by Anne Applebaum
Our bookshelves are full of works describing the events leading up to disasters. Books like The Origins of the Second World War or The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 win prizes and become enduring classics. They also influence political thinking: Invariably, the fatal mistakes of the past become lessons for the present. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, for example, Europeans were arguing about whether the situation most resembled 1914, 1938, or some other date. The “lessons” to be drawn were different, depending on which precedent was selected.
By definition, it is far more difficult to study disasters that have been avoided, let alone to draw lessons from them. Wars and social upheavals that have not taken place do not figure prominently in history books, and the interventions that stopped them do not receive the attention that they should. But this collection is an argument for thinking about precisely that: the plans and reforms that mitigated catastrophe before it happened.
We are today witnessing the spread of a whole host of old and familiar American pathologies, some of them in new forms: nativism and white supremacism; extremism on both the far left and the far right; the spread of conspiracy theories; the entrenching of corruption; the disappearance of jobs; the widening of inequality; the growth of a complex physical- and mental-health crisis created by opioids, food insecurity, and limited health care. In the spring of 2020, all of these things combined to create the perfect storm: an unprecedented medical and economic crisis, sparked by a new virus but made worse by the authoritarian culture built inside the White House. In May and June, outrage over the police killing in Minneapolis of a black man named George Floyd led to protests, riots, and a blizzard of disinformation from extremists of all kinds and brought the nation to a halt. The president’s inappropriate use of military force in Washington, D.C., as well as his tweets calling for violence, inflamed the situation. For a long time, we have watched a deepening of political divisions, a phenomenon that we now call “polarization,” but which is nothing new, in our country or any other. Our Civil War has imprinted on all of us the memory of how irreconcilable political divisions can lead to debilitating mass violence. Bad decisions and bad leadership at this crucial moment could lead us in that direction once again.
But there have also been moments, in our history and in the history of other nations, when intelligent leadership healed equally profound divisions without resorting to violence. Not enough time these days is spent thinking about the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, for example. Although his face is carved into the rock of Mount Rushmore, the memory of the first Roosevelt presidency has somewhat faded into clichés involving eyeglasses, jodhpurs, and big sticks. But Roosevelt—a vice president who took over after the shocking assassination of President William McKinley, becoming the 26th president and the youngest one in American history—deserves more attention for the role he played in anticipating, and seeking to prevent, a social crisis. His presidency occurred in the long shadow of the panic of 1893, at a moment when the nation had technically recovered. Although growth had returned, the economic and political fallout had already inspired a “populist” political movement, a loss of trust in institutions, a deep urban-rural divide, and even acts by violent anarchists, such as the man who killed McKinley.
Roosevelt, a Republican, was himself a beneficiary of the Gilded Age, and possessed many of the prejudices of his time and his class. Nevertheless, he understood both that many Americans perceived their society to be fundamentally unfair, and that his job was to fix it. Writing in The Atlantic as early as 1891, he took on corruption in government and made the case for a professionalized civil service: “We have to do constant battle with that spirit of mean and vicious cynicism which so many men, respectable enough in their private life, assume as their attitude in public affairs.”
Roosevelt was not “anti-capitalist,” to use modern terminology, and he was by no means a “socialist.” But he did denounce the “unfair money-getting” that had created “a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” In office, he did not arrest this class or destroy their companies, as his Russian counterparts would do a couple of decades later, but he did regulate them. He broke up their monopolies and changed some of the rules so that the economy would “work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service,” in his words. Recognizing how fundamental American natural resources are to American national identity, he also took the first steps in the direction of what we would now call environmentalism.
Once again, we are living in the long aftermath of a crash, at a moment of deep distrust in the government and at a time when a new and frighteningly powerful set of monopolies—Google, Facebook, and Amazon—have rapidly reshaped both economics and politics. This is not to suggest that there are exact analogies, let alone a recipe we can follow, cutting and pasting early 20th-century remedies onto the problems of the 21st century. To overcome our current crisis, we should focus not on the specific policies that Roosevelt used, but rather on his instincts—his beliefs, for example, that the American economy has to work for all Americans; that natural resources are finite; that the state exists to create fair rules, and not to favor particular groups or industries; that Americans can still be unified by their mutual faith in the language of our Constitution. Or his understanding that the economy operates according to a set of rules that can be changed: “The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.” He also understood that violent change was dangerous: “I am not advocating anything revolutionary. I am advocating action to prevent anything very revolutionary.”
At other times and in other places, a similar set of attitudes and instincts helped prevent other countries from sliding into crisis. The reforms of the Victorian era in Great Britain, for example, not only increased economic protection for people whose lives had been disrupted by the Industrial Revolution, they extended the political franchise to them as well, allowing Britain to democratize as well as modernize. The Meiji Restoration in Japan, inspired by the realization that Western technology had leapt far ahead of Japanese technology, modernized Japanese politics and economics, too. In response to the outside challenge, Japanese reformers adopted and adapted elements of Western culture, including mass education and scientific research, to Japanese circumstances. They prepared the nation to think differently about a changed world. This was not an easy or obvious choice: The Ottoman empire, in contrast, reacted to its discovery of Western technological superiority in precisely the opposite manner, by limiting its citizens’ contacts with the West.
All of these strategies, in the U.S., Great Britain, and Japan, were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. But evolutionary does not mean insignificant. These reform programs were deep and profound. They altered the nature of the national elite, changed the class structure, reshaped the business community, upended property structures, rewrote the rules of commerce, reformed education and the arts, and brought new people and new ideas into mainstream politics.
Many were also centralizing, removing power from older elites, from aristocrats or industrialists, and transferring it to the state. The Meiji Restoration reduced the influence of the samurai, for example; the American antitrust laws reduced the power of Standard Oil. The same is even more true of FDR’s New Deal, of course, which brought enormous new powers to the government. By contrast, the successful national-reform programs of the 21st century may not be centralizing at all—quite the opposite, perhaps. But again, it is the spirit of these 19th- and 20th-century movements, their comprehensiveness and their ambition, not their specific policy prescriptions, that we should look to as an example.
Their optimism should be a model for us, too. For decades, the majority of Americans have lived in a warm cocoon of self-congratulatory self-confidence, convinced that ours was the best of all possible systems, that we had not only the most freedom but the greatest wealth, the strongest army, the most positive influence around the world. In some ways, this was a useful illusion—it helped us expand opportunities, encouraged us in many positive and generous actions—but it also blinded us to many of our own flaws. The 2016 election and the multiple disasters of the Trump presidency have led many to draw the opposite conclusion: We are a failed democracy, even a failed state.
But our own history, and the history of other states, offers a path between bravado and despair. We can have faith in ourselves, and in our values, without magical thinking. Our self-confidence can be tempered by realism. Theodore Roosevelt himself once described optimism as a “good characteristic,” but warned that “if carried to an excess, it becomes foolishness.” We have found this middle ground before, between optimism and foolishness. We have found the ability to make deep changes without destroying those elements of our system that are useful and good. And if we did it once, we can do it again.