The Shadow Election

The editors of Tablet magazine have invited me to beam a bright light of occasional political commentary on the election, and I have agreed to do so, except that, instead of beaming light, I intend to beam a shadow. An immense and tragic and glorious era in world affairs is coming to an end. Everyone sees it. Each of the political campaigns ought to be discussing it. But not everyone agrees on how to describe the era in question, or the meaning of its eclipse. And, in any case, speechlessness is the nearly universal reaction.

Michael Bloomberg conjured the origins of the era in his remarks in Norfolk, Virginia, last week, and this was useful of him. He recalled that, in the summer of 1941, at a moment when the world war was going worse than badly, Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Winston Churchill on a Navy vessel off the coast of Newfoundland. America was ostensibly neutral. Roosevelt and Churchill shared the expectation, however, that soon enough (in December of that same year, as it happened) America was going to assume its place among the combatants, and the American intervention was likely to shift the military balance. And Roosevelt and Churchill took the occasion to stipulate a point of principle.

This was the question of war goals, which they presented in the document that came to be known as the “Atlantic Charter.” Bloomberg, in his account of these events, has improved the charter a little by incorporating into it a speech that Roosevelt had made earlier in the year, spelling out the “Four Freedoms.” The Four Freedoms were freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—and only two of those freedoms, the freedoms from want and fear, made their way into the charter. Still, the charter did establish that something called freedom was a goal. Bloomberg was accurate enough. And the stipulation of freedom amounted to a major event in world history.

It was also an American event, given that, from 1776 onward, freedom had traditionally been an American war goal—freedom in one version or another, including self-deluded versions. But America had not, in the past, been a world power, or else, as in World War I, had not known how to behave as one. Things were different by 1941. The United States did seem to command the ability to impose a military domination over large parts of the world, which suggested that it might also be capable, postwar, of kneading certain of those parts into shapes congenial to the traditional goal. Those were the hopes. The Atlantic Charter laid them out. The hopes amounted to a call for a new and revolutionary phase of world civilization, peaceful and in some degree liberal.