(Originally posted at Greater Democracy)

I am sitting at a beach house out on Cape Cod. Half the family has gone out whale watching and the other half is still sleeping. We spent much of yesterday at the beach, playing in the sand and the waves. It seems like a perfect setting for reading E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat. It is a collection of essays that White wrote while living on a saltwater farm in Maine during World War II.

In the foreword, his stepson, Roger Angell writes, “Who amongst us can be certain that when another time as vivid and dangerous sweeps us up we will find an E. B. White somewhere to talk to us in these quiet and compelling tones?” While I may be a long way from being an E. B. White in what seems to me to be another vivid and dangerous time, I do strive for his tone.

This morning, I read White reflecting on the war coverage of Hendrick van Loon. White writes, “I have liked his reports on the day’s events because he has made them seem like part of a whole, not like an isolated moment in time.” It has seemed to me that much of the coverage of 9/11, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Iraq, and this year’s presidential election has been ‘breaking news’, isolated in this post turn of the millennium moment.

It is understandable how this can be. I remember the afternoon of 9/11. Living in commuting distance of New York City, I did not yet know which of my friends and former colleagues died in the attack. At my daughters’ school, the children had not been told what had happened. This was left to the parents. My ex wife came over and all of us sat in the living room and talked about what happened. The children were eight and eleven years old at the time and didn’t have a context to place this in.

I likened the event to when John Kennedy was shot, when Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the moon, to Nixon’s resignation, or the assassination of John Lennon, events that people will ask in years to come, particular of people my daughters’ age, “Where were you when 9/11 happened?” They will tell their stories of being in school, of not knowing what had happened till they came home. They will tell stories of a teacher who had a best friend that died in the World Trade Centers.

9/11 was an isolated moment in time, but it is also part of a whole, and that whole feeds into Afghanistan, Iraq, and the presidential election.

In the essay that I read yesterday on the beach, White criticizes Anne Lindbergh’s book, The Wave of the Future. I have not read The Wave of the Future, and it was only through reading the book that stirs vague memories of hearing about the book. Lindbergh wrote about fascism in a positive light. Today, almost all of us look back at fascism as a horror. We remember the thugs in brown shirts and the concentration camps. We use the word fascism in hyperbole to attack our political opponents. Yet we would do well to look at what led Germans, and even some Americans to support fascism.

White writes, “Mrs. Lindbergh pines for the days of her father when, she said, a person could discuss differences of opinion intelligently and dispassionately without being branded ‘prop’ or ‘anti’; and I believe in that sort of discussion too and so cannot understand her pleading in the next breath that we do not resist the forces that are pledge to destroy parliaments and senates and congresses and newspapers and courts and universities.”

I hear many people pining for intelligent and dispassionate discussion today as well, and while some people suggest that if the other political party wins the White House or Congress we will see destruction of courts or the media or the American family, it does seem a bit polemic in the context of World War II.

As White delves deeper into the subject, he writes, “The force that Hitler employs is the force generated by people who have stood all the hardship they intend to, and are exploding through the nearest valve, and it is an ancient force, and so is the use of it by opportunists in bullet-proof vests. … The forces are always the same – on the people’s side frustration, disaffection; on the leader’s side control of hysteria, perversion of information, abandonment of principle. There is nothing new in it and nothing good in it, and today when it is developed to a political nicety and supported by a formidable military machine the best thing to do is to defeat it as promptly as possible and in all humility.”

Today, Americans are frustrated and disaffected by a terrorist attack on our own soil compounded by continued fears of a reoccurrence. They are frustrated and disaffected by the faltering of the economy and it is worth questioning of some of our leaders have opportunistically been controlling hysteria, perverting information, and abandoning principle.

Yet I think the real meat of White’s essay comes even later on. White writes, “I think democracy … holds everything hopeful there is because ‘demos’ means people and that’s what I am for, and whatever Nazi means, it doesn’t mean people, it means ‘the pure-bred people’, which is a contemptible idea to build a new order on.”

He expands on this by observing that the motivation behind common people supporting the Nazi party were “people fed up not with a ruling class but with hard times and were surrendering their individual liberty on the promise that they would themselves become a ruling class and a ruling country.”

I remember years ago in college, arguing with a well meaning and good friend of mine. He believed in socialism and that the world would be better off if the rich would simply give up much of their riches. I posed the question of how one would get rich people to give up their riches, and he didn’t have an answer.

It seems as if mankind will always struggle with that. Whether we are talking about German’s surrendering their individual liberty on the promise that they would themselves become rich and powerful, or we are talking today about people voting for a party that panders to the wealthy with a promise that if you help out the wealthy, maybe some of the wealth will trickle down and make the average man wealthier, it seems a long way from Kennedy’s, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you….:’