WestWords: What a Cold Civil War Feels Like

A War

An American soldier escorts prisoners in the rain during World War II. From Bill Mauldin, Up Front (1945) p. 21.

Years ago a friend sent me a list of aphorisms from World War II that she, in turn, had received from her father. I haven't been able to find the list in quite a while, but a number of the entries keep coming back to me when I'm facing certain situations.

The one I've been thinking about recently goes like this: "When both sides think they're losing, that's when you know you're fully engaged."

Right now, many friends of democracy are quite worried about the future. I'm one of them. But I also know that this is what it feels like when you're in the middle of a fight.

I was taught in school that the turning points in World War II were in 1942 - the battle of El Alamein in Egypt, the battle of Midway in the Pacific, and the battle of Stalingrad in the Soviet Union, which began in 1942 and lasted into 1943.

However, if you look at 1943, it seems that people were feeling much as we are today - tired and anxious.

And they had good reason. The Allied march up the boot of Italy was excruciating and frequently stalled by German tactical brilliance and Allied command mistakes.

The crucial battle of the Atlantic - German U-boats v. Allied supply convoys - had its turning point in the middle of 1943, but, as with the events of 1942, this was not clear at the time, and the Germans continued to fight with great skill and determination. In fact, despite enormous casualties, discipline held in the German armed forces until a few weeks before the surrender in 1945.

I could go through the parallel history in the Pacific, but I'll spare you. Oh, well. Let me just mention Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. And I'll airlift us over China-Burma-India. Stop, Bill.

As we look back on all this, there is a warm glow of historical inevitability. It's misleading. First, yes, we had turning points as early as 1942, but the war wasn't over until it was over. Remember the Battle of the Bulge. Second, people were very uncertain of the future, and morale was not excellent always and everywhere.

What did happen, during the course of the war, was that people just kept showing up and doing their jobs. And in the end they got the job done.

What will our turning points be? I don't know. I'd nominate Charlottesville in 2017 as an early one. I think the idea that we were dealing with fascism, rather than Republicanism, reached a large audience only at that point. The November 2020 election and the January 6 sack of the Capitol may prove to be other turning points.

It's worth noting that the fascists lost all three of these battles.

The forces of sanity have been fighting a cold civil war, leaving violence to the Trumpies, who fortunately aren't very good at it. Our asymmetrical response involves reform throughout the government and the society, and prosecution of people who have committed criminal acts.

The big difference between a cold war and a shooting war is the amount of shooting. Death from violence has so far been very rare in our current struggle, although the coronavirus pandemic, which has been going along in parallel with the war for the last two years, has certainly produced a lot of fatalities.

Another reason to feel tired and anxious.

Interestingly, Donald Trump, when faced with a pandemic, made the same mistake that Woodrow Wilson made during World War I, when the great influenza epidemic broke out in 1918. Trump and Wilson both chose to concentrate on the prosecution of the war they were fighting. In Trump's case, of course, he was fighting mainly on Twitter, but in both cases, the death toll in the pandemic was certainly higher because of the failure to take sensible public health measures.

A lot of people are concerned about the slow march of justice. I am one of them. The January 6 committee has been doing very encouraging work, but there is a long path from here to actual indictments based on the committee's findings.

I am a bit surprised that nobody has yet indicted the Former Guy. What's going on in Georgia? What's going on in New York?

But I think there are positive signs. Every once in a while, I check in on a fellow Pennsylvanian, Riley June Williams, who may or may not have stolen Nancy Pelosi's laptop. One of the small fry, certainly. But we need to be thorough in our follow-up to January 6. I had doubted the staying power of the Justice Department in dealing with such a mass act of criminality, but now I do see encouraging signs that most of the small-fry perpetrators will have to answer for their crimes.

I hadn't checked up on Riley Williams in a while. I did late last year, in December. It turned out that, in October, news had arrived that she had been indicted on a laundry list of charges. Apparently the prosecutors got tired of negotiations for a plea deal that weren't going anywhere. The charges include theft of government property and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers.

However slowly, the wheels of justice are turning. In other words, democracy is alive, if not necessarily very healthy.