What is sad it that, unlike De Gaulle, few of our politicians really know anything much about the country's history and traditions, and fall back on tired slogans. But it's doubtful really that De Gaulle succeeded in transcending the divisions of French politics. I think this was only achieved when the socialist Mitterrand came to power and served two terms beginning in 1981, and France's communist party faded away especially with the Cold War's end.
1
Mike Marks, I just finished reading These Truths by Jill Lepore, and based on what I read there, and on what I felt in the 60-ties and there after, I don't think that all of the presidents you mention belong there. Omitt Reagan, the founder of the neocapitalist model, Clinton, for doing away with Glass Steagal, Bush for starting a stupid war and making the world unsafe in a measure not seen since WWII.
1
Trump is Petain , not De Gaulle.
Americans are not able to make the symbolic analysis.
Reading the comments here is really a picture of this nation.
2
Its a fine biography and it and the subject it tackles are worthy of more attention.
1
The prose is excellent, as usual, far far above any other contributor to these pages. But the sadly misplaced hope is indicative of persons with a stake in the future facing the inevitability of a world gone mechanistic, agnostic, consumerist - and in his children's lifetime, a feudal corporate-oligarchy with sharply angled divisions.
2
Everything happens for a reason. Trump and the deep divisions he is creating is probably the reason why the USA will find its De Gaulle.
1
Since no country has done as much to make life's opportunity here equal, I think all voices can be included in our history.
Look at any other country in 1787 and how far we came with the same basic government all that time. No place else comes close.
3
" and the extent to which it’s possible for a very unusual sort of politician to effectively reinvent tradition "
I think Ross means Donald Trump is that politician...
I do not think this detour of 'de Gaulle' is of any relevance to Trump's America and our sad national predicament. The simplest and most applicable narrative is - we need to 'restore' the rule of law in this country. It does not matter whether Dow Jones is 29K or 7K; the notion of America that matters is - no one, including the president, is above the law. (Let Trump's tax returns come out since he is a public servant...)
That is the presidency we need which will replace the lawless, corrupt and fact denying presidency of Donald Trump.
Too bad, the only challenger who is trying to make that case is an old horse, Joe Biden. But that is not an excuse for the preeminent columnist of our era - Ross - to duck the issue and take this French de-tour.
2
I’ve long thought that authoritarian government is human destiny. A fascist, theocratic, reactionary autocracy, plutocracy, whatever the nomenclature or description, an authoritarian government is easier to maintain and govern than is a liberal/progressive one. Neither thinking nor governance are required to maintain an authoritarian government.
On the other hand there is Edmund Burke on democracy:
Burke believed that government required a degree of uncommon intelligence and knowledge not possessed by most people.
Burke thought that most uneducated people, if they had the vote, could be influenced and easily lead by demagogues. He feared that then the authoritarian impulses unleashed by demagogues would undermine traditions and established religion, leading to violence and confiscation of property.
Burke warned that democracy could create a tyranny over unpopular minorities who needed the protection of the educated, intelligent and non-discriminatory.
Stephan Douglas’s doctrine of ‘popular sovereignty’ meant just that: in a democracy justice is defined by the majority.
Abraham Lincoln, however, insisted that the case for popular government depended upon a standard of right and wrong independent of mere public opinion and was not justified merely by “majority rules”.
A democratic republic needs educated, knowledgeable and participating citizens in order to function optimally. Maintaining and governing a democratic republic is hard work.
1
@HapinOregon
Power-hungry zealots will try to gain control of every important country from time to time.
The shock in 2019 is that a president finishing his term of offfice here actually set up a cohort of political soldiers in the Dept. of Justice to cause Donald Trump to lose and, failing that, mount a coup d'etat against him lasting most of his (first) term of office.
I'm still stunned to think that so many supposedly loyal men agreed to carry it out out of - what? Loyalty to Mr. Obama? To Hillary?
1
It will be impossible for any leader to unite America while an extreme media presence continues to sow division and discord at any length. There will always be opposing political camps in our society. At present, the camp on the left yearns beyond measure for stabilizing, rational, principled, optimistic leadership. The camp on the right simply wants to be boss and subjugate the other camp, in a nakedly dishonorable putsch fueled by rabidly divisive television media. You know who I'm talking about. Would-be statesmen are flayed alive before the living room couch Colosseum benches. The left desperately wants argument and governance based on principle, and for a unifying leader to arise from that. The right knows they will never win on that basis, and winning is their highest goal, so they shirk fact, reason and consistency, poisoning any chance at unity. Unity, for the right wing propagandists, means failure. As long as Fox News persuasively cries havoc, the animal furies of its audience will prevent us from elevating any de Gaulle.
2
I lived in France in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. However, Mr. Douthat, your analogies, for me, fall flat. Old by May of 1968, de Gaulle didn't seem to understand what was then going on. That crisis seemed quite complex to my foreign eyes, and just trying to stifle it with force didn't work. Furthermore, the United States is quite a different place: we don't need any mystique, but rather transparency and consistency. Not easy to come by these days!
2
When I was in elementary school the children were taught the American songs: patriotic songs, folk songs, negro spirituals, cowboy songs, songs of other cultures. I can still sing them all. We were taught the iconic stories and myths of our nation: Washington and the cherry tree, Lincoln and his log cabin, George Washington Carver, Henry Ford, Rosa Parks. We learned about the Pilgrims, the Tea Party, the Westward expansion, the Underground Railroad.
If we want to rewrite our national story in a way that includes us all and unites us, we need to start in the same way: with the myths and stories and heroes that we revere and look up to. We can't erase our mistakes, but we can acknowledge them. Above all, we must have heroes and principles we lift up.
7
I usually don’t enjoy Ross’s columns, for we have many ideological differences. But this one is good for a specific reason. It asks open questions and implores us to go off and think for a while.
Many people say the solution to America’s political divisions is to have more people be better listeners. But I think, and what Ross is asking us all to do here, is for everybody to just shut up for a while and do some hard thinking about who we are and what we want. We don’t do enough of that these days.
We can resume talking in a bit, but first go gather your thoughts.
2
Attempts to diagnose the current cultural battles in America, as Mr. Douthat has done, without mentioning the heritage of slavery is to be blind-sided by history. Racism and a return to the fantasy world of Gone With the Wind motivate much of what passes for conservatism today. This evil legacy is why conservatives hate Obama. Disagreements on policy are part of democracy, but refusal to allow a black man to rule is to cling to a past that should never have happened. The Constitution is riddled with concessions to slavery; the country was broken apart by slavery; and we are still divided by a fundamental difference in how others not like us should be treated. We are living Part II of the Civil War!
2
The US is not capable of producing a de Gaulle, or of collectively embracing a unifying narrative that synthesizes left and right. It's a colonial settler society unlike France.
2
“Our religious landscape is polarized, since the collapse of the old Protestant establishment, between a secular, anticlerical liberalism and a MAGA-and-megachurch conservatism.”
Dear Father Doubt That: Please do not confuse “anticlerical liberalism” with a strong desire not to have your, or anybody else’s religious beliefs imposed upon me. You are free to believe whatever you wish, but you have no right to impose your belief upon me.
5
This is one of my favorites of anything Ross has written. Loved it. It asks all the right questions, mostly at the very end. And those questions apply to all of us.
5
Ask Mayor Pete. He'll know.
2
De Gaulles democratic credentials were established when he relinquished office not once but twice.None of us and none of our leaders is perfect. What saves us is that our leaders are willing to leave the stage when the curtain comes down.
2
De Gaulle just happened to be the right person in the right place at the right time. Because of his courage, obstinance and belief in democracy, he played an instrumental role in defending democracy for his citizens as well as those of the free world.
Ironically, his name was eerily providential to his mission.
Yet the real question is, who is our de Gaulle and where is he when we need him the most?
2
Alexandra Occacio Cortez, has certainly shaken up right wingers of all stripes. Even Ross cannot help but take a back handed swipe at her by including "as yet" in parenthesis lol.
As someone born in India and lived in US for 30+ years, after living first 30 years in India, my idea of US is a mélange of what I recall America was seen as in 60s to 80s and what I have personally experienced it.
On the one hand you had a super power which perpetually supported military dictators. Not many people growing up then in India will forget Nixon sending the seventh fleet for intimidation purposes as Indian army was liberating Bangladesh from the massacres by Pakistan army and Ayub Khan.
Having lived here for a long time, I find it a strange mixture of really openminded and generous country mixed with utter ethonofobists, mostly experienced in south when I lived for a short time in Georgia.
As a francophone and listening to French TV and reading French newspapers on a regular basis, I have found it interesting that the French consider De Gaulle the greatest French of all time. All because he personified france but you would find it hard to find any great accomplishment out of him.
2
Once in a while Ross you hit one out of the park, outstanding!
3
How can you govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six varieties of stupid?
5
From the end of WW2 until the 1980's, de Gaulle acted with more moral courage than any other post war European leader. However, Gorbachev evinced even more courage and Nelson Mandela far more. Moreover, Mandela combined courage and moral leadership with forgiveness to those who had wronged the non Whites of South Africa.
Here in the USA, every single day he was President, Barack Obama put forth more courage, and demonstrated more moral leadership than all the Republicans in Congress put together. What Ross Douthat longs for, the United States has already had, but the ideology of the Right has blinded his eyes and hardened his heart.
4
@BigGuy, though De Gaulle was certainly larger than life he in fact died in 1970, thus was not in power through the 1980s as you postulate.
Additionally, he served in WWI as well as during WWII. It was de Gaulle who virtually alone lead the French resistance from London, crucially keeping the French National Spirit vigorous and determined during WWII. He literally saved France from self-immolation.
De Gaulle would have despised the weakness and lack of conviction shown by Obama, as he did in Roosevelt and Kennedy.
2
Once again, another opinion based on/ touting our country as ,
A M E R I C A. We, the United States of America, do not encompass the whole continent of NORTH AMERICA. Only this country the ,USA, within this massive continent by nomenclature claims to be the only one residing on it!
Is this tradition of your invention? Do you have to keep this deception alive?
2
If Douthat's column is going to now serve merely as bleak book report, I personally would prefer he do it without either the unnecessary swipes at Ocasio-Cortez or his myriad of self-serving false equivalances.
4
"Between the revolution and the Vichy era " and The Miserables " are complicated enough " . You gett a feeling of the depth of ignorance , confusion but arrogance about French history . I remember an art student telling me " I forgot what Napoleon had to do with the building of Notre Dame " ...
I read through the end with great pain.
Is this is the intellectual level of the NYT ?
3
Whew! For a minute there, I though you were gong to suggest Trump as a “DeGaulle” of our own.
2
"De Gaulle was a man of the French right, associated from his earliest days with ... right-wing and monarchist family traditions."
Authoritarianism / Fascism-Lite? Dictatorship? A "certain idea" of America? Republicans today, drunk on trump's Kool-Aid, are not "the party of the Reaganite Thermidor or the Bush-Bourbons."
No, we can pass on a de Gaulle of our own, thank you.
3
"What is your certain idea of America? And how many Americans, and how much of American history, would your idea be able to include?"
There are people who looked at Donald Trump mocking a physically challenged man:
https://newstoaddotnet.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/trump-mocks-disabled-reporter.jpg
and still supported him. I would rather not have these people included in my America.
6
"If the lesson of Gaullism for today’s America is that to escape an ideological civil war you first need to be conquered by Nazis, then it’s not a particularly encouraging case study."
I'll say. But we're on the road to being conquered by Putin, neo-Nazi "Fine People" and Victor Orban, with the active collusion of Mitch McConnell and his cronies. https://reframes.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/who-knew-ii-realdonaldtrump/ That's a much clearer and more present danger than the rule of "First Citizen" AOC.
2
you get smarter with age.
1
“Our religious landscape is polarized, since the collapse of the old Protestant establishment, between a secular, anticlerical liberalism and a MAGA-and-megachurch conservatism.”
I suggest you pay attention to both the Establishment Clause, which the current majority of the Supremes are working to overthrow, and the fact that those of ‘MAGA and megachurch conservatism’ have no way to justify support of a thrice married, failed casino magnate who was paying off a porn star and playboy playmate with whom MAGA hat in chief wascommitting adultery while wife number three was home with a newborn child.
Add the generations of Catholic clerical pederasty to the blatant embrace of the Pharisees leading the evangelical movement, and you have religion as the most clear and present danger to our republic.
4
When peaceful Algerian demonstrators were shot and their bodies thrown into the Seine, de Gaulle said nothing. A la Voltaire, Quebec...oh that acre of snow!
Lawd save us from anybody like him.
1
Thank you for an elightening and educational column.
1
Darlan, Trump, same bucket.
1
I guess an authoritarian white man who is not a fascist is your idea of someone who can bridge the differences between us (a large, huge, us).
2
At least our Gilets Jaunes in France, just as the young protesters of Mai 68 can bring a leader down or make him / them cave in.
His propulsion on the international stage during and after WWII made of him an intriguing character. De Gaulle was either loved or hated by the French. It seems he gained more respect from outside France than within. But whatever your differences with him, political or otherwise, he was as we say in French:"un grand homme". Where we are right now in this country, at a shameful moment of American History, when an illegitimately elected president plays autocrat, threatens everyone around, practices a scorched earth policy and creates crisis after crisis just to get the ratings ( how about an upcoming war with Iran?....) We need to know about leaders like Charles De Gaulle. America is gearing up to become a dictatorship, a rogue nation and an untrustworthy partner. Since the Republicans in Congress are doing nothing to help us against the action of this dictator president, it will be for the people to Rise, Persist, Resist and Vote the wrong party out of office.
2
"...with the Democrats as the coalition of the glorious 1960s".
Hardly.
The Democratic Party has been inching its way to the right pretty consistently since then, funded as so much of it is by corporations and the very wealthy. Only now does it seem to be reawakening to its roots supporting working men and women.. I see these developments as invigorating and as shoots of hope and growth - as the glass half full - but it looks as if the columnist envisions us turning into a giant commune as a result, or maybe even a gulag.
Mr. Douthat would give us de Gaulle - when we need an FDR -for these times.
4
"... any politician who imagines breaking out of our 50-50 politics and governing as a national rather than a tribal figure."
President Obama tried this and his "own tribe" was not too kind to him. To wit the 2010 elections.
More importantly the GOP was over-the-top exploitative of the middle of the road accommodating President.
Worse they viciously ignored all consequences to us - We the People - and acted in every way shape and form to discredit him and thwart all his efforts.
If we Progressives are showing signs of the GOP ugliness in us I suggest it is because a good man - not always right - not always perfect in approach - but still good and productive - tried to "to get his country to transcend its ideological civil war" and was burned by it. The GOP fueled the fire.
4
Barack Obama was an academic who had no clue how to wield the power handed to him with the 2008 mandate and call for Change. He is more comparable to Leon Blum than Charles De Gaulle.
1
How could you leave out FDR? The president who gave us Social Security, won WWII because of his vision, and took on war profiteers and corporations on behalf of the well-being of Americans?
4
How I can imagine FDR in an "Infnerno" type encounter:
You'll find it tragic how I lost
My soul to the prince of hell;
I failed to stop the Holocaust,
Then into this place I fell.
All I cared about was power,
Would not risk the loss of votes;
When they came, my soul turned sour,
And I tured away their boats.
FDR had completely ample, reliable, irrefutable documentation of the death camps and the rail networks that fed them, including clear air reconnaissance photos. A few bombs on the tracks and/or crematoria would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, innocent men, women, helpless children.
If being invaded by Nazis is a necessary precursor to a Gaullist compromise, we are certainly approaching that prerequisite.
2
DeGaul was a fascist as was Franco. Gee thanks for thinking that we need someone even more facist than Trump.
3
@Terence De Gaul ( e ) . It is De Gaule not De Gaul .
De Gaule a fascist ? Come on ! Like Franco ?
You can read everything and its contrary from Americans.
The Mississippi is a little river in the Alps.
Yeh . That's right ! If I want it !
3
@Terence
It’s cool to call people fascist but you are wrong on both counts.
1
• Charles de Gaulle doesn’t loom particularly large in the American imagination — but maybe he should.
Who looms large in the American imagination other than 'Americans'? Donald Trump?
AMERICA FIRST!!!
(duh-uh)
2
Fantastic article! Full of, “the right stuff.
—
I’m old enough to remember de Gaulle.
In the (Canadian) press, he was regarded as, “an irritant,” by both friend and foe. I guess we were all wrong!
—
France is part of who we are. So I suppose that includes de Gaulle, now that we know better.
1
Douthat's statement that "everyone is constantly trying to claim ownership of contested symbols — in the flag, the Statue of Liberty, the Bill of Rights — in order to assert that theirs is the true Americanism" should be amended. Instead of "everyone", Douthat should have written "Republicans". Another example of false equivalence.
6
The problem Douthat is trying to solve is the one he builds into his prescription.
We've have more then a lethal dose of "the centrality of narrative and imagination" in our national politics. On Planet Earth (i.e., outside the soft foggy Op-Ed section of The Times), it's called "branding". The centrality of narrative and imagination was what gave us the Marlboro Man, for whom narrative and imagination were more central than the facts. You could call that "imaginative narrative". You could more accurately call it self-delusion endured case by case for tens of millions of brand-addicts who rode the ropin' range of Flavor Country until the facts killed them.
Now our politics is all branding. The GOP is a brand: ugly, factless, loutish, lawless Trumpism. Now the Democrats seek to define their brands as well, and in their eagerness to be Anything But Trump they just look like flavors in Baskin-Robbins.
It clarifies nothing and helps nobody that we're choosing among branding narratives. We need leadership based on reality, not on more stories. We don't need tribalists, we need empiricists. The opportunities, tools, and understanding are right in front of us to transcend self-delusion and apply the facts to the epidemics of infrastructure breakdown, obsolete buildings and settlement patterns, and acquired illnesses. The "centrality of narrative and imagination" is what got is into these messes. Getting out of them means leaving self-delusion behind.
2
De Gaulle was the catalyst that set off our Quiet Revolution.
After two centuries of isolation from post revolution France Quebec finally entered the 20th century. Fifty years later we are reaping the rewards of a revolution started by our own Benjamin Franklin and George Washington rolled into one.
It was De Gaulle that allowed Rene Levesque to give birth to a nation that provides virtually all its citizens healthcare, opportunity to the best possible education, access to welfare and a secure environment. Liberty, equality fraternity is not the motto of conservatives anywhere. The ultra conservative ultra religious, unemployed and highly impoverished Quebec and the reliable hierarchy that saw those in power rule generation to generation was the Quebec of my youth. Fifty years later we are wealthier, healthier, better educated and above all freer than our Southern neighbour. If De Gaulle was a conservative I for one applaud him for helping destroy conservatism here in Quebec. I wish I knew what De Gaulle might say.
Your De Gaulle was conservative my De Gaulle helped create a successful liberal democracy. Democracy ain't easy and comes with many problems but for people like myself it is better than the same old same old conservative societies and their built in self destruction.
4
There is an idea of America is quite clear. It is the "melting pot" that welcomes diverse ideas, cultures, religions, and people. It is a place that values tolerance over bigotry, freedom to try new things over being constrained by dogma. It is where there is no "natural right" to power by virtue of birth.
I suppose this isn't an idea that will appeal to everyone - there are plenty who think "my way or the highway." That just doesn't strike me as particularly American.
1
De Gaulle was truly the last charismatic democratic leader in the sense that he not only succeeded in reversing policies that were counterproductive (Algiers) despite tremendous resistance (and at great personal risk) and stabilize the republic, but also in the sense that he had true convictions and a vision for the nation (however pig-headed at times). But what no one here mentioned was that he was deeply steeped in French culture and history, that he was an excellent writer and superb speaker, in other words that he was educated in a way that fits the 19th or first half of the twentieth century better than our era. Not the least important was his ability to attract the best and smartest French intellectuals (not of the left, obviously) to his cause. Maybe more important than the leader are his apostles.
There is no one like that on the horizon because the social conditions are so different: we have made “elite” (original meaning: the best in any field) a dirty word both from the left and right, admittedly in different ways. The best we can hope for is a leader with a sense of decency and morals, someone who is not in it just for personal self-promotion. Thus far, only Sanders and Warren seem to fit the bill: even if you don’t agree with them you have to recognize that if you have any common sense at all. It would be quite wonderful to see someone like that from the center right but small chance for decency from that quarter, let alone a towering figure like de Gaulle.
4
And brought down ultimately by student protests. Now that's a part which pleases. Vive Maxim le Forestier!!!!
14
@will segen Nope. De Gaulle quit after a structural change referendum he was promoting failed. Don't forget, after the 1968 disturbances, the Gaullist party won the ensuing parliamentary elections.
3
@will segen Maxime Le Forestier had nothing to do with the May 68 students uprising.
2
It is shameful for De Gaule's intellectual level to compare him with the ignorance and vulgarity at work here today.
Americans have no idea about their own history and that principle amplifies towards other cultures or histories.
Obviously the guy here is completely ignorant, either about the intellectual level of De Gaule ( will DT write his memoirs ? of what quality ) or the real defects of De Gaule : his implication with the SAC ( fascist secret police ) the crimes committed under the end of colonialism ( Paris massacre of 1961 ,Ben Barka assassination, etc..these are justice problems still not resolved today ),his complete deconfiture at the moment of May 68 when he was unable to keep in touch with modern intellectual life.
