{"id":38048,"date":"2017-04-19T01:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-04-19T05:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38048"},"modified":"2017-04-15T11:07:51","modified_gmt":"2017-04-15T15:07:51","slug":"qotd-hubris-and-nemesis-or-pride-goeth-before-the-fall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/19\/qotd-hubris-and-nemesis-or-pride-goeth-before-the-fall\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Hubris and Nemesis, or pride goeth before the fall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Few things are more likely to precede defeat than the conviction that you are on the verge of victory. One hundred years ago, in the spring of 1917, Germany had every reason to believe that it would triumph over its enemies in the First World War. France had been bled white in repeated attacks on the German army\u2019s fortified lines, England was suffering from shortages of both munitions and military manpower, and Russia was descending into a revolution that would, within a year, enable Germany and its Austro-Hungarian allies to shift enormous numbers of troops and guns to the Western Front. Yet the entry of the United States into the war on April 6, 1917, proved to be the counterweight that shifted the balance. By the autumn of 1918, the fond hope of Germany victory had been exposed as a delusion. The ultimate result of the Kaiser\u2019s war was the destruction of the Kaiser\u2019s empire, and of much else besides.<\/p>\n

What is true in war is true also in politics. Hubris is nearly always the precedent to unexpected defeat. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory; less than four years later, LBJ could not even win his own party\u2019s nomination for re-election. In 1972, Richard Nixon was re-elected in a landslide; less than two years later, he was forced to resign from office. More recently, after George W. Bush\u2019s 2004 re-election, some imagined that this victory was the harbinger of a \u201cpermanent Republican majority\u201d \u2014 a GOP electoral hegemony based on a so-called \u201ccenter-right\u201d realignment \u2014 but two years later, Democrats captured control of Congress and in 2008 Barack Obama was elected president. Obama\u2019s success in turn led Democrats to become overconfident, and Hillary Clinton\u2019s supporters believed they were \u201con the right side of history,\u201d as rock singer Bruce Springsteen told a rally<\/a> in Philadelphia on the eve of the 2016 election. Unfortunately for Democrats, history disagreed.<\/p>\n

Robert Stacy McCain, “Why Is the ‘Right Side of History’ Losing?”, The American Spectator<\/em><\/a>, 2017-04-05.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few things are more likely to precede defeat than the conviction that you are on the verge of victory. One hundred years ago, in the spring of 1917, Germany had every reason to believe that it would triumph over its enemies in the First World War. France had been bled white in repeated attacks on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1118,7,5,53,41,13,246],"tags":[670,595,515],"class_list":["post-38048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-germany","category-history","category-military","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","category-ww1","tag-hillaryclinton","tag-lbj","tag-richardnixon"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9TG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38048"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38049,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38048\/revisions\/38049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}