Not long before he died, President Franklin Roosevelt, in his Proclamation 2524—Bill of Rights Day memorializing the fifteenth day of December, 1941, speculated, "Those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them. They come in time to take these rights for granted and to assume their protection is assured. We, however, who have seen these privileges lost in other continents and other countries can now appreciate their meaning to those people who enjoyed them once and now no longer can. We understand in some measure what their loss can mean. And by that realization we have come to a clearer conception of their worth to us, and to a stronger and more unalterable determination that here in our land they shall not be lost or weakened or curtailed.”
Roosevelt was often prescient and this was another example of that. As the last WWII veterans die away, so has the memory of their sacrifice and why that sacrifice was worth the lives of 407,316 U.S. military service members and 5,662 to 11,287 U.S. merchant mariners. The war was against fascism and the very likely possibility that it would succeed in Europe and Asia and infect North America. We are a long way down that path today and many Americans have no idea how those rights and privileges were won and how fragile they are.
A few years ago, after being surprised at the differences between a 1940s and a 2008 North Dakota map, I took a 3,000 mile North Dakota Ghost Town tour. On my way back from Alaska in 2007, I’d stopped for a couple of days and nights in Bismarck, ND. At that time, the state museum would, today, qualify as “pro-socialist” or even “communist,” by MAGA’s perverted fascist standards. The 1930’s political posters and newspaper articles would make today’s Democratic Socialists look downright conservative. After years of relatively non-partisan governors, North Dakota’s constant population decline and brain-drain brought Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple and a collection of regressive state legislative Republicans into power and the next time I visited Bismarck, in 2014, the state museum had been scrubbed of all that anti-corporate anti-banker “propaganda.” Newspeak at it’s finest and Orwell wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
What I saw on that 1940’s state map was the outcome of the 1930s Dust Bowl and the Great Depression that resulted in a long-term decline causing more than 1,000 former settlements and towns across North Dakota to turn into ghost towns or plowed fields which were also soon abandoned to become unused plains. The Great Depression began before the 1929 crash in North Dakota. Drought and declining markets and increased farm-to-market railroad expenses forced farmers to empty their savings from local banks and take on loans from large Minneapolis banks. Unable to pay back the loans or even the interest, the farmers lost their land, the towns and villages lost their banks (99 North Dakota banks went out of business in 1923) and businesses, and all of those places shriveled into the history I saw on that 1940’s map. By 1933, 573 North Dakota banks had closed and with them went a good bit of the state’s residents and the places where they once lived.
Like the lessons Americans learned, the hard way, about fascism, the economic lessons learned in the Great Depression didn’t keep us from following exactly the same path in 2007-11. And it isn’t keeping us from doing it again with Trump and the MAGA cult. This time we might follow the entire 1930’s German route, too. The combination of massive national debt, an entire political party committed to authoritarianism and fascism, a captured servile national media, a substantial portion of the voting public who will take careful aim at their own feet and empty all chambers into themselves, and a federal government that has been purged of every competent law enforcement official and national security expert. To me, that sounds like certain doom and such a long road back to stability that I can’t imagine Americans having the integrity, patience, competence, or even ability to take the trip.
I keep hearing people say “we’ve been down this road before and we came back.” That, of course, is only partially true, but as investment counselors remind us, there is a good reason why “past performance is not a guarantee of future results" is a mandatory legal disclaimer required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under SEC Rule 156 for mutual fund and investment marketing materials. Likewise, just because we survived the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Great Depression and WWII, there is no good reason to hold much faith that we’ll survive a fascist major political party and an illiterate, uneducated public determined to destroy the country and everything accomplished so far. `
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