The writing of this diatribe is so painful for a French guy. And the recuperation of De Gaule ( Andre Malraux at the level of trump ??? ) to justify the vulgarity at work here is without any scrupule.
Typical.
1
Yo Ross,
Find a simpler word for synecdoche. Open you column to folks who never took AP English or who don't remember it. You could have called Dreyfus a 'stand in'.
1
I guess this is what a columnist with nothing to write has to do: take an event or figure in history, and draw fake parallels with current time. Oh, and take a pot-shot at someone you don’t like in the process (in this case AOC). Big yawn!
5
"[...] and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez" is a cheap, lazy, Fox-like shot. AOC has exhibited more rigor, precision, pragmatism and moral clarity in the communications I have seen from her, either Congressional hearings or tweets, than I have ever seen in Ross Douthat's columns.
4
Where is Trump's Andre Malraux ?
2
If Malraux had published Man's Fate today, he would be disinvited from universities for his "cultural appropriation" and "insensitivity and fetishization of Asian cultures."
1
You must be joking. To take a small item: Kavanaugh, Covington are comparable to the Dreyfus Affair? Let's see. instead of being confirmed to sit on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh was unjustly convicted of treason, disbarred in a public ceremony (his gavel smashed), sentenced to life in Guantanamo, where he will languish, sometimes in shackles, for 5 years, weakened by tropical diseases, while the directors of the American Bar Association conspire to shield the real traitor, who will go scot-free. The discoverer of that traitor is then himself charged and disbarred. In the meanwhile, anti-Catholic opponents of Kavanaugh riot. And this goes on for 12 years. And who is the uncontroversially loathsome Covington in all this?
1
To use the word commune implying communism is a dastardly use of words without morality. Don't hide your biases behind lying words.
3
Ross notes that it took France being conquered by Nazis to escape their ideological civil war. That kind of feels like rule under Trump and his sellouts in the GOP... So maybe there is hope?
It is remarkable to me how Ocasio-Cortez has so frightened conservatives. Turn on fox or open Douthat's column and it is AOC time all the time.
While I am a progressive, I only have a vague idea of what AOC's positions are. But to here conservatives, you would think she has the democratic nomination for the presidency locked down.
This is absurd. AOC is one congresswoman representing one extremely liberal district. Does Steve King represent the GOP? Despite the fact that King has close ties to Trump and even was able to arrange the Viktor Orban visit, I don't believe Kind represents the GOP. On the other hand he is certainly more representative of the GOP than AOC is of the democratic party.
De Gaulle was a cartoon of man. Trump has used up America's cartoon quote for the next 100 years. We need serious leadership. Not a caricature of a leader.
1
We are in a deeply transitional period, driven in part by an increasing world population and rampaging technological change. That is translating into the ever more rapid elimination of decent jobs for average people, and the destruction of our planet as humans plunder its resources and eradicate species and habitat. In our country, the powerlessness of all but the plutocrats has allowed them to deflect attention to culture war issues. It is easy to divide people with bias, to make them believe others are responsible for their misery, because they look different, worship differently or not at all, live somewhere else.
The problem, and the genius of the plutocrats, is that they have made too many Americans focus on the wrong “others”. Their true enemies are the plutocrats. We don’t need another DeGaulle, if you want to look to France. We need another, more rational Robespierre, our own National Razor, and its frequent application to the likes of the Kochs, Adelsons, Trumps, McConnells, and multitudes of others. That won’t happen in my lifetime, as I am in the oldest “Boomer” cohort. I fear it might in my new grandson’s life, because it will be the death of our nation. All because of the unspeakable, inhumane, abominable greed of the too-rich. And their utter disdain for anyone else.
1
They had a President de Gaulle; we have a President de Gall.
4
Someone once said, back in the day, the Charles de Gaulle was an amalgam of the seventeenth and the twenty-first centuries. We don´t have a De Gaulle on the horizon because we don´t have a seventeenth century that even remotely fits the bill in our historical imaginary. True, the Grifter in Chief really believes that he is the state and that he and he alone can fix what ails us, but his act is more like twenty dwarfs in a VW bug than the monarchy of Louis XIV or the ultra-presidentialist semi-monarchic state of Charles de Gaulle.
4
@Edward Baker I think you're right. We had only about 80 years in the USA before the ever-imploding Stuart Dynasty decided, under James II (who was impersonating his cousin Louis XIV) , to wipe out multiple colonies' governments, thereby promoting his fantasy of our entering the newfangled entity called Great Britain at a level lower than that of the conquered Irish. If that action alone hadn't triggered a revolution in New England and New York (starting as the Salem Witch Trials), then Parliament wouldn't have thrown the Stuarts out, and brought in their less attractive cousins, the Hanovers, to replace them.
1
De Gaulle was the last man standing against Germany after the fall of France. But he never offered enough to the allies to be treated as an equal partner and that drove him crazy and even made him remain reluctant to be an ally after WWII. He helped France survive the loss of it's remaining colonies of it's defunct empire and so will remain important to France, but he never achieved the international importance of FDR or Stalin, and he knew it.
1
Well, I do get the feeling much of our government is under fascist control, even while there is a strong resistance.
So who will be our de Gaulle?
1
I didn't notice the author, jumping into the column as I'm reading this bio (and re-reading Churchill's tendentious blow-by-blow account of the War) and was curious to learn what parallels to the US at present others see. When I got to "...without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez," I surmised that it was Mr. Douthat - no one else at the Times would be that self-indulgent. *sigh*. Too bad Mr. Douthat does not have some of what reader M. Lonne pointed out as DeGaulle's "...complete lack of political greed." A little more self-discipline, Mr. Douthat, and you'd be a little more convincing.
The way French people live today does not come from De Gaule. It comes from before him.
The monthly salary, the yearly one month paid vacation for everybody, the week of 40 hours ( now 35 ) , the national health insurance system of social security (implemented in 1949 ) for everybody even not working, the mandatory retirement for all workers to be given by mutual employer and state and worker participation , the foreign policy of free will for all nations, etc...they all come from the Front Populaire of 1936 under communist/socialist alliance.
Americans have a tendency to forget also that De Gaule was very defiant towards the USA and refused NATO participation.
There are so many historical mistakes and fabrications in this paper that it would take 5 pages to start expressing them.
2
Ross, I am glad to see you have given up your very prejudiced attempts at Journalism and are now reviewing books. Much better for the reader. David Brooks started doing this a long time ago. You both are too prejudiced to really be able to give a reasonable journal article. book reviews are good for you both.
2
After De Gaulle pulled France out of NATO
there was a departure ceremony.
My mother had just discovered she was going to
be leaving Paris for Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho.
She was not happy.
She leaned down and told my youngest brother
to dash over and give De Gaulle a quick and sharp
kick in the shins.
Fortunately my father reached out and grabbed my
brother by the collar before he could
assert American supremacy.
I had always thought had he given De Gaulle
that kick it might have ended up on the last
page of LIFE magazine under the caption:
Take That !
You ungrateful Frenchman !
8 year old American David Brown gave
French President De Gaulle
a proper kick in his shins, at the prompting
of his mother, who did not relish leaving Paris
for Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho.
2
"... and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez."
Jesus. Can anybody sat "Crossed the line?"
2
"If the lesson of Gaullism for today’s America is that to escape an ideological civil war you first need to be conquered by Nazis, then it’s not a particularly encouraging case study."
Doesn't that depend on what outcome your find encouraging?
Isn't "being conquered by Nazis" comparable, (only in terms of political impact), to being shamed and disgusted by Trump? And might not the tide then turn toward setting aside longing for the perfect in honor of the better (and likelier) possibility? It seems to me that's kind of exactly what some optimists among us believe could happen. Is this what you're actually telling us, in a backhand sort of way, with this book review? Interesting, that, coming from your POV, Mr. Douthat. Do go on.
"...and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez."
Wow. Quite an image. You push her even further to the left than she probably is, but you probably shouldn't give her the temptation. Fortunately though, her boyfriend is named Riley Roberts, not Riley Robespierre, so he may not be a provocative instigator. Then again...
2
Comparing the Kavanaugh and Covington controversies to the Dreyfus affair is one of the most ludicrous things I've ever read.
Dreyfus was the victim of governmental anti-semitism that allowed him to be falsely accused of a crime simply because he was Jewish and the government needed a scandal to take the French peoples' minds from the financial irregularities in the failed building of a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific which involved many government officials.
And Dreyfus served years in a prison so harsh that we don't even have anything in our prison system to compare to it. Perhaps I missed it, but I don't recall Kavanaugh or the Covington kids serving even a single day anywhere.
The Times should be ashamed and embarrassed by publishing something so foolish.
3
This column would be enormously improved if Ross would write that the Dreyfus Affair was all about antisemitism and the framing of a Jewish officer in the French army.
Sad that Ross does not mention that.
7
Trump is certainly very galling, I'll give you that. Unfortunately, that is where the similarity ends and you become just another Republican cheerleader trying to maker a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
1
Analogies are generally weak representations of reality. France is not like the United States.
The United States is a true social contract with very well composed written principles and the real world obligations of all participants. The compromises required are explicit. The flaws are there for all to see. If any policies or propose policies conflict with contract they are universally considered invalid. Interpretations of the contract provide endless debates and arguments.
France is not just a polity that governs the country, it's a history going back to the dark ages and warrior barbarian tribes which replaced the greatest empire seen up to that time in Europe. A Frenchman can claim monarchism to be as French as any modern advocate of liberal democracy can claim that to be French, and none be wrong rather than dissimilar. At any moment, every era of history can be found to be represented by somebody in France.
Ross perhaps the only legitimate claim to defining Americanism belongs to the Native Americans but we cast them aside centuries ago.
So I think that the best definition is to be found in the Declaration of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Americanism has been defined by those in the majority and in power at a moment in time. Over time this changes, as we become less a country of European white ancestry I suspect our history will be redefined as well as our politics and culture. This is no longer a Country For Old Men, especially old white men.
Oh and please stop bashing AOC, she is a well intentioned as you are.
1
French intellectuals denounce the 5th republic as monarchist and Macron is a good exemple of that. Americans are always a couple hundred years of philosophical knowledge behind.
1
Here’s my ( surely unpublished ) idea of America :
Freedom from Religion. Especially of the Male centered and controlled variety. But you couldn’t handle that, Sir. Not for a minute, and certainly not for any Woman’s lifetime.
1
Excellent, Mr Douthat. I will need to read this book.
"In our media frenzies we keep generating controversies, from Kavanaugh to Covington, that resemble the Dreyfus Affair, 1890s France’s great scandal — in which every cultural division is somehow distilled into a single debate over guilt and innocence, with a representative figure’s virtue or turpitude as a synecdoche for everything dire our factions each believe about the other."
What percentage of trump supporters do you think can comprehend your above paragraph?
Turpitude? Synecdoche? -LOL (De Gaulle - Dryfuss)
Probably the same percentage that subscribe to The Paris Review.
Elitist and aesthete thee? -Naaaah!
2
"I would still hand Jackson’s biography to any politician who imagines breaking out of our 50-50 politics..."
Step 1: elect leaders who read books, are intellectually curious and generally care about culture, history, the arts and literature.
Mr. Douthat, your next read should be "M: il figlio del secolo" by Antonio Scurati.
It is clear that “First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez” of the wholly invented yet personally dreaded “New York Commune” would never be included in the pundit’s “certain idea of America”. Never miss an opportunity to take a cheap, if passing, shot at someone who at least has the courage and conviction to actually engage in the rough and tumble political world than pound out screeds on a safe keyboard.
3
“Gaullism succeeded,” Jackson writes, “in becoming the synthesis of French political traditions, or as de Gaulle put it, reconciling the left to the state and the right to the nation, the left to authority and the right to democracy.”
So Ross, you'll go after all the GOP voter suppression, disenfranchisement of minority voters, gerrymandering, and fraudulent claims of voter fraud as you seek and claim the ever higher [moral] ground while reconciling the right to democracy? Please! Let the fun begin.
1
At the end of this piece Ross asks, If the lesson of Gaullism for today’s America is that to escape an ideological civil war you first need to be conquered by Nazis? I can only say it seems we are and the Republican Party is doing a very nice job of filling in for the Vishy. As Republicans continue to try to normalize Trump the man stirs the Caldron of hate and ignorance, he is happy to have North Korea shooting missiles off if only to keep his own nuclear launch capacity viable (We would like to hope the Air Force hesitate if ordered by this mad man) As he winds us up for a war with Iran. I'm sure the Pentegon would be thrilled to go to a big set pieces war, but not a nuclear one. I can see why Ross would like to muse about De Gaul at times like this, but I'm more worried about making it threw the next few years.
2
Secular Liberalism is not anti clerical at all. There are many churches that align with compassionate Liberalism rather then judgemental and exclusionary fundamentalism. Faith in God is not required, but it is certainly welcomed.
1
I read a review of this book in The New Yorker a few months ago and was delighted to read that de Gaulle was intrigued at the notion that he would have liked to have been a librarian. "Oh what a dream job" he is said to have opined. I share this idea and will buy this biography. Thanks Monsieur Douthat.
9
Just to go back to the Irish example for a minute, the Easter Rising had no democratic mandate, it being organized by a secret grouping within an in-turn militant Irish Republican Brotherhood within the much more encompassing Irish Volunteers, a sect within a sect so to speak. But it was strangely brilliant in terms of its theatrics, and this gradually gave rise to its ex post facto popular acceptance. This is all captured very well in a 1982 book, "The Imagination of an Insurrection," by William Irwin Thompson, focusing on the literary activities of the insurrectionists. National narratives are quite precarious, and quite fictional, but can be very intense and effective.
2
The problem here is Douthat’s premise - that we need to “invent” something - is all wrong. How about we just accommodate reality and tell the truth rather than write a fictional narrative, one grounded in unreliable myths and abstractions like religion, patriotism, “of the people, by the people” – confounds that delude rather than illuminate who we are.
I prefer a reality-based vision, one that can be successfully measured in terms of the common good. The only narrative that will unite us is one in which we all have adequate jobs, and the food and shelter they buy; where we all have access to education and healthcare, where our elections are demonstrably fair.
We need a story where capitalism recognizes social profit and not just financial profit, where it would be impossible for a handful of people to possess the vast majority of the profits from the labor and production of everyone.
It would be a narrative with sensible gun laws, and would demand that Silicon Valley considers the wider ethical implications of its creations and not just indulge in an obsession with smaller, faster and “cool.”
The narrative would qualify Constitutional anachronisms like the Electoral College and the Senate arrangement to reflect the reality of 2019.
It would have to teach honest history in our schools and include a national reconciliation with our history of slavery and Indian genocide.
Otherwise, who decides what goes into our tradition? Let the truth speak for itself.
6
I resent the cheap shot at Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez. She seeks to prevent the current occupant of the White House and his revenants from turning the earth into a revolving cinder, while you lament that we cannot respectively agree to disagree over brandy and lively discussion as to whether Paris was ever actually burning
8
@Abdb. She deserves every cheap shot leveled at her. Her Green New Deal is a farce - even the Dems didn’t vote for it. Your “revolving cinder” expression, while amusing, is hysterically dramatic.
What about De Gaulle's association with the OAS and I do not mean the Organization of American States and the terrible treatment of North African consequent division of types of citizens which has contributed to the divisions within the populace today? People who want a picture of the French election system should find and view the first two Seasons of the wonderful French TV series BARON NOIR with Kad Merad...and the relief that there is no Article 49.3 in our political system or else Trump would have flung it at us long ago...
1
De Gaulle? A standout political figure in Canadian history too - through his words encouraging separatists in the country's province of Quebec. During a visit to our country up here in the late sixties, his French words in a speech were, "Vivre le Quebec libre" Which means -"Long live a free Quebec." Free from Canada. It helped further stir the passion for separatism in that "francophone" province. It provided a notable moment for all Canadians because it was words from a famous world leader who knew of Quebec's political fire of independence - and hoped to keep it burning. To people in English Canada, it looked like the famous foreign leader had spit in their faces in front of the world world. The bubble of independence in Quebec continued to grow faster and faster afterward - leading to separatist governments being elected and referendum being carried out. They're still part of Canada. Not too many separatists are roaring about their political goals nowadays. Things are very different than a half-century ago. De Gaulle. wa 6ft. 6", I think. He stood out in a crowd.
1
Curious why no mention of Eisenhauer, not only our closest comparison to De Gaulle, but a general-turned-statesman very much in the same mold, with similar capacity to straddle right and left. Worth noting that under Eisenhauer the top income bracket paid 92% tax rate, and we all know how Eisenhauer felt about the future Republican standard-bearer/Trump role model Richard Nixon.
Eisenhauer cautioned us about the dangerous "military-industrial complex." Today there is the "academic-industrial complex" and the "prison-industrial complex."
5
@Andrew
"Eisenhower."
@Andrew It's spelled Eisenhower.
Comparing countries is always a task that serves mostly to create unresolvable arguments, Douthat's column is no exception.
From a structural standpoint one has simply to compare the Constitutions for both countries to see that they were clearly formed from a totally different historical perspective. De Gaulle pointed to that when he said "France is overwhelmed by its history." which dates back to about 500 AD starting with Clovis I.
America is also burdened by its history but in a much different way. While the French Constitution directly elects their President, here we go through an Electoral College made up of electors appointed by political parties based on their loyalty to the party. On election day, in most states, the electors of the winning candidate;s party take all the votes for that state. That's why we can have a minority elected president like Trump, and may yet again in 2020.
Another way of looking at this is that France trusts its citizens to elect their President, while here the Founding Fathers made sure that the citizens of the country would not have the final say on who their president is.
That's why Trump is not a national leader but a tribal one, it's baked into the Constitution.
3
in 2015 I taught I course about "lost civilizations" before I plunged into the importance of cultural heritage I asked students to think about their oen cultural heritage and bring an object associated with that heritage to class. As I went around the room, i heard that my students felt their cultural heritage was American and I saw the objects that meantto them "American"in the row by the window 7 or 8 young women waved their bibles. One explained that her brother had died in Afganistan and the bible was his.In the middle rows I noticed young men holding pieces of wood. they too claimed an American heritage but their objects were all about barbecue. Young people inthe heartland in wichita ks.or at least this group did not feel connected to the past at all. their vision of America was Christian, meat eating and highly gendered. my Afeican American students refused to participate openly (one emailed me her views) and onehispanic yong man brought in an enormous framed print of the Virgin ofGradelupe These the the people any idea of America must reach. I am not optimistic.
1
Being French, and 69 years old, I must reply here. DeGaulle's redeeming feature was his total commitment to his idea of France and his complete lack of political greed. Once the war was over, we fell into the same bickering as our English neighbors; our other 'heroes' of the war became life long politicians, hell, the mayor of Bordeaux, my area, was mayor way past senility! So, yes, I am grateful for DeGaulle's wartime efforts- only he could stand up to the English and Americans with no army to speak of. As for the rest, well, I'm afraid even God can not protect us from ourselves.
98
De Gaulle made himself repugnant to Americans and Brits after the war ... and many claim that it actually happened "during".
It was entirely a fluke of history that he was so captivated by Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, that the old bird thought that he and the Kennedy family had created a formula for energizing a global repudiation of Britain, and a new birth of anglo affinity for gallic culture, centered in Quebec and Paris and Washington. The word "delusional" may be too strong, but that wonderful and creepy general definitely had a fascinating smattering of Louis XIV.
La Belle France desperately needed a good stiff dose of Louis XIV after the horror of WWII. But the prescription for that medication definitely ran out long before his fall.
@Sequel
"Creepy" Charles DeGaulle eh? It's funny but your take him sounds delusional to me. There is no need for an effort towards promoting affinity for France in the Anglosphere. It has always existed and always will. Britain and America likewise never need France or any other Nation to repudiate them. Our follies are epic and speak for themselves. Same as with French debacles.
@Peter "There is no need for an effort towards promoting affinity for France in the Anglosphere."
Nah ... cultural antipathy between the two goes back to the period between the fall of Rome and William the Conqueror's successful invasion of England in 1066.
@Sequel
Yes do you have a point? I get it you hate the French or your ancestors did or a segment of the Anglosphere still does. The fact is probably as many people if not more do not hate the French.
1
deGaulle was a general in the French Army which collapsed and surrendered just six weeks into the German invasion of 1940. The underlying theme of all his later actions was an attempt to restore French self respect and pride.
1
I am surprised that Ross Douthat doesn't see that among us is "a statesman with a certain idea of America," a statesman who tries to keep the best of America while sliding away from the worst, a statesman who tells the truth and keeps his promises.
The name of that statesman is Barack Obama.
Well, perhaps it's not surprising that Ross Douthat can't see. "None are so blind as those who will not see."
5
De Gaulle famously said "non" to Britain joining the then Common Market.
He was right.
1
@Max Davies "De Gaulle famously said 'non' to Britain joining the then Common Market. He was right."
In what way?
@William Starr
He said 'because it is an island'.
That may sound ridiculous, but there is a bottom of truth in it. Watching the never-ending deliberations on Brexit in the UK parliament has made me aware of the large cultural differences between England (not Scotland!) and Europe. De Gaulle must have become aware of them as well after he left France in 1940.
