Michael Barone:
“…Family elders fret about getting through Thanksgiving and the holidays without violent arguments, and more parents than ever say they’d be upset if their children marry across political lines.
But are things really so bad? Last week’s ceremonies commemorating the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I — or, rather, the Armistice that stopped the fighting on the Western Front but not farther east — suggest that they could be a lot worse, and they have been within the memory of some people only recently departed.
In many ways, today’s troubles look like miniature versions of the woes of the 20th century…
But the threats to legitimacy of established governance were much greater and more destructive 100 years ago. As strange as it may seem to 21st century readers, before World War I European hereditary monarchs, who to varying degrees made government policy, were a widely respected legitimizing force. Allegiance to a ruling family mostly overrode ethnic loyalties.
The Great War put an end to that. The Romanoff dynasty in Russia fell before the Armistice, replaced after civil warfare by the murderous Communist regime for 70 long years. The German Kaiser, Queen Victoria’s oldest grandchild, was ousted in November 1918, as was the Habsburg monarch of Austria-Hungary, whose predecessor Franz Josef reigned for 68 years.
Dynasties were not replaced by stable democracies. Hitler maneuvered into power in Weimar Germany, and his Nazis took control of the multiple nations carved out of Austria-Hungary between 1938 and 1941. The defeat of Hitler was followed by America’s Cold War with its wartime ally, the Soviet Union.
These struggles, gigantic in stature, grave with dangers, dwarf the unpleasant but not existential struggles of our own time. As Steven Pinker argues in The Better Angeles of Our Nature, we live — and mostly thrive — in a far less violent world than our ancestors did 100 years ago. Happy Thanksgiving…”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/amid-your-complaints-a-reason-to-give-thanks