I see many comments and questions here for me today about Emmanuel Macron, the next round of French elections, and what they mean. I’ll get to them soon, I promise. Though with what’s happening on the Korean peninsula, I can’t blame anyone who thinks, “That’s enough of France; we’ve got bigger things to worry about.”

That’s kind of what I’m thinking, and I live here.

Today, though — at last — here’s the article I’ve been working on about the referendum in Turkey.

The first draft of that thing was monstrously long. My editors at The American Interest helped me organize some very unorganized thoughts, and they very wisely suggested I take out enough of my personal vituperation that I might one day be able to eat lunch in Washington again.

Maybe.

There’s of course a much longer version of this article, though, still waiting to be born. And it will be. That too will go in the book. It’s connected to everything else that’s happening in Europe, and to this strange new world we’ve all entered.

It only took me so long to write this piece because I was trying to reduce what I saw and lived through over the course of a baffling decade to an article that you’ll be able to read in ten minutes. I think I did it, though. I think in the end it makes sense. (And I know you’ll tell me if it doesn’t.)

Lest there be any misunderstanding, start with this: “Make no mistake,” I wrote. “Turkey did this to itself. It’s an inexcusable conceit to imagine that everything that goes wrong in the world is somehow under American control and thus our fault.” That point is obvious, and I think we can take it as given.

But this article isn’t about that. It’s about the parts that were under our control. And we did not, in my view, acquit ourselves well — or even understandably:

At every turn, we misunderstood events, deliberately or through laziness; at every opportunity to speak when it might have made a difference, we were silent or said precisely what was least useful; we rewarded every step toward despotism with praise, indifference, or investment.

Had all the experts, politicians, human-rights monitors, and democracy-promoters spoken up before this and all the previous democracy-eviscerating lies and purges and referenda, who knows whether they might have made a difference? At least the West would have appeared to stand for something, to have principles. But we were so quiet that you could be forgiven for thinking that this—one referendum, one day—is how democracies die.

No: they die bit by bit, lie by lie. It’s hard to kill even a democracy of the imperfect sort Turkey’s was. It takes years.

The story of what really happened in Turkey still matters, even if it’s too late to help Turks. We all need to have a good think about how democracies die, because they’re dying like flies. It’s not too late to learn how it really happened. If we don’t, we can’t hope to draw the right lessons. These might apply to democracies still alive. They might even apply to our own.

Turkey and its politics became very personal to me. Obviously. I doubt I’ll ever fully understand what took place while I lived there, or why the West — to the extent there’s an entity called “the West” — behaved the way it did. I probably won’t live long enough to see the unsealed archives.

So I can’t tell you, as a historian would, what really happened.

Nor do I have the talent to make you feel what what it was like to live there during these events. That’s a job for someone who’s been given different literary gifts. 

My job, I decided at last, is just to tell you more about this strange period in Turkish history. To leave you thinking that there are some very strange questions about it, and about how we reacted.

I don’t have the answers to those question. But I still think they’re worth asking. If only we could answer them, we would understand ourselves better.

I can’t say I know what we would learn, exactly. All I know for sure is that years after I left, I’m still asking them.