Loss, defeat, revanchism, herrenvolk democracy: These things happen. They have happened, historically. I have always been moved by what happened to the French during World War II, the “strange defeat” that the great historian Marc Bloch wrote about after his country’s proud republican army folded like a soggy crepe in the face of the Germans. The book came out in 1946, when the war was over and Bloch himself had long since been tortured and assassinated by the Gestapo for his participation in the French Resistance and for being a smarty-pants Jew.
As Bloch tells it, and as you get from books like Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française (Ukrainian Jewish, killed by the Nazis in 1942), there was just this sense of utter disorientation, of disbelief. How could it happen? And so fast? And so utterly? Who are we—and who are they, these enemies of ours who could overcome us and then treat us so ruthlessly? Are we still human? Are they?
It happens, it has happened. When Reconstruction, after the Civil War, let people see just for a moment what a real democracy might look like, with mass voting (at least for men) and a small cadre of Black political leaders gaining seats, it turned so quickly into “Redemption,” like a sudden explosion in the lab when the final teaspoon of chemical is poured in. Or, more accurate, when the relentless force on the other side finally pushed or putsched its way into the voting booth, the state constitutional convention, and the Supreme Court.
Our Black and white forebears woke up, too, the morning after the Wilmington Massacre or Plessy v. Ferguson, disoriented, aching, seeping from a wound they couldn’t remember someone having delivered. This was possible all along? Our adversaries, those who lost a little in our immeasurable gain, they held the country’s promises so cheap? And were willing to toss it all over, the red-white-and-blue thing, the Declaration and the Bill of Rights thing and the mass democracy thing, to hang onto all the chips instead of leaving a few on the table for someone else?