We don't do DeGaulle's. But we have Franklin Delano Roosevelt and before him, Abraham Lincoln. Calvin Coolidge was far from the liberal parody, and far from the person Reagan thought he admired. He abjured government welfare, but energetically pursued voluntarist efforts. And he wanted peace. It was he who appointed the people who gave us the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
Not many presidents to admire, sadly, but they are still good role-models for today's Democratic and Republican contenders.
I appreciate you drawing attention to CDG because his leadership of France was quite remarkable and goes largely unnoticed in the USA. Alas, as you suggest, the GDC analogy is of limited use if for no other reason than no current US political leader has as much power as did CDG who had the power to create the Fifth Republic and ratify an entirely new constitution to track his vision of France. Still, we may draw from CDG's underlying values. Perhaps the most important was an acceptance that even with his extraordinary power over France, he understood that France would include many movements and institutions that he had disliked his entire life. For example, he hated communism. Yet, in his France, he accepted that there would be communism. He even tolerated the generals who hated him after he evacuated Algeria. He understood that in order for France to work, he would have to accept a France that was bigger than his own preferences. A France where the French version of an AOC and the French version of Justin Cavanaugh would both feel at home. And, guess what? We already have that America.
"our 50-50 politics" represents the rise of political science thinking over the thinking typical of de Gaulle of a unified nation or state with one idea that will persuade as near all of it as possible.
Political science here means the number crunching that calculates how to get that 50.1% to win, assembling fractions with varied appeals that may be entirely inconsistent (and never honored anyway). It is the idea that one side has nowhere else to go, and so a fraction from the middle will win it all.
De Gaulle tried to carry a huge bloc, as near to all as he could. He surrendered the extremist margins on both sides, to hold the largest center as he could. He made only the one set of promises, and actually tried to keep them in order to hold together his bloc.
Today, we tend to think of right and left, with "moderates" being in between them as "Independents." Actually, the independents may be off to the margins, and the moderates may be establishment Democrats. Our basic concept may be mistaken. The parties may believe their own stories, but disconnect from voters.
De Gaulle disconnected from the far right and left. He didn't think he owned either with no place to go but him, he instead thought they didn't matter because they were too far from power.
Douthat would like that, if that large center bloc were conservative enough.
I think that is the past, and we need to move into the future: Environment, economics for declining work needs, medical care science can now do.
2
If you are looking for a de Gaulle you will have to look outside the current Republican Party. What America needs is equal opportunity and republicans have continued to get in the way with their support of the monied interests that have kept all the economic success for them selves. A party that continues to drive a wedge between religions,ethnic groups and has refused to find a common ground. The United States is also a world economic and military leader. Our go it alone policies will do nothing to help find common ground on world issues. We pull out of treaties, get into trade disputes with long time partners. Witnesses this administrations unwillingness to support the U.N ‘s policies on cleaning up the world wide contamination of plastics. As a military leader we have chosen war over diplomacy. Look at our present spat with Iran. A regime change is needed if America is to be great again.
2
De Gaulle was definitely one who was very insightful about the generalities of men and that skill guided him as he led France after the war. His quotes about human nature are spot on.
2
The way Mr Trump has used (misused) the many powers Article One powers that over the years the Congress has ceded to the Presidency puts me in mind of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic and the very strong and central power wielded by its President. This is quite the evolution from the agrarian Republic envisioned by the Founders but that evolution towards a Fifth Republic-like structure may have been an inevitable response (short a new Constitutional Convention) or acquiescence to modern reality. However, one very important and critical reform to the Fifth Republic that de Gaulle introduced in 1966 was direct Presidential elections. Unlike this country where a President elected by the Electors does not always reflect the choice of the people, the French President these days does carry a popular mandate, and with it a legitimacy, that the current US President does not have.
I'm not sure about the accuracy of that "50-50 political split". This only takes into account those who vote. We also have ~40% of the population that is completely disconnected and tuned out from civic life for one reason or another. Only a bit more than 50% voted in 2018, and that was a historically high turnout for a non presidential election.
Bringing many more of such people into civic life would help a lot, but it won't happen easily. It is also far too early to tell if some version of it would occur in 2020 in order to halt the
collapse into a racialist/nativist based autocratic rule, dictated by ignorance, resentment, and amorality, that a trump win in 2020 would essentially insure.
Most countries only learn the hard way, if they ever learn at all, that something fundamental in their culture is politically
self destructive. They are able to learn something constructive if they are fortunate to have political leadership that can guide the society in a healthier direction.
But it's not a sure thing that such leadership can emerge
from a deeply ruinous disaster. Consider the failure
of Reconstruction.
We haven't had such a disaster, of late, despite recent
brushes with calamity. And leadership needed to deal intelligently with the near misses is absent. So, we remain complacent, fiddling while things burn around us, inattentive to the gathering collective catastrophe that climate change, in particular, promises all of us.
@bl "Consider the failure of Reconstruction."
The Reconstruction may have been having its problems, but its failure is entirely the blame of the Republican Party's selling it out in 1877 in exchange for getting their man Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House. (A sad affair that the Republicans today who like to proudly claim the mantle of "The Party of Lincoln" for some reason rarely mention.)
1
I am of an age to remember him but knew little about him. But enough to understand your column; absolutely informative and masterful.
Jim, Wilmette, Il
I remember how watching the arrival of De Gaulle in Washington after the assassination of John F. Kennedy gave me a sense of stability. He is worth knowing about. But we have models of asking what-is-to-be-done who offer superb examples from within our distinctively (not "exceptional") American situation. One is the tale of the Iroquois Peacemaker, which tells how a very troubled people emerged from their own "dark time" of misery. Another is James Madison probing the "vices of the political system of the United States" in April, 1787 in anticipation of the Federal Convention. Still another is Frederick Douglass asking "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" on July 5, 1852. A fourth is Lincoln at Cooper Union in February, 1860, defining the terms of the worsening crisis about slavery and showing how the Dred Scott decision could be overturned, with a broad hint that as president he would appoint the Justices to do it. So too the women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, NY, in 1848, Walt Whitman inventing a new way to write poetry so he could sing his Song of Myself, Martin Luther King at the Washington Monument, and the extended film work of Spike Lee. We do not need a hero so much as to pay attention to these and other better angels of our own nature.
Whoever she/he that may be, is certainly not going to come out of today's Republican party.
2
One quote attributed to de Gaulle says, "Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first." It's a distinction completely lost on the GOP.
9
Well, Obama obviously tried to govern as a National Leader, not as the Chief of the Blue Tribe. He was stymied by hte Tea Party and Mitch McConnell.
7
That's a good first question, "How much of America is included in your vision?" The second one is obvious: "How will you help that happen?"
1
Sorry. a stumbling block prevents me from finishing this op-ed. L'Affair Kavanaugh was not, for me, a symbol of any larger issue. There was credible evidence that this particular guy went too far with a particular young wo and the GOP thwarted an in depth investigation. Additionally I lost respect for Sen. Lindsay Graham, who I used to begrudginly admire. I hold both Kavannaugh and Graham in UTTER COMTEMPT, not as symbols of some Zeitgeist-y fog but for their individual actions.
Ross, please choose another example for your tone poem.
3
Lost me with "tragic, avoidable Civil War." Must be a fan of alternative histories writing this.
2
Interesting view of Charles De Gaulle and of the American "condition humaine." We are living the trumpian version of "l'état, c'est moi," of Louis XIV, not the 60s of De Gaulle.
How we eradicate our current condition, put it behind us totally, quickly, and forever, is the enigma and the challenge.
2
I first read about De Gaulle’s period in office about 10 years ago. I knew who he was of course, and was aware of the Algerian issue but not much more.
I was shocked to learn how much De Gaulle’s policies resembled the fascism he fought against: pro-capitalist authoritarianism with violent opposition to labour. Of course, De Gaulle was not a dictator nor was he a fan of socialism, so maybe his approach could better characterized as light quasi-fascism.
Had the yellow vests been around then, they would have all been tear gassed and imprisoned (instead of just being shot with rubber balls from hand held rubber ball bazookas, as they are today).
25
@Norm Vinson Reading between the lines of the column I suspect Ross may believe that the American experiment in democracy has failed and that the best we can hope for now is some form of, hopefully decent and non-corrupt, Gaullist hyper-presidency. He may be right about that. But the culture that shaped the kind of elite De Gaulle came from is lacking in America. Our future now may well be a succession of Trumps and Giuliani’s, either of the Right or Left.
3
@Norm Vinson--I beg to differ. If you read the Constitution of the 5th République, you will see it is not founded in capitalism but in socialism. De Gaulle was the driver of this constitution.
He was a friend of labor, and helped stabilize the unions in France through his communist allies.
In the Constitution of the Fifth Republic are four principles:
1) Social welfare, which means that everybody must be able to access free public services and be helped when needed.
2) Laïcité, which means that the churches are separated from the State and the freedom of religion is protected.
3) Democracy, which means that the Parliament and the Government are elected by the people. De Gaulle himself proposed that the President be elected by popular vote.
4) Indivisibility, which means that the French people are united in a single Unitary sovereign State with one language, the French language, and all people are equal.
It supports the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789 and declares that France derives its sovereignty from the people.
You seem overly fond of those TNT-filled rubber balls shot at demonstrators. Many have lost eyes, several teeth and had head injuries from them. The Yellow Vests have a right to demonstrate--this is recognized by the French government. The damages are caused by violent thieves who accompany the demonstrators, not the Yellow Vests.
I doubt De Gaulle's government would have provoked these demonstrations.
16
@Norm Vinson Why are people saying things about de Gaulle that are just untrue? Although there were some atrocities committed by State forces, de Gaulle most defintely was not Fascist or reactionary. He tried to impose a middle way between socialism and capitalism, and the rejection of a referendum along these lines resulted in his resignation and death not long afterward.
8
Well, to start with the obvious, "Trump is no DeGaulle." Ross Douthat will certainly agree with that. Second, I applaud Douthat's erudite references to the French and French history. Third, Douthat's final sentences and questions are the correct ones for our next rounds of leaders: What is your certain idea of America? And how many Americans, and how much of American history, would your idea be able to include? My answers are "all Americans" and "all of American history." So, who will this new leader be for the United States? Seriously, it has to be someone (actually many politicians) who can successively occupy the seats in White House and the Congress over a prolonged period via our scheduled election cycles. And, because the world is more than ever "the world" and not just the United States, people who understand that we as a planet now need to work together to enable a survivable future. Then, more tongue in cheek because I can't resist the recommendation: Ideally our immediate next round of leaders will speak French and act more like the French; and the best next president -- why not Ross Douthat?
To some extent, De Gaulle is comparable to Eisenhower and Churchill. What makes him so different, so important to French history is that when he came back to power in 1958 he did so with a completely new constitution unlike any France had had before—a condition he had demanded. He never could have done what he did under the constitution of the 4th Republic (1946-1958), a virtual carbon copy of the constitution of the 3rd Republic (1870/75-1940). He also instituted major reforms as head of the provisional government (June 1944-Jan.1946) such as giving women the right to vote (by sheer dictat).
I seriously question that an American De Gaulle-like figure, even if he or she existed (doubtful), could bring about much change without several major amendments to the constitution, something that has a less than a 0.0001% chance of happening.
3
You make doubting Kavanaugh's qualifications and questioning his past sound like a mere annoyance. The controversy over him nomination was not generated, it existed.
As for the rest of this article it a very showy piece of nothing.
2
Nationalism is an idea that's run its course. Nationalism is not only not useful, it's detrimental to our future. That said, nationalism will probably hang on for a long time as a painful impediment, slowly eroding the very society it purports to unify in the face of so-called polarized division. We're not divided. When Monday comes, we're at work, democrats and republicans alike, because our faith and our hope is in our money. When war comes, we support the troops (even--at times especially--when we know our troops are engaged in unconscionable atrocities). When we look at college debt, home mortgages and health insurance, we don't see slavery, we all see security and so we fight to stay in our chains. Nationalism has its hooks in us, and we defend it to our own detriment time and time again.
We don't need a statesman with a certain idea of America, we need statesmen and women (and ordinary men and women) with humane ideas about humanity, i.e. statesmen and women (and ordinary men and women) who are willing to dispense with any ideas of America.
2
"In our political battles everyone is constantly trying to claim ownership of contested symbols — in the flag, the Statue of Liberty, the Bill of Rights — in order to assert that theirs is the true Americanism,"
Totally disagree with your premise. The only people waving the flag and these other symbols, in a furious attempt to distract from reality, is the Right. GOP lawmakers and their consultants and other enablers in the media are flashing a laser pointer around the room, and their adherents chase it like a kitten, ultimately failing to catch the elusive beam. This isn't a problem that left-leaning people suffer from. We are aware of and can appreciate the symbols of our republic, but we don't fetishize them or use them as political tokens.
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@Clyde
It was CNN's very own Jim Acosta who quoted the Statue of Liberty when confronting Stephen Miller on the Trump Immigration policy... so you are wrong: the Left use these symbols just as much as the Right does.
What part of any country's history precludes a rebellion against the powers that be? America had Bacon's Rebellion in the 1670's, the Westmoreland Rebellion somewhat later, the Regulator Rebellion in the 1760's, Shay's Rebellion in the 1780's, and the Bonus Marchers of the 1910's. (Let us agree to disregard that highly unpopular rebellion of the bourgeoisie in the 1770's that resulted in a Declaration of Independence, and a protracted, but slightly more popular War for Independence.)
Does Douthat think that Democracy precludes rebellions any better than a constitutional monarchy? That formula never worked for France either.
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Mr Douthat, you do realize that de Gaulle resigned when he realized that he no longer had the confidence of the people. What the USA needs is another Roosevelt, a dismantling of the lobby owned Congress and adding more seats to the Supreme Court for starters. BTW, many of us in France have been supportive of a 6th Republic, a republic that diminishes the power of the Presidency and would give a more direct voice to the people.
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We keep making references to the founding fathers, yet most don’t really understand their idealism. Yes, ideas of liberty for all were floating around thanks to the French. The liberty piece eventually took on a different meaning where unrestrained capitalism could flourish. The “for all” part was never intended to apply to all our inhabitants which included slaves, and eventually mass immigration.
This was an enlightening biography, even better than the previous deGaulle biography I have read. One thing you don't mention is that deGaulle was a true intellectual. We certainly don't have one of those running the U.S. today.
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Ross read a book and wants to show its importance to America, whilst merely exposing his own ignorance of the differences between the French and American political cultures.
De Gaulle removed France from NATO - is Ross suggesting a similar break in the transatlantic alliance from Trump or the next President? De Gaulle had a "certain idea of France" which was a country that still had an empire that was crumbling around him, was recently occupied in a war and in a previous conflict lost upwards of 4% of the population. His attempt to revitalise France was in many ways similar to Thatcher: unique to the characteristic and history of that country.
Ross should stop giving us this high school level analysis and instead do some real work of reconciling the widening gyre of American politics.
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@Faust
This is incorrect. De Gaulle did not remove France from NATO.
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The fact is that most of the statesmen have been long dead, as the average person doesn't read enough to understand that borrowed money has replaced statesmen, and stateswomen, as it is only special interests by lobbyists, and lawyers, Congress, and certain ideological ideas that drive spending, not either good domestic, or foreign policy. If Congress had taxed for all the legislation it passed the last 60 years that needed funding, including tax cuts, we wouldn't of had the length of the Vietnam War, runaway entitlement promises, and 17 years in the middle east with millions of deaths, millions of refugees left on the doorsteps of western Europe, and trillions of borrowed money with little to nothing to show for it. No, it isn't about good policy at all, as it is mostly about the over 70,000 pages of the IRS Tax Code that allows Amazon, the Trump Organization, the Kushner Holdings, and few left to pay any taxes. Only those under the age of 50, will see the consequences of allowing all those deductions, and tax credits for each child, and everything in between for immediate gratification, versus little for them as they grow into their retirement years. They will only be paying for those over the age of 50. Statesmen, or stateswomen in our country, think again, not so much. $22 trillion in debt, with over $1 trillion in spending each year more than we are collecting in revenue, with payments of $400 billion in interest on the debt only rising as far out as one can see.
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My idea is that Ralph Nader has never been given enough credit (or blame) for ushering in the age of reactionary Republicans. If he had forgone his narcissistic attempt to become President, his name would not have been on the Florida ballot in 2000, Gore would have been clearly elected and a Republican-dominated Supreme Court would have been deprived of its coup-like takeover of the Presidency.
Emboldened by the "coup," reactionary Republicans pushed their party to lie on a war-making scale, started the age of "swiftboating" their opponents, picking Palen to be a breath away, the accepting of "Birthers" in the rank and file and the ultimate election of Donald Trump, whose whole career has been based on fraud and grifting.
Thanks Ralph.
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@Joe Kernan Been waiting for someone to articulate this thought for years. I think Nader has done more harm than Trump, though Trump is playing catch-up hard.
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Gore was a dull witted candidate with nothing to excite anybody who campaigned so poorly he lost his home state of Tennessee. Nader on the ballot drew about as many voters from Bush as from Gore. The election should not have been close even with Gore's terrible politics and terrible performance. It was close largely due to GOP disenfranchisement of African-American voters and their politics as a game to win at any cost tactics.
The Nader lost the election for Gore canard has been debunked many times in the past 19 years in great detail. It is depressing to see it rolled out again - obviously as an attack on the non-establishment dems (Bernie, especially).
Honesty is the best policy. A nation won't last long if it's held together by lies, as its enemies can easily poke holes in them.
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"What is your certain idea of America, and how much of Americans would it be able to to include?"
My idea of America: Room, at the table for most. Some people just don't like to sit down at a table and share. But there should be chairs left open.
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The only thing close to DeGaulle we had was Kennedy (who was superior)-- a synthesis of liberalism, anti-communist, progressive nationalism (space program), civil rights, pro-business, and a beacon for the world. Kennedy-Nixon, Truman-Eisenhower were not liberal-conservative contrasts at all. We haven't had a Republican with brains and integrity (other than Bush, Sr somewhat) in 60 years.
DeGaulle, like Churchill, was merely a hero of his time... and anything but a visionary, and no example for America. We are nothing like France.
Kennedy's opponents cautioned that his Catholocism would adversely skew his policies; Kennedy convinced voters this would not be the case, but the Vietnam debacle would not have unfolded as it did w/out Kennedy's exceptional virulence in opposing the spread of communism, a stance encouraged by the Catholic Church. I'm almost certain that the corrupt leader of South Vietnam was himself Catholic, also playing a factor in Kennedy's unmeasured stance and policy.
I'm not against a Catholic being president, but in this case I think religion played into some very bad decisions (including hiring MacNamara, a man with know experience/special knowledge in government, foreign policy, or military affairs, to run the show: he'd only run Ford, which he did purely on the basis of efficiency thinking/number crunching in the tradition of FW Taylor, the same technicist mindset that helped bring us to catastrophe in Vietnam, focusing on body counts at the sole arbiter of success & progress).
History has not judged Kennedy very favorably. And speaking of anticommunism, there was not just Vietnam, but the Bay of Pigs & our failures with Cuba culminating in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He miraculously squeaked through by making a secret deal with Kruschev to take missles our of Turkey in exchange for missles out of Cuba. So he weakened NATO somewhat.
Probably Kennedy won't be remembered as one of the greats. But he did bring some youth/glamour to the White House, including Marilyn Monroe.
Donald Trump has done nothing if he hasn't taught discerning Americans what an American autocracy would look like.
Trump has given Americans a preview of
1) how a collapse of the fourth estate has its beginnings in the unrelenting daily tweets and spoken threats berating the "fake news" media;
2) how the rule of law becomes meaningless if you simply ignore the law and pack the courts with judging supporters;
3) how facts can be countered by alternate-facts; how a lie that is repeated ad nauseum can morph into the truth in the minds of his supporters;
4) and finally, how Congress can become Trump's lapdog by his threatening any and all Republican dissenters with a primary firing squad executed by his base.
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Whatever. He would certainly support tariffs against China.
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Another parallel: Tito in Yugoslavia managing to keep age-old ethnic conflict and tensions at bay through repressive autocratic means. Only to have those submerged forces erupt in civil war upon his passing. Given the growing divide in this country, finding concurrence around shared values, without an external crisis, is becoming more fraught every day. Especially when compromise is viewed as capitulation.
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Mr. Douthat says we need a special president who could re-shape our nations narrative. Well, we had that in Mr. Obama for eight years. But too many career Democrats wanted him to just act like the Clintons, and too many corrupt Republicans wanted a mix of scorched-earth politics and Birtherist nuttery.
And so here we are.
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First, this is for the most part an exceptional analysis & piece of writing. I think the parallels are exactly as you uniquely describe them, mostly with pinpoint accuracy; not only the parallels, but your extraordinary insight, even original discovery, of both the roots & inevitability of liberal-conservative conflicts in relation to modern-era (post-1776/1789) founding revolutions & subsequent political traditions.
However, the (possible) Achilles heel in the analysis may be insufficient acknowledgement of just how different the left and right were in France, morally, in relation to the nazis (& before that, prefiguring WWII-era crimes, in relation to Dreyfuss's accusers). Many, subsequently to the war, celebrated the heroisim of the Resistance, as if that was a somehow broadly French entity. The Resistance, like opponents to Franco in the Spanish Civil war (including the American "Abraham Lincoln Brigade"), were by & large hardcore leftists. The hard left opposed the fascists/genocide, & the right mostly went along with it.
