Stromata Blog

Reminder: It’s WASHINGTON’s Birthday

The federal holidays are listed at 5 U.S.C. §6103(a). The one celebrated on “the third Monday in February” is “Washington’s Birthday”. Not “Presidents’ Day”. (Contrary to what I long believed and the Internet will tell you, Richard Nixon did not rename it sub rosa when he issued his executive order implementing the federal Uniform Monday Holiday Act.)

Some commentators object to the term “Presidents’ Day” because it doles out a smidgen of honor to Presidents who were mediocre or worse. Everyone can furnish his own examples, which became more frequent after Ronald Reagan left the White House. I have a more fundamental objection: The President is only one branch of the government, not an embodiment of the whole. He is not a monarch. If he were, it would be fitting and proper to set aside a day to mark the incumbent’s birth (as is done in Great Britain, where King Charles III is officially honored on the third Saturday in June). Because he is not, it is grotesque to give his portion of the nation’s political structure recognition that is denied to the rest.

Until we have a “Congress Day” and a “Supreme Court and Federal Judiciary Day”, let’s stick singling out our first President.

Another View of the Putin Monologue

Many watchers thought that Tucker Carlson’s interview of Tsar Putin was boring. Some thought it was outrageous: “It brings war, genocide, and fascism.” An old friend of Lithuanian descent found it mostly amusing: “Preppie Mouse Interviews Big Bad Wolf.”

Watching Putin delivering that lengthy and self-flattering version of the history of the Muscovite Despotism to the gapingly naive and historically clueless Tucker was more than a little sad and sent me struggling for a comparison case of the innocent bourgeois herbivore conversing with the monster predator who is, just for now, managing to refrain from making him into an amuse bouche.

 

One pictures Tucker as another Bilbo sitting and interviewing the Dragon Smaug about his current dwarf policies and his friction with the Rivertown. Or as Jonathan Harker listening to Count Dracula boast of his descent from Attila the Hun and victories over the Turk. I kept waiting to hear the howling of wolves nearby briefly interrupt the conversation, and expecting Putin to remark: “The Children of the Night! What music they make!”

 

But neither Bilbo nor Jonathan Harker were anywhere nearly as oblivious to the real nature of their interlocutor. Nor did either publish his own account, failing as Tucker Carlson does, to comment on the disingenuity of the Big Bad Wolf complaining of the possible installation of guard dogs at the neighboring sheep flock as an example of aggression against himself.

 

Nonetheless, “bow tie or four-in-hand, you have to give it to [Tucker], he makes an excellent tie. St. George School clearly grounds its graduates in at least some of the important fundamentals.”

George Kennan on Nominating Political Candidates

While working on something else entirely, I ran across a quote from George Kennan, whose many faults included an abiding hatred of American democracy. In one of his late books, he wrote, “It is not in the election of representatives that our system fails; it is in the process of nomination. That is an extremely complicated problem.” One of his proposed solutions harked back to the day of the infamous “smoke-filled rooms”: Candidates should be nominated by an “elite body” (though I suppose that its deliberations would have to be smoke-free).

Kennan wrote in 1993, perhaps in reaction to the nomination of Bill Clinton, whom he voted for but didn’t like. This year's Presidential primary campaigns lead one almost to applaud the old misanthropist.

H/T: I gleaned the Kennan quote from a review of The Kennan Diaries that appeared several years ago in The New Republic, then a less demented publication than now, although the title attached to the review, “U.S. Cold War Policy Was Designed by a Bigot” shows which way the wind was blowing. The review is very long. If you read it, you will never again think of Kennan as a wise and prudent statesman.

Could Hitler Have Been Remembered as a Progressive Hero?

Adolf Hitler presented himself to the world as a socialist, and he transformed the German economy into a centrally directed dirigiste regime. Suppose that he had not lived long enough to embark on World War II and the “Final Solution”. He might today be remembered as the man whose progressive governance could have brought peace and prosperity to Europe. After all, if progressives can overlook that faults of Stalin and Mao, how hard would it have been to praise posthumously a Hitler who never had the opportunity to produce the fruits of his ideology?

Taking up that theme, I have channeled the Hitler apologia that British historian (and communist sympathizer) A. J. P. Taylor might have written, if Hitler had fallen from power in 1936, instead of the one that he actually wrote.

