O LOST!

Not Really. Screw Your Courage to the Sticking Place

"O Lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again."

Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel.

The Thomas Wolfe Angel statue in Hendersonville, NC

Those words are repeated throughout Wolfe’s massive novel like a musical motif recurring in a symphony. They prefigure the feeling many in America have of the current state of affairs. We are LOST!! The irony is that many people might not be able to put those words to their feelings of something irreplaceable having been lost.

No writer’s reputation has fallen as fast in my lifetime as that of Wolfe. In high school in the 1960s he was one of 20th century American literature’s Big Three along with Hemingway and Faulkner. Published in 1929, Look Homeward Angel, all 544 pages of it, had been turned into a Pulitzer Prize-winning play starring Anthony Perkins which ran for more than 500 performances on Broadway.

By the late 70s I don’t think anyone read it and by the 80s, if you said Thomas Wolfe to the average reader, they were thinking of Tom Wolfe, author the Right Stuff and Bonfire of the Vanities.

But the cry “O Lost …” seems to describe the mood among more than half of Americans, and a much larger percentage of Europeans.

The idea that all is lost colors my email inbox seven weeks into Trump 2:0. It’s a view across the generations. Lucian K. Truscott IV, 77, grandson of one of the top Allied commanders in Europe during World War 2 and a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, sent out a substack last week headlined:

The coup has already happened

Molly McKew, an expert on Russian cyber-warfare, three decades younger than Truscott, put out a substack column describing her friends, most of whom work on the Hill or in the Think Tank-industrial complex, at a dive bar in DC on a trivia quiz night last month. The booby prize was a pickled egg, and periodically, these generally conservative folks in their early 40s are chanting “Pickled Egg! Pickled Egg!” McKew writes,

The Trump administration will probably lose every court case and they have already ignored most court orders and they have declared the president alone gets to interpret what the laws really say. He’s already issued questionable orders to the military, which they have followed (on domestic affairs). No one even has time to keep track.

They are making the typical calculation that if you just keep going, rules can’t contain you and doubly true when you are tearing down the system meant to contain and you already have the alternative power structures — the people with the money— on board.

It’s nearing the end of the republic but we’re cheering for the pickled egg.

This defeatism is difficult to square with reality. It is born of fear partially rooted in an incomplete knowledge of history. Going back to Donald Trump’s first term in office, and especially since his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election result, the comparisons to Hitler’s rise to power have come in waves.

A favourite of the moment is the concept of 53 days. According to a story in The Atlantic by Timothy Ryback that’s how long it took Hitler from his appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 through the Reichstag fire, passing the enabling law that gave him sweeping emergency powers thus creating the conditions to suspend the Constitution.

If you keep count, I am writing this on day 48 of the 53. While Congress is a rubber stamp, so far it doesn’t feel much like Germany in 1933.

One reason is the main players are not formed of the same experience. Donald Trump is a well-known physical coward. Adolf Hitler was a veteran of the trenches in World War 1. He spent four years at the front and was wounded several times. After the war, he was not just a rabble rouser, as Trump is. He came down from the podium and was a street brawler. He did not spend most days playing golf, he worked at building an organization to take power through politics backed up by the threat of violence, including the creation of a paramilitary group, the Sturmabteilung. The SA, or Brown Shirts were not like the mob Trump incited on January 6th. They were a disciplined, violent organization made up of combat veterans, and veterans of the street fighting with Communists that made the Weimar Republic so unstable.

The German Communist Party was an electoral force. It won 12% of the vote in 1924, in 1930, it won a fraction over 13 % of the vote. In that same election, the Nazis won 18 % of the vote, and the Social Democrats won nearly 25% of the vote. That meant the two largest left-wing parties, out polled the Nazis and the next largest right-wing party, the Center, by more than 8%.

In July 1932, as the country became more polarized the Nazis came first and the Communists came second. In November of that year there was another election as the Nazis were unable to form a stable coalition, They lost vote share. The left gained seats, neither side could form a stable government. Ultimately, the German President appointed Hitler Chancellor on 20 January, 1933 — start your 53 day countdown.