Also, one can be religious and liberal: within the Catholic Church Jacques Maritain comes to mind. Within the Jewish world, the Torah has socially conservative and socially liberal elements: The text really gives little guidance on who to vote for, & one may be fully Torah-observant & identify Democrat. And this not just on economic issues. One may be very Yeshivish-Haredi & still think the government should stay out of people's marriage decisions.
First, this is for the most part an exceptional analysis & piece of writing. I think the parallels are exactly as you uniquely describe them, mostly with pinpoint accuracy; not only the parallels, but your extraordinary insight, even original discovery, of both the roots & inevitability of liberal-conservative conflicts in relation to modern-era (post-1776/1789) founding revolutions & subsequent political traditions.
However, the (possible) Achilles heel in the analysis may be insufficient acknowledgement of just how different the left and right were in France, morally, in relation to the nazis (& before that, prefiguring WWII-era crimes, in relation to Dreyfuss's accusers). Many, subsequently to the war, celebrated the heroisim of the Resistance, as if that was a somehow broadly French entity. The Resistance, like opponents to Franco in the Spanish Civil war (including the American "Abraham Lincoln Brigade"), were by & large hardcore leftists. The hard left opposed the fascists/genocide, & the right mostly went along with it.
Also, one can be religious and liberal: within the Catholic Church Jacques Maritain comes to mind. Within the Jewish world, the Torah has socially conservative and socially liberal elements: The text really gives little guidance on who to vote for, & one may be fully Torah-observant & identify Democrat. And this not just on economic issues. One may be very Yeshivish-Haredi & still think the government should stay out of people's marriage decisions.
In other words, left and right don't simply balance out (and, correspondingly, their extremes cancel out) in any kind of facile inclusive synthesis in "one grand cultural/political" tapestry. The nature of the differences (such that expressed in French antisemitic culpability) has too deep implications to be worked out in a simple "agree to disagree/all part of the same team" synthesis.
Mr. Douthat urges us to unite our warring parties in a grand national coalition, calling our current political conflict "tribal".
We have a Republican President who has committed crimes for which he would be indicted and prosecuted were he a private citizen. Given the horrific, anti-American policies Trump is trying to force on our once proud and honorable nation, his urging would-be leaders to include the current Republican party as worthy partners is both preposterous and never going to happen. Amazing the NY Times editors published this column
de Gaulle hardly created "unity" in France. The left detested him, and rightly so from their perspective.
Seriously? Oh, Russ, you’re caution! (And as out of date).
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Well, Monsieur Douthat - you already have your own DeGaulle, in Trump.
What is not mentioned in this article is de Gaulle's nationalism - to be polite - or outright racism, to be blunt:
"Nous sommes quand même avant tout un peuple européen de race blanche, de culture grecque et latine et de religion chrétienne. Qu’on ne se raconte pas d’histoire"
Here he proclaimed that France was a white, Christian nation first and foremost. In the same speech he went on to say that to allow Muslims to integrate the nation would be dangerous and disastrous the the French identity. These words were relevant in that they were the justification he used to abandon a certain population of Muslim French in Algeria that had fought with and for the French during its occupation of this African nation. De Gaulle's refusal to allow these allies to emigrate to France, resulted in the massacre of over 100,000 innocent men, women and children. They were dark-skinned muslims - so he didn't care all that much.
Given trump's rhetoric and actions - methinks you have your own version of DeGaulle.
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@Mike Bonnell
That quote is more typical of the period where de Gaulle lived that of de Gaulle himself. Winston Churchill also said appalling things about Indians and Africans, and he's still seen as a great statesman.
Speaking of attitudes towards "Indians," Churchill, not unlike a certain Democratic candidate I suppose, proudly claimed to have "Indian" (i.e., "native American") ancestry through his Brooklynite mother, Jenny Jerome.
@Marty F
True...they were seen as great statesmen by people of like minds. To those that were the targets of both these 'great men', not so much. The victors write the history books, but sometimes we can still find the truth if we dig around and read the books of the non-victors.
Drette là
Thanks to Mr. Douthat for this statement. As he says, most Americans have utterly no idea of the enormous complexity of French history--or, as he also says, how we ourselves are recapitulating in our contemporary history various deep conflicts that express issues in modern history that are in some respects irreconcilable. One thing that is not very well known about de Gaulle is that with the help of Jacques Maritain he tried to root out the influence of Vichy Catholicism. That insidious spirituality reached itself into my own family through the influence of the infamous--yes, the infamous--Society of St. Pius X resurrected--where else?--among reactionary rich folk of the High Far Right and their absurd patron Archbishop Le Febvre. Pope Paul II had the good sense to put an end to that worthy's career in revolt, but this spirit still lives on in various precincts of Catholicism, including among Steve Bannon and his pals. Having been thus stained I got stubborn and refused to convert to Catholicism when the U.S. Episcopal Church sold its soul, but I can't forget JP II and other great recent Popes. Meanwhile, for all his arrogance, de Gaulle was a truly great leader of the anti-communist West when it mattered. Again, thanks to Mr. Douthat for this important statement.
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Perhaps we could start without a partisan jibe at a young, inexperienced Congresswoman of color with an opinion. My vision of the US is inclusive and doesn't start with division. But, more to the point, Joe Biden - someone whom I disagree with on several things - could be the sort of leader Mr. Douthat is talking about. Obama tried to be that person but he was 'of color' and one side couldn't rise above that.
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It's unfortunate that none of the Democrats competing for the nomination for President have a comprehensive "vision" of any sorts for the USA. One or another preaches criminal justice reform or gun control or an opiate policy; and yes, while these are important issues they are "ants" compared to our elephantine need to understand and become what is possible and desired for our nation.
We must decide exactly what we want to be, what our goal is for both our nation and the world and what we all must endure to accomplish our destiny. Once we do that the rest will fall into place.
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@marv c.
The only "vision" Republicans seem to have is autocracy and the creation and maintenance of permanent underclass to exploit. That is what they want. They could care less about American "vision" or "destiny."
@marv. Obama was such a man, but the reactionary GOP and followers despised his large, inclusive vision. The zero-summers prefer negativity in all its forms. I suspect we'll see big-picture thinking emerge but just now they're busy with "brand differentiation." (And be sure, the same reactionaries will be up in arms when the time comes. )
@eheck I completely agree with you.
But while rejection of the Republicans is both justified and necessary, and will bring many people out to vote (for "negative" reasons. to fully motivate the rank and file requires a vision and hope that they can relate to.
The unfortunate truth is that MAGA is a stroke of brilliance in accomplishing that for Don The Con's base
How much of our history is included?
Perhaps what separates us is that ANY of our history should not be.
The history of our country is full of the great and the scoundrel, and like all of humanity many members of each group share traits, or moments, that mimic the other.
I believe that part of our problem is a tendency on each side of our current divisiveness is to stress one side and suppress the other.
As humans we all are fully equipped with feet of clay, and an abiding talent for self delusion, why would our ancestors be different?
We need to see not the greatness, an the error and face them to truly unite and grow!
I don't think this comparison goes very far, because there is one way in which the ethos of America is unique, or at least has been taken to an extreme found nowhere else (not even in the nation in which it originated)--one cannot explain American divisiveness without an examination of the Calvinist viewpoint on worthiness of help and on capitalist accumulation.
DeGaulle may have had to deal with a lot of things, but one thing he didn't have to deal with is the idea that certain inhabitants of the country were not worthy of its rights and protections merely by the fact that they had lower income. The French ideal of "liberte, eqalite, fraternite" emphasized the latter two as much as the first. It's one reason the French are much more tolerant of "socialist" structures than Americans will ever be. (It's also a reason that the Yellow Vest movement is taken seriously and not just frowned or tear gassed away, as a similar movement likely would be here.)
America is pervaded by the Social Darwinist idea that if you're not rich, you must not be smart, and you must not be deserving of a leg up. While many have forgotten the religious underpinnings, a lot of our attitude towards poverty and who deserves what comes from this Calvinist idea (of the Elect) and while we didn't invent it, it has reached its apogee here--and it's why we don't have universal health care, education, etc.--our "we built this ourselves" oligarchs simply believe not everyone deserves those.
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@Glenn Ribotsky
The ideas of Social Darwinism run exactly counter to the ideas of John Calvin who had a keen sense of social justice based on his reading of the Old Testament prophets. He was particularly hostile to the idea that a person's wealth was proof of their personal righteousness. (See W. Fred Graham, The Constructive Revolutionary: John Calvin and His Socio-Economic Impact.) Sadly his American namesakes succumbed to the opportunities and temptations of a new land waiting to be seized from its original inhabitants and turned into wealth for themselves and their posterity. And they revised John Calvin's theology to ease their consciences and justify their actions.
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@Glenn Ribotsky The Massachusetts Calvinists also introduced socialism in their public education system: any town that wished to have representation in the colonial government had to have a public school open to all children, and financed by taxes on those who could afford to pay. As a consequence, of 18 colonial members of the Royal Society, 12 had been educated in New England, and just 4 came from the slave south, where education was restricted to the children of those who could afford a live-in tutor--i.e., plantation owners.
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@Glenn Ribotsky
"DeGaulle may have had to deal with a lot of things, but one thing he didn't have to deal with is the idea that certain inhabitants of the country were not worthy of its rights and protections merely by the fact that they had lower income."
That is categorically wrong. He had to deal with the fact that Muslim Algerians did not even have French citizenship & were in practice 2nd class citizens. They had no rights and protections when they were tortured in the hands of the various French Para regiments in Algiers.
8
What is your certain idea of America, and how much of Americans would it be able to to include?
Challenge accepted, Mr. Douthat.
My idea of America is of a nation that is self-directed. One in which we collectively choose freedom, opportunity, justice, rule of law, tolerance, education, civic honor., personal responsibility and social justice. One in which we inform ourselves and vote. One in which we value information.
One in which we reject kleptocracy, autocracy - even if it means that the trains don'r run on time - and willful ignorance.
One in which we are realists, and understand corruption is always present, but doesn't celebrate corruption as long as it is seen sticking it to the other guys.
My idea of America is the rejection of bread and circuses, not the institutionalization of a three ring circus.
My idea of America leaves room for immigrants, and leaves room for religious people, and leaves room for thriving businesses and leaves room for rural communities and leaves room for thriving urban centers and leaves room for oddballs and conventional people. It relies on law and common sense. It allows for the tensions that arise from opposing views and needs, and thrives on finding common ground.
My idea of America is an ideal, and a fantasy. But shouldn't we be more worried about achieving it than say, taking a swipe at Rep. Ocasio-Cortez simply be she doesn't fit *your* idea of America?
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And a nation that acknowledges the racism that is part of this current “political” climate and is not addressed by this piece.
And, maybe as another return “swipe”, Kavanaugh should not be on the Supreme Court bench. Not because of his alleged misdeeds of youth, but because of his desperate manipulative tearful tirade to get confirmed.
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@Cathy Thank you. You saved me precious time. I read Ross's articles via the comments. Helps with the blood pressure.
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One need only listen to the speeches at the 2016 Democratic National Convention to find your philosophy in the flesh.
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I'll take First Citizen AOC over Il Duce Trump any day.
5
This is a thoughtful column which raises the question: Is there any states-person who can re-unite our states of America?
At a simplistic level, I'd say the answer is no. We will not all think alike, or agree on everything.
What we can hope for is to re-learn tolerance of our differences while recognizing that we have a common good. We can refresh our understanding of where to draw the line between individual freedoms and sacrifice, between states' and federal rights. Elected officials can re-learn the art of compromise. Voters can encourage their efforts.
We can escape the worst of tribalism if we recognize that we may live in tribes, but we are neighboring tribes, all sharing the same natural resources and inhabiting the same country.
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Yet another cheap shot at AOC suggesting that citizens on the left are all slathering Soviet-style socialists...that riff is getting old and tired already; and is most aptly met by the observation that the entire Republican Party and conservative right have abdicated their personal moral and civic responsibilities and placed them in the hands of an Il Duce-style fascist leader who loves crappy fast food.
At least Il Duce knew the difference between pasta and microwave popcorn. Elitist? Damn right...
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Thanks for the recommendation. I think what we really need to know is whether this reading is dry and factual, or rather fun and interesting. I think your article probably told us all we need to know.
Like most people, I start out reading biographies with good intentions, but the dry details eventually make the reading intolerable, like the biography of Hamilton. He was an impressive character, worthy of the broadway rendition and more, but I'd like to see AI form the ability to annotate biographies to pull out different narratives to suit the reader's mood.
Google? Are you on this?
These men are brave. To take on this much is brave. Only God can reward them.
"Yes, our own ideological extremes are less dramatic."
Douthat writes the above, then he goes on to malign a congresswoman as a potential "First Citizen."
So let's consider how extreme Douthat's potential left wing dictator really is. Her platform is universal healthcare (a staple across the world for countries with similar and even far less robust socio-economic situations than ours), a transition from fuel sources that are contributing to a situation that will render the planet uninhabitable for humans (which is an undeniable scientific consensus), and a marketplace that ends the trend of trickle-up economics by distributing wealth and services more equitably across the demographics whose labor and spending represent the vast majority of the engine driving our economy and filling the coffers of the top 20%.
Now the political right: courting racism with a wink and a nod (they'll [almost] never say it outright, but we all know what they're doing and, more importantly, so does the target demographic), reducing access to services (like health care) by privileging the "free" market in a setting where stagnant wages (dictated by the people benefiting the most from wage stagnation) ensure people lack the resources to participate, and politicizing everything from the economic well-being of the bottom 60% of earners to the future well-being of our species as a whole for short term economic and political gains.
I think one side is rather extreme, Mr. Douthat.
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"Yes, our own ideological extremes are less dramatic, and our culture war has been waged mostly without barricades in the D.C. streets, and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez. But in many ways our politics since the 1960s have been Frenchified in a very 19th-century style."
What is it with right wing republicans and their incapacity to refrain from making weird comments about Ocasio-Cortez. It's like dogs at the beginning stages of rabies.
3
Ross misses the point, again. The polarization we see is caused by a massive disinformation machine based upon Fox, Talk Radio, and virulent web postings. Creating a mesmerized mob of zombies.
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How about Jefferson Smith goes to Washington? Except unlike in Capra's film, he is the descendant of slaves and a Founding Father.
1
The "certain idea" of America seems to be, for Republicans, an America by and for straight, conservative Christian white people. To keep folks in line, and in the fold, they invented "identity politics", the transgression of thinking that all the rest of us are Americans, too, and that the promises of our founding documents might actually apply to everyone.
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We need better public schools. it's no coincidence that as Republicans gained power in the states -- often by cheating -- schools lost funding and quality and... produced more Republicans.
Those mostly empty places control 70 senate seats.
Now there's a conservative for you: hankering for a military leader in the aftermath of a devastating war to bind left and right in a blinding ethno-cultural nationalism that postures on the world stage way beyond its depth.
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I’m sorry, which grand American tradition is Republicanism — I mean Trumpism — now representing?
There is the America of 1776, in which Enlightenment giants like Franklin and Jefferson imagined a liberal democracy, founded in science, spreading across a limitless frontier. Is that Trumpism?
There is Abraham Lincoln and the the Civil War. . . .no.
How about the 1930s, the years between the two wars, in which Franklin Roosevelt and his liberal warriors, in the face of outrage from the right, reinvented capitalism with a human face, with Social Security and all the rest. Not exactly tax cuts for the wealthy.
Or the post-war years, in which generations of American leaders from both political parties created pax-Americana, a global movement for free trade and the spread of freedom and the ideals of the American Declaration of Independence.
When you listen to Donald Trump speak at a rally, and look at the faces of his audience, which grand American tradition do you see?
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@Mark Roderick To answer your final question, Huey Long and Charles Coughlin come to mind, as does the Native American Party of the 1850's and later, William Jennings Bryan.
For several years I have studied intensively the Second World War, concentrating on what could have happened differently. France is a focal point, both because they did so much so badly and because they had major modern industrial might. They squandered their considerable armored strength, and popular histories suggest that adopting de Gaulle's theories of armored warfare would have helped. Unfortunately de Gaulle's plan (massed tanks charging forward unsupported like French knights in the Hundred Years War) was worse. One the more junior of hundreds of colonels, de Gaulle retired from the French military in June, 1940. Then in London he with Britain's sponsorship proclaimed himself not just the French Government, but France. "La France, c'est moi!" I also during the 1960's followed him as he ruled the Fifth Republic. Most of what is in this piece described of de Gaulle I do not recognize. What I do recognize is not praiseworthy.
3
". . .If the lesson of Gaullism for today’s America is that to escape an ideological civil war you first need to be conquered by Nazis, then it’s not a particularly encouraging case study."
Check on a Nazi ("There are some fine people there.") admirer, if not outright lover, gaining high office here.
You're right. Damn discouraging!
2
Charles de Gaulle was a unique, French phenomenon. Without him the French presidency as we know it today would not have existed. He was, what many have called, the republican monarch, resembling Napoleon Bonaparte, both the 1st and the 3d. I can’t see any comparable figure playing a similar role in the American republic.
The biggest problem with the American republic is its rigid two-party system. The French republic, though it has this monarchical presidency, still has maintained its multiparty system, often forcing the president to compromise.
And by the way, in my opinion, the USA had an almost perfect role model in its previous president. But it somehow managed to elect the worst possible alternative as his successor.
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We have little, if anything in common with France. Despite the rhetoric, we have no enemies at our border. We are historically a nation of immigrants and diversity. We are a right and left whose fate is decided by a confused center that swings wildly back and forth. Finally, we now know, with the advent of trumpism, that the right stands for absolutely nothing of value. What is over there that I would wish for my country? The ignorance? The fear? The racism?
1
Ross is right. We need a great depression and a WW II to reset the conditions for a DeGaulle. We need a situation that similarly forces us into a “we are all in this together” nation to enable a DrGaulle to emerge
Current America is a nation with the guns turned inward, it’s “we are in this for ourselves or for our group” and all other (false) Americans represents an existential threat that must be destroyed. We hate each other, and our politicians, and perhaps our media, win by flaming the fires. We are acting to injure each other, to weaken the opposition, even at the cost of weakening the nation.
There may be a day for a DeGaulle in America. It is not now. Today is a day for a Trump
I am amazed and shocked at how little I knew about our Constitution and political system. I did not know and can't believe that Congress gave so much power to the President. That power must be returned to the people. The entire concept of seperation of powers depends on no one person being able to do what Trumpis doing.
1
Unfortunately, there's no de Gaulle-type solution for the US. Sure, factional differences seemed permanently irreconcilable in postwar France, but the constitutional and political structure didn't preclude a strong personality from achieving some measure of reconciliation. In the US, by contrast, the chief impediment is structure not ideology. Polls show that a majority of Americans have similar positions on virtually all major issues. That the Republican Party, a minority party that can claim only 27% of the electorate, is able to suppress the will of the majority and foist its minority agenda on the rest of us is due to the unintended consequences of the framers' inclusion of the electoral college and the two senator per state setup in the US Constitution. Meaning the only way to establish majority rule in the US would be through major structural changes in the Constitution. Unfortunately, the amendment process also devised by the framers makes these structural changes highly unlikely. So, welcome to permanent minority rule, fellow Americans.
2
Ross deceptively and constantly employs false equivalencies. Thus, he says: "Our religious landscape is polarized ... between a secular, anticlerical liberalism and a MAGA-and-megachurch conservatism.". While the latter group pursues racism and hypocrisy, the former seeks rational collectivism. But for Ross there is no mention of the substance of either group, just acknowledgement of the existence of two groups, implying equality between them, when the latter does evil.
4
The idea of Frenchness excluded those who were not of European descent, regardless of how many generations ago they arrived in France. The same is true these days here in the U.S. and has been for quite some time, ask the birthers. So no, the French example is not particularly good, because the uniting Frenchness de Gaulle sought was inherently exclusive. That’s what Trump wants here, an exclusive definition of what the being American is.
American minorities are not like French minorities, they have different histories, different origins. Native Americans were here before Europeans, Spanish was spoken earlier in the U.S. than English was.
A stronger apartheid won’t take hold in the U.S. We’ve had several civil rights movements (Blacks, Latinos, LGBT, etc) a few decades ago. The current nationalists on the right, if kept in power, will likely elicit another Civil Rights Movement, which, in the era of the Internet, will be better organized, hopefully not as fractious, and much more transformative.
1
In answer to Mr. Douthat’s closing question: Speaking of the current administration and its enablers; far fewer Americans than in the past and in historical context, the two decades before the Civil War.
1
I personally think we are at the beginnings of something far larger and more important than any sort of nationalism that you might stamp with the name of leaders from history. (any leader)
The whole idea of states in general is being outstripped as monetary powers (personal and corporate) can cross borders as easily as clicking on an icon. (and they do which has massive destabilizing effects to states and their tax base)
On top of that is continuing wars (decades in length and still going strong) that spill across multiple borders and are having again, massive effects in the destabilizing of certain states as they cannot handle the influx of millions of people.
On top of all that is social media that has shrunk the globe and brought us together, while at the same time being used by people and states to again, destabilize countries. (and their elections)
Finally on top of all that (and really the greatest threat or crisis) is climate change which doesn't recognize any border. It will (within decades) cripple many states, if it doesn't wipe them out of their boundaries and resources. It is going to destabilize the entire world.
