It will be very hard to explain to future generations why, in the democratic West, there was still so much debate—as late as 2024—as to Vladimir Putin's motives in Eastern Europe. For more than a decade, we've watched him hive off little pieces of all his neighbors, one by one, under a variety of pretexts. Then, fulfilling everyone's direst and seemingly most hyperbolic predictions, he one day up and invaded one of them outright. If anyone was still protesting in January 2022 that Putin had no ambitions beyond settling a variety of ambiguous territorial disputes at his borders, one would have thought that the events of the next month would have shut them up. But no... the same people are still at it; still making the same case!
The equivalent here with regard to domestic politics would be January 6. Before that fateful day in 2021, people might have said, "Oh, Trump will probably accept the results of the election. All these liberals saying he wants to be a dictator are overstating the case. They are engaged in typical partisan exaggeration." And these voices would have had precedent on their side. After all, all the previous presidents, no matter how bombastic or demagogic, had accepted the results of the democratic process. They might have huffed and puffed, but they stepped aside in the end. So people were entitled to predict that Trump would do the same. Yet, January 6 should have settled that debate once and for all.
And yet—it didn't. Just as Putin's invasion of Ukraine didn't silence the people saying Putin was still a man of peace; Putin was still just responding to the aggressive posturing of NATO; Putin was just trying to guard his country's rightful interests in Eastern Europe; and so on and so forth. One would think, when people show their hand so openly—when they step forward and say: "hi, I am in fact a would-be dictator" or "hi, I am in fact an aggressive megalomaniac trying to restore the Russian Empire," that the silver lining would be that at least everyone can now agree on the facts of the situation. But no—Trump and Putin alike still have their apologists—no matter how blatant their behavior becomes.
The situation is described perfectly in Max Frisch's 1958 play The Firebugs, which I read this weekend (in the Bullock translation). The play—which was apparently written in direct response to Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, but which was intended to serve as well as a parable about the appeasement that enabled the rise of the Nazis—depicts a respectable bourgeois citizen named Biedermann who is asked to shelter a group of men in his attic. Biedermann's city has recently been plagued by a series of arson attacks. And, when the men in the attic start stockpiling drums of explosive and measuring lengths of rope for a detonation fuse, all the signs point to the fact that they are indeed the arsonists responsible.
Yet, no matter how obvious the warning signs become, Biedermann still refuses to believe that the men in his attic could be planning anything so criminal. When the men talk openly about purchasing combustible material, Biedermann passes it off as a joke. "Haha, good one," he says, in so many words. When they start asking Biedermann himself to help them measure the length of the detonation fuse, he still insists they must be kidding him. Eventually, the men just tell him flat-out that they are arsonists. But even this elicits no real response. The firebugs conclude that, in order to "hoodwink" people, oftentimes the best strategy is simply "to tell the plain, unvarnished truth. Oddly enough. No one believes it."
This seems to be where we're at today with regard to the enemies of democracy, both at home and abroad. Increasingly, these enemies are telling us openly what they plan to do. Trump says: "I will be a dictator on day one." J.D. Vance says: Our administration will defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop us, and thereby cause a constitutional crisis and undermine the rule of law. And no one thinks for a moment to take them at their word. Putin invades another country, and no one thinks that maybe he has aggressive territorial ambitions. Xi Jinping says he plans to take over Taiwan one of these days. And yet, Trump is out there signaling the United States would not lift a finger to protect the island if he did.
The arsonists are telling us point-blank who they are. But no one believes them. People pass it off as a joke. "Oh, you liberals," they say, "you always take Trump so literally. Can't you see he's kidding?" They are like Biedermann holding the rope for the fuse. "Haha, you're fortunate I have such a good sense of humor," they say. Maybe, in some frames of mind, they acknowledge to themselves that Putin and Xi have pretty obvious pronounced ambitions to conquer and subdue some of their weaker neighbors. But then, they say, what is to be gained from antagonizing them? They echo Biedermann again: "If I report those two to the police, then I know I will make enemies of them. What’s the good of that?"
Of course, some people enable the Trumps and the Putins and the Xis of the world because they genuinely want to see them prevail. The far-right AfD party that won some disturbing gains this week in a state election in Germany is openly committed to cutting off military aid to Ukraine and aligning Germany's foreign policy with Putin. Politico ran a similarly troubling article yesterday as well about the inroads into the U.S. Republican Party that are being made by think tanks aligned with Hungary's right-wing neo-authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán. Trump has of course pledged his devotion to Orbán on multiple occasions. And both men in turn are more-or-less openly aligned with Putin's aggressive agenda.
Firebugs of a feather flock together, I guess. These men are not so much Biedermanns trying to appease Putin as they are his co-conspirators. They are all in the attic together, stockpiling oil drums. But many of the rest of us are in the position of Biedermann. We can see pretty clearly what they are doing. They have announced their intentions plainly enough. But still, we don't want to believe them. Acknowledging the risk of Putin invading a NATO country or Xi invading Taiwan is to accept the possibility that things could radically change. It is admitting an uncomfortable truth. Better, surely, to bury our heads in the sand and hope it goes away. Better to assume, as we always do, that somehow everything will work out for the best.
As Edna St. Vincent Millay once wrote, in a critique of American political complacency that rings very true today:
All will be well, we say, it is a bit, like the rising of the sun,
For our country to prosper; who can prevail against us?
No one.
The house has a roof; but the boards of its floor are
rotting, and hall upon hall
The moles have built their palace beneath us, we have
not far to fall.
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