What gets me about a lot of these alternative histories is that it's hard to know what to make of them. How could Britain or America have foreseen Hitler and Stalin in 1914 or 1917? Ought they simply to have rolled over and let Germany have everything it wanted? Would this not also have had bad consequences? Why assume that allied victory was responsible for what followed and not German aggression or post-war failures? If history had taken another course, how would we know what we had missed?
In any event, it does seem puzzling that some of those who make out that Hamilton's or Clay's protectionism makes them monsters ignore the protectionism, cartelization, and welfare statism of the imperial German economy. Why do supporters of Taki's view say so much about TR or Wilson or the British Fabians and ignore Germany's own socialists and its statist authoritarians. Had Germany won the war, we'd see articles about how much better things would have been had Britain prevailed.
A German victory might have prevented a Hitler or Stalin from coming to power, and that would have been a very good thing, though there's always the possiblity that a defeated France or Russia would breed their own monsters, especially if, the Germans imposed the kind of harsh terms on them that one would have expected. Those who experienced and suffered under such an Imperial German ascendancy would have regarded it as a defeat for liberty. It may be unlikely that statist and racialist ideas would have been taken as far by Imperial Germany as they were by the Nazis, but the ideas that were in the air would definitely have had consequences.
Good book on alternative history: "Virtual History," edited by Niall Ferguson, who does view Imperial Germany in a benign light. Also, New article on Theodore Roosevelt today.
Thanks for the latest TR bump. He's still playin' us for suckers. He's a hit these days, ain't he? He hasnt lost a beat. This one is funny, because the author commits the exact crime he accuses others of, the usurpation of TR. The main thesis, though is correct:
In other words, the Roosevelt fans are being selective, not to say opportunistic, in claiming his legacy.But Roosevelt himself was the first one to do this. Oh well.
This one, I'll smash in my upcoming book on Taft:
TR felt compelled to come out of retirement in 1912 to challenge his Republican successor, William H. Taft, for the presidency because he saw that the GOP was already reconstituting itself as the party of big business. Republican leaders now opposed conservation, railroad regulation, and causes he had made his own.Bull. And for all the wrong reasons.