So yes, Hitler was able to grow his party from nothing to a position where he could be appointed Chancellor but it was against a background of extreme political violence and two economic catastrophes: the hyperinflation of the early 1920s and the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Many in Germany were exhausted and prepared to let Hitler have an unfettered go at ruling by decree just to bring some stability. Many had been cowed by fear of the SA, more than a few didn’t mind that he planned to force the Jews out of public life.

None of that applies in the US in 2025. There are town halls where MAGA congresspeople endure the wrath of voters, the Proud Boys don’t turn up to assault people speaking out. Dachau was opened during Hitler’s first 53 days to incarcerate his political opponents. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are still roaming around unhindered. And as for violence on today’s left: it seems to be mostly rhetorical and confined to elite university campuses and social media. The tent cities that sprang up in various quadrangles to demand an end to Israel’s war in Gaza (actually to demand an end to Israel, full stop) have not been recreated outside the White House demanding an end to Trump/Musk’s destruction of the administrative apparatus of the US government.

That destruction is the main driver of the fear we are told is stalking Washington.

That is the headline in a piece this weekend by New York Times writer-at-large, Elizabeth Bumiller,

“The silence grows louder every day.

“Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.

“Even longtime Republican hawks on Capitol Hill, stunned by President Trump’s revisionist history that Ukraine is to blame for its invasion by Russia, and his Oval Office blowup at President Volodymyr Zelensky, have either muzzled themselves, tiptoed up to criticism without naming Mr. Trump or completely reversed their positions.

“More than six weeks into the second Trump administration, there is a chill spreading over political debate in Washington and beyond.

“People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families. Politicians fear banishment by a party remade in Mr. Trump’s image and the prospect of primary opponents financed by Mr. Musk, the president’s all-powerful partner and the world’s richest man.

“Nothing has been permanently lost yet, the danger is real.”

It is possible to understand the fears of the hundreds of thousands who work in the federal bureaucracy. Washington is a company town and the company is Uncle Sam. The workers’ fears are identical to those faced by anyone who works in an industry undergoing radical downsizing because of changing economic conditions.

As for the others Bumiller references, you can only ask: what are they afraid of? We don’t live in a dictatorship where the knock on the door at 4 a.m and a disappearance into the bowels of the SS HQ on Prinz-Albrecht Strasse in Berlin is a probability for publicly standing up against the regime.

SS HQ on Prinz-Albrecht Strasse after the war. The building was later demolished.

You fear losing an election? Being forced by the board of directors from your upper six-figure salary job running an Ivy League university? (Actually at some Ivies and other elite places it’s a seven-figure job) You will find another position, perhaps less well paid but not dramatically so. You will be seen as a hero and a martyr in many quarters. You won’t be like some mid-level federal worker with a graduate degree and nearly two decades of experience who has to take a job stacking supermarket shelves because like most ordinary Americans he or she is only a couple of paychecks from economic disaster.

This isn’t to say that something precious has not been lost. Because it has. A few days before the Trump-Vance Oval Office diplomatic mugging of Ukraine’s President Zelensky I was part of a panel at London’s Frontline Club

In the final round of comments I spoke of my own sense of bewilderment. As an American Jew, born five years after the Red Army liberated Auschwitz I had grown up with a particular understanding of what America’s defeat of fascism meant. If the good America had not come in to the war (with generals like Lucian K. Truscott) who knows how much further the elimination of European Jewry might have gone.

Throughout my life I have had many arguments with my native country, and ultimately I left it. But I never thought that America was gone. The loss of the nation, the society that ultimately does the right thing is incalculable. We have watched that country erode over the last 80 years but really have no experience of what the world will be like if it is no longer there and that is frightening. But there is no reason to be afraid. It is still there. We just need to remember and look more closely for it.

The words Wolfe writes in Look Homeward Angel just before “O lost …” offer a guide:

“Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?”

Ask yourself: Where were we good, when was it? Not so long ago and the language of those times, the words to live by, actually isn’t forgotten.

And don’t forget to listen to the latest FRDH, First rough Draft of History podcast