As we (and pundit alike) try to stamp names on tiny movements (in comparison of the above), the world is evolving very quickly to the idea of no money and no borders.
We are going to have to come together as a global populace to just survive, and all else is going to seem rather antiquated.
1
"What is your certain idea of America? And how many Americans, and how much of American history, would your idea be able to include?"
These would be excellent questions from the moderator to the candidates in any of the televised debates coming our way soon.
2
"Our political parties are organized around an unfinished revolution and a partial restoration, with the Democrats as the coalition of the glorious 1960s and Republicans as the party of the Reaganite Thermidor or the Bush-Bourbons."
Or are our political parties organized around an unfinished Civil War, one that failed to eradicate the mindset of racism and institution of slavery that ignited the war? As such the South has never truly surrendered its states rights mindset. Until that way of thinking is eliminated the states can never be truly united, even by a modern day de Gaulle.
And one has to wonder what Douthat meant by his desire that we find a politician who can, "reinvent tradition?" He left that suspiciously vague. What America needs to create future inspirational leaders like de Gaulle who can unite the country would be a mandatory public service program requiring all citizens when they reach a certain age to either join the military or do some other term of service to their country. From a program like that we could create the future powerful leaders with vision that Douthat longs for. This as opposed to electing predatory capitalists like we did with Trump who only prioritize short term profit at others expense.
2
"our culture war has been waged mostly without barricades in the D.C. streets, and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez"
Well, actually, considering the French revolution was mainly about city people revolting about the overwhelming influence of rural landlords enjoying disproportionate power, I'm not sure how thing will evolve in an America where a few people from Wyoming have the same electoral weight as thousands from NY or Los Angeles...
1
Give the US a few more hundred years and politicians will accept the idea of examining the idea of the nation. Right now, they are too busy to get elected.
1
Within the Republican Party, Reaganism and any remaining Bushism, has been overthrown by Trumpism. Trumpism is an amalgam of resentments, anti knowledge, anti democracy and pure unrestrained power. It plays upon all manner of racial, cultural and class prejudices. It is a part of pure human nature that, in the worst of times, has thrived in every culture, throughout time and around the world. We are only left to believe in and hope for, a resurgence of the better angels of our makeup.
Speaking to Mr. Douthat's search for a Gaullist American, President Obama tried to be that person and was confronted, at every turn by the growing Republican wave, that has morphed into Trumpism.
1
"Our political parties are organized around an unfinished revolution and a partial restoration, with the Democrats as the coalition of the glorious 1960s and Republicans as the party of the Reaganite Thermidor or the Bush-Bourbons."
Ross have you observed U.S. politics from Bill Clinton on? The Democrats have moved steadily to the right, championing welfare reform and financial deregulation (eg eliminating Glass-Steagall). Meanwhile Republicans have made torture the law of the land and encouraged bigotry at every turn. Reagan would be appalled.
1
And there it is..Busted Mister.
"a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez."
This would be like me saying to you... "America would be fine with out all the Mitch McConnell's and their Garland snapping ways."
Trump that.
4
"If the lesson of Gaullism for today’s America is that to escape an ideological civil war you first need to be conquered by Nazis, then it’s not a particularly encouraging case study."
We're well on our way to being conquered by nazis right now. We will need, we do need, to escape this current sweep of hate and pain.
1
No thanks for the gratuitously snarky comment about Ocasio-Cortez. Do you really think it's funny to label her as a Stalinist?
1
The Paris Commune happened before Stalin was born. Nothing about the comment has anything to do with Stalin.
The only real question of the middle part of the Twenty First Century will be Americans who live on High Ground versus Americans who live on Low Ground. I mean this literally. All the rest of it will be ideological whipped cream.
1
Just one question, Ross: How many Americans, really, did Obama's idea of America exclude?
It was the American Vichyites and their collaborators, such as Mitch The-Single-Most-Important-Goal-is-to-Make-Obama-a-One-Term-President McConnell, who have no interest in a politics of unity or fair play. Remember Merrick Garland?
I fear, unfortunately, that we have to wait until the American Vichyites bring true disaster upon us before they are finally discredited. Only then will this country be ready for a DeGaulle.
1
"Yes, our own ideological extremes are less dramatic, and our culture war has been waged mostly without barricades in the D.C. streets, and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez."
This type of writing is truly non-productive and reveals your gutless, pink-palmed self-satisfaction. Grow up.
4
The first thing to contest in this article is the statement that the nation is divided "50:50." It's not.
Trump lost the popular vote.
This nation is divided into gerrymandered segments,
voters"removed" from voting rosters, minimal polling locations, felons who were given the vote in FL but it's being blocked, two SCOTUS members with reasonably probable past abuse of women, etc.
That's without discussing the immorality, corruption, racism sexism and lies of one of the "50."
But Ross glosses over all that.
2
Your inserted remark re Ocasio Cortez is a silly, if not a prejudiced, aside. Progressives looking for intelligent conservative columnists here might well find that there is no such thing !
3
Reagan and the progeny of Prescott Bush....Douthat on mushrooms?
Reagan was a grade B actor who had Alzheimer’s 15 minutes after he left office. The Bush dynasty was founded on Prescott Bush’s Union Bank, seized in 1942 for Trading with the Enemy for its partnership with Thyssen, a Nazi corporate magnate. A legacy of propaganda and savage profiteers, similar to the vile history of all monarchs and aristocrats. No royal family was exempt from brutality, yet the Bushs and the Windsors are celebrated.The propaganda machine of royals give us the Royal baby and Charles de Gaulle, Churchill’s propaganda poodle.No. We do not need a statesman like de Gaulle.
“In our political battles everyone is constantly trying to claim ownership of contested symbols — in the flag, the Statue of Liberty, the Bill of Rights” Trump and the GOP like to fondle the flag and portray Black football players of kneeling to the flag mourning dead unarmed Black men as if they were insulting the flag. Trump’s embrace is insulting. Republicans hate the Statue of Liberty and immigrants. Republicans hate the Bill of Rights and distort it’s meaning determined to impose religious beliefs on American, and deleting “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” from the Second Amendment. Denying women “The right of the people to be secure in their persons...” 4th, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States”14
4
As usual, Ross Douthat hides his far right fascism under a very thin veneer of liberalism. his nasty, arch-trumpish swipe at Ocasio-Cortez is unprofessional, sexist and hateful. I don't know much about her but Douthat is bent on destroying all Democratic candidates. He is a stealth Trump supporter who wants the good old days of the autocratic and dishonest De Gaulle. It was De Gaulle who ordered the brutal murders of many, many Algerians when they had the temerity to want to be their own country instead of a French Colony.
1
I wish Mr. Douthat would elaborate on the subject of our "avoidable civil war." Does he contend that America's southern states should have been allowed to maintain their culture of human slavery? Does he believe that that egregious institution would ultimately have collapsed on its own accord? Does he wish to deny that the race-hatred permeating Donald Trump's America (and endemic to southern politics ever since emancipation) does not offer a clear sign that human bondage would persist in the states of the former Confederacy if our Civil War had not taken place and not been won by the Union states?
6
@stu freeman
". . . pit ancien-régime narratives . . . against more iconoclastic reimaginings . . . ."
When a reader is faced with a comparison, the trick is to locate the dividing point -- here, the word "against." Douthat is listing the historical claims of two principal ideologies. Whether he agrees with any or all of either is not stated.
What our country needs is better readers.
1
fyi Ross, I stopped reading your piece after the little snipe about AOC. I'm not really and AOC fan, but your snipe just made me realise that you don't deserve the five minutes of my time it would have taken to finish the article.
9
Typically shallow and self-indulgent Douthat, especially the deliberate mis-characterization of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the favorite bogeywoman of right wing hacks everywhere. Surely the Times can do better.
11
OK Ross, enough now.
3
DeGaulle was able to keep dark secrets in the dark which no one today could do. His anti-semitism seemed typical of the time (pace Dreyfus) until he insisted that fleeing Jews seeking aid from the Maquis kill a German soldier first, and after the war ordering his underground commanders to destroy the paperwork that set his policy into stone, stating then that “those people already have too much sympathy.” By 1968 his nationalism had become a joke so that he prepared to resign in favor Cohn-Bendit, known as Danny the Red. Fortunately Danny wanted no part of running the country; he and millions of others just wanted Gaullism to join the rubbish heap of history.
1
Alarmingly, our current political situation has more similarities to Hitler's approach to gaining power and influence than to Charles De Gaulle. Jingoism, fear mongering, racism..... its all there.
1
Can you write just one column where you don’t toss out a throw away line about a democrat? The writing thesis should stand on it’s own without punching down on someone in the other party. When you are reading along and then out of nowhere is a paragraph that doesn’t carry the intellectual weight of what your intent is in writing. What is it about AOC that makes her the new female dog to attack on the right? Between Omar, AOC, and now Tlaib y’all got a littler of female puppies to beat up on. What is it about these women that scare republicant’s so that they attack them consistently. It’s like Pavlov’s dog, salivating at every word they speak, so that you can gnaw on that bone like a pack of rabid dogs. Grow up and act like an adult instead of a taunting 7 year old on the playground. You really aren’t an intellectually stimulating writer when you delve into the petty.
10
@tjcenter
It's due to a lack of imagination that is peculiar among conservatives, and just good ol' fashioned sexism and xenophobia, all of which Mr. Douthat would strenuously deny. The combination of these elements are pretty much boilerplate Douthat. It's primarily why I've stopped bothering to read his column - most of what says can't be taken seriously.
3
"that to escape an ideological civil war you first need to be conquered by Nazis." No, the American equivalent of this is that the racist/evangelical/conservative/Republicans have to be vanquished by liberal multiculturalism. And given demographic trends, that will happen in the not too distant future.
1
Reagan (who I am not a fan of) was the last unifying figure. First Term Obama was also a unifier, but had to tack to the base for re-election.
I believe that America fractured with the Nixon impeachment. While he did commit a crime, was it worse than LBJ and Bay of Tomkin? Or JFK and the 1960 Chicago vote rigging? Teddy killed a women a few years earlier and got away with it.
Would it not have been better for Nixon to finish his term and have the Republican's get whipped out in the next election? Instead - the Republicans came back with a vengeance in 1980.
1
We missed our chance with Obama. Despite his belief in compromise and reconciliation, he was the bete noire of the right.
1
De Gaulle was France.But he was France with flair, with wit, and with eloquence only rivaled by that of Churchill.
Was he a dictator? Maybe, but what dictator would respond to a question about whether he was one, with a televised address in which he said (rough English translation):
“Some say you are here,
It is nice of them to acknowledge me.
But after you, we will have a mess.
Thus, some others insinuate that I should make a mess of things right now.
Well my fellow citizens, Let me think about it.”
1
If the Republicans were really conservative they would work to reduce the power of the Presidency to what it was at the Founding of the Republic in line with their Original Intent Doctrine (which even Scalia rubbished - he supported Original MEANING). Instead they foster the delusions of a first-rate scoundrel, Trump. By comparison Gaulle was trying to put back together a badly fractured nation while Trump, the evil and nasty twin of the Wizard of Oz is trying to further divide it.
1
That was fascinating, Mr. Douthat. Thank you.
Personal reminiscence coming up.
I was a child of eight when my family went on vacation somewhere. And I remember my father turning on the TV one day. Sitting there, watching it for what seemed hours. Why on earth?
All we saw was a sober-faced man sitting at a table, talking away. In French! Neither of us understood a word. But we sat there, both of us, drinking in the syllables of this unintelligible language.
The Fourth Republic (as I realized years later) was collapsing. The man was General De Gaulle, laying out his blueprint for today's Fifth Republic.
History in the making! Marvelous!
But this parallel between French and American! Neat. Very neat.
A little TOO neat maybe.
Is there not a vehemence, a dogmatism--even (dare I say it?) an intellectual arrogance--to the French that we simply don't have. The Church versus the Revolution. The hard right versus the implacable left. A dichotomy that plagued the Third Republic.
Especially during the 1930's. Preparing the way for--
--Vichy. A regime that licked the boots of whip-wielding Nazis.
I don't think we have that bitter dichotomy in our country, Mr. Douthat.
Not yet anyway. But hey--
--look at that photo of De Gaulle. Talking to his mentally incapacitated daughter. Face alive--vibrant!--with love, interest, compassion.
He grieved bitterly at her death.
A real human being after all! With a heart.
Like you and me.
3
I hate to begin by saying that I normally don't like Douthat's columns. But I feel like my next comment stands out better that way: I loved this column.It gave me a moment of hope. I'll read that book, and I hope other Americans -- right and left-- do, too.
1
Douthat is oh-so-clever in his distortions of culture and history.
1. Kavanaugh and Covington (the white student smirking at the native american) are not “controversies.” They represent the exercise of pure political power in the former case and blatant racism in the latter case.
2. The “[b]etrayed Algerian colonials” is a cruel euphemism for the unforgivable slaughtering of a 3rd world people.
3. AOC’s ideological concerns (about the climate, predatory capitalism, guns and extreme inequality) have no relationship to a “commune’ under her impliedly autocratic rule as “First Citizen.”
4. “MAGA-and-megachurch conservatism” does not represent a “religious landscape.” It represents white supremacy.
By engaging in such distortions, Douthat (and such similar columnists in the NYTimes whose names will go unmentioned) become part of the problem, not part of the solution.
28
Douthat bemoans:
"In our media frenzies we keep generating controversies, from Kavanaugh to Covington, in which every cultural division is somehow distilled into a single debate over guilt and innocence, with a representative figure’s virtue or turpitude as a synecdoche for everything dire our factions each believe about the other."
Who do we have to thank (or blame) for that?
- Fox News
- Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and the rest of the Rightwing talking heads
- Breitbart, Infowars, Mark levin, and the rest of the Rightwing wacko conspiracy theorists
- Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Bret Stephens, and the rest of the supposedly "temperate" Conservative punditocracy who sat in complicit silense while your movement systematically destroyed our country.
15
What is it that is so threatening to you about Representative Ocasio-Cortez that you felt the need to attempt a diminishing statement about her in your fourth paragraph? It's just becoming tiresome.
26
“ We don’t need another Hero “- Tina Turner.
Give it a rest, Ross. I’m exhausted.
Seriously.
3
America thankfully has no need for a DeGaulle because we have Canada and Mexico on our borders. DeGaulle is the last in a long line of rightist “men on horseback” to rise to power post Bonaparte. His certain idea of France was simply “grandeur.” Why are you so impressed by him? America’s certain idea is wealth. That’s all it boils down to. The political ideals are mostly propaganda.
4
"Our religious landscape is polarized, since the collapse of the old Protestant establishment, between a secular, anticlerical liberalism and a MAGA-and-megachurch conservatism."
I work as a church librarian in a mainline ( I'm tempted to say "normal") denomination, and I resent the way the media focuses on "evangelicals", who have largely abandoned Christianity in favor of a foul-mouthed idiot in Washington. It just goes to show how superficial evangelicalism always was.
14
Maybe Ross should interview Trump and ask him the questions that Ross ends this column with.
2
France surrendered quickly to Nazi Germany and its Vichy regime continued in cooperation. France was liberated at the loss of American, British and Canadian blood. After the war, De Gaulle worked to reduce European cooperation with Britain. And in 1967 he had the chutzpah to encourage Quebec's separation movement. I have a hard time celebrating him as a hero.
2
I "love" how conservatives like to bend history to suit their agenda, though RD doesn't go for full-frontal pretzel-bending rewrites (like Dinesh D'Souza, who literally invents "facts" to fit absurd "analysis").
I'm not sure Russ intended this, but it surely looks like his loose metaphor of de Gaulle and the Vichy quislings sounds an awful lot like our own Russia quislings in the White House and Senate...but I'm not sure who is "de Gaulle" in this scenario.
Biden? Maybe, but too nice. Obama? He's done his time and mostly checked out (who could blame him?). Sanders? Well, he's got the ego.
Certainly nobody in the GOP has that kind of stature combined with a moral compass. There's only the giant quisling himself, Trump, our own Pierre Laval. And the only thing Trump has in common with de Gaulle is a gargantuan ego.
2
Wherein Les Unreasonables meet old school Enlightenment types, we are likewise polarized by a great schism. Hopefully the guillotine won’t be necessary this time but yet, things aren’t looking very suspicious, right about now, either.
1
Perhaps we’re missing Ross’s diabolical point. As he says, degaulle was cynical and a betrayer, amongst other things (I admire him). So the question Ross may be asking, or should be asking is just whom will this American degaulle betray? And why? And how? Of course Ross is a small ball vatican/authoritarian apologist, so expect no visionary answers from that quarter.
1
Ross - apologize for helping to give us Trump!
2
No mention of “mai 68” or “le chienlit c’est moi”? I think we’re not getting the full story here.
2
I’ll tell you Ross you are a snide little man.
We don’t need another arrogant, self centered, privileged man. We have one and his name is Donald Trump. There are a few others who want to take his place and they know who they are and so do we.
One thing de Gaulle had that Donald doesn’t have is a uniform and some courage. Trump can buy the uniform but not the courage.
What we need is a human with a commitment to other humans. As much as you and many in the media hate it, that’s Bernie! He doesn’t desire to stride above the rest of us. He’s one of us. He’s committed to the common good. Not just some puffed up idea of what it means to be great....kicking people when they down and pretending to be the big man on campus.
Bernie is the person we need right now.
1
Douthat would be much more effective if he learned how to avoid the endless run-on sentences.
1
I might have actually read it to the end but I had to stop at the “New York Commune” comment. Ugh.
2
First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez? Beware, you show your leaning is not to integration, but to the triumph of Conservatism that is white, male, and elite.
1
I’ll tell you Ross you are a snide little man.
We don’t need another arrogant, self centered, privileged man. We have one and his name is Donald Trump. There are a few others who want to take his place and they know who they are and so do we.
One thing de Gaulle had that Donald doesn’t have is a uniform and some courage. Trump can buy the uniform but not the courage.
What we need is a human with a commitment to other humans. As much as you and many in the media hate it, that’s Bernie! He doesn’t desire to stride above the rest of us. He’s one of us. He’s committed to the common good. Not just some puffed up idea of what it means to be great....kicking people when they down and pretending to be the big man on campus.
Bernie is the person we need right now.
1
As a Canadian, I can only see de Gaulle the coward who came to Montreal during Canada’s centennial for the sole purpose of trying to destroy a country that had sent tens of thousands of its English and French speaking citizens to die on French soil helping to take back France from Germany. Despicable.
5
One of your better columns, Mr Douthat. And thanks for the book recs - always looking for some good reads.
I do have to call you on your own biases though:
'Our religious landscape is polarized ... between a secular, anticlerical liberalism and a MAGA-and-megachurch conservatism.'
It's a shame you can't pull your head out of your devout religious beliefs long enough to see that there are liberals who are very religious, just not right-wingnut religious. Maybe because they are not in communion with your beloved catholicism (or other approved sects), you are unable to acknowledge their strong spirituality?
1
Douthat's level of hostility to the left truly has no boundaries.
"... our culture war has been waged mostly without barricades in the D.C. streets, and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez." Ocasio-Cortez is an obsession of the right, not a leader of the left. Her policies more closely resemble Nixon's than Haight-Ashbury's. But don't let that trouble your pretty little head, Douthat. You have decided that Democrats are Hippies so that you can hate us. No opportunity ridicule those you hate should be left unspoken. When he speaks about the extremes in America only the opposition is cartooned while he pretends reasonableness.
You have your Monarchist DeGaulle in the White House right now. He is willing to work with anyone who agrees he is King. He believes he embodies the State. Law is the "deep state." You are just annoyed that he is not Catholic.
4
'First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez'
Can Ross Douthat be civil, or even fact-based?
Apparently not.
8
Well, Ross, your mention of the ‘dark days’ as important to change, may be prescient. The nasty question is just how much darker our days have to be in order to give our next savior an opening? King Trump? Another war that we not only lose, but ends up at home? Domestic nazis taking over Congress? Or something minor, like banning all sources of news, especially the NYT?
Meanwhile, I’d enjoy watching a computer-generated de Gaulle debating our current facsimile president.
2
I was wondering when Douthat would get around to coming up with an ideological justification for Trump. And if I’m wrong, I still take a pass on having a strongman run the country and bring us back together.
Especially one who never fought, and spent the War safely behind the lines jockeying for power.
2
Charles DeGaulle was many things to many people. A man for his time, but it some ways, for all time.
He was grand in his thinking of France and her place on the map of Europe and the world, but he was modest in his own way. He would only use a small apartment in the palace, and insisted on paying rent for it. He never accepted the higher rank conferred on him by the Vichy government since he would not recognize it as legitimate. His book on tank warfare in the 1930's was praised by Erwin Rommel.
Churchill found DeGaulle maddening but necessary, once remarking that everyone had a Cross to bear, and his was the Cross of Lorraine. The present constitution was written by DeGaulle, for DeGaulle, but it has held up pretty well. France could not be as DeGaulle wanted in the postwar period, but he exited Algeria and beat back the invasion by the Foreign Legion in response; their legacy lives on in French politics today in the person and following of LePen.
DeGaulle was a strong man, not like today's would-be strongmen as he knew the value of elections and a republic.
1
Like most NYT’s articles (especially OP/EDs), reader comments provoke a wide range of input from not just the USA but globally. This has done so much to not only provide me a wealth of interesting insight as to its reader’s thought and responses, it in many ways enriched and influenced my own perspectives. Just wish that more people would engage debate with the informed and civil dialogue witnessed daily by your subscribers.