An Unexpected Future?

Yesterday the Tory Party at Yale University held its annual banquet, marking 54 years since its founding (in which I played a small part). In connection with the event, the party published an issue of The Tory Truth, its irregular periodical, and dedicated it to the memory of Queen Elizabeth II. The editor asked me for a short essay on monarchy. I thought at first that it would have to be an exercise in nostalgia. My initial premise was that the late Queen was the last of her kind and that her death marked the passing of a venerable but obsolete institution. Kings and Queens would linger, I supposed, but only as celebrity anachronisms.

Yet as I pondered further, I began to see that monarchy is more than a bad habit that mankind is now shrugging off. It is rooted in human nature, and reports of its death may be exaggerated. Here is the piece that I produced, which I present not as confident prophecy but as a reflection on how unexpected the future may be.

Why Monarchy Will Endure

When the outlying territories of the Ottoman Empire began to fall away, the Great Powers searched for presentable younger sons of minor German dynasties and installed them as princes or kings of the newly freed lands. Thus it was that Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and even (for half a year) Albania received sovereigns who bore the surnames Wittelsbach, Battenberg, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and Wied.

No one saw anything odd about that. Everybody took it for granted that monarchy, preferably hereditary, was the natural form of government. The exceptions were few enough that any schoolboy could recite them: the Greek city states, the Roman Republic, Viking Age Iceland, the medieval Italian communes, the Swiss cantons, and the recent, revolutionary republics of the Americas and France. Elsewhere, government without a monarch equated to tyranny or turmoil, as in Cromwellian England or the last days of Republican Rome.

The modern schoolboy (or should I write “schoolperson”?) needs less than a moment’s thought to conclude that all his forebears were fools. From the “enlightened” point of view, which sees government as a mechanism that can and should be perfected by the application of rational principles, vesting sovereignty in a man or woman with no qualifications save ancestry is as nonsensical as leaving the choice up to a lady dispensing swords from the middle of a lake.

Nevertheless, as G. K. Chesterton advised, before we tear down a structure, we should consider why it was built. That monarchy was, until very recently, favored pretty much semper, ubique et ab omnibus suggests that its roots lie deep in human nature.

Men, Aristotle observed, thrive only in organized communities (“polities”). There is more to that truth than the obvious fact that it isn’t easy to live in solitude. A polity that consists only of individuals jostling side by side, with no relationships except through contracts founded on self-interest, has no power to preserve itself. If a faction of the inhabitants has the means to subjugate the rest, why shouldn’t they? Or if a great danger arises – a foreign invasion, for instance – what motive do some have to give up their lives or fortunes to save those of strangers?

Socrates was an outlier among Athenians. When condemned to death, he refused to escape, saying that his duty to “the laws of Athens” overruled the instinct for survival. His three most brilliant pupils were more typical of the city’s mentalité. Plato saw nothing good in “the laws of Athens” and proposed alternatives derived from abstract analysis. Xenophon became an admirer of Sparta and sent his sons to be educated there. Alcibiades betrayed the city. None of the three had any stronger tie to his countrymen than what self-interest could furnish, and that proved woefully inadequate.

A polity cannot endure unless its citizens regard the good of their fellow citizens as part of their own self-interest. That fellow feeling, commonly called “patriotism”, connotes an affection analogous to that of children for parents. (The analogy can be, and often is, misapplied. Citizens are not infantile wards of government, to be instructed by their betters on what they may think and how they may behave. The wise men of Davos are granted no rights by the Fifth Commandment.)

Patriotism is, then, essential to the survival of a polity, but whence does it derive? Historically, and nearly universally, it is first grounded on loyalty to a person who is seen as embodying the polity, that is, on a monarch whose title is accepted as legitimate without regard to his personal qualities.

This sentiment is not, of course, rational in the Enlightenment sense. The source of Elizabeth II’s legitimacy was not her admirable character and devotion to duty, just as Edward VII’s lack of those qualities did not render him any less a king for whom Englishmen were willing to fight and die.

