Things Worth Remembering: ‘We Fell Morally Ill’

Welcome to Douglas Murray’s column, “Things Worth Remembering,” in which he presents great speeches from famous orators we should commit to heart. Scroll down to listen to Douglas reflect on the promise of President Václav Havel.

I was in Washington, D.C., last week to see the 47th president of the United States sworn into office. Listening to his inaugural address, I was struck by one sentence above all: “My recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal—and all of these many betrayals that have taken place—and to give the people back their faith, their wealth, their democracy, and, indeed, their freedom.”

It’s an extraordinarily powerful promise: that a leader will actively return the government to the governed. It’s been made many times throughout history. A new leader alludes to a dark, recent past, one in which the regime did not respect the wishes of the people, then declares: I will usher in a brighter future.

That may indeed happen in the United States after the events of January 2025, though we will not be able to tell for some years. The arc of history is long and torturous, and often hard to make out.

It definitely happened in Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution of November and December 1989. The Czechoslovakian people were still blinking in the sunlight after many dark decades of communism when newly elected President Václav Havel addressed his nation on New Year’s Day 1990.

“You may ask what kind of republic I dream of,” Havel said in a televised address. “Let me reply,” he went on. “I dream of a republic independent, free, and democratic; of a republic economically prosperous and yet socially just; in short, of a humane republic that serves the individual and that therefore holds the hope that the individual will serve it in turn.”

And then: “People, your government has returned to you!”

It may seem an odd thing—or even an outrageous thing—to compare Donald Trump to Havel: to hold up the American billionaire next to an erudite Czechoslovakian playwright who never seemed entirely comfortable being in charge of a nation.

And yet.

Both presidents were able to tap into the national zeitgeist in a way no one else could. The two men, in wildly different ways, set out to accomplish the same thing: to restore the compact between the ruling class and the ruled, to legitimize that which felt beyond legitimization.

Havel was born into a bourgeois family in 1936, and was 11 when the communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. He was 31 when Soviet troops invaded. By then, Havel was on his way to becoming one of his nation’s most celebrated writers—and bravest dissidents. He published his most famous essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” in October 1978 in samizdat form—in bits of handwritten or mimeographed text circulating through the liberal underground.

The central theme of the essay—like that of his televised address and, really, his entire oeuvre—is that truth is inescapable. We can run away from the truth; we can pretend that lies are facts; we can pretend that there is no such thing as objective reality. But reality always manages to force its way into our consciousness. The dissident does not really choose to become a dissident. Dissidence is forced upon a person, born from a painful but unavoidable tension with the external world, an awareness of the suffocating, subjugating power of myth.

“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment,” Havel said in his 1990 address. “We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves.”

The most devastating effect of this contamination, Havel explained, is a melting away of real emotions and relationships—a grotesque atomization that leaves us feeling deeply alone, misunderstood, frightened.

“Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships,” he added.

To be clear, though Trump is fond of calling his political rivals “communists,” the United States has never been subject to the brutal reality of socialist totalitarianism—the labor camps; the secret police; the fear, rage, and mass deprivation. And even though the challenge Trump faces—reversing decades of paralyzing distrust in the government—is steep, it is not nearly as steep as that faced by Havel and his fellow reformers in the early 1990s.

But there is a parallel: Havel grasped, just as Trump grasps, that the people—not the ideas or the ideology that informed his agenda—were his absolute priority. That was how Havel forged his bond with the Czechoslovakian people and steered the country toward a more open and pluralistic society.

“Let us try, in a new time and in a new way, to restore this concept of politics,” Havel added in his address. “Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community.”

That was how he ultimately “returned” Czechoslovakia, and, later, the Czech Republic, to its people—not as a gift, but as a pact. Havel’s demand, to the newly liberated population of his nation, was that they take responsibility for the future, and also the past.

“It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the last 40 years as something alien, which some distant relative bequeathed us,” Havel said in his 1990 speech. “On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy as a sin we committed against ourselves. If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us alone to do something about it.”

He added: “Freedom and democracy include participation and therefore responsibility from us all.”

Click here to listen to Douglas reflect on the promise of President Václav Havel:

Douglas Murray will be back in your inbox next Sunday. His last column was about “The Zionism of Martin Luther King.”

Donald Trump, just sworn in as the 47th president, was reelected to be a wrecking ball to the Beltway elites. And while this populist moment feels unprecedented, Eli Lake, host of our new show, “Breaking History,” says it’s not—the rebuke of the ruling class is encoded in our nation’s DNA. Listen to the first episode below or wherever you get your podcasts.