In September 1939, as Germany's mechanized war machine rumbled across Poland's offended terrain, Colonel Mastalerz of the imminently counterattacking Polish cavalry scolded an objecting junior officer: "Young man, I'm quite aware what it is like to carry out an impossible order."
Observes British military historian Max Hastings: "Within minutes half the attackers were dead, including Colonel Mastalerz. The survivors fell back in confusion, flotsam of an earlier age."
In America's "industrial heartland" this week, as Politico's Alexander Burns editorializes, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum "are competing less over who has a superior plan for the future than over who can more compellingly play upon Michiganders' nostalgia." Romney croons his "the-way-we-were message" and Santorum "answers Romney’s personal reminiscences" with "fond memories of a happier time in the Rust Belt — a time, he says, when families were strong and work had dignity."
The junior officer, you might say, is Republican Senate candidate Clark Durant, who nervously told Burns, "The focus has to be: lay out your vision and how you’re going to get there." Romney and Santorum, added Durant, should "stop focusing on yesterday and start focusing on tomorrow" -- because at present they're but the flotsam of an earlier age.
Yet who can really blame these two political cavalrymen of the 21st century? As the NY Times' Timothy Egan reminds us this morning:
[T]he small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian and unrepresentative of the nation at large.
The GOP, America's 19th-century -- or at best, 1930s -- horse-and-buggy party, which itself guarantees the very kind of seemingly bewildering demagoguery we've come to expect from Republican pols. And by that, I mean this:
In one of the most insightful works (in my opinion) of American political history ever written, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, Alan Brinkley argues that what made Long and Coughlin such splendid demagogues was their "dissident ideology" that, principally, affirmed values and institutions which their target audience (older, white, uniformly Christian) saw as threatened, and that helpfully identified the villains at the epicenter of a changing and complicated world.
Long and Coughlin were, rather simply put, ideological revanchists -- but their time had irreversibly passed; they were the flotsam of an earlier age, horse-and-buggy men in an 8-cylinder era.
Still, that's all they had to work with. Their troops may have been numerically insufficient and their counterattacks useless, but demagoguery founded on wistful desperation is rarely discouraged.