The Times Literary Supplement recently reprinted an essay by the prolific writer, critic and editor, John Middleton Murry (1889-1957), that first appeared September 16, 1939, two weeks after the Nazi invasion of Poland triggered the beginning of World War II in Europe. 

It addressed the temptation to adopt the “inhuman methods” of an “inhuman political creed” in order to defeat such an adversary. Those tempted argued that “totalitarian states get things done” and that “guidance of society more and more resembles a huge job of engineering work.” For that  reason, “you cannot afford to allow more than a single directing mind to control the function of a modern society. Whatever society may once have been, it is now one giant machine. The future lies with those who have the courage to conceive and the ruthlessness to treat it as such.”

Murry rejected this notion, as the WWII Allies did and as did NATO and a web of other alliances in the postwar world designed to counter the danger posed by totalitarian regimes. In our time, this dispute between those willing to entrust government to the power of a single strong man and those who refuse to trade messy representative democracy for neat tyranny has come home to roost. Thus, the following paragraphs are worth a look as the impeachment of Donald Trump proceeds. 

We have recently been treated to video of him stumbling though an attempt to record a few words from the Constitution of the United States which he complained was “like a foreign language.” No doubt he would find the following remarks an equally foreign kind of prose. We are about to test whether the American people share his rejection of the old, self-evident truths that our democracy is founded upon as outmoded and antique — Human rights. Civil rights. Minority rights. Constitutional checks and balalnces. Here’s what Murry had to say.

“Though democracy is largely a system of political machinery it is something more than that; for it is a machine which, if manipulated mechanically, will no longer do its true work. On the mechanical level the will of the majority is simply compulsive on the minority; but on a different level democracy is the political expression of a way of life. On this level, the minority not merely has precious rights of its own — above all, the right of freedom of expression — but it is a necessary and active part of the democratic whole. The attractive phrase, His Majesty’s Opposition, has a depth of philosophical significance. It utters in characteristically concrete and  ceremonious terms the truth proclaimed by William Blake: ‘Without Contrarieties there is no Progression.’

“Precisely this truth is denied and repudiated by totalitarian government. The right of the contrary to existence cannot be admitted; it has to be exterminated. The nation is conceived as a unitary organism controlled in all its parts by a single centre of intelligence and will, which is infallible. No criticism of this authority is tolerated, still less any radical criticism of the system itself. All that is recalcitrant to the process of Gleichschaltung (standardization of behavior, uniformity, conformity) is obliterated; every loyalty, whether to God, or friend, or family, or the simple idea of good faith, which conflicts with the demand of the omnipotent and ubiquitous state, is a treason.”

This is where our politics is tending and it calls an answer to the question posed by the old tune from the Great Depression: “Which side are you on?”