1
“... to any politician who imagines breaking out of our 50-50 politics and governing as a national rather than a tribal figure.”
Barak Obama was that figure. His most famous, most applauded line was that there was no red America and no blue America. And he won more votes than Bush or Trump, twice.
Mitch McConnell responded by promising to make him a one-term president, by opposing every initiative, placing party before country, and finally by flouting the constitutional duty to advise and consent on Supreme Court nominations.
You might not have liked Obama, Ross. I had my misgivings, too, especially around national security and surveillance. But tribal he was not.
No amount of inspiration will surmount the cynicism and mendacity of the right. The exaggerations — death panels, outlawing airplanes and cows, confiscating guns, shariah law in Detroit — only prove they’ll say anything to confuse the electorate. Republicans are promising to defend people with preexisting conditions, as though Obamacare didn’t already do that. They claim credit for the booming economy that was already in good shape in 2016 and is threatened by Trump’s trade policy. They stopped talking about the deficit the day he was elected.
In the 2nd debate, Trump literally promised to wipe out the national debt with revenues from oil leases on public lands. You can look it up.
As ever, Douthat is wrong. Inspiration is no answer. The answer is policy: promising concrete action on real problems.
3
We are, of course, far more divided than we were when De Gaulle was president of France, and when Ike and Kennedy led the US.
As a far lefty, I'm not sanguine, as the left is going a little nuts with identity politics and open borders (areas where I disagree with the my confreres), and the right is being run these days by the Koch brothers.
Funny: when I lived in Paris in the mid-60s, as a middle schooler, I didn't understand why the Parisians hated Americans. I'd been fascinated with foreigners as a kid. Now I fully understand the Parisian attitude towards us. Paris was littered with Americans, and they often didn't speak our hosts' language or treat our hosts with respect.
Thanks Mr. Douthat, for an interesting and thought provoking column.
1
The Right isn’t run by the Kochs at the moment, and the Left doesn’t push open borders. And not buying the bit about the 1960s, either.
1
You may think we need a Charles de Gaulle, but in the meantime, the US has managed to elect Francisco Franco.
6
This column is a rare phenomenon in this newspaper -- it should get both sides thinking, rather than just blaming, one the other.
1
AOC bashing - the last refuge of rightwing scoundrels who support a party represented by the likes of Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, Steve King, Matt Gaetz, Duncan Hunter and so on and so forth.
3
Does your idea of America include making it clear that you will vote for the democratic nominee to save America?
2
The (re)definition of the idea of a Nation is less due to the divination by one individual. It is a synthesis of the forces of the time, a remarkable person's response to it and the people that leader can galvanize around it. One important trait for this leader has to be humility in their own ideology - either as a pre-existing condition or forced upon when fond ideals are shattered by reality. In de Gaulle's time, the Nazis were the sobering deconstruction of the values behind every competing French ideal of a nation and republic. de Gaulle was forced to forge a balance that may have never soared to levels he expected but endures as singular legacy. Today, in America the voting blocks are shaping not just policy but also thoughts of the leader candidates. They guarantee votes by how recalcitrant the candidate is to their position. Humility is seen as weakness, so no synthesis is possible. Anyone who offers a vision that even includes the possibility of some evolution is shut down. Obama could have been a de Gaulle like leader, if he were given an opposition that put nation over winning and had he not taken the smaller, easier winnings over his vision. At least he showed a willingness and struggle to synthesize competing ideals compared to anyone we see today. Maybe if the great recession had actually been a great depression with no winners we as a country may have toned down our flinty idealism and abandoned their false prophets - now we wait for climate change catalysis.
2
Shorter Douthat: “I’m looking for a man on a white horse, a national father figure who who will knock heads and make the kids stop squabbling. Father knows best.”
The false equivalence in this piece approaches LD50 levels.
1
This: "...our culture war has been waged mostly without barricades in the D.C. streets, and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez..." is gratuitous and unworthy of you.
3
please unmask this nationalistic politician who only thought of himself. His military colleagues did not tolerated them, he was the supreme egoist, the Trump of his time.
A "de Gaulle of our own"? you have it already!
look for somebody else, not french.
1
The "anti-clerical left" is cheap slur on people who simply don't want religion crammed down our throats by holier-than-thou politicians. I've no quarrel with any religion -- as long as it doesn't try to dictate my life.
3
". . . a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez." Mr. Douthat, I wish you had enough taste not to mar a thoughtful column. You cannot resist the cheap shot, the low blow, le coup-sous. But why are the Faux News Rightists so obsessed with Ocasio-Cortez? Maybe because she sees problems and proposes solutions while they can only mount personal attacks. Maybe because she does her research, and they would rather make things up. Maybe because she is well-spoken and attractive, and they prefer to sneer and smear for the base . . . Perhaps even those who think in slogans have quiet moments of reflection, and in those they see the weakness that burns what is left of honor.
3
Very interesting article.
As you point out, if it takes being conquered (in about 2 weeks) by the Nazis, then perhaps this ignition of imagination is not meant to be.
Then its not meant to be. DeGaulle's "certain idea of France" won because France was humiliated by the incredibly swift capitulation to Germany, just over 20 years after Germany was devestated by WW I.
I don't believe America can imagine what that was like.
1
Why the shade on AOC? Is this author part of the GOP’s campaign to use her and her progressive policies to win the Presidency again in 2020. Hope not.
4
@Pat Choate
AOS is too young to stand for President in 2020.
We have a potential DeGaulle of our own. His name is Mueller. Comey would make a good vice president for Mueller. Moreover, we should have a Constitutional Amendment that defines the prerequisites for every presidential candidate, including service in uniform, in combat when there has been a war during that service, and a graduate degree including STEM topics as well as more than two college-level semesters in world and American history. Being a successful catamite of Mammon is NOT a qualification for the Presidency.
1
Good piece, Ross....
A million Frenchmen can't be wrong, even General deGaulle:
"Vive la liberté!" has become a million cries of a million voices, instead of one.
1
Churchill said his cross was the Cross of Lorraine. De Gaulle was a largely unsuccessful megalomaniac and the bloody end to the war in Algeria must be laid at his door.
Anyone who lived through 1959-1960 in Paris, as I did, remembers bombs left on doorsteps, shootings, police brutality, torture and terrorism from the French right, massacres of Algerians. Time to leave in the dust this ineffectual poseur, as no biography can place him on the good side of history.
2
Nonsense.
Charles DeGaulle was a white French colonial conquering capitalist supremacist.
DeGaulle and France and the French have to answer and pay for the likes of Haiti, Vietnam, Algeria, Mali, Tahiti ,Cambodia, Ivory Coast, Martinique and Vichy.
France has been falling and failing since Charlemagne. Caught between Spain, Great Britain and Germany destined for 2nd or 3rd place.
Great art. Great food. Great literature. Great science. Great technology. Great ideas and philosophies. Not so great nation.
See ' The Wretched of the Earth' Frantz Fanon
4
“Our religious landscape is polarized, since the collapse of the old Protestant establishment, between a secular, anticlerical liberalism and a MAGA-and-megachurch conservatism.”
If a Protestant collapse is worth mentioning, so is the complete loss of Catholic authority because of the child abuse scandal.
1
I think you'd find plenty of support for a country that is socially liberal, fiscally conservative, is not engaged in endless overseas conflicts, tolerates all religions but governs from a strictly secular perspective, stays out of people's private lives and medical decisions, and works to ensure that everyone has a chance at a better life no matter their economic station.
It's just that simple.
1
I am a fan of de Gaulle and his Constitution of the 5th Republique, ratified in 1958. His broadcasts from England during WWII unified the French and bolstered the Resistance against Nazi occupation.
But he was not to the right. I would agree he had an ego, and was steeped in military training, but the preamble of his constitution recalls the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789 and establishes France as a secular and democratic country, deriving its sovereignty from the people.
De Gaulle himself introduced the 11th amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing presidents were to be elected by popular vote. France has proportional representation, not just two parties.
The oppressive monarchies gave rise to the rights of man and citizen. French bakeries are pharmacies are mandated to be open each day so everyone can have daily access to food and medicine. (Normally, shops close on Sundays)
France provides free health care and a generous social safety net, because of the deprivations experienced through monarchs and wars. We pay higher taxes here, but the result is a higher quality of life for everyone.
None of our parties, from extreme right to extreme left, ever suggest abolishing this safety net -- it's part of the French worldview.
When De Gaulle left France during the 1969 anti-war, pro-birth control student uprisings, he visited his Communist colleagues and further solidified the unions' presence in France.
He was progressive.
2
One of Douthat's better columns. I read this biography of de Gaulle (who was a truly extraordinary man) some months ago and it well worth a read.
1
America is not a nation, it is an empire. Conceived as an Empire for Liberty by Jefferson, comprised of sovereign States with widely disparate political cultures and a Federal government of definite but limited power, held together in some sense by a brutal pecking order with Native Americans and African Americans at the bottom.
What, really, does the culture of corruption in New Orleans have in common with the Yankee-Scandinavian rectitude of the Twin Cities? New York City remains at its heart the place where the Dutch worship of money remains enshrined. Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area it colonized by ship in the late 1840s and 1850s just know they are smarter and more moral than everybody else and long to provide instruction. LA is the once and future capital of a striving, dynamic Mestizo culture. Tejas in many ways has never stopped being a country of its own.
Any example taken from France has limited value for America.
If we had a less powerful Federal government, we could lower the temperature of our disputes. But all involved seem to want a battle to the death with the Federal government imposing some kind of Neo-Reconstruction on one or another of the recalcitrant regions (depending on which side is in control). The Obama government was bound and determined to have transgender locker rooms in every middle school and high school in the Deep South. The Trump government seeks to prune back the sovereignty of California and Massachusetts.
1
@Frank When the federal government was less powerful we had a deadly civil war, and afterward our African American population were treated as less than second class citizens, Native Americans were not citizens at all. That is just the beginning of what is wrong with your assessment.
2
Ross Douthat repeatedly shows us the intellectual justifications employed by conservative think tanks for maintaining conservative minority rule. They have abandoned their initial revulsion to Trump in favor of a complicity that serves their ultimate purpose. We should view every column by Douthat, Brooks, and Stephens in that light.
1
If for nothing else, this column will be remembered for the analogy of how American current cultural flashpoints get transformed into the Dreyfus case, over and over again. Nice piece of insight.
1
In July, 1967, de Gaulle visited Canada during its Centennial celebrations and insulted the tens of thousands of English and French Canadians who fought on the beaches of France trying to help liberate France from Germany, by calling for the break-up of the country. While Canadians were dying in France, de Gaulle was living a life of comfort in London.
1
In July, 1967, de Gaulle visited Canada during its Centennial celebrations and insulted the tens of thousands of English and French Canadians who fought on the beaches of France trying to help liberate France from Germany, by calling for the break-up of the country. While Canadians were dying in France, de Gaulle was living a life of comfort in London.
1
"...without barricades in the D.C. streets, and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez." But maybe we need something like that to shake up the entrenched power structures in this country. "Do you hear the people sing" could be more than just a song for American ears.
1
Born 3 months before VE-Day in Marseille, I remember the De Gaulle era and Mr. Douthat does not seem to know much about this unique idiosyncratic often infuriating man who was a significant part of helping France in its long slow economic recovery from the War. Also equating the divisions caused by the Dreyfus Affair with our current divisive climate shows much ignorance about French History. Why not stick to what you do know, dear?
2
The gratuitous swipe at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was cheap, Ross.
Overall, the column is further affirmation of Douthat's status as the imperial wizard of false equivalence.
Obscured by his pretentious prose is a capitulation to the idea that today's left and right in America are just two competing visions for the future of our democratic republic. But they are not.
The Republican vision is the evisceration of the democratic republic. We are watching the corrosion of the social contract, the erosion of the rule of law and the explosion of political norms.
We have to stop pretending this is a normal cycle of balancing and rebalancing our civic life.
4
Perhaps Republicans could learn from this De Gaulle quote:
“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”
EU leaders too could benefit from some of De Gaulle’s clarity of thinking:
“What is the point of Europe? The point is that one is not dominated by either the Russians or the Americans.”
Of course, De Gaulle also famously vetoed Britain’s attempts in joining an early version of the EU in the 1960s. He knew it.
1
Huh, and were do such pressing Global issues, like climate change...fit into this?
The idea of imagining an ideal in a tiny nation, like France, seems cute today. The world has changed.
1
Yea, yea, yea, but where would an American DeGaulle come down on dealing with climate change, immigration, the American Oligarchy, our monopolistic financial system. That's what really matters.
1
Many Americans appear to disregard history.If we were a nation of learned citizens we would never tolerate endless wars and a waste of our treasured military. Everything here is based on a capitalist mentality. The majority of those serving in the military are poor to lower middle class citizens. Many of us can't name a member of the army, navy or air force. To compare de Gaulle's France to our separate unequal United States is a farce.
1
Charles de Gaulle was essentially a patriot and hero of the French people--the brave Gaulois. I have conducted research on him for decades , including personal interviews with his son in law, General Boissieu, and his Foreign minister Couve de Murville.
Unfortunately, as I have elaborated in my dissertation in 1984 and my following publications, De Gaulle was also a war criminal who triggered the so-called First Indochina War, 1945-1954.
Anyway, he is more respectable than our sitting president who doesn't belong to the rank of decent leaders.
2
True statesmanship is standing up for principle even though it will cost one's political standing, reputation, social status, friendship and will risk ridicule, scorn, and perhaps worst of all, complete rejection/expulsion from the tribe. De Gaulle was a statesman.
I give you the last statesman in America: Senator Robert Burren Morgan of N.C. who in 1978 cast the deciding vote to approve the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panama, and lost his seat in the 1980 election. He knew beforehand that his vote would result in losing his seat. Morgan was a Democrat that was both conservative and liberal, who actually voted his held convictions regardless of the cost to him personally. He was a Democrat, but not a tribal Democrat. Like De Gaulle, Morgan was a statesman. Where have all the statements gone?
1
Ross, we’re NOT France, or Europe, or any other nation in the world. We were founded on the mistakes and over-reach of the past. That’s what both Democrats and Republicans seem to have forgotten. What ever happened to “One Nation, Under God, with Liberty and Justice for All?”
In the 60’s, we used to add the words “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” in response to Nixon’s henchmen, but above all, we were Americans. Yes, we protested in the streets, but most of that was about the war in Vietnam.
What is happening now makes absolutely no sense to me. Even a blind person knows the difference between right and wrong! You don’t have to SEE it to know it’s wrong! All you have to do is Listen!
When Donald Trump won in 2016, I, along with so many considered it a total fluke. Couldn’t ever happen again. REALLY! Guess what? With the help of the so-called Republican majority of Sycophants, he actually could win again! Yikes!!!
2
Enjoyed the column. Some of the commenting professors object to the swipe at congressgirl what's-her-name, but they ought to read about the self-destructive Paris Commune.
1
The 5th Republic established a system of government that could evolve as circumstances and political tastes changed. de Gaulle must have known this so it was inevitable that the system he put in place would eventually allow a Francois Mitterand and his Socialists to assume power. Americans may wake up one day to realize that Trump and the right wing Republicans have established a reactionary regime that is impossible to change. De Gaulle was a brilliant thinker and tactician whose 5th Republic brought a degree of long term stability to France that many thought impossible until he appeared on the scene. We, on the other hand, are led by a cowardly doltish fool. This is not going to end well.
1
Can the history of our nation include a sensible reckoning of what the labor systems of the Black Atlantic brought in riches and inequality? Can we talk about labor and slavery and the ongoing wish of the fear-mongering elites across the centuries as the bane of liberty and the threat to the world that have been and still are? Can we hold our traditions both secular and religious in moderate contempt for their failures even as we question the new digital godheads being rammed down our throats? Douthat will never get there with his patrician understandings and Old Testament Christian foundation. The past he lauds never won the fights he thinks it did. Daddy won’t save us. More likely it will be a female “first citizen” who finally reunites us to save mother earth.
1
You can’t include people who want to use the government to dominate you with someone else’s religion. Freedom and liberty demand religion to stand aside and enjoy their own freedoms while others enjoy theirs. What we have in America today is the rise of religious extremists combined with straight-up crooks exploiting them - and the rest of us are left trying to figure out how to rescue the rule of law from the rule of true believers.
1
So Ross, what you're saying is: "There's nothing new under the sun". Got it.
But we don't need to borrow figureheads from other nations, we have some fine ones of our own. How about FDR, or his cousin Teddy? Both Roosevelts stood up to the powers that be, and for the "little guy", and that's who we need today. We've had forty years of the elites and Corporate America running roughshod over the rest of us, it's long past time that we reverse this disastrous reign.
Ask not, "Who is our DeGaulle?", but rather, "Who is our Roosevelt?"
1
Folks, how do we govern a country with 400 candidates for president on one side and a personality cult on the other. In France, at least one can eat the cheese! Citizen Douthat celebrates de Gaul, but a unifying voice, such as deGaul was, for a brief period, is out of the question in contemporary America. Vision is the hallmark of leadership, but articulating a unifying theme, a thread that binds us together, well, that will take some work.
1
A fine meaty article with a lot of ideas thrown in, very French in it's reach for historical similes. Charles de Gaulle was very much the creation of the debacle of 1940, and as the article says who wants to repeat that?!
1
The best America has to offer, from the context of our founding ideals, principles, and values, comes from its citizens, not from our leaders, who should be reflecting, articulating, and practicing those ideals, principles, and values citizens exemplify across the nation. E pluribus Unum.
1
The big lesson that France offers America is that it had 5 republics, not one, the one being that crazy patchwork that is now compromised, degraded, and on its way to the garbage bin. The year 1866 should have marked the Second American Republic. The US is too tied up in money and race and kinship and lawyers to see point of all this, while the French actually battled it out. By the way, DeGaulle didn't 'betray' the colonials, as the writer suggests; his withdrawal from Algeria helped invent modern Europe (the trading bloc) and neo-colonialism and it undercut the Bourbon-Vichy drive in France to restore class privilege and ethno-religious dictatorship. Currently, the anti-Gaullists, egged on by Putin and TrumpBannon, wish to restore the restoration.
1
Thank you, Mr. Douthat, and timely on your part for this reader with reference to your last sentence of your essai, or attempt at the art of persuasion:
'It also suggests the importance of a Gaullist question for our would-be leaders: What is your certain idea of America? And how many Americans, and how much of American history, would your idea be able to include'. A la bonheur, and it takes a finely tuned measured journalist to write it.
In less than cinq minutes, it would take all Americans in possession of a vote, to write anonymously if need be a concept of how they perceive in the Now, a vision of power, culture and prosperity in the Year 2020.
Recently I asked an elderly family friend at Versailles who lived WWII, her thoughts of de Gaulle. After a brief pause, accompanied by a sigh, she added they do not make presidents like him anymore - (no need to pipe in, with 'yet FDR and Churchill found him a bit of a handful').
The Students Revolution in 1968 caught him by surprise, and he disappeared for a day, in search of counsel. He returned looking weathered and old.
An American uncle of mine, always discreet, shared housing with Jean Monet during WWII, recollected that M. Monet was given to temper tantrums over the cook's bill of fare, while later Edmund, acted as translator to de Gaulle, on his visits to Washington where the president had an affinity for a glass of fine whisky.
To sum it up in a spring nutshell, our Goal for America is US.
Cheers!
1
Interesting intellectual piece. It is helpful, at times, to take a birds eye view of what is going on from a longer historical lens.
I had wondered if today, with its MAGA hat wearing right wing elite bashing norm busting turn-back-the-clock cultural wars, is not in fact a counter revolution to the bandana wearing long haired hippie left wing anti-establishment cultural wars of the 1960’s and to the liberal norm setting of the decades that followed.
It feels like America is experiencing a cultural pendulum swing. Who is America? What do they believe in? What do they stand for? The question is whether there can be a common vision with all the division that is purposefully being created by Mr. Tear Down Trump.
What needs to emerge is a leader coming up the middle who can weave a vision that will resonate with all despite one’s political bent. Is this possible?
1
For their thirty nine conservative federal judges and two Supreme Court justices (one stolen from the former duly elected President), the Republicans under McConnell (and departed Ryan) have capitulated to a grifter (oh, and their pay off to their donor class, the 2017 so-called tax reform). Perhaps, the Republican Party was always poised to so capitulate as they were becoming the all white party anyway. If there is a de Gaulle among us, someone with a comprehensive positive vision of a new America, he or she will come from the Left. The Republicans have had their souls eaten by Trump and gladly joined in the feast.
12
A good article. Our two countries are more similar than most Americans realize, France does, indeed, have important things to teach us, e.g., about the culture wars, socialism, immigration, and the problems encountered in coexisting with Islam.
2
The certain idea or conservative Americans is certain: America is where will triumph the ruling of the majority by a rich minority. It doesn't seem that the progressive Americans won't be able to ever change that.
2
In my first visit to France, in 1951, I discovered that most Frenchmen hated all other Frenchmen. One village was jealous or suspicious of its neighboring village.
In 1953, when I lived in Paris, this was emphasized again. Parisians wanted nothing to do with the rest of the country, unless it was a resort they could visit as a ''foreign country'' would be visited.
