(Turning Points Appear To Be Reversible, But They Aren’t)

Part A

As the news cycle heats up, hysterical pronouncements abound, and people try and make sense of how Donald Trump could have won the election, it is becoming clear that the U.S. may be experiencing a historical turning point.

While this might seem obvious to some, others seem to think that if we can just dispose of Donald Trump somehow, things will return to the way things were before. A true historical turning point though isn’t just that things change or that a historical event has happened, it is something (or a series of somethings) that occur that completely change a country, a region (or the world) to such an extent that what things were like before is totally different from what things are like after. True historical turning points are not one-off events like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. While those might change a way thinking that eventually lead to different policies than would otherwise be the case, they don’t fundamentally change everything.

An example of a true historical turning point would be the start of WWI. Yes, it was started by an assassination, but the magnitude of the change that this would lead to was not understood at the time. When WWI started, people assumed that it would be a relatively short, quick affair that would be over, and then things would largely return to how they had been before. But after 4 years, the entire map of Europe was different and many countries had entirely different governing structures than what they had only a few years earlier. Roughly 75 years after the start of WWI, Eastern Europe would again experience a historical turning point with the collapse of Communism. The governing AND economic systems that existed in these countries during and after the communist period so totally different as to be unrecognizable from each other. People were truly living in a completely different country from what they had been just a few years earlier.

An for the U.S., of an historical turning point would be the Great Depression + WWII. With the expansion of government and a Supreme Court that allowed the government to enter into areas of American life that it had not been before, the country was, over time, fundamentally changed in a way that what went before was completely different from what went after.

The thing about historical turning points is that they seem, initially at the time, to be temporary and/or reversible changes when in fact they are not. The WWI generation thought that the war would be temporary and that things would return to their ‘normal’ path. They had no idea that an aristocratic system that had held sway in many countries, in some cases for hundreds of years, was to be swept away forever. It was just viewed as “let’s just get through this insanity as quickly as possible, and then return to our lives”.

In the case of the changes to American governing assumption wrought by the New Deal and WWII, Republicans in the 1930’s thought that they would be able to overturn them when their turn in power came. The problem was that never really came for 40 years, at which time the changes were an indelible part of the American government structure, rendering talk of “small government” laughable. So ingrained were they that the first non-war hero Republican President (Richard Nixon) actually expanded upon them. In other words, Republicans had accepted to a large extent the governing assumptions of their opponents.

In 1990, some hardliners in the Soviet Union thought that they could launch a coup, replace the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, and restore the Soviet Union to what it had been. Their plan, it seemed, was to grab control of the government, close the borders, and basically reverse with the stroke of a pen what Gorbachev had done over the prior 5 years. It seemed so simple, but it wasn’t. The Soviet people were no longer cowed by their government, and the troops were no longer willing to take directives from a few jokers who nobody had ever heard of. People and troops went out into the streets and brought the coup to an end. Basically, the historical turning point had been reached passed, but some had not yet recognized this fact.

The reason that these changes seem to be reversible is that those trying to reverse things back to some earlier point don’t seem to appreciate the deeper social forces that are creating the visible change that they are trying to reverse. In the case of the Great Depression, small government conservatives didn’t seem to understand that the economy wasn’t working for a lot people and that people, in some cases, were starving. Talking about Constitutional restrictions on the power of the federal government don’t mean much to people who are feeling economic anxiety regarding where their next meal is coming from. All they see is that one group of people is attempting to help them and another group is attempting to stop the first group. Furthermore, when the second group’s President (Herbert Hoover, a Republican) appears to be the one that caused the mess, it is hardly surprising that Democrats had a lock on the White House (with the exception of a singular, centrist war hero in Dwight Eisenhower) for nearly 40 years. By the time Republicans were electable nationally again, they were comfortable adding to the size of government and the historical transformation was complete.

Another example of this is the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. In 1989, the Communist governments in Eastern Europe simply weren’t working for large swaths of the population. Because of the tight media control that those regimes had, the West (and the rulers themselves) didn’t really understand how bad things were for ordinary people. On the outside, the regimes looked stable and strong enough to last 100 years. Then, suddenly it seemed, people lost their fear of the government and began to go and protest in the street. And within a very short time, regimes that looked to be set for the ages were gone. While this process was going on, some people thought that they could stop or reverse it, but they couldn’t. The factors driving the process was irreversible.

(In the next installment, we will look more specifically at the historical turning point that we are now living through).