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Authoritarian politics seem to have been a cottage industry for the Lindbergh clan. In 1940, his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, published a pamphlet entitled ”The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith,” which quickly became a best-seller with the America First crowd. In it, she argued for a U.S.-German nonaggression treaty similar to one Germany had concluded with the USSR (and which Hitler would soon violate with the most massive land attack in history). She also wrote that totalitarianism might have a few rough edges, but it was an inevitable wave of the future, to which Americans should submit.
Brands concludes by suggesting that post-World War II foreign-policy disasters ensued for the U.S. largely because of capricious acts by overmighty chief executives who presumably followed FDR’s example, and that foreign policy “stability” would result from “[r]eturning Congress to the center of the decision-making process.”
But at the most critical points — the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the blank check issued to the Bush administration after 9/11 and the authorization of the use of force before the invasion of Iraq — Congress gave the executive everything it asked for. The legislature voluntarily, nay, eagerly, abdicated its responsibility when it could have used skepticism and restraint.
Brands says that we need “a serious and searching” debate about foreign policy, just as we did in the early 1940s. That would be welcome, but how is that even conceivable? One of our two political parties has, during the last two decades, descended into such unseriousness and gross irresponsibility as to beggar belief.
Its members now talk about Jewish space lasers causing wildfires in California and Italian satellites changing vote totals in U.S. elections, and has engaged in so much demagoguery over COVID as a deliberate Chinese bio-warfare instrument that it obscured the very real threat of pandemic disease transmission from wild animals to humans. If Congress can’t do its primary constitutional job of passing a budget, why should it be entrusted with running foreign policy?
Absent the American people suddenly waking up and refusing to elect dangerous crackpots to Congress, Brands’ pious wish for congressional reassertion of power is a non-starter. But far worse, particularly at a time of increased antisemitism, xenophobia and political violence, as well as a rising tide of admiration within the Republican Party for foreign dictators, his airbrushing of Charles Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi views in order to make a case for America First is historically unprofessional and morally unconscionable.
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from Mike Lofgren on history as politics
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Publish date : 2024-09-20 18:45:00
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