Now maybe this attitude was a hangover from the war. There was still little forgiveness for the Normandy invasion and Americans were not particularly liked. There was resentment because de Gaulle was shuffled aside by Ike and Montgomery, living safely in England, but a fly in the ointment, having little input for the invasion and subsequent military actions.
I used to think that a single person in a democracy could not change an entire country until Trump came along, determined from the get-go to destroy the United States. And he is doing a great job. Whoever follows will have a much tougher time governing and repairing the damage.
2
@jhbev
Then again, many of us thought the sainted Barack Obama did his best to try to destroy the United States.
And, based on what we know about his use of the IRS to harass his political opponents and his apparent corruption of the Justice Department and FBI to advance the cause of the venal and duplicitous Hillary Clinton, we were on our way to a one-party police state.
The election of the appalling Donald Trump put a halt to those nefarious plans.
1
Douthat's analysis fails to incorporate a major difference between the political struggles that threaten unity in France and America. In the former, de Gaulle grappled with ideological conflicts between right and left, each with a different conception of the nation. In America, both liberals and conservatives cherish the republic and the Constitution which created it.
Traditionally, the two groups clashed over the role government should play in managing the country's social and economic problems, but not to such a degree that compromise became impossible. In recent years, however, especially since Trump took office, the Republicans have abandoned their commitment to the norms and laws that bound all Americans into a political community.
How can any political leader, however agile, bridge the divide between a political party which, despite its faults, still adheres to the rule of law, and one that seems determined to preserve its grip on power, regardless of the consequences for our system of government? No imaginable compromise could unify Democrats, who still believe that facts should shape government policy, with a Republican party which slavishly follows the lead of a president who lies every time he opens his mouth.
This country needs to heal, but the first step in that process requires the removal next year of the toxic influence of Donald J. Trump.
12
You know Ross, the 'left' in the USA doesn't need to be reconciled to authority.The Republicans, on the other hand, urgently need to be reconciled to democracy - to stop removing voting rights, acknowledge that their refusal to give a hearing to Merrick was a coup, fix the media landscape the deliberately skewed, and recognize that 43 and 45 were not legitimately elected presidents.
25
@S North
Actually, 43 and 45 were legitimately elected presidents.
The problem for many, as always, is the blocking role the United States Constitution and the Electoral College place before the aspirations of (leftist) totalitarians.
Thank God for the eternal wisdom of the Founding Fathers.
@S North
You ask far too much from an avowed conservative, they do not admit error to facts, they only look to liberals and Democrats to appease them and to fix their messes for them.
1
@EGD
The Founding Fathers never contemplated the SCOTUS picking the president nor the electoral college going against the popular vote unless such popular vote presented a clear danger to our government, I'd say that with trump they failed miserably
1
Until the United States realizes that their only hope of good candidates and a well balanced system of checks and balances must come from local initiatives that consider clean habitats. Forcing these clean initiatives will stop the branding and game show style of plantation politics in the swamp.
Right now multi billion dollar infrastructure bill is being introduced and hashed over by the two factions you mention here, I'd like to recommend a book.
Richard White's titled Railroaded.
There are few who realize how crippled the intercontinental rail has been since its inception. The reasons why are relevant to our democracy and political atmosphere is a direct result of the absolute infrastructure failure .
Ike was mortified after Pearl Harbor at the lack of infrastructure in this country. A ton of effort to expand turnpikes and highways was undertaken.
The limits due to the original contracts during the expansion and the corrupted choices made for roads built for rail sometimes in competition with themselves or nobody gives us no physical room to expand. Closing borders will not change this fact.
The only way to drain the swamp are local ecological initiatives that will stop federal permits. Illegal dumping, fracking, Lyme Disease, 1-4 Dioxane in the water supply along with lead and fertilizer run off as well as ash and pipeline and oil drill leaking must come from the townspeople. Ecological considerations will starve these swamp beasts OUT who divide us.
2
The big problem is what happens when De Gaulle dies. Basing the political culture of your nation on a single mortal individual leads to this problem.
The Founding Fathers, in their wisdom (or folly), tried to come up with a system of government in which various interests would be forced to compromise, and the states would run their own local affairs. This worked for a long time.
2
I've never been able suffer historical biography. Writing a biography about an individual is itself promoting a personality cult. The only time the act is appropriate is when no one has heard of the person in the first place.
Think of it this way. I'd rather read a book describing the events from WWI through the Korean War than read a book about Douglas MacArthur. Not least of all because MacArthur was in love with his own vanity. In the broad scheme of things though, he just wasn't that important. His name requires mention, not dedication. So too with de Gaulle.
You compare that to Frank McCourt or Elie Wiesel. Yes, their stories deserve biography. Not because they were shaping the vast events of their own place in time. Because they were part an experience that would otherwise go unnoticed and unremarked. That's where I think biography is important.
1
Pleased that a great French and European has been given note. Quite apart from an entirely different political tradition , a core personality element lacks , modesty. The American model best success when its leader demonstrates restraint, vision and a keen political instinct.
Thats right, Lincoln. period.... No less peril to the national enterprise, far less institutional support for an untested western rube, and a lasting legacy of embracing and forwarding the constitutional form of governance....not bad for one term plus a month.
De Gaulle rightly should be considered a historic great, a Gallic Ceaser....Abe just one of the folks
1
De Gaulle was also a man who lived inside his own imagination, wherein the liberation of France had nothing whatever to do with the British and Americans. And he was very propagandistic in pushing that line. Least, that's the impression I get from reading the history.
1
Ross has a poor short term memory. Just over two years ago we had a president who, in my opinion, went out of his way to appease American conservatives and was spurned by them again and again. The Democratic party, unlike today's Republicans, is not monolithic in culture and ideology. There are always liberals looking to bring pragmatic conservatives to the table. Our current problems come from the absence of the reverse.
47
I would hope any leader of this country would reject those whose vote is largely based on racial politics.
That would the boundary one does not cross. Forget economic voting, abortion voting, immigration voting. When someone votes because he or she truly believes another race is inferior, than leaders must turn their back on them.
Unfortunately we now have a president who doesn't think that way. And large swaths of the country who, as the Pugh post-election study pointed out, voted primarily to maintain their perceived higher place in America's racial hierarchy.
The country has a big problem.
4
@me
Sure go ahead and "think" about racial superiority if you'd like. You are free to think it.
I just hope our leaders reject it as "fact" and turn away from those who espouse such vileness.
As we all know Nazi Germany was based on the notion of a superior race. It didn't really work out too well.
I really found your column interesting today, Ross Douthat. I've always been fascinated by Charles De Gaulle (could any name be any more French? To compare, you'd have to name your US statesman, "John America").
But comparing European culture to ours can also lead you to set up your own interpretations that might ring totally true. First, the Democratic party today is hardly the party of the 60s, even if Republicans want to label AOC as a revived hippie protestor. Sixties Democrats were anti war, and anti business, while today's are supporting wars on climate change and the nation's inability to provide healthcare for all Americans.
Comparing the today's GOP to Reagan or even the Bushes is so far off as to be out of this country. If you must compare, make it reconstruction, with all its greed, corruption, and exploitation of others.
I agree we need a statesman (or woman) who can transcend factionalism to come up with a vision of America that works for all people.
But for such a person to succeed, the country needs agreement on one shared reality and historical narrative--something Donald Trump has splintered, perhaps forever.
DeGaulle was a savior that helped restore to his countrymen belief in themselves as a great nation.
Who can considered a savior here?
14
The last paragraphs undermine the analogy between DeGaulle's times and ours that Douthat struggles to devise. French politics before DeGaulle's rise to power was much more splintered than our has been, at least in terms of the number of parties contending for power (which led to coalitions often lasting mere nanoseconds). Also, DeGaulle, as Douthat says, was a national hero (maybe the only one!) and had stood apart in opposition to Vichy throughout WW2. Compare Trump: no hero, no personal history of principled opposition, etc.
Side note: in 1969 JK Galbraith (writing as Mark Epernay) pub'd a satire titled "The McLandfress Dimension" about a political scientist who devised a measure to determine how selfless a political leader was by counting the number of times he referred to himself (autre temps . . .) in speeches. DeGaulle ranked as the most selfless but a footnote suggested that when DeGaulle spoke of "France" he may have been referring to himself, in which case he went way down the list.
2
@Rich Elias
On a number of occasions de Gaulle said "I am France" perhaps echoing Louis XIV when he said 'L'etat c'est moi' ('I am the state').
The hard reality is that in no country there is a unitary view of its traditions or vision. It may exist in small countries with a homogeneous population, but certainly not in a country where the population, as in the United States, comes from the four corners of the world. The imposition of a particular vision can only be carried out by a dominant faction to a powerless majority, but it falls apart once that majority or part of it acquires a political voice. Civil strife occurs when a faction persists on imposing a vision that is no longer sustainable or accepted. The abortion issue is an example. It is banal to say it, but civil peace can only be obtained when different factions are willing to forgo their ideal reality of the country and accept in some measure the other's myth.
1
"In search of a statesman with a certain idea of America."
No. After what Donald Trump has wrought and is, we would settle for a statesman, period.
19
@rich I'd settle for a human being.
Inclusion is the key, not exclusion which is just what we have now.
2
The central aspect of this new fifth republic created by de Gaulle is a president with a lot of powers instituted and thus legitimized by a direct vote. This president then ideally acts as a figurehead of the nation not as a party politician.
The question I ask myself is do americans want to strengthen their president after the experience of the Trump Years, and does the Institution of the two-party-System which defines US politics allow such a uniting national figurehead?
Secondly, as someone who grew up in Germany and thus with the german political system, I wonder whether americans want a strong president after this experience with Trump.
Biased by my home country's political system it seems more rational to me to revisit the checks and balances and increase oversight instead of relying on a system that gives one person a lot of powers and hoping that the parties bring out an especially virtuous one.
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@Marin Le Déroff
More Americans want that more rational checks and balances, but too large a minority, who hold power, are not rational and abhor them as long as their own Vichy guys are running things.
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@Marin Le Déroff
Checks and balances are great and necessary safegards, but they don't resolve the split of the people into approximately equally sized opposing sides deaf to each other. Moreover, as seen in France now, in Italy, and in the US too, all seek to manipulate the powerful balancing institutions (parliaments, courts, press, etc. ) to paralyse any attempt at reform from the other camp.
14
@Marin Le Déroff In my view the American presidency has been becoming too powerful, and I felt that way long before Trump. Now with Trump in the presidency I am convinced of it. The American president has gradually taken away the ability of Congress to declare war, or maybe I should say the Congress has given it to him. It is time to take it back. Now it seems that the power of the purse, vested in the House of Representatives, is under assault by this president. I trust the courts will not let him take it. Likewise, the oversight responsibility of the Congress is being usurped. At the present time we still have theoretically a three legged stool government, if we can keep it (a la Benjamin Franklin).
35
Our national myth is about the individual, not the state. Yet the inequality baked into America is in direct opposition to our myth that hard work is the path to success. No American leader since LBJ has successfully grappled with that dichotomy. No Republican leader since Lincoln has even tried. That is our tradition. We don't need to reinvent it. We need to ditch it. None of our current crop of contenders, with the possible exceptions of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, seems to understand that. We don't need a new American de Gaulle. We need a new FDR. Since big money controls us now I am not holding my breath.
22
For any true leader to emerge, we Americans first need to understand the true danger to our country from the Trump regime and its Republican Party supplicants. They represent the extreme right that, whether in France, Spain, Germany of Italy in DeGaulle's era, or Russia, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Venezuela or the Philippines of today, envision the "state" as the embodiment of an autocratic government unchecked by law enforcement or the rule of law.
The battle for the soul of America pits those who believe in more democracy and more opportunity, versus those who believe we have too much democracy, too many choices, and too many voices waiting to be heard.
Who is prepared to voice this choice and lead America to a restoration of our essential values -- hope, empathy, respect, cooperation, justice, and the conviction that a rising tide does, indeed, raise all boats?
12
I am delighted that Mr. Douthat recognizes the great significance of Charles DeGaulle. Far too few Americans know anything about 1958 when DeGaulle, in effect, seized power and ruled as a virtual dictator but for only six months. He then presented the French people with the Fifth Republic, the most stable democratic structure they had ever experienced, which endures to this day. I am not so sure that he reconciled conflicting visions of France so much as created a coherent and rational governmental structure. Clearly, our own nation could do well by jettisoning much of our revered but archaic Constitution: the ridiculous electoral college, the irrational state divisions and attendant unrepresentative Senate, the life appointment of a Supreme Court empowered to overrule the people at every turn, the inevitably imperial presidency, Yes, we need a DeGauule of our own but I have little hope one will appear in our place and time.
250
@Mark Conway mostly agree but the 5th Republic has been created with a De Gaulle type président in its vision of power sharing between the branches. Unfortunately or not, no one can be him but himself.
2
@Mark Conway
There are periodic suggestions in these comments and in Op-Eds to rewrite some or all of the Constitution or renegotiate various aspects of statehood. It should be clear to all that there is far too much partisan distrust to do so. Every change you mentioned would be seen as having a pro-Democrat bias.
The good news is that our biggest political process problem is likely gerrymandering, and both the courts and a bipartisan group of voters seem to be getting involved to limit it.
19
@Mark Conway
Americans don't know much about their country's history. Why would they care about other countries' history, specially if a country speaks a strange language.
21
"But it established a unity out of deep division that could not have been anticipated in 1940.
"Of course that raises the question of whether anything like Gaullism would have been possible without the total French collapse in that dark year..."
And that ( e.g., a war, a depression, an eruption of citizen militias. etc.), I fear, is what will be needed to transcend the ideological divisions and maybe make us focus on the common good again.
Trump's lack of self control, curiosity, and a unifying vision won't lead to any sort of Gaullist awakening on his part. But his gall-ism will continue to wreak havoc if much of the electorate continues to slumber through it.
8
Other than having a vision for a nation that embraces all of its citizens, DeGaulle is not a model for America. He was just shy of being a monarchist. America has plenty of its own models, thank you. If we want to reach back only to WW2 we have FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama as leaders who embraced a big and great and (imperfectly) inclusive American nation. In short, every American President since WW2, other than Nixon and Trump has sought to unite the national around shared ideals rather than dividing it for the benefit of his base.
290
@Mike Marks. I love that first sentence .. it's like saying "other than helping us breathe, lungs are not very attractive or useful"!
42
@Mike Marks Everything Trump does is for Trump. His base is only an easily exploited resource.
10
@spb, read the second sentence.
5
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Government is a force of good and can and should lift us up in times of trouble. Fear not government!
Teddy Roosevelt: Busts the trusts and the monopolies. Protect our natural beauty.
John Kennedy: "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: A brave, intelligent American woman from the Bronx who speaks truth to power and who cares about our planet, the air we breathe and those marginalized by the corrupt practices of the ossified and twisted form of capitalism you, the GOP and powerful interest groups (fossil fuel industry, the gun lobby / NRA, health insurers, the radical religious right and FOX news) cloak in code words about its virtues.
Between, De Gaulle was a centrist who supported tuition free higher education and universal health care. And he would not have invited Victor Orban to the Elysee Palace.
469
I shudder to think of the future prospects of a country where people include AOC in the same post as both Roosevelts and Kennedy. OK, Kennedy maybe, but the Roosevelts are in another’s strata of leadership all together.
9
@Larry Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does have at least one thing in common with Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy. Like AOC, those three past presidents were caricatured as dangerous "radicals" by conservatives in their time. FDR in particular continues to be demonized by the American right-wing to the current day. Conservatives have always portrayed anyone who dares oppose the interests of the wealthy as a threat to the "American way of life." In that sense at least, AOC is in good company.
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@Larry
Well, the Roosevelts and Kennedy were politicians with grand ideas to address pressing issues of their time. Who else are the grand idea politicians to addresses the issues of Climate and Health Care today? Obama took important baby steps.
19
Equality, Liberty and Fraternity meet E Pluribus Unum.
Our unifying rubric accepts all comers, all states, all factions and finds its strength through representation, deliberation and justice. It's abstract yet practical. It's on our currrency.
Any constitutional constructionist will find it embedded in our founding fathers' writings and discussions.
We should try it sometime.
125
@Zeke27 Equality and liberty are contradictory. The genius of France is that nobody notices this fact.
@Zeke27 In God We Trust replaced E Pluribus Unum on our currency a very long time ago, unfortunately.
3
My wife and I just returned from a visit to France, including a pilgrimage to the D-Day beaches and the American cemetery where over 9,000 men rest who gave their lives for the freedom of Europe and of America. In Paris, we saw the statues of De Gaulle and Churchill, one of my personal heroes. (I think there's also a statue of Franklin Roosevelt, who led the New Deal and our effort in WWII from a wheelchair.) I was both proud and humbled to reflect on what these people of the Greatest Generation did to keep our world from becoming Fascist of Communist. Today's generation just sees to have lost that greatness, and we seem to be on a slippery slope to perdition.
If we somehow had a sort of de Gaulle in America today, I fear he would have lost in the GOP primary to Donald Trump. Sort of like Trump badmouthing John McCain, and nobody seemed to care.
11
Thank you, Ross, for bringing up the Dreyfus affair! In France, that was a national trauma. In the U.S., we have one of those every month or so, and that's more than any nation's nervous system can stand. Thanks also for using the word "synecdoche" in a complete sentence. (It's a figure of speech using a part of something to stand for the whole, as with a herd of 100 "head" of cattle.)
4
De Gaulle is unique to France and its politics. No American de Gaulle will emerge because America would not tolerate such a person. America is too consciously divided. America has the burden of race. American politicians take no prisoners. America has the second Amendment. De Gaulle mused about France, "How can one govern a country that produces 400 kinds of cheese?" He created a Fifth Republic from the never ending coalitions of the Fourth and it survives him. Lastly, France has a multi-party system; we have only ins and outs.
141
@Stephen Kurtz You say that America has the burden of race. So does France, having been the colonizer of much of North Africa. But I will say, having grown up in Europe, and spent much time there as an adult, the United States has done the better job. Under the shield of the Revolutionary Constitution, the French have made no efforts to know, or care, about their citizens of African descent. The divide is much greater in France than it is here. And try to find a role model, in business, advertising, or on TV, that isn't white and usually male. We have a long road ahead, regarding race relations, but we have, at least, taken a few steps.
34
@Ambroisine
However, what is surfacing quickly in America is a white Christian European patriarchal colonialist attitude toward race and women.
Trump has escalated this through his immigration policies, attacks on civil rights through the justice department, federal programs in HUD, HHS, Labor, Education, etc. and support for the religious right war on women.
Those steps have been removed - America is becoming white Europe.
19
@Mimi. I absolutely agree with you Mimi. I lived in Europe in 2005-2008, and was so happy to be back in the US, when there was still hope! It's devastating to watch us go backwards at such a rapid clip.
23
"Our political parties are organized around an unfinished revolution and a partial restoration, with the Democrats as the coalition of the glorious 1960s and Republicans as the party of the Reaganite Thermidor or the Bush-Bourbons."
Are the Republicans the party of Reagan and/or the Bushes? Seriously?
That's a narrative that stretches the limits of imagination.
Wake up, the Republicans are Trumpists now.
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@Brendan
Trumpists now and when he abandons them as he will if relected they will be lost and alone in the forest they helped plant and the wolves who inhabit it won't give a howl who they are eating.
32
@Ian MacFarlane Brilliant reply!!!
10
If only this really were a battle between symbols, concepts, and conflicting notions of the American ideal. In fact, what's going on is a rapidly accelerating concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands. America is transitioning from a democratic republic to a criminal oligarchy. The model is Russia, not France or any other relatively enlightened nation. While American intellectuals and pundits keep searching for historical analogies and clever metaphors, the oligarchs and plutocrats, led by Donald Trump, are tightening their grip on our nation's wealth and nodes of power. They couldn't be happier at the ongoing prospect of watching the country's best minds caught up in denial and wishful thinking.
10
@Eric Caine Thank you Eric in Modesto for the most on the mark comment of the day. Surprised it's only had a couple of recommends so far. I've come to believe that America's achilles heel, it's ultimate undoing, is that its true national religion is greed, its worship of money and what comes with it. As we write these words Bolton and Trump are provoking a war in the Persian Gulf, thousands or hundred of thousands will die and be maimed, and for what?
2
But the idea of America is much less tied to ancient tradition and a unified people and culture. France is first a country and a people under whatever regime. America survives only because we are a put-together country of (mostly) emigrants from many such French-like countries who all share in an idea of inclusiveness and toleration of our differences...conversely we fail that test when we do not.
4
Speaking of “deliberate submerging of many important controversies”, let’s not forget May of 1968, when France was shut down by a student movement that only grew as it was brutally repressed, and how CDG resigned less than a year later after his constitutional amendment re jiggering the structure of the Senate failed in referendum. An ignominious end for your great unifier.
2
@Peter Orth
He prevented a civil war over Algeria and ended the student movement which was essentially a Communist uprising. That is worthy of respect to non Marxist French.
@Peter You make three brief assertions, none of which is supported by the historical events, themselves. For the sake of brevity, I'll refer to two of these. (1) The student revolt, known as "Mai '68", was anything but a Communist uprising. In fact, it was disavowed by the French Communist Party, both because the PC didn't know what to make of it, and because the PC knew that it couldn't control it. (2) The student revolt dissipated over time. And, though it was not ended by President de Gaulle, it contributed to ending his political career and tenure in Elysées. In response to "Mai '68", de Gaulle proposed a series of reforms to public institutions, and put it up to vote, in a public referendum. The referendum lost and he resigned, humiliated.
