federal spending in the stimulus package would be devoted to public works projects that would endure for generations, it would be one thing. That is not what is happening, however. Instead, it is being frittered away on wasteful political pet projects and funding activities that could, and should, be financed by local governments — like the two local traffic projects in New Albany or further improvements to the ridiculous boondoggle that is the John Murtha Airport. I object to a pointless expenditure of taxpayer funds that achieves nothing lasting — except increasing the national debt and saddling future federal budgets with enormous “debt service” line items.