Echoes

“Those who do not study History are doomed to repeat it” is an oft quoted cliché, to which an also oft quoted response is “History does not repeat herself; she speaks in rhymes.”  And what we create are her echoes.  So a fascinating echo of the Cold War is that on August 1, 2013 Russia granted temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, almost exactly 50 years to the day, July 30, 1963, that the Soviet Union announced it had granted asylum to Kim Philby, the leader of the “Cambridge Five” defectors from British Intelligence.  Snowden is no Philby, truly a major defector whose impact was so great that he shook Cold War relations for years and later became the model for John le Carre’s arch mole Bill Hayden.  Putin appears to have fond memories of Philby and to be seeking a repeat of the brilliant Soviet coup of the Cold War.  Instead, he is providing more a fading echo, a weary rhyme that serves mainly to remind us that repeating the past is indeed usually doomed to failure.  He will now have to figure out how “l’affaire Snowden” will comport with the Syrian crisis and the many other hot topics that Russia and the U.S. must work together on.  Nostalgia exacts a high price.

It is also a major impediment to effective planning for the future.  De Gaulle, knowing how enormously the tank and the airplane had changed the technology of warfare, famously warned the French generals during the 1920’s not to repeat the trench mentality of WWI with the Maginot Line; they did not listen.  And an article, years ago, in the Harvard Business Review on how better to organize long range planning started out by warning that if you had previously completed a good planning effort, the leaders of that effort should be prohibited from participating in the new effort being organized.  They would be prone to repeat their successful strategies from the past, which would likely be inappropriate to the new needs.  Now technologists of the Republican party are attempting to echo Obama’s technical internet success to revive their party, not recognizing the Obama success was based as much on the content of his message as on how it was conveyed.

The newspapers are full this morning of the Republican Party’s struggles to repeat history back to the 19^th century.  The big item at the moment is Ted Cruz’s idea to shut down government in a 41^st, or is it only 40^th or perhaps 42^nd, attempt to destroy ObamaCare by defunding it as the price for letting all government continue.  He believes Gingrich’s 1993 shutdown, which everyone else including Gingrich admits to have been a disaster, was actually a repeatable success.  Beyond that Rand Paul seeks to restore the splendid, in his mind, isolationism of the 19^th century, so unfortunately destroyed by Teddy Roosevelt and his successors.  Eisenhower and Reagan are forgotten.  20^th and 21^st centuries, be gone; I’ll have none of ye.  Beyond that, though, they are skipping past Lincoln, the founder of their successes, by their efforts to curtail the Voting Rights Act, all the way to the 1840’s and the death throes of the Whig Party.   They seem determined to echo the entire 19^th century.

Part of their problem is that they do not go back far enough.  The Whigs of the early 19^th century were one of the great American success stories, and their success was founded on their championship of westward expansion and the development of a trans-American infrastructure.  Their champion, Henry Clay, had as a major life goal a continental America created with an infrastructure of roads, canals and railroads enabling its unification.  By the mid-19^th century Whigs had evolved to a coalition of northern bankers and southern planters unable to keep up with the times and Jackson Democrats.  Sound familiar?  It is interesting that after the Whigs’ demise, Abe Lincoln, leader of the new Republican Party that replaced the Whigs as the dominant force in American politics, honored and shared Clay’s vision of an American infrastructure.  Even during the Civil War, he sponsored the transcontinental railroads, explicitly to unite the continent.

Part of the difficulty of learning from the past is choosing the right echoes.  The Republicans could benefit from Clay’s championship of an American infrastructure, or Lincoln’s championship of a unifying transcontinental railroad, or Eisenhower’s sponsorship of the interstate highway system.  They could champion the new American industrial age with robotics, green technologies, job creation at home  and the like.  That is a message that might revive them.  And championing American enterprise is a subject that should come naturally to them.  Instead they present themselves as a coalition of financiers and southern conservatives interested not in American success but in their own personal advantage, and the only echo they seem to hear is a death rattle.