Imagine this:<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the middle of June, 1940. Germany has just conquered all of Europe. The British have just withdrawn their army from the continent, in a miraculous evacuation that was the only redeeming note in a catastrophic defeat.\ufffc\ufffc<\/p>\n
The army had left virtually all of its equipment – just about everything heavier than a rifle – in France; it would pretty much have to be re-equipped from scratch. \ufffc\ufffcThe Royal Navy had been badly bloodied. The Royal Air Force, likewise, leaving itself under strength to face the German Air Force in the upcoming campaign to try to bomb the UK either to the negotiating table or into a state ready to be invaded. \ufffcGerman U-boats were ravaging the merchant shipping on which Britain depended for not only all of its industrial raw materials and oil, but virtually all of its food.\ufffc\ufffc\ufffc<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Winston Churchill went on the radio and gave a speech after the last of the British Expeditionary Force arrived home.<\/p>\n
What speech did he give?<\/p>\n
He could\u2019ve given a realistic speech – pointing out the sobering facts of the situation, and readying the British people for what was likely going to be at best a disheartening and economy-gutting armistice that left them sitting alone on their island, and at worst complete conquest in the face of an invasion that would certainly follow,\ufffc if the Navy and Air Force failed.\ufffc\ufffc<\/p>\n
But no.<\/p>\n
Churchill gave\ufffc a speech that was, if all you cared about was the facts on the ground, utterly unrealistic;\ufffc he told Britain, and the world, that the United Kingdom would fight to the last inch of ground, and if Britain fell the Commonwealth would carry on the fight forever, until Europe was free again.<\/p>\n
It was a little like that poster of a mouse holding up a middle finger at a diving eagle; \u201cthe last great act of defiance\u201c was the caption.<\/p>\n
And it was one of the greatest bits oratory in the history of the English language.<\/p>\n
And it was completely unrealistic.<\/p>\n
But it was leadership.\ufffc<\/p>\n
In 1987, Ronald Reagan had already proved<\/strong> he was the best president of my adult lifetime. His leadership had brought America back from the worst case of emotional depression it had ever suffered, and from an economic downturn every bit as nasty as 2008, but much more short-lived. And after running for office on a stridently anti-Communist message, he had\ufffc already sent the message that Soviet expansionism was off the agenda, and made it stick.\ufffc<\/p>\n He was scheduled to give a speech at the Brandenburg Gate – the very symbol of divided Germany, and the high watermark of communism in the west.\ufffc\ufffc. It was a time when most political and academic \u201cexperts\u201c in the west expected the Soviet union – the \u201csecond world\u201c \u2013 was here to stay; well five years later everyone said the USSR was eventually going to collapse, nobody that anybody was paying attention to was saying it in 1987. They had the worlds largest military, the worlds largest nuclear arsenal, and they controlled a good chunk of Europe and Asia.\ufffc\ufffc<\/p>\n Reagan\u2019s advisers urged him to take a moderate, conciliatory tone\ufffc toward the east Germans, the Soviets, their new (or at least newish) leader Mikhail Gorbachev, \ufffcand the wall he was standing in front of.<\/p>\n To give\ufffc a \u201crealistic\u201d speech.<\/p>\n \ufffc instead, he gave a speech that electrified the resistance in Eastern Europe, that galvanized support for democracy among the downtrodden, and did its part, along with much of the rest of Reagan\u2019s policy, in the downfall of the Soviet union that had a thousand fathers by 1995, but was very nearly an orphan before Ronald Reagan was elected.\ufffc<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t \u201crealistic\u201c to the conventional wisdom of the day. It was leadership.\ufffc<\/p>\n Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill<\/strong>, and he\u2019s no Ronald Reagan.<\/p>\n This week, he said that he wants America to be \u201cback to work\u201c by the Easter weekend.<\/p>\n Is this realistic? Maybe not. The experts say it\u2019s unlikely. The legions of not very funny late night comics and \ufffcblue-checked droogs say the idea itself is risible.\ufffc\ufffc. And the whole business of declaring America open or closed is mostly the responsibility of the state governments, and the free market itself. I, myself, plan on working from home (although I am working, knock wood).\ufffc<\/p>\n But America is a restless, endlessly creative, impatient nation, overstocked with people who are not going to sit on their hands and wait for things to get better; it\u2019s a nation full of people who are descended from people who came from all over the world, uprooting everything they knew,\ufffc to make things better.<\/p>\n Trump could have echoed the words of the scientists and experts gathered around him. He could\u2019ve lectured the nation like a hectoring schoolmarm, or like Barack Obama. But he\u2019s got a stage full of experts, including his vice president, and more importantly 50 state governors, already doing exactly that.<\/p>\n Trump urging America to \u201cgo back to work\u201c Easter weekend is not the Dunkirk speech, and it\u2019s not the Brandenburg gate speech.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not eloquent, and it\u2019s not going to go down in history.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s leadership.\ufffc.<\/p>\n The economy runs as much on psychology as it does on money, analysis and marketing. It’s trends depend as much on how people are feeling as objective fact. Don’t believe it? Have you checked the toilet paper aisle lately?<\/p>\n The nation’s psyche needs a boost. Trump is setting a tone; the United States is not going to be on sick leave forever. He\u2019s telling a nation with cabin fever that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. When? Maybe Easter, maybe memorial day, but it\u2019s coming.<\/p>\n It was brilliant. It wasn\u2019t scientific. It may not of even been all that well advised.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s what America wants to think, and wants to hear. We\u2019re not stupid, we\u2019ll hash out the details later.\ufffc\ufffc\ufffc\ufffc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine this: It\u2019s the middle of June, 1940. Germany has just conquered all of Europe. The British have just withdrawn their army from the continent, in a miraculous evacuation that was the only redeeming note in a catastrophic defeat.\ufffc\ufffc The army had left virtually all of its equipment – just about everything heavier than a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,416,297,301,367],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-covid19","category-favorites-culture","category-favorites-history","category-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73671"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73672,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73671\/revisions\/73672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}