De Gaulle is a paragon of virtue compared with Trump. He may have been a "a nationalist,'' but he was not a morally bankrupt conman who conspired with Germany, France's moral enemy, to steal an election. His values were at least genuine and heartfelt. And he wasn't using the trappings of power to line his own pockets. Douthat is becoming yet another "principled conservative'' who railed about the Clintons' conduct and is now working overtime to normalize Trump: further proof that Trump is not an outlier but a reflection of the moral rot at the center of the entire conservative movement.
28
Mr. Douthat loses credibility when he portrays the divide in US politics as if both sides behave the same way. Has he willfully forgotten the fruitless attempts of President Obama to reach across the aisle, and Mr. McConnell's adamantine rebuffs? Has he lost sight of Merrick Garland's candidacy? Has he lost sight of the angry white Republican Senators who confirmed Judge Kavanaugh? Has he lost sight of the Republicans in Congress who are enabling Mr. Trump? Fine, write a book review, but please get real about politics.
52
"...or as de Gaulle put it, reconciling the left to the state and the right to the nation, the left to authority and the right to democracy.”
Were that all there were to it here and now in America. What about reconciling Black to White and vice-versa? Woman to man? Pro-life to pro-choice? Labor to business? And, of course, humans to their environment?
8
Yes that is the Point. What is an American?
How do you define a nation. What is in it for each citizen and what is the obligations of each citizen? What is the differrence between a Nation and its citizens and an Empire and its subjects?
No party in America has dared/tried to touch these issues since the depression and the second world war.
1
@Martin
The concept of the nation is becoming more impossible with each passing day. It was flawed because it is was like taking a demographic snapshot of each nation at a certain point of time and ignoring the fluidity of their past in terms of ethnic migrations through invasion or natural migration or whatever.
2
Brilliant comparison. But wouldn’t you say the Algerian crisis of the fifties, more than the German conquest of the forties, was the seed bed of de Gaulle’s synthesis?
2
@PL
Spot on. I can’t believe Douthat misses this.
Honestly don’t see how Civil War was avoidable.
1
@Daniel Deagler--The southern states could have agreed to prohibit the continuation of slavery in new territories and states. Lincoln was ok with continuing slavery in states where it already existed, but didn't want it spread into other areas. But, southern states wanted slavery continued in these new states, and Lincoln could not agree to that.That lead the Southern states to secede and the rest is history. The whole war could have been avoided, if the Southern states had been satisfied with keeping slavery contained in their states.
1
@Daniel Deagler
They could have just not fought it. The slavery argument doesn't really hold up, as just about every other nation in the Americas had slavery (the vast majority of slaves from Africa actually went to South American nations like Brazil), but all of them managed to end it without a war. America could have - and would have - done the same.
1
@Daniel Deagler
Well DeGaulle prevented a civil war over Algeria.
France may have had De Gaulle; sadly we have Trump and his collaborators in treason, no matter how much dust Douthat throws in our eyes.
17
Taking a cue from Napoleon Bonaparte, de Gaulle governed from both the left and the right. Napoleon broke down the monarchies of Europe as well as the ghetto walls (Europe's oldest), in Venice, AND, as emperor, wrapped himself in the symbols of kingly authority, including coronation by the Pope (in Notre Dame Cathedral). De Gaulle led the Resistance, from London, not only because he wished to defend France, but because he wished to defend a certain idea of France. As was the case with Napoleon, de Gaulle's idea of the nation was based on shared allegiance to common values and a common destiny, and not on ethnicity, religion or race. Thus, he abhorred the Nazis. De Gaulle, who was from Lille, declared, at the age of twelve, that he was destined to rule France. He was much better out of power, than he was in power, whether in the period immediately after the Second World War, or as the first president of the Fifth Republic, in the late Fifties and across the Sixties. In the first instance, he abandoned Elysées after several months, saying that he could not govern a system of parties. And, in the second, he may just have been too old. He was certainly out of step with the social changes, in the Sixties, that were stirring up French youth. America doesn't, or shouldn't, produce leaders, such as Napoleon, who wrap themselves in the garments of kings, nor de Gaulle, who believed, almost mystically, that he was the knight who could save mistress France.
1
@Joe Goldiamond
I think your bold statement that he was better out of power is laughable. He prevented a civil war over Algeria.
@Peter Actually, not. Charles de Gaulle came to power on the back of a "quasi coup d' état" in the spring, 1958, led by French generals who wished to maintain French Algeria and who had reason to believe that de Gaulle sided with them. Four years later, he pushed through the "Accords of Evian" ending the French presence in Algeria. It can be argued that the apparent change in his position came close to inciting civil war, in France, rather than the reverse, as you state. He remained in power until 1969, and abandoned Elysees after losing a public referendum on reforms concerning the French Senate which he saw as a humiliation and disavowal of his presidency. For more, I would urge you to read "La Société Bloquée" by Michel Crozier" which argues that under de Gaulle those who governed France grew progressively distant from the aspirations of the French people, particularly, the young, who saw his presidency as both irrelevant and ineffectual throughout most of the Sixties.
@Joe Goldiamond
Yes exactly as you say. His whole game was bait and switch with regards to the French army and it succeeded solely because of his prestige. He knew the army needed to beat up on the Algerians in compensation for the humiliations of losing prestige among the colonials from 1940 onwards. DeGaulle essentially said enough is enough. It was a pragmatic decision albeit brutal and a bit cynical but France was never going to hang on to Algeria.
How many divisions did DeGaulle have? None. Puppet of the Allies. That's why he's a footnote in global history. Reduced to a figurehead and difficult till the end. Let's not compare and try to equivocate another culture to our's. Let's focus on our's, please.
3
@Scott Manni
Explain how he was a “puppet” and “a difficult figurehead to the end.” Seems like a contradiction. How many divisions did he have? A few. And they actually did fight in Africa, Italy, Germany, and France.
Well, first you'd have to find a politician who's seeking to break out of the 50-50 political
1
"And it also suggests the importance of a Gaullist question for our would-be leaders: What is your certain idea of America? And how many Americans, and how much of American history, would your idea be able to include?"
Where I'm struggling with this -- isn't this more or less exactly what Obama put forward in the 2008 election and then for most of his presidency? An inclusive vision which reconciles our competing histories in the spirit of coming together.
And what happened? Mitch McConnell and Fox News went no-holds-barred against President Obama from day one, all the way up to the point of refusing to give Merrick Garland so much as a hearing in 2016.
Would that all the next president needs to do is tell a nice story and bring people together, but that only works if both sides of the divide want to be brought together. And what we have in today's Republican Party is a small coterie of power hungry plutocrats, aided by what is now essentially their private propaganda network, manipulating aging cable news viewers and disaffected white males with conspiracies and race-baiting.
The only option is to beat today's GOP badly enough at the ballot box that it's more afraid of the rest of the country than it is of Fox News watchers and right wing trolls. Until that happens, Ross Douthat can keep writing his esoteric columns about Charles De Gaulle, but he'll be missing the real root of the problem.
17
"In our media frenzies we keep generating controversies, from Kavanaugh to Covington, that resemble the Dreyfus Affair, 1890s France’s great scandal — in which every cultural division is somehow distilled into a single debate over guilt and innocence, with a representative figure’s virtue or turpitude as a synecdoche for everything dire our factions each believe about the other."
The resemble the Dreyfus Affair? You do remember the virulent anti-Semitism involved and the negative consequences of the affair for the Jews of France.
Perhaps a different comparison might be better, or is the Dreyfus comparison apt?
3
There is absolutely no comparison between France in the aftermath of WW 2 and the USA today.
France suffered a humiliating defeat to the Prussians in the late 1800s, lost millions of men in WW1 and required a tremendous effort by England and finally a push from the USA to drive the Germans out of France.
The French Socialist government of the late 1930s was feared and hated by the Reactionary Catholics who undermined it at every opportunity.
When Germany finally invaded France, France had more troops, more tanks and more airplanes than the Germans.
But France's military establishment feared the Communists and Socialists in their own government more then the German fascists and gave up without much of a fight.
Enter de Gaulle in 1945 who feared the Communists in France who were the backbone of the Resistance and rushed his Free French troops to Paris to "liberate 'it before the Communists could solidify power.
There is nothing in the history of the USA ,excluding our Civil War, that mimics the trauma and internecine struggles that France endured since the 1800s.
We do not need a de Gaulle who did not meld France into a working democracy. We just need a rational, intelligent, truth telling president that will represent the majority of Americans.
The Trump supporters will never change and as time goes on they will die off and given their fear science, facts and education will become more and more an impotent minority.
4
@Edward B. Blau
Sir this could have come from a PhD in history...well said!
Lincoln as portrayed by George Saunders in his novel Lincoln in the Bardo.
“Yes, our own ideological extremes are less dramatic, and our culture war has been waged mostly without barricades in the D.C. streets, and without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez.”
Just couldn’t resist, could you?
7
My favorite story about de Gaulle occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis through which I lived.
President Kennedy dispatched former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to show the CIA's surveillance photos of the Cuban missiles to de Gaulle.
I don't need to see pictures of the weapons of mass destruction, de Gaulle replied: "The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."
Oh, my friends, how the world has changed relative to the respect afforded by our allies to the current occupant of the White House.
And, you can call us globalists if you want, his white nationalist supporters, but friendship is important and without trust, there can be no friendship.
21
The reason we no longer mention DeGaulle in the same breath as Churchill and FDR and Eisenhower is because DeGaulle turned out to be a wannabe dictator.
3
@Benjo
Wrong. Ridiculous actually. Please explain how a dictator governs as a president in a democracy and then resigns.
"without (as yet) a New York Commune under the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez. "
In a column about finding a way to national unity, that snark is both uncalled for and unhelpful.
59
DeGaulle came to Canada in the sixties during high frictions between the French and English speaking provinces.
`Vive la France!' was his hail to the secessionist Quebecers.
Odd how DeGaulle's nationalism was used to try and De-Nationalize another country
3
@Gordon MacDowell
Good point in the paradox of nationalism.
DeGaulle actually was more intrusive in 1967 and said 'vive la Quebec libre' , a direct offense to a nation that ha d fought and died for France two decades earlier. That one act caps his place in history to mediocrity.
3
@Rick Williams
Perfect - thank you.
Dreyfus was innocent. He was a scapegoat, wrongly accused. How does his persecution have any parallels to Kavanaugh? And in Covington Kentucky (presumably your other supposed analog to Dreyfus?), someone really did kill other people.
1
I'm really curious as to how Mr. Douthat thinks the American Civil War was "unavoidable". There was that pesky issue of human slavery.
1
A statesman? I'd settle for one that doesn't appear to be a crook.
6
Perhaps the writer should learn more about de Gaulle and he would be less enthusiastic about wanting an American version of him. I would not.
1
We have had this figure. His name was Eisenhower. I read plenty about the need for a Democrat to be this centralizing figure that can take the general election in 2020 but I would like to see a Republican have the guts to challenge Trumpism and also come to the center. I would like to see a Republican channel Eisenhower and be able to work with the extreme right but also not be bullied by it. The extreme right isn't going away but it does not have to run the country.
4
@Anthony As a faculty brat, I listened to Ike make a campaign speech at Carleton College, in 1952. During his administration, the highest tax bracket paid around 92%, and any high school graduate could earn enough in a summer job to pay winter's tuition at a state university. What did he have in common with Carter, Truman, Lincoln and Washington? Childhood on a farm, with the attendant responsibilities, followed by service in uniform.
9
@Anthony. Eisenhower was bullied by the extreme right in Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee, supported by Richard Nixon and Roy Cohn.
A rather long winded, almost tortuous, way to get to the crucial questions at the end. I am not as sure that De Gaulle actually mended the divisions in France. Look at what has been going on there for the last few years.
Rather than a charismatic leader how about one who is honest, diligent, open to science and new ideas, and leads by example? Oh, we had one recently. His name was Obama. But he was crucified by the right because he was not White, like them.
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@richard-
“Long-winded, almost torturous ...”. Both those — and unfocused, actually. Going in, I thought he was reviewing a book. I couldn’t follow what he was getting at until well past the mid-point.
For what it’s worth, I doubt that many of De Gaulle’s contemporaries saw him that way. FDR, for one, sincerely wished him dead.
Post WW-1 3rd Republic France and Weimar Republic Germany make for an interesting comparative study of Night of The Living Dead political cultures. One interesting historical “what-if?” is what might have emerged had Hitler adhered to Plan Fall Gelb, a rerun of the von Schlieffen Plan that failed to knock out France in 1914. That failure produced the 1915-1918 Western Front stalemate that pretty much defined the rest of the 20th Century in Europe. Given its glaring flaws it’s quite likely that it would have failed in late 1939, for the same reasons. After a series of accidents made Gelb impossible to launch Hitler was persuaded to abandon it and adopt von Manstein’s “Sichelschnitt” Plan whose success in May 1940 made Hitlerian Germany the most powerful European land power until 1943.
But had that not happened, had Fall Gelb been attempted and failed resulting in another bloody stalemate, Gen. de Gaulle would be remembered as just another General of Division like Pierre Koenig, if remembered at all.
1
De Gaulle is in many ways the most extraordinary of the big four figures on the allied side in WW 2. The story of how he parlayed nothing (he was under sentence of death by the Vichy regime with whom the US maintained diplomatic relations) into leadership of France in 1944 and saved it from civil war, and then did an encore in the 50's and 60's when the others had disappeared from the scene is almost miraculous. He doesn't figure largely in US historiography because the Americans didn't like him and were still trying to remove him as late as August 1944. The feeling was entirely mutual. His WW 1 career was also notable. He was wounded three times, reported killed at Verdun but turned up as prisoner of war in Germany. He escaped five times but was recaptured every time basically because he was 6' 4" tall. After his return to power in 1958 he was the subject of 32 assassination attempts. At the two closest he displayed massive sang froid.
I do not see any de Gaulle's on the US horizon at present.
15
He spent his WWII years from the comfort of London.
1
@Mark
As did Churchill, Eisenhower, Brooke . ..
During the liberation of Paris he strode through the streets under sniper fire, that didn't let up in the interior of Notre Dame.
3
@Mark I spent WWII in London, and it was not comfortable.
3
Of course, electing a statesman with a vision as leader of the Country is what all thinking persons years for even if their idea of what that vision might be often differs.
Such leaders are not always available and in the meantime, wouldn't it be great if all Political Parties would make an effort to nominate candidates who don't have mental health issues, who are law abiding and well informed (like in "not ignorant"), have a certain respect for truth and science and have had a reasonably successful personal and professional life?
55
it’s possible for a very unusual sort of politician to effectively reinvent tradition, synthesize from conflict, and persuade many millions of people to go along with it.
True that. de Gaulle came to Quebec supposedly to visit Expo 67 in Montreal, and was requested to leave Canada less than two two days later for proclaiming from the balcony of our Hotel de Ville - Vivre le Quebec libre! - (long live free Quebec!) - a little speech that turned a handful a separatists few took seriously into the leaders of a mass movement that very nearly succeeded in tearing our country apart.
20
as usual, a bit too much overthinking and reaching for straws.
"But his particular style of nationalism, his extreme devotion to a “certain idea of France,” ... dont suppose this impression of de Gaulle was at all influenced by the two invasions of France by German forces. To give credit, compared to many of his fellow senior military officers de Gaulle did not capitulate and continued the fight for France.
I dont think we need to pretend that in current political circumstances in America there is a de Gaulle (or for that matter a Churchill as one politician has fancied himself) that is needed in order to "save us" from ourselves.
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Given the utter venality, unremitting bad faith, and (increasingly) the outright fascism of today's American right, I think these are issues progressives must wrestle with especially urgently.
We need to see our goal as building a sustainable majority for a more humane society that gives *everyone* a fair chance. That can't be done without narratives about both our history and our future that say: we *can* make this country a better place. We *can* build something new that is grounded in what was truly aspirational about us, not just what was vicious and genocidal.
We used to have such narratives. They conveniently elided crucial facts we can no longer ignore. We desperately need new narratives that recognize those facts without simply saying that America's future will forever be determined by its original sins. If our future is foreordained, then only Trump has a believable story, and only the Trumps (and Richard Spencers) of this country will ultimately win.
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Very interesting and thought provoking. I hope that we can find a more encompassing national narrative as you urge.
However, I am disheartened by your causal and less than empathetic "shot" at a current politician/fellow citizen:
"the rule of First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez"
Surely that kind of small mindedness is not going to help build the understanding and intellectual respect America needs to build a more inclusive future.
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@john.jamotta
Douthat also shows his small-mindedness and petty partisanship by comparing the Dreyfus affair, an infamous travesty of justice fueled by anti-Semitism, to credible accusations of sexual assault. He willfully ignores the vast amount of right-wing media frenzies and fearmongering that would provide examples of his supposed point to take a cheap potshot at that darned evil librul media. He's not interested in unifying the country, just in having his brand of conservatism win out.
(I actually thought the first citizen joke was kinda funny though.)
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@john.jamotta
Just in case you might have forgotten, Ross is a dyed in the wool Republican. He may not love Trump, but he will take any opportunity to throw a little shade on a Democrat.
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@john.jamotta
Maybe if we are lucky First Citizen Ocasio-Cortez will establish her commune on a certain persons leafy tree lined street in New Haven.
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If you are interested in historical analogies (and notice that in Ross's whitewashed narrative, the bloody war in Algeria becomes the betrayal of the colonists, not the slaughter of the colonized), then the Republicans are the party of Charles X, the ultra-reactionaries who tried to resuscitate dead institutions and medieval superstitions, such as the royal touch (cures scrofula!) and reimposed the death penalty for sacrilege.
Of course, when Charles's party got hammered in the election of 1830, he retaliated by trying to consolidate absolute powers. This policy didn't work so well. It led to the july Revolution.
So, maybe there's hope.
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No, no, no. The whole idea of America is that it isn't embodied in a "statesman" at all. Douthat, as a super Roman Catholic is wedded to the idea that, like the RC Church, institutions must be embodied by people, e.g. the Pope, the College of Cardinals,Bishops, Priests, etc and a detailed doctrine that people swear allegiance too. America is the experiment to see whether a country can exist when the only central idea for the country is that persons should have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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@Horace
And the ability to govern themselves.
DeGaulle's patriotic mysticism could not and should not be the animating principle behind a renewed American patriotism. But a numer of points well made. A great deal of anti-historical historical critique of American history is conducted by both the Right and the Left.
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A great book and Degaulle speech of June 1940 is the most underrated event of WW2. It took a long time to read (800 pages) but I learned a lot that I did not know and all of our readers and pundits should read more. Thanks for the column, no need to look for modern analogies
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@arthur
Would you care to divulge more about said June 1940 speech during World War II?
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@Benjamin J. Matwey
He’s referring to the BBC radio broadcast of DeGaulle’s condemnation of the French armistice and his call to arms under the “Free French.”
America, like France, is almost more an idea than a country. The centrifugal forces unleashed by clashes between the Founders' original conception of liberty as principally protected by the states powers, and the post-Civil War reality of liberty as protected by the federal power is virtually unknown and unimportant to average Americans.
The idea of armed rebellion against an oppressive central government remains as attractive here as it does in France. Fortunately, state governments and French departments quickly become as odious as the central government, so keeping the people shadow-boxing with alternating levels of power seems to provide some measure of flexibility and stability.
I doubt any candidate will ever say that, much less endorse it.
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There was a chance to define America as a nation of citizens that cared about each other in the late 1960s. The war in Viet Nam was tearing our country apart as thousands of students idealistic anti-war college students took to the street and thousands of their working class cohorts were drafted to fight the war.
WHAT IF instead of replacing the draft with an all volunteer army the President and Congress agreed to replace the draft with two years of voluntary service to be completed by all citizens before the age of 25. Those who wanted to serve in the armed forces could do so at a time that suited them and those who wanted to defer their service obligation until after college and/or graduate school could wait. This would have appealed to the idealism of the anti-war group by engaging them in the War on Poverty while allowing those who wanted to serve in the military to do so without feeling like they were alone in their commitment to making our country a better place.
By the way... we could institute this kind of universal service today and address the infrastructure upgrades we need while providing meaningful full-time jobs with benefits to millions of millennials. In doing so, we might provide a way for people across our country to get to know each other and become the UNITED States of America.
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@WFGersen
Trouble is, opposition to constraint—save when sprung from vital necessity, as with the draft—runs deep in the American grain. Unless survival itself is at stake, a government of the people can’t impress the people into involuntary servitude.
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@WFGersen Excellent suggestion. My two years of Peace Corps service in India (1968-70) opened me to the world and taught me that we're all in "this" together, regardless of color, religion, tribe, whatever...
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@WFGersen interesting point, did you know they had mandatory military service in France but got rid of it? It ended up being the poor or poorly connected who went and many who had the means and the werewithal figuring out ways to avoid it. No surprises there!
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First, you'd have to find a politician seeking to break out of the 50-50 politics of our day before you could hand him a copy of the de Gaulle biography. Since, the majority of both parties bases want it that way, (congrats Back Street Boys, it's the 20th anniversary of your opus) that politician would be pretty hard to find.
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