Boomer fantasies of world peace die in Ukraine | Will Bunch Newsletter

I’m suspending the intro’s usual lame jokes out of respect for the rapidly deteriorating situation in Eastern Europe — and for a special event this week that I want to tell you about. The Inquirer’s intrepid foreign affairs columnist, Trudy Rubin, just returned from a whirlwind trip through Kyiv, Ukraine’s northern border with Russia, and neighboring Lithuania, and she still has a lot to say. Moderated by our deputy editor Erica Palan, Trudy will be online Friday at 11 a.m. for a very special Inquirer LIVE: Worldview event. You can, and should, sign up here. (And speaking of events, don’t miss my note below about the Will Bunch Culture Club, a new event series you can participate in, where we can talk about books, podcasts, and more!)

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If you grew up on the East Coast during the 1960s and ‘70s and went to a decent public school like I did, then you probably remember your class field trip to the United Nations headquarters, that boxy, towering monument to a better, more stable world constructed on the banks of the East River in Manhattan. The show of sharp-dressed diplomats, translated from the world’s polyglot of tongues, was meant to reassure my large generation of boomers that whatever we’d heard about the nightmares of World War II, the people of Earth had finally learned our lesson. Indeed, as my generational cohort starts applying for Medicare, there has been no “world war” since 1945, despite many awful, smaller-scale conflicts.

We’ve spent most of our lives in a dream world, watching our chance for a lasting world peace slowly slip away.

I’m writing this at daybreak on a Tuesday morning in February 2022, as convoys of Russian troops and armored vehicles roll into two Ukrainian provinces that the dictator in Moscow, Vladimir Putin — and pretty much no one else on the planet — claims as independent and clamoring for this incursion of troops from their Eastern neighbor. They call it the fog of war for a reason. No one believes Putin’s ridiculous Orwellian language that these armed men are “peacekeepers,” but also no one knows if these convoys are “the invasion” of Ukraine that’s been feared for weeks, or the tame preview of something far worse. No one knows yet if bombs will rain down on the 2.8 million innocent civilians of the capital city of Kyiv, like a modern rendering of Picasso’s horrific “Guernica.” All we know is that it wasn’t supposed to be this way.

I’m not going to go deep here on analyzing the more minute geopolitics of what led Russia to this flashpoint of aggression against its flawed democratic neighbor, or what’s inside the warped kleptocratic mind of Putin; for that, I’d steer you towards smarter folks like my Inquirer colleague Trudy Rubin. But I do think its time to look more deeply into something that I do write about frequently here, which is the failing state of democracy — both in the freedom to vote but also the broader sense of an economy that works for everyone — and how that makes global war inevitable, once in the 1930s and seemingly again today.

“For the post-war baby boomers of America and the world, how we let this happen is the question of a lifetime.”

The generation after the collapse of Hitler and Mussolini and Japanese imperialism — the world I was born into — marked a push for democracy that managed to be both very real and hypocritical at the same time. The rise of the United Nations and the end of naked colonialism was accompanied by some sense of the wider systems that could make a true democracy possible, including universal education and shared prosperity for a wide middle class (powered by unions, something we’ve spent decades unlearning, and marred by racism in its unequal application.) Of course, that post-war idealism struggled against the hardness of realpolitik — the same kids who visited the UN also learned to “duck-and-cover” amid fears a Cold War would turn nuclear — while liberal education made it easier for college students to see the rank hypocrisy of the Vietnam War.

Despite all of that, there was still a moment when everything could have turned, after communism collapsed in 1989 and revelers partied atop the Berlin Wall as an artist named Jesus Jones sang, “Right here, right now, there is no other place I’d rather be.” In the 1990s, the promise of a so-called “peace dividend” seemed to guarantee that most of the world would continue to prefer democracy and the more worker-friendly forms of capitalism. So what went so wrong?

America could have led the pursuit of an actual kinder, gentler world, but we were already too far gone in abandoning the public good for the winner-take-all mythology of a fake meritocracy that produced the unequal world of neoliberalism. Here, a military-industrial complex pushed for the U.S. to dominate the global stage just like a handful of billionaire plutocrats dominated the economy. The move to reject the shared prosperity of a peace dividend instead invented new enemies from Panama to Iraq, where an oil-soaked invasion under absurdly false pretenses has made it so much harder to call out Putin or China’s Xi Jinping today when they copy our lethal playbook.

Our policy failures in Russia are particularly instructive. The fall of the USSR seemed to hold the promise for a true democracy in the land of Stalin and the czars, and the United States pledged to help make that happen. Instead, we sent our overpaid, focus-group-driven consultants to prop up a bumbling Boris Yeltsin and help Russia build an economy modeled a little too well after our own corrupt kleptocracy.

The only thing less surprising than a 21st-century czar like Putin promising the common people to make Russia great again is that the resentful, formerly middle-class Americans of “Flyover Country” would launch our own Putin in Donald Trump. But the strongmen who promise that “I alone can fix it” — as opposed to the harder work of a society that works for everyone — must inevitably turn to every dictator’s last, Hail Mary pass for greatness: Starting a war.

