Why is the courage lacking to stand up to Trump? French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s wartime writings offer a clue

For most European civil servants, communicating with their American counterparts in the Trump era is a totally new experience – if you can call it that – compared to the past. According to a senior European official who has been in frequent contact with colleagues at the state department in Washington for years, it becomes increasingly clear that the US is hardly run by its institutions anymore but primarily by what they call ‘The Family’: ie, the Trumps and a small clique surrounding them. When this man, who of course shall remain anonymous, speaks to his counterparts in Washington – people in positions of responsibility, like him – they suddenly tell him they are out of the loop and cannot make decisions on anything. Nowadays, if he seeks information or wants to coordinate positions, his counterparts say only very few officials with exclusive access to ‘The Family’ can do this. At the state department, everybody knows who they are. “I am told there are only three of them in the entire ministry.” ‘The Family’ This anecdote from one of Brussels’ corridors shows how quickly the dismantling of democracy can take place. Tellingly, it is not solely down to the behaviour of ‘The Family’ and the small circle of chosen few feeding off the Trump trough (for instance, it became known recently that the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was involved in plans to privatise FIFA – officially a non-profit organisation). No, Trump’s walkover has also become possible because many others let it happen – people throwing their hands up in the air saying: we no longer have a say here, we have been bypassed and overruled. Why is it so difficult for civil servants to stand up to Trump? Why was there so little resistance when then-prime minister Viktor Orbán decided to bypass Hungarian institutions? Lessons from wartime To understand this, read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Écrits de Guerre (1939–1944) (‘Wartime Writings 1939-1944’). In this large volume of notes, letters and reflections, Saint-Exupéry - the French pilot and writer who became famous for The Little Prince - observed in early 1939, shortly after the Munich Agreement of September 1938, that humanity has “somewhere strayed from the right path”. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had just handed over Sudetenland to Adolf Hitler in the hope of avoiding another major war in Europe. But, as Saint-Exupéry duly notes, if men are unwilling to fight for the greater good, all they will ultimately be left with is a peace anchored in shame. “The human anthill is richer than before,” he wrote. “We have more material wealth and more free time, and yet now we are lacking something essential that we cannot even find a word for anymore. We feel less human; somewhere along the way, we have lost mysterious human properties.” Why do people not fight back evil? Why do they offer little or no resistance when potentates dismantle the rule of law, trample human rights and start illegal wars? That question is relevant once again - even in Germany, where the extreme right is on the brink of power in one of the Länder [regional states] after almost having secured a majority in the regional elections on Sunday (6 September). Saint-Exupéry had a prompt reply: this is because a greater common purpose is lacking, a purpose “that lies outside ourselves and allows us to breathe again”. Without such a purpose, a clearly defined goal, people will not sacrifice themselves to show courage and do what is right – the good deed that is in everyone’s interest. Without sacrifice for the greater, common good, therefore, every individual ultimately stands alone. To him, this is what sacrifice is about. It binds people together, so they can dedicate themselves to the greater good and overcome evil. Saint-Exupéry, who never returned from a mission in 1944 (his aircraft was only found in 2003, in a bay near Marseille), repeatedly used the image of the sacrifice he himself experienced whilst helping stranded colleagues in inhospitable terrain: “We, children of an age of comfort, feel inexplicably good when we share our last morsel of food with others in the desert. Every one of us who has felt the great satisfaction of rescuing crashed colleagues in the Sahara knows that any other pleasure pales in comparison.” 'Children of an age of comfort' We see that self-sacrifice every day in Ukraine – without it, the country would have been wiped off the map long ago. In America, where a higher good (liberal democracy) is also being destroyed, we see it less often. How would European countries fare in such situations? Even today, Europeans are “children of an age of comfort”, to use Saint-Exupéry’s words, children who scarcely realise that humanity is not a passive state but a conscious act. This is the difference between them and “the pilot who sacrifices himself for his post, the doctor who gives his life in the fight against an epidemic, a camel rider who endures hardship and loneliness at the front of a caravan”. Words of wisdom. Rediscovering the writings of Saint-Exupéry is one of the few positive by-products of the Trump and Putin era. This column was adapted from a recent column in NRC.