History Should Make You Humble
Odds are, you're wrong about how to change the world – as am I.
I love reading history. I hope to learn lessons to help me understand the current political situation, which seems to be constantly catching everyone by surprise in one way or another. I hope to positively impact the future by knowing what's right and acting on it. But I've come to the conclusion that it's quite difficult for even intelligent and well-educated people to predict which is the best action to take.
In order to make sure that you're actually learning something and not simply reinforcing biases, I think one should make predictions about what should happen before finishing reading about what did happen. And thinking about this really deeply has forced me into an uncomfortable realization - most people in history, even those we paint after the fact as stupid, unprepared, or lazy, were making decisions that seemed pretty reasonable from their standpoints.
Obviously this is true tautologically - they wouldn't have done something if they hadn't thought it was the right decision - but it's also probably true that you or I, if we had access to the same information, would have made the same decisions. That's not to say there's nothing to learn from history, as certain patterns tend to repeat themselves. But there are a limited set of ways to respond to those problems, and many leaders we criticize see themselves as forced into a poor decision by circumstance. And most of the time, they're probably right.
A Few Brief Examples
Rome Conquered Britannia For "No Good Reason"
I was confused for a long time why Rome conquered Britannia. It seemed like something the Emperors did mostly for PR value, and while that is a real benefit from the perspective of the Emperor, it doesn't make much sense as a strategic vision for Rome to conquer random distant territories that never pay for themselves. Historians I read also questioned the value of investing military resources in Britannia which was not a real military threat to Rome, and suggested they could have been better used elsewhere.
I believed Rome should have expended that energy instead on conquering Germania - sure they had experienced setbacks there before, but they also never applied their full might to subduing Germania. Both Gaul and Pannonia were similarly unprofitable in the short run and took double the number of legions dedicated to the German campaigns. Since the downfall of the West came from Germania, it seemed logical they could have avoided that end by subduing and Romanizing the area earlier. Plus Germania is an ideal area in many ways for Roman infrastructure projects, like canals.
But it turns out the Romans knew this well. They wanted to subdue Germania and tried several times, each time undone by terrible luck. Plus, the average citizen didn't want to pay for more campaigns when Rome already had an extensive empire and wide buffer zones between barbarians and any really important province. In the specific example of Britannia, those campaigns were actually seen as a way to pacify Germania. The legions used for those campaigns came from the Rhine - half recruited from barbarian tribes, half from legions already there. So from that perspective the conquest of Britannia was basically free, and really just gave the German tribes something to do besides conquering Rome. It didn't matter if it didn't pay for itself if the real purpose was to keep the Germans busy. It was less expensive than maintaining a bunch of manpower on the Rhine doing nothing.
Russia And The Quest For Ports
I used to think it was a critical error that Russia focused on access to the open sea via Siberia and Manchuria, versus actually developing their own interior waterways. During Soviet times, Russia finally did this and today can move ships from any of their major ports to any other major port via inland rivers and canals, granting strategic flexibility and economic benefits while making it difficult to fully blockade them. Why didn't Tsarist Russia develop these connections far sooner instead of wasting money on overland territory incredibly difficult to access from the population centers of Russia? This was especially curious to me after reading that others like the Ottomans believed that interior canals in Russia were possible given the technology of the time.
Well, it turns out that Peter the Great had actually tried this exact strategy. He gave up land in Manchuria in order to focus on his European possessions and invested a lot of money in a Volga-Don canal, the most important of modern Russia's waterways. Though it seemed achievable, in practice it was not until technology and state capacity advanced somewhat - the canal was shut down after a few years. Perhaps it would have been achievable by the Tsars by the end of the regime, but one can understand why leaders versed in the history of Peter the Great would learn the lesson that it's better to invest in Manchuria than interior waterways, even if this later didn't pan out due to a complete upset in the Russo-Japanese War when an untried power defeated an advanced European army for basically the first time in modern history.
Achieving Through Nonaction: The Case Of Japan
The aforementioned Russo-Japanese War is itself a bizarre study in how sometimes one achieves something by doing the opposite. There is a Japanese parable where Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa - the three great Unifiers of Japan in the late 1500's - are sitting around watching a songbird. Nobunaga (a famously violent man) says: "If that bird does not sing, I shall kill it." Hideyoshi (who came after and thought he had completed Unification) says: "If that bird does not sing, I shall make it sing." Tokugawa (who established a shogunate that lasted for three centuries and prepared Japan to be the only non-Western country to establish a modern empire) says: "If that bird does not sing, I shall wait for it to sing."
Hideyoshi invaded Korea in a bizarre attempt to rule the world. My personal favorite anecdote: he asks the Koreans nicely to please surrender because he doesn't really want to conquer them anyway, he's just passing through on his way to conquer all of China and India. Apparently he believed that if the barbarian Mongols could do it, so could he. This campaign destroys his regime.
Tokugawa had the exact opposite impulse. He sees that Western guns and ambitions are destroying his country, and when he comes to power he shuts Japan away from the world for two hundred and fifty years. They spent this time developing the philosophy of Ukiyo (lighthearted pleasure) and sipping sake - they seem the opposite of a serious world power. One would assume that when Japan next encounters a Western military they will lose.
But Japan used this breathing room to centralize power in the hands of a capable bureaucracy. The effectiveness of the Japanese system allows them to rapidly copy Western advances when they are finally forced to. And contrary to expectation, shutting out foreigners in the meantime helps this process. A lack of Western merchant houses means a lack of Western imperial ambitions - exactly what doomed the rest of the world. It also may have spared them a currency crisis, which China experienced during this period possibly as a result of New World metals. The easy and patient route also turned out to be the correct one.
