The Spanish Historical Lesson

And thoughts on Joe Biden

Spain committed national suicide through mass deportation

Travel has a way of emphasizing historical lessons. Spain is no different.

As I’ve mentioned, when traveling around this gorgeous, fascinating country, you constantly see evidence of the rise and fall of civilizations—Rome, the Visigoths, the Muslims, and the Catholic Spaniards (who completed their reunification in 1492). The latter made a fateful error that cast a pall over the rest of Spanish history: Spain threw out the non-Catholics.

Through persecution, torture, murder, and the choice of exile or conversion of Jews (beginning with pogroms in 1391), the Catholic monarchy de-Judified the country, stripping it of some of its most educated people. Doctors, royal advisers, philosophers, scientists, and financiers were banished. Spain’s loss was the Netherlands’ gain, as Jews helped produce the Dutch Golden Age.

The expulsion of Muslims (Moriscos) between 1609 and 1614 followed, stripping the country of a large group of industrious workers, farmers, and craftspeople. The notion that national defense required ethnic and religious homogeneity not only resulted in mass atrocities, it also deprived Spain of many of the people and ideas that had helped it become a world power.

American xenophobes and Christian White Nationalists should be forewarned. In stamping out diversity and pulling back the welcome mat for immigrants (often the pluckiest and most ambitious people), they would destroy the essence of America, which for centuries has served as a haven for the persecuted and downtrodden. The victims are not only those whom the MAGA maniacs deport, and the families and communities they tear asunder. Also at peril is America’s economic, cultural, and political health.

The United States’ sustained dominance as the world’s superpower is not guaranteed, any more than were the civilizations that rose and fell in Spain. Decline is often the result of self-sabotage. If MAGA know-nothings and cultural homogenizers have their way, the U.S. will enter a period of decline, to the detriment of all Americans and freedom-loving people everywhere.

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Joe Biden

The confluence of former President Joe Biden’s terrible cancer diagnosis and a highly promoted book on his supposed mental and physical decline has resulted in a great deal of breathless, heartless, dumb commentary. People need to get a grip and exercise some basic humanity grounded in basic truths.

First, a dedicated public servant (whose contributions to America will need to be recognized by later generations, given the utter lack of seriousness in the current political-media climate), a father, a husband, and a grandfather has received news all of us would dread. That he and his family must endure this ordeal during a time of pearl-clutching and angry accusations underscores the meanness that now courses through our politics. Instead of “Who knew what, when?” the appropriate question is “What will we lose when he passes from the scene?” (The answer: A statesman who defended the post-WWII world order and a clear-eyed, center-left champion of the middle class.)

Second, the notion that Biden was a feeble, inert, and nonfunctional figurehead during his presidency is utter nonsense. He made decisions, delivered some marvelous speeches, crafted far-sighted foreign policy alliances, and presided over a flurry of productive, bipartisan domestic bills. On his worst day as president, he was more insightful, knowledgeable, productive, and effective than not only Donald Trump (as would be any sentient being) but many other presidents.

Third, none of this excuses those around him and, yes, Biden himself, for failing to recognize sooner that he lacked the verbal acuity and forceful presentation skills needed to run a successful campaign. He should not have decided to run. It was his worst decision, enabled by advisers who could not bring themselves to level with him. As a result, we are undergoing untold horrors in Trump 2.0. Depending on the success of pro-democracy forces in defending our fragile system, Biden and his inner circle will have played a role in the human, economic, and constitutional damage his successor will leave behind.

Fourth, for all the media caterwauling, when the heck are they going to level with voters about the current president’s mental and emotional descent into utter incoherence? Trump crafts his lies and then reflexively imbibes his own disinformation, conspiracies, and lies. By continuing to treat him (during his presidency) as if he is all there and by absolving Republicans of playing along, the media repeats—at the worst possible time—the profoundly irresponsible, lazy treatment of Biden they now bemoan. They are picking over the remains of a presidency allowed to persist too long (as did Woodrow Wilson’s, for example) while ignoring the five-alarm fire of insanity currently consuming the White House.

The utter refusal to systematically reveal, analyze, and hold him accountable for his divorce from reality constitutes the worst media malpractice imaginable. At some level, voters know corporate and billionaire media refuse to level with them, which is why so many news consumers have fled to The Contrarian and to other independent media outlets.

Finally, expecting every Democrat to have perceived what the media did not (Biden’s accelerated decline) and expose what the media failed to do is rich, even for a corporate media already corrupted by desperation for access and self-interest. Aside from those in the inner circle, most saw what the press did—an aging but still effective president.

It’s quite something for the media to demand Democrats take responsibility even as the corporate media ignore their own obtuseness while refusing to engage Republicans on the latter’s astounding deceit and lack of constitutional loyalty in enabling Trump to trash our economy, democracy, and national character.

Where does that leave us? Essentially, where we have been since the November election. The fate of our endangered democracy is the seminal challenge of our time. Recriminations about the past and idle speculation about 2028 distract us from the task of solidifying a broad coalition to defeat the racism, fascism, disinformation, and xenophobia that we foolishly told ourselves would not take hold here. It has.

Only if we focus on ripping out the MAGA menace root and branch will we spare ourselves of the horrors that Europeans have experienced over millennia. Perhaps that is why EU countries have consistently chosen center-left leaders in the Trump era. They know exactly what is at stake.