Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a new series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
Democracies are vulnerable political systems. Democratic governments have frequently given way to authoritarian regimes, and most people have always lived in societies that deny the equality of human rights and the value of public participation in governing institutions.
The breakdown of democracy is thus a common event in human history, but the American narrative of democratic progress has helped us look away from this reality and assume optimistically that the long arc of history bends toward justice and democracy.
The Fragility of Democracy
Although historical optimism can sustain determined action in dangerous times, historical realism confirms that the arc of democratic societies has often bent toward authoritarian strongmen.
The ancient Athenian democracy gave way to the empire of Alexander the Great; the ancient Roman Republic’s senate-based government gave way to the Caesars of the Roman Empire; the first and second French Republics gave way to the authoritarian regimes of Napoleon Bonaparte and his nephew Napoleon III; and the struggle to establish a multiracial democracy after the American Civil War gave way in North Carolina to an authoritarian Jim Crow system that denied African Americans the rights to vote, hold public offices, or attend integrated public schools.
The most famous 20th-century examples of this historical pattern emerged in the authoritarian societies of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Communist Russia, but democratic institutions and human rights have often disappeared whenever the fear of social instability, economic changes, and governmental incompetence could be used to justify the power of autocratic leaders—from Napoleonic France to contemporary Russia, Venezuela, Hungary, and Hong Kong.
Yet, authoritarian attacks on democratic institutions or traditions also generate new affirmations of democratic ideals among critics who staunchly oppose strongman regimes. It’s reassuring to note, for example, how the 19th-century writer Victor Hugo condemned Louis Napoleon’s overthrow of France’s democratically elected republican government in 1851 and how Hugo’s writings endured long after the autocratic Napoleon III vanished from the world.
Mocking this nephew of the famous Napoleon Bonaparte as a simple-minded “Napoleon the Little,” Hugo angrily described the “moral injury” that this petty “emperor” had brought to his nation. He treated “the people of France like a conquered country,” Hugo complained, because he inflicted “moral degradation” as well as “political degradation” on France’s long-developing government institutions. “When one has fixed one’s eyes too long on… this spectacle, even the strongest minds are attacked with vertigo.”
Hugo therefore refused to surrender his own values or literary work to this “strangler” of French liberty. He chose instead to convey (from exile) his own vision of the enduring French struggle for democratic rights in his great novel Les Misérables (1862); and he later returned to a hero’s welcome in the French republic that reemerged after the collapse of Napoleon’s anti-democratic ideology and regime.
Hugo’s famous story of a struggle for freedom and equality still resonates with readers and theater audiences across the world, but who now celebrates “Napoleon the Little” or his narcissistic desire for unquestioning admiration from his obsequious French followers?
Authoritarian political movements and strongmen flourish in unsettled times because they promise to restore a past that never really existed or to create a future that can never be constructed. Liberal democracies, by contrast, evolve slowly and with constant setbacks, in part because they cannot promise simple restorations or revolutionary changes.
History and the Winding Journey of Democracy
Teachers and defenders of public education drift toward despair in dangerous times, because the careful cultivation of critical thinking or historical knowledge cannot easily dispel the fears, social experiences, and propaganda that justify demagogic leaders and anti-democratic ideologies.
The paralysis of despair has thus challenged pro-democracy movements in every past era and modern society, as you may understand from your own experiences and conversations. Almost 75% of the voters in Orange County, for example, supported the losing presidential candidate in the recent election that gave many despairing North Carolinians new fears for the future of American democracy.
The citizens in democratic cultures must accept the outcomes of free elections, but it’s equally important to reaffirm that democratic societies must always recognize a “loyal opposition” that remains active within democratic institutions and insists on adhering to democratic processes. Authoritarian-minded leaders and political parties want to weaken or dismantle democratic checks and balances as they consolidate their own power, but their actions also provoke new forms of resolute political and cultural resistance.
When post-Civil War white supremacists regained control of North Carolina in the early 1900s, they systematically denied equal citizenship rights to African Americans, Native Americans, and poor white people throughout the state. But the pro-democracy movement never disappeared, and community-based political groups pushed back in long struggles to establish equal voting rights, equal access to education, and equal entry into all public institutions before, during, and after the pivotal 1960s.
Attempts to turn back the democratizing achievements of that era continue in the North Carolina legislature’s gerrymandered dominance of state government and in the one-party control of state courts, but the opposition to anti-democratic policies will continue. More Hugo-like activists will emerge, and fact-based education will remain a bulwark against authoritarian threats to vulnerable democratic traditions.
Our generation has reached another inflection point in American history. We all have fears, no matter where we stand in the political conflicts of these polarized times. Historical accounts of the people in earlier generations who defended democratic ideas, voting rights, and public education therefore offer empowering encouragement for educators, citizens, and voters who want to engage with (and move beyond) the challenges of current reactions and transitions.
The democracy-enhancing work of education and civic action never ends, even when the paralyzing temptation to withdraw from public debates and institutions becomes most intense.
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. He has recently published “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
Past Rhymes With Present Times: Democracies, Memory and Public Action Chapelboro.com.
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