Today we watch President Biden — surely the last POTUS born during World War II — trying desperately to rebuild both the global alliances and the fundamental idealism of what feels like a bygone era. It may be too little, too late for Ukraine, or for worse conflicts to come. We’ve had 77 long years since the last world war to build the kind of planet where that could never happen again, and it looks like we blew it. For the post-war baby boomers of America and the world, how we let this happen is the question of a lifetime.

Brace yourself for the most exciting news since we launched this newsletter nearly two years ago. The thing that I love about you, the subscribers of the newsletter — and there are now well over 10,000 of you, thank you very much — is that we are a community of shared interests around politics, history, and culture. That’s why my editors and I decided to launch a new feature here: the Will Bunch Culture Club.

A few times a year, I hope we can bond over a cultural event — a new book, or maybe a podcast, or a documentary — that captures the zeitgeist of the things we like around here. The idea is to then all get together after several weeks — enough time to read the book or listen to the podcast or watch the documentary — to talk about it. We’ll start virtually but maybe one day we’ll actually get to do this in person!

I’m thrilled to announce we’re going to start with the fantastic, acclaimed new book Watergate: A New History by Garrett M. Graff.

Graff is both a political fanatic and a great storyteller. Some of you may have read his oral history of 9/11, The Only Plane in the Sky — and he was right to think that the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in which occurred on June 17, 1972, is the perfect time to revisit the most famous political scandal in American history. If you’re a boomer like me and watched the downfall of Richard Nixon unfold through the eyes of a young person, Graff will help you see some things in a new light, like the role of journalists Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and their “Deep Throat” source — the FBI’s Mark Felt. If you’re like most folks and weren’t around in the 1970s, Graff’s tome will show you what all the fuss was about, and why today’s scandals — like Jan. 6 — are still viewed through a Watergate prism.

Watergate: A New History is out now — at your local independent bookseller, at the usual suspects like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, at the library, as an audiobook on Audible and in the Kindle format. Please check it out, and then sign up to join Garrett and me as we talk about Watergate and writing the book, and as he answers your questions, during a live virtual event. It’s happening on March 30 — that’s a Wednesday — at 4:15 p.m. (stay tuned for the sign-up link), but you can email me with your thoughts at any time, or tweet them to me @Will_Bunch. And after the event, I’ll publish some of your thoughts and reviews in the newsletter, and we’ll start planning the next one!

Question: What would DJT have done? Remember first impeachment was over military aid to Ukraine to help against a potential Russian invasion. — Via @JawnsRaw on Twitter

Answer: I’ve been wondering the same thing myself. Despite his longtime man-crush on Vladimir Putin, President Trump would have faced a lot of pressures from the Mike Pompeo-types in his orbit to offer at least token verbal resistance to the idea of Russia waltzing into Ukraine. That said, Trump’s years of hostility toward NATO make it impossible to imagine he’d match the yeoman’s work of President Biden in building an anti-Putin alliance. I think the more salient question might be how the American presidency affects Putin. The dictator’s ultimate goal is to weaken democracy — in Ukraine, and in the United States. Here, the former KGB agent knows that meant propping up the divisive Trump, while trying to make a real small-d democrat like Biden look weak. Would Putin had bothered with Ukraine if DJT had actually won in 2020? We’ll never know.

It’s the kind of story that, in a simpler time, might have led the national newscasts. In a major western city, a crowd gathers around a public square to protest police brutality on a Saturday night. A 43-year-old man comes out of his house, tells a gaggle of mostly women who were there to provide security and crowd control for the march that he’s sick and tired of political protests, and — after a few words are exchanged — the man pulls out a gun and starts firing. When the smoke clears, a woman named June Knightly lay dead, five others are wounded, and the gunman — a machinist named Ben Smith — is also down, struck by a bullet from someone at the protest who fired back. Maybe it’s because of the wall-to-wall Ukraine coverage, or because this happened in Portland, Oregon, where two years of frequent political violence has made folks numb, but it’s shocking how little attention has been paid to a mass shooting with such raw political overtones.

Is America on the brink of a civil war? If so, this is what that might look like. Reports in both the mainstream media and from activists who track the political far-right suggest that Smith had been radicalized against Portland’s frequent leftist protests and also railed against the city’s homeless population. One tracker said Smith’s social-media postings showed a particular fondness for the right-wing provocateur Andy Ngo, whose breathless reports from Portland and other left-wing protests are sometimes debunked. The mass shooting speaks to America’s growing radicalization, but also raises more questions about the role of Portland police in escalating their city’s tensions rather than calming them. It’s beyond ironic that on the same night that marchers were protesting police violence, cops shot and killed a Portland man in a completely separate incident. Preventing Civil War II is going to be a lot harder if the police can’t get their own house in order.