Yet when Japan rapidly started winning against the West and China, the philosophies of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi reared their ugly heads yet again. Japan was growing so rapidly - who was to say they could not rule the world as Britain, another tiny island, was currently doing? They lost patience, and despite some incredible success initially they did not keep an empire for long.
Sometimes trying harder to achieve a thing means that you lose it, while noneffort means that you gain it. Just another funny irony in the waves of life.
A Tale Of Trumpian Triumph
Does any of this carry lessons for the modern world? It certainly changes how I view criticisms of modern political figures.
Take Biden. Everyone "knows" he should have dropped out earlier in 2024. But as someone who vocally called Biden out in 2024 for running when he was obviously too old, I want to take a second to discuss the reasons he overestimated his own ability to shape that election and keep Democrats in power for years.
Biden's History
Obama picked Biden for Vice precisely because he was old. Obama needed someone white and male, someone comfortable with the limelight, and someone who was obviously too old to be a successor. This latter requirement had a very clear reason – usually, the VP becomes the nominee. And the VP is by definition not as charismatic as the President. And the VP loses. It's an unusual case where the VP wins, requiring everything to be perfect - and even then, the VP ends up losing Congress and then losing reelection. So Obama needed 2016 to be competitive.
Biden wanted to run in 2016 anyway but was dissuaded. He was too old, he had done poorly in previous primaries, he wasn't particularly popular. The 2016 election needed someone who had a proven track record. It needed Hillary Clinton - someone who polled well, had been preparing her entire life for this, and combined progressivism, pragmatism, and experience.
And with Bernie running, the Obama vote could not be split. No one in the party wanted Bernie to be President (nor did they believe he could win), so they consolidated behind Hillary – the exact thing people criticized the Republican party for refusing to do in the face of Trump. Just pick a good candidate and don't split the elite vote!
But (spoiler alert) Hillary did not win in 2016. And so in 2020 – despite the fact he was four years older than "too old in 2016" – Biden ran again. His age became a plus: he made people feel comfortable, he reminded them of Obama, and he was able to be more moderate than any other candidate in 2020, allowing him to defeat Trump.
Then he pulled off something even more incredible; he won Senate seats in the midterms, something which only two Democrats have pulled off in the past 100 years. And again his age seemed like an asset. Voters viewed him as nonthreatening, and so did not punish the party in power like they do in virtually every other election – despite incumbent parties all over the globe doing terribly that year thanks to high inflation.
Why This Didn't Work In 2024
And now we return to 2024. Everyone and their dog "knows" how Democrats could have won that year. But I think what we learned is that they probably could not.
I won't say Biden and Harris did everything correctly - that would be ridiculous and impossible to prove even if I believed it. But I will say they did everything reasonably.
Biden remaining in the race allowed Kamala to dodge a damaging primary. Everyone knew Kamala would probably win the primary anyway as Biden's VP. Sure she hadn't won in 2020, but that was because Biden won in 2020, and Biden had done even worse in his previous presidential run (in 2008) than Kamala had in 2020. So the only point of the primary would be giving everyone a great chance to perfect their attack lines against Kamala while not changing the outcome in the slightest.
It worked wonders against Trump, too. Trump picked Vance as VP because he thought he was going to win no matter what and wanted someone really, really uncharismatic to ensure he is never removed from office. Biden waited until Vance was picked and Trump was locked in, then announced he was dropping out. It was perfect!
Obviously in retrospect, it wasn't enough. But realistically, was there a way to change the outcome? Probably. Was it knowable? That's where I remain unconvinced.
The Democratic Party was probably right to avoid a primary. I've already mentioned why I think Kamala would have won the primary anyway as the existing VP, and if it weren't her it would probably have been someone to her left - maybe that would have been better electorally, but I don't think that's clear.
Once Kamala was chosen, she didn't moderate for good reasons. It was not her brand and would have looked fake. She actually did moderate about as far as she could have. But remember how people treated Hillary's moderation in 2016? They didn't believe it, and they were probably right. Kamala cannot erase her liberal California voting record and she cannot portray herself as a principled moderate.
And I also don't think her campaign lacked enthusiasm. Democratic events in this time were electric. She was a great speaker in my opinion. I am still baffled that people picked a sundowning geriatric egomaniac over her, but they did. And I'm not sure how things really could have been that different without substantially changing the starting conditions of the race.
FDR didn't win in 1932 because he was the best candidate ever. He was a good candidate in many ways, but the most important factor was the Great Depression. The Great Depression started in 1929. Perhaps if it had started in 1928 we'd be talking about President Al Smith. As it is, Al Smith is credited with starting the Great Realignment that Roosevelt solidified, just like Goldwater is credited by many for beginning a later realignment that would culminate in Reagan.
Sometimes you have to lose to win later, and there isn't another clear way. I think sometimes how the world would be if Hillary won in 2016, or Gore became President in 2000. I like to think the world would have been better because I greatly prefer their policies, but the truth is, I don't know. Would Gore have been able to push a carbon tax through Congress, or would he have lost Congress like most incumbents do? Would Clinton have been able to do anything substantial in the face of a Republican Congress? Perhaps the only way to get a congressional majority in 2021 was to have a complete moron be President in 2017-2021. And hopefully we're learning a lesson right now, too.
I don't think that means there's nothing we can know about history. I made lots of money betting that Trump would harm the US dollar, and that the price of oil would go up. I convinced a few people not to support Trump anymore. But I think I gave up on changing history. Now I see current events like incoming waves - you can float, you can ride the surf, you can even set up an electric generator. But if you want to declare war on Neptune (the sea god) as Caligula allegedly once did, you'd better give yourself a pretty long timeline.
Sometimes, like Tokugawa, you have to wait for the bird of life to sing.
