My daughter gave me a movie for my birthday last Thursday.  We had gone to the movie theater last year to see Darkest Hour, and I was greatly moved by the performance of Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill.  When I opened the package to see that same movie on DVD, I had to watch it again.  It was just as powerful the second time around.

A good movie inevitably plays a bit fast and loose with all the facts, as this one did, but it can generate an emotional response if it remains steadfast to the underlying truth.  Having perused the garbage coming out of Congress for the past several weeks, I needed some inspiration, and Darkest Hour provided just that. 

Watching Churchill stand for what he recognized was the honorable and necessary, but sometimes cruel and difficult task that faced him when he became prime minister was a sobering, enlightening experience.  Watching Churchill struggle to corral the votes and efforts of his peers and contrasting that with the recognition that Adolf Hitler was running Germany as a personal fiefdom highlights the challenges that a democratic style of government faces when dealing with tyranny.

The movie illuminated the conflict between Churchill's Cabinet member Lord Halifax, and his desire to enter peace negotiations with Germany at the fall of France, and Churchill's recognition of the fallacy of appeasing dictators and expecting any good to come of it.  Too often, leaders who love their power more than they recognize their obligation to the citizens of their country will negotiate away their principles in order to maintain control.

Power is a constant force in history.  The accumulation and desire for power explains a significant portion of what we read in our history books and the stories we hear about leadership and control.  Threats to power and the status it secures are resisted in fanatical measure, which leads to the violence of subsequent revolutions like the French Revolution or the takeover of China by Mao, as the old order falls before the arrival of the new.  History doesn't repeat exactly, but there are similarities that occur on a regular basis.  By studying those occurrences, we can gain a feel for what is happening or can happen soon.

This past week, we saw a rush (about three years in the planning) to impeach our president as he represented a threat to the power of the progressive ideology within which most of the Democratic Party and the administrative bureaucrats abide.  The election of President Trump was a lightning strike to the foundation of the world that they knew.  It was unexpected and correctly viewed as a threat to their power structure.  It was also almost inevitable.  Disruptive technology, such as the personal computer, the mobile phone, the internet, the ability to communicate and travel around the world in days as opposed to months, and the fracking revolution, all promised a period of uncertainty and unrest as the processes that civilizations rest upon were challenged and found wanting.  New processes, new boundaries needed to be created, and those processes threaten the power of the status quo.  Like the unrest that followed the introduction of the printing press, we find ourselves in a period of technological change, and new power centers are created to handle those changes — changes that disrupt and do away with old procedures that no longer work in the new world being born.

During the period from 1980 to today, the private sector has changed dramatically.  The number of people employed as secretaries for example has dropped dramatically, no matter what they are called today.  Change has forced the private sector to become more efficient, to find ways to produce more from less, to move resources to where they can best be utilized, and to react quickly to changes in local economies and situations.  The private sector watches for those places that become logistical bottlenecks, those areas that constrain the efficient use of time and labor, those areas that reduce productivity and don't enhance the bottom line.  This sector recognized for a long time that the public sector was the cause of many of these problems, and while large corporations could manipulate their friends in the Legislature to protect them and the status quo for some period through the use of favorable regulations, the marketplace is inexorable, and eventually, even large corporations have to bow to the wishes of the marketplace.

With the election of President Trump, we see the ideology of a successful businessman, not a corporate manager, brought to the forefront of the equation.  When President Trump began forcing reductions in job and business-killing regulations that had enriched the few and impoverished the many by making new job creation too expensive, a revolution was at hand.  Entrenched groups that were unable to compete in the marketplace but knew how to manipulate the levers of government to procure the regulations to protect and defend their little empires recognized that times were changing — not to their benefit, but to the benefit of the lower and middle classes, the disenfranchised, or perhaps we should just call most of them "deplorables."   There is a reason the economy is booming now.  If we could just wean the elites in Washington off government largess and make them earn a living instead of voting themselves one, we would truly see a new age of prosperity.

As we watch this ensuing power play, as the various entities trying to protect their little fiefdoms circle each other, looking for an advantageous place to strike, it should be incumbent on us to look to history for some indications of possible outcomes.  Leaders, who recognize their responsibility to all their citizens, who have a respect for the traditions of freedom encoded in our Constitution, who are willing to stand up to the demands of the powerful in defense of the "deplorables" who fight our nation's wars, are necessary if we expect to grow and prosper as a people.

Darkest Hour has Churchill claim that nations that fight will rise again, while those who surrender are gone.  Perhaps it is true, perhaps not, but I prefer to fight for what I believe is right.  This country and its Constitution are worth fighting for as it plows through the coming upheavals.