Radio Free New Hampshire: A Good Crisis

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

It’s attributed to him, and he never actually said it, but it would suit Winston Churchill anyway – “never let a good crisis go to waste.” When things fall apart, it’s tempting to patch them together again and return to the status quo. But at best, that gives you the same situation that led to your crisis to begin with. That means another crisis will be waiting. Better to deal with the roots of your problems and start fresh accordingly.

Donald Trump’s presidency has broken so many standards that it may take decades to sort through the wreckage and decide what to keep and what to toss. At his worst, which is sadly too often, he has done grave damage. He has decimated our nation’s support for science; he has weaponized our criminal justice system; he has weakened our international alliances; the list goes on. Yet at his best, he has challenged stale orthodoxies and called their partisans to account; at his best he has given us a roadmap for necessary change.

Perhaps it was time to tell our universities to quit coddling haters. Perhaps it was time to strip the veil from our nation’s immigration conundrum. Perhaps it was time for NATO’s members to assume more responsibility for themselves; and perhaps it was even time to shake off the palsied hand of the United Nations and its lackeys when it comes to dealing with malefactors like Iran and Venezuela.

The present administration’s signal failure hasn’t been its insistence on change. It has been its unwillingness or inability to rally support for structural instead of ad hoc change in venerable systems that have, in truth, been found so wanting, for so long.

Imagine if our war with Iran (a large country ruled by an evil clique whose sole desire is to live in peace so it can kill as many Jews as possible) had begun with the support of not just our allies in the Gulf but also our allies in Europe. Imagine if our war with Iran had benefited from the imprimatur of China. Imagine, in other words, if our war with Iran were not our war – if it instead belonged to every single nation that would benefit from removing this malefactor from the world stage.

It would not have been easy. Success would have taken years and events would most likely have overtaken the effort itself. Given that Iran could not be allowed to go nuclear, America would have needed to act sooner or later. But the effort alone would have been valuable. The effort alone would have changed everyone’s actions.

If Trump were a true leader, he would be leading that charge. His failure to do so is tragic. But it is never too late to do the next right thing. We can do that with every day’s decisions. Our world needs new alliances, new codes of conduct, new understandings of war and peace that take into account the rise of non-state actors with asymmetric power profiles, who can’t be challenged in conventional ways, who only take advantage of rules written for conflicts involving the likes of France and Belgium. Suicide cults are hard to correct. Yet no new voices are calling for new codes of law. The silence is deafening.

Now move from the international to the domestic. Consider how corrupt our recent presidencies have been when it came to the pardon power, when it came to nepotism, when it came to cultural bullying. Consider the media horizon today. Consider the rise of AI. As Karl Marx warned us, when capitalism runs at full sprint, all that is solid melts into air.

This is therefore a column about Kamala Harris appearing in New York City the other day, glibly suggesting that she is ready to run for president again (I guess her listening tour of American cities is over). She said she learned the job by being there for four years. I don’t know where she was, because those four years led to Donald Trump.

Every generation has its own challenges to meet. Our world rarely benefits from neglect. This generation must mend not only our domestic politics but also many aspects of our global order. We have no choice because existing structures are broken. The Republicans have internalized the idea that progress is possible. If they can find even one individual who can see the Trump presidency’s actual value and yoke it to the hard labor of building new institutions, then the future will rightly be theirs. As for the Democrats, they still need to learn the basics: how to take advantage of a good crisis.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.