What is one to think as one watches the clown show in the White House, the train wreck in Congress, and the multi-vehicle accident that is conservatism today? We’re inclined (as we so often are) simply to quote Winston Churchill, in this case speaking in 1931 about Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald:
“I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as ‘The Boneless Wonder.’ My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.”
Today’s spectacle in Washington, D.C., is surely as revolting and demoralizing. And the contortions of the boneless wonders of the Republican party and the conservative movement have been especially depressing.
But let us avert our gaze from such matters. Let us take advantage of the release of the movie Dunkirk to elevate our vision from what is to what could be.
The deliverance at Dunkirk, remember, came not long after the disgrace of Munich. The Munich agreement was the culmination of what had been a decade of drift and appeasement. In February 1933, the Oxford Union had carried by 275 votes to 153 the motion “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” Less than six years later, partly as a consequence of the dominance of the view endorsed by the Oxford students, Great Britain and its allies had, as Churchill put in the House of Commons on October 5, 1938, “sustained a total and unmitigated defeat,” while deceiving themselves that it was a diplomatic achievement.
Churchill continued: “We have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road.” And then: “The terrible words have for the time being been pronounced against the Western democracies: ‘Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.’ ”
And finally: “Do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
Munich was a grim moment, the nadir of what W. H. Auden would famously call “a low dishonest decade.” But less than two years after Munich came Dunkirk—described by Churchill to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, as “a miracle of deliverance, achieved by valour, by perseverance, by perfect discipline, by faultless service, by resource, by skill, by unconquerable fidelity.”
So the crowds who had cheered Munich became the generation that achieved Dunkirk. It was what Churchill had hoped for against hope—an amazing “recovery of moral health and martial vigour” by the people of Great Britain.
Are we conservatives, we Republicans, we Americans not capable, in our very different and far less challenging circumstances, of such a recovery?
