Strange Victory
By Yglesias says what needs to be said about Andrew Sullivan’s meditation on Marc Bloch:
But on top of that, though there clearly is a sense in which current American politics is very polarized, there’s another sense in which our levels of polarization are almost trivial compared to 1930s France. We don’t have a substantial revolutionary Communist movement here in the United States, nor a monarchist movement, nor do we have an officer’s corps that’s generally skeptical of civilian command and republican governance. Indeed, even compared to the United States of forty years ago when you had a lot of votes going to George Wallace on a white supremacist platform and substantial intellectual support for the idea of convergence between the Soviet and American economic models, our politics is conducted across a pretty narrow ideological spectrum.
Quite right. Interwar France was notable for having substantial minorities on both the left and the right that openly denounced the idea of liberal democracy. The United States lacks anything like that on either side. I’d add (and Yglesias mentions this as well), that France’s “strange defeat” was far more dependent on how the military situation developed in May and June of 1940 than on deep divisions within the French body-politic. In spite of considerable political division in 1914 (the Dreyfus Affair was recent memory), France managed to rally and hold the Germans, if at a cost of 1.3 million soldiers. Conversely, Prussian operational military success in 1871 led to political collapse in Paris. The determining factor for French resistance or political collapse in all cases was, I think, the military situation at the time. To bring this back to the US case, I’ll heartily agree with Sullivan’s correspondant that, as soon as Al Qaeda armored divisions occupy Washington D.C., we’ll need to seriously worry about the collapse of the US government.
On the other hand, I would say that the interwar political divisions in France helped determine the character of French surrender and of the Vichy regime. The defeat brought to power a coalition of practical collaborators and rightists, the latter of whom envisioned a fascist transformation of French society. This made the Vichy regime particularly foul, and limited the degree to which the French armed forces and the colonies would cooperate with the Allies. Even then, however, positive developments in the military situation helped empower the Resistance and undercut Vichy.