“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, philosopher

Fear and paranoia run rampant. The political world is filled with grifters, zealots, and hucksters who use their power for self-aggrandizement when they aren’t demonizing those who hold different ideas about culture, gender, and America’s role in the world. Civil servants who have labored for years to keep the government running smoothly are being driven from their posts and replaced by incompetent loyalists. Book banning is on the rise. Rich white men feel compelled to deprive women and minorities of their rights. Both here and abroad Fascism threatens to turn republics into oligarchies.

1952 was a terrible year.

2025’s disturbing similarity is proof positive of philosopher George Santayana’s famous observation: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As we watch the past being repeated in all its nauseating horror, it’s helpful to remember that in the past brave citizens risked censure and persecution by standing up and speaking up.

A prime example can be found in the recently published Remembrance: Selected Correspondence of Ray Bradbury (Jonathan R. Eller, ed., Simon & Schuster). Ray Bradbury was no stranger to censorship; his novel Fahrenheit 451 has frequently been banned. He wasn’t a political animal, but he knew when he needed to add his voice to the struggle.

In November 1952 Bradbury paid to run a message in Daily Variety, the showbiz Bible, in the wake of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s victory over Harry Truman in the presidential election. His open letter to the Republican Party reads, in part:

You have won and the Democrats are now the opposition…

Every attempt you make to identify the Republican Party

as the American Party, I will resist. Every attempt that you

make to identify the Democratic Party as the party of

Communism, as the “left-wing” or “subversive” party,

I will attack with all my heart and soul…I do not want

any more lies, any more prejudice, any more smears. I

do not want intimations, hear-say, or rumor…Leave [the

Democratic system] alone, leave our individual rights

alone, protect our Constitution, find us a way to peace…

But God help you if you lay a hand on any one of us

again, or try to twist the Constitution and the Bill of

Rights to your own purposes.

The parallels to the present are too obvious to miss.

The late 1940s and early 1950s are considered the height of the Cold War, but there’s a bitter irony in the fact that from this distance Eisenhower, whatever his flaws, looks positively liberal in comparison with ensuing generations of Republican – and Democratic – Presidents. In his 1961 Farewell Address Eisenhower warned the nation:

In the councils of government, we must guard against the

acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or

unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential

for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will

persist. We must never let the weight of this combination

endanger our liberties or democratic processes. 

Ike was right. As misplaced power strives to return America to a pre-Civil Rights, pre-Stonewall, pre-Feminism, pre-Environmental Protection Act America, Ray Bradbury’s principled response to a world in conflict is more relevant than ever.