Monarchical sentiment also is not irreplaceable. The United States of America has jogged along well enough without a king. We have a substitute in a similarly pre-rational attachment to our Constitution and our history, an attachment that survived, and indeed was strengthened by, a civil war on an epic scale. Unhappily, it now shows signs of fraying. It is no good sign that the Harvard Law Review recently published a 264 page essay by a prominent professor lauding the idea of ignoring the Constitution whenever it inconveniences progressive preferences. [Michael J. Klarman, “The Supreme Court 2019 Term: Foreword: The Degradation of American Democracy – and the Court”, 134 Harv. L. Rev. 1 (Nov. 2020).]

Outside our own land, “Constitution plus history” has a poor record of fostering useful sentiment. The formula has been ingested throughout Latin America and has produced little in the way of good health. The Romans had greater success with loyalty to the mos maiorum and their own founding mythos, but that, too, failed in the end.

The most common substitutes for monarchy in the era of republics have been insidious: fictive ties of blood or the charisma of dictators. Readers of The Tory Truth do not, I trust, need to have those alternatives disrecommended to them.

In the long run, notwithstanding its current eclipse, hereditary monarchy is the only reliable foundation for a polity. One must add the reservation that “reliable” does not mean “immortal”. Nor is it obvious how the revival of kingship will take place. No one can be argued into affection for a dynasty. Yet “Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret” is a wise maxim. Unless human nature changes dramatically or civilization proves to be a passing fad, the world shall yet see the return of the kings.

Epochenwende

Today is the 90th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of Germany. While I haven’t looked, I have no doubt that leftists around the Internet are comparing that day to January 20, 2017 (and January 20, 2021, to May 2, 1945). Ho, hum. Today on Law and Liberty, Samuel Gregg recounts a reaction to Hitler that has far more bearing on our own time than any fantasy about Donald Trump.

As Mr. Gregg notes, many Germans who had no enthusiasm for Hitler viewed his appointment complacently.

When the Nazis acceded to power in 1933, the effect was not mass consternation on the part of those with misgivings. Even the most important German Jewish representative group, the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, maintained that, despite the Nazis’ ferocious anti-Semitism, “nobody would dare to touch [their] constitutional rights.”

(I knew someone in college whose grandfather, a Jew who had been awarded the Hamburg Hanseatic Cross for his service in the Great War, remained in Germany, confident that the Nazis wouldn’t touch a man with his patriotic record – until he was deported to a death camp. Fortunately, he had sent his wife and children to England before that.)

One man who didn’t share that complacency was Wilhelm Röpke, a 33-year-old, gentile professor at the University of Marburg who was already a famous economist. On February 8, 1936, he delivered a public lecture titled “Epochenwende” (the turning point between two eras), in which he “sought to identify the essence of what the highly ideological movements of the right and left then striving for power across Europe wanted to annihilate”. He called that essence “liberalism”, a term to which he attached a broader meaning than the political and economic opinions of contemporary liberal parties.

Instead, liberalism served in Röpke’s lecture as a synonym for the integration of Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian, and Enlightenment ideas, culture, and institutions that, he believed, constituted the civilization of the West. Nazism – and Bolshevism, for that matter – should, Röpke maintained, be recognized as an insurrection against that particular complexion of concepts, expectations, and institutions.

Mr. Gregg describes Röpke’s synthesis of those “concepts, expectations, and institutions”, and I won’t repeat his summary. Instead, I have another point, one that is as pertinent today as it was 90 years ago.

The intellectual and political movements that contended in Europe before the rise of Nazism and Bolshevism all drew on elements of Röpke’s mix, though not necessarily the whole: Reactionaries and romantics omitted the Enlightenment, radical liberals the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, French revolutionaries everything but the Enlightenment, pietists of various stripes everything outside their preferred faith.

The Nazis and Bolsheviks were different: They rejected all that went before, including the idea, common to Greece and Rome, Judaism and Christianity, and the Enlightenment philosophes, that reality is objective and the truth or falsity of an argument depends on how closely it tracks reality rather than on the race or class of its proponents. And because their invented reality was both mandatory for all and detached from reason, they enforced it through violence. Not believing in reason, they had no other choice.

Argument with convinced Nazis or Communists was futile, because they “knew” that arguments put forward by racial inferiors or bourgeois chatterers were inherently false. Moreover, if someone of the “correct” race or class presented them, that showed only that he had been deluded by the Jews or the capitalists (groups that tended to coalesce in their minds).

