The Acceleration of Time

Back in the fall of 1989, when the Warsaw Pact regimes were falling like a row of dominoes, my graduate school friends and I joked about offering a new history course to be entitled “Europe Since Last Wednesday.” It seemed as if time itself was accelerating.

There have been a few other moments like that in my lifetime: especially the weeks after 9/11, and then the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020. Are we in another such moment now, as the Trump administration attempts simultaneously to blow up the federal government and the international order? It certainly feels like it. I’m generally suspicious of essays that begin “We stand at the cusp of a reordering moment… as significant as 1989, 1945, or 1919…” How can we know? It’s like saying you are at the summit of a mountain, when you are standing in a dense fog, and might only be halfway up the slope. But Nils Gilman makes a surprisingly strong and depressing case in Foreign Policy, even at the risk of repeating Samuel Huntington’s uncritical reification of the notion of clashing “civilizations.”

French history has been particularly rich in moments when time seemed to accelerate, and the French have been especially eloquent in pondering them. “The French people seem to have moved two thousand years ahead of the rest of the human race,” proclaimed Robespierre less than five years after the start of the French Revolution. “This quarter-century equaled many centuries,” wrote Chateaubriand after the maelstrom of the Revolution and Napoleonic rule had ended. The historians Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson have written excellently about the phenomenon, with particular reference to the Revolutionary period (see for instance here, here, and here), but there have been other moments of apparent acceleration as well: the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1871; the defeat of 1940 and the birth of the Vichy Regime; the fall of the Fourth Republic and De Gaulle’s assumption of power in 1958. May 1968 seemed like yet another such moment to most observers at the time, only to fall short (even if it did, in the end, both reflect and drive along epochal changes in French society and culture).

Unfortunately, it is the 1940 moment that seems most apt in thinking about our present moment. Which is not to say that history is repeating itself, that Trump’s victory signifies the return of “fascism,” or that we need to start dividing ourselves into “the Resistance” and “collaborators.” I already discussed the limitations of the “Vichy comparison” in a column a few weeks ago.

But rather like in France in 1940, the triumph of reaction at home is taking place in tandem with an apparent overturning of the international order. The new international order again seems to be a particularly brutal one, grounded in raw, unabashed transactional and competitive moves by great powers. As several people have written recently (see here for instance), Trump’s horrific betrayal of Ukraine looks less like the appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 than like the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. And in the US, these head-spinning changes have so far seemed to induce a sort of shocked paralysis. In 1940, the most obvious members of a French Resistance, Communist Party members, had their hands tied because the party took orders from Joseph Stalin—Hitler’s new ally. Today, the most obvious members of a strong American opposition to the Trump administration, college students and the progressive left, have tied their own hands because of their reluctance to join forces with mainstream Democrats whom they accuse of “neoliberalism” and complicity with the alleged “genocide” in Gaza. Even as some leading Democratic politicians show signs of true leadership (especially my college classmate and hero Jamie Raskin), many others look like the proverbial deer five seconds away from their transformation into radial tire-scented venison.

The problem, however, is that in most cases, at moments of seeming acceleration, there is simply no way of predicting what the forces that have been unleashed will ultimately bring about. There are too many variables, too many unknowns. In France in the late spring of 1789, when the deputies to the Estates General proclaimed themselves a National Assembly and pledged not to separate until they had given the kingdom a new constitution, absolutely no one could predict what would actually happen. The end of the French monarchy seemed utterly unlikely, let alone the execution of the King and the Reign of Terror. The two most likely outcomes seemed either France’s transformation into a constitutional monarchy similar to the British model, or a royal coup d'état. After the King seemed to acquiesce to the Assembly’s demands, most observers started to speak of the “revolution” in the past tense. In June of 1940, as the Wehrmacht paraded down the Champs Élysées, most of the French assumed that the war was basically over, and that Germany had won, leaving them no choice but to adjust as well as possible to the new order.

Today we remember Charles de Gaulle’s defiance of this attitude as heroic and inspirational, but things might easily have turned out very differently. In his terrific counterfactual novel SS-GB, Len Deighton imagined what might have happened had Germany invaded and occupied Britain in 1940. At one point, one of the characters remarks: “I wonder if anyone remembers that French army officer – de Gaulle – who escaped here to England when France fell?... Promoted himself to General, and declared that he was the voice of France. It never came to anything. As far as I know the Germans never bothered to include him on the Primary Arrest List.”

In one sense, our inescapable incomprehension of where the forces around us will lead is humbling. Let’s not make confident pronouncements about what it all means and which moment in history is now repeating itself. In another sense, of course, it is absolutely terrifying. What if we are in a moment like the World War II of SS-GB? But in yet another sense, it is liberating. Don’t try to predict exactly what will happen. Don’t worry endlessly about strategy, when half the chess board is out of sight. Just do the right thing.