I’m as surprised as anyone else that the American establishment has been so quick to bend the knee to Donald Trump. Before Election Day, we saw Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Mitt Romney, and others flinch from endorsing his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris. Now that Trump is president and laying waste to republican government, rule of law, and the stock market, we’re witnessing a nauseating capitulation by the law firm Paul, Weiss, Columbia University, Big Pharma, Goldman Sachs, and, arguably, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (though I lean toward Matt Yglesias’s contrary view that shutting down the government is an ineffective strategy against a chief executive already bent on shutting down the government).
It’s shocking to see people you previously thought ran the country reveal themselves to be such cowards. But that’s only because we aren’t used to seeing leaders put to the test in this kind of way. The United States was, until 2017, a reasonably stable democracy that didn’t require much in the way of bravery from its political, business, and academic leaders. Consequently, we didn’t have much occasion to register the unhappy truth that courage is never the norm.
The only exception to this rule that I can recall during my lifetime was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the question arose whether Vietnam draft dodgers like Dan Quayle and Bill Clinton would succeed on a national ticket, given the country’s conservative yardstick of patriotism and its liberal yardstick of equality. The upper-class privilege of draft avoidance turned out to be forgivable in Quayle’s and Clinton’s cases and of little interest at all thereafter. That paved the way for George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, none of whom had an especially good answer to the question James Fallows raised in his classic 1975 essay, “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?”
Indeed, not a single Vietnam War veteran was ever elected president; Al Gore was the only one who came close, serving two terms as vice president and then winning the popular vote for president in 2000 (but losing in the Electoral College). Most astonishing of all, Trump—who used a dubious bone-spur diagnosis to avoid the Vietnam draft—got himself elected in 2016 after disparaging the Vietnam service of Senator John McCain. (“He was a war hero because he was captured—I like people who weren’t captured.”)
To summarize: During the past half-century, America put its leaders’ courage to the test only once—and when it did, it ignored the findings.
Were things different in the past? People used to express greater reverence for traditional virtues like courage, but evidence is thin that these bygone eras produced more of it. Then, as now, we admired courage not because it was common but because it was rare. Being courageous entails risk, and the consequences can be very unpleasant. Looking over my battered memorial edition of John F. Kennedy’s 1955 book Profiles in Courage, I’m struck by how many of its celebrated acts of courage ended Senate careers: Daniel Webster, Edmund G. Ross, Thomas Hart Benton. No wonder most leaders avoid being courageous.
We pretend bravery is the norm in human affairs, in large part by congratulating people to excess for enduring hardship. But true courage entails volunteering to put yourself at risk, and that has never been the norm in human affairs. I remember being hit hard, as a teenager, by Marcel Ophuls’s 1969 documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, which conveyed the unpleasant truth that resisting Hitler was not something nice, normal middle-class people showed much interest in doing. That seems obvious today, but the prevailing view during the two decades that followed the war was, as Harvard political scientist Stanley Hoffman explained in his preface to the film’s published transcript, “the myth of the French as massively enrolled in or at least standing behind the Resistance, with the exception of a handful of collaborationists and of a small clique of reactionaries.”
The truth is far less reassuring. The people who aided or joined the Resistance were almost always those who had the least to lose. Here, from the film, is Denis Rake, who was a British secret agent in occupied France:
The middle class was very neutral. I must say they didn’t help me very much. I found working people really wonderful—waiters, salesgirls, and so on.… I always found everything I needed through workers. But the middle class was scared.
Social class wasn’t the only dividing line. Wealthier resisters tended to be, for lack of a better word, weirdos—people shunned by bourgeois society not because they they were working class but because they behaved differently. Here’s testimony, in the film, from a man with the aristocratic name Emmanuel D’Astier de la Vigerie (1900–1969):
I had done many things: I had smoked opium. I had written scandalous editorials all over the place, and so I was considered a black sheep, and an unsuccessful black sheep at that.… I’m going to say something nasty about my friends and myself: I think you could only have joined the Resistance if you were maladjusted.
After the war la Vigerie was rewarded for his bravery by being named interior secretary in the de Gaulle government. Later he was publisher of Libération. He died a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. But he was not headed for such eminence when he started out.
I don’t mean to be too discouraging. Please remember that the French Resistance, with all those proles and oddballs, won (with considerable assistance from the Allied powers), and that the respectable collaborationists of the Vichy government lost. More good news: The quantity of bravery needed to resist Donald Trump is considerably smaller than what was needed to resist Hitler. This country has more than its share of weirdos to mobilize against Trump, and although the working class at the moment has taken Trump’s side, it’s hardly inevitable that it will continue to support him.
Some of the establishment will support the Trump resistance; just not most of it. My hero at the moment is Christopher Eisgruber, president of Princeton, who unlike other Ivy League presidents took a stand last week in The Atlantic against Trump’s (very illegal) cutoff of research funds to universities based on political disagreements with university departments and policies.
Eisgruber’s unusual courage should inspire a few others to be courageous too. As Robert F. Kennedy Sr. famously said in Cape Town in 1966, “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
When those walls come down, though, don’t expect Jamie Dimon or Jeff Bezos or Big Pharma to be standing at the barricades. That’s not what big shots typically do. Which is yet another reason why we’re fools to give them so much influence in the first place.