The mentality of the Nazis and Communists marks the Woke anti-thinkers of today. They, too, regard all previous generations with contempt and consider statements true if, and only if, they emanate from sufficiently wokened mouths. Their fantasy world differs from Hitler’s or Lenin’s, but it is fantasy all the same. Wilhelm Röpke would have recognized them. Their ideas – or, more accurately, emotions and neuroses – will, if they prevail, be the Epochenwende between Western civilization and an era of unprecedented barbarity.

The Crimean Conundrum

Here is an interesting report, dated yesterday:

President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that the U.S. would for the first time send 31 of the sophisticated [M1 Abrams] tanks to aid Ukraine’s war effort. Speaking anonymously during a press briefing, a senior administration official acknowledged that those tanks could roll on Crimea.

“We want to make sure that [the Ukrainians] have the capabilities to not only defend themselves against the Russian onslaught … but also that they have the ability to retake, to reclaim their sovereign territory, and that means everything that is recognized by international borders,” the official said.

The official was asked to clarify whether they meant retaking territory in Crimea or in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, where Russia purported to annex several areas last year.

“Crimea is Ukraine,” the official responded. “We’ve never recognized the illegal annexation of Crimea. But where the Ukrainians decide to go and how they decide to conduct operations in their country, those are their decisions to make.”

That “senior official” may be an outlier. The Biden Administration’s enthusiasm for Ukrainian victory seems to wax and wane unpredictably. The decision to equip Ukraine with our top-of-the-line armored fighting vehicles followed days of insistence that the country’s armed forces didn’t need and couldn’t effectively use M1’s. Still, the quoted statement raises a question that isn’t often addressed but will need to be answered if the current war is to come to a satisfactory conclusion: What should happen to Crimea?

Neither Ukraine nor Russia has strong historical ties to the peninsula. After the Mongol invasions in the 13th Century, it fell under the rule of the Golden Horde, then of the Ottoman Empire, then, briefly, of an independent Crimean Tatar state. In 1783, Catherine the Great annexed it to the Russian Empire. During the Russian Civil War, it was a White bastion under a democratic Tatar regime. After the Bolshevik triumph, it became the “Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic”. Agriculture was collectivized with the usual communist brutality. The Tatars were subjected to forced Russification. During World War II, they were deported en masse to the Russian far east. After the war, the “autonomous republic” was demoted to an oblast.

In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, an action of zero political significance. It wasn’t a recognition of any Ukrainian character. According to the 1959 census, ethnic Ukrainians made up only 22 percent of the population.

In the referendum on Ukrainian independence in December 1991, Crimea had the lowest voter turnout (68 percent versus 84 percent for Ukraine as a whole) and the lowest percentage of “yes” votes (57 percent in Sevastopol, 54 percent in the rest of Crimea; next lowest voting district was 83.9 percent). Those figures suggest tepid enthusiasm for the Ukrainian connection.

In 1992, the Crimean parliament voted to declare independence from Ukraine, then retracted the declaration the next day. In 1994, Yuri A. Meshkov, a supporter of Crimean independence and closer ties with Russia, won the Crimean presidency. A referendum endorsed greater autonomy for Crimea and dual Russian-Ukrainian citizenship for its residents, but the movement fizzled out as the separatists turned to fighting among themselves. The Crimean parliament and presidency were subsequently abolished (ironically, by a Ukrainian president known for his pro-Russian sympathies).

Also in 1994, Russia and Ukraine agreed to the Budapest Memorandum, which recognized Crimea as an integral part of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of its nuclear weapons. That agreement seemed to settle Crimea’s status – until Russia’s “little green men” invaded in 2014 and, almost bloodlessly, seized control. A referendum in March 2014 supposedly gave 97 percent approval to annexation to Russia, but polls taken shortly before the Russian takeover showed majority opposition to joining Russia, and “a report by Russian human rights experts that was posted on the website of the Russian Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights found that turnout was only 30 to 50 percent, with just 50 to 60 percent of participants voting in favor of annexation”.

Now it is 2023, Ukraine and Russia are at war, and among Ukraine’s overt war aims is the recovery of Crimea. The strongest basis for the Ukrainian claim is the Budapest Memorandum. If this were the 18th Century, when sovereigns exchanged territories like trading cards, that argument would have heavy weight, but the notion has since