As I approach my 200th subscriber, my readers—well, you—have taught me something. My most-read articles (or posts on Substack—whatever you want to call them; I am never quite sure, really) are my Message Mondays, followed by my Friday responses to the news. My straight history is occasionally popular, but it depends.
I never intended to become an essayist. After 20 years of studying and teaching subjects ranging from the evolution of poverty and culture in Britain and America, international relations, the Israel-Arab wars, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, race and racism in Western Christianity, and American political development in light of the New Deal and the Second World War—my specialties—I have found that the core of what I focus on is the mind and emotions of individuals: people in power, people who are subjugated, men and women who are just trying to get by, and those resisting injustice.
I guess I have always liked people—people similar to me, people different from me. It doesn’t much matter. I listen. Once, a friend of mine, a brilliant psychologist, told me that perhaps I listened too much when I interviewed people for my podcast, and needed to speak up more. It was a gentle criticism, and she was right. I always have something to say, but I often do not say anything because I am curious about other people and want to hear them. But I needed to share my thoughts because others want to hear them. She was right, and I was not.
It is a lesson learned a bit late. I should have noticed this before as a teacher. My analysis and philosophical explanations are always the best received, the ones when the students want to keep talking after class is over. At my core I am an explainer: I explain strangers to audiences—people long dead, who they will never know. Again, this is humbling because I did not understand that this is what I was doing. I translate the past to moderns, and divided Westerners to themselves.
And so it has happened that I learned to stop self-censoring and start sharing. But I never intended to become an essayist. I just wanted to write history. Now I am using history to write about life. After returning from Normandy—and spending six months prior to visiting the beaches of D-Day formally studying the campaign—I have much to say about the new gods of fascism and the old deity of liberty. Specifically, I have ended up as an internal dragoman to North America’s political tribes.
The government of the Ottoman Empire, the Sublime Porte, originally employed dragomans because the Ottomans were biased against high imperial officials using the language of non-Muslim peoples, meaning the languages of the European Christians. As a result Ottoman diplomacy required the sultan’s ministers to use interpreters, dragomans, who were key to negotiations. It can feel like North America’s political/social tribes not only do not understand one another, but they do not even want to seen to make the attempt, lest they be tainted by the effort. My Substack, in part, helps to bridge this divide by engaging in analysis rooted in something deeper than partisan loyalties: history. The past loves no one and humbles those who need it.
So, if you are reading me for the first time or the hundredth time, know that my goal is always understanding, and also building the social infrastructure of resilience based on knowledge and common understandings of the past.
History does not offer comfort to the passive, but it does offer orientation to the engaged. And in an age of constant distraction and putting things in a “memory hole,” the act of remembering, clearly, critically, and without illusion, is itself a form of defiant renewal. If we remember anything let it be, that being ruled is easy and self-government is hard. Democracy is difficult, hard work. Canadians and Americans have it tough, they are expected to actually choose their leaders, and know what the politicians are talking about as they prattle on. Power, the power to choose your leaders, when vested in an incurious people is a recipe for fraud and eager deception. But it does not have to be that way. You can choose the strenuous life of the citizen.
To the Windy City, the place that this year, 2025, gave the world the first American Pope; over a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt extolled the need of an individual and national character geared toward labor and activity in order to make the country good and great:
In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the West, men of the State which gave to the country Lincoln and Grant, men who preeminently and distinctly embody all that is most American in the American character, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.
A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting American demands from himself and from his sons shall be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in their eyes-to be the ultimate goal after which they strive? You men of Chicago have made this city great, you men of Illinois have done your share, and more than your share, in making America great, because you neither preach nor practice such a doctrine. You work yourselves, and you bring up your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remunerative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in historical research-work of the type we most need in this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects most honor upon the nation…
—Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life” 1899
I never meant to become an essayist, it is hard work, but apparently 190 of you are reading, so I thank you and I’ll continue to do my part.
Whether you wanted to end up here, here is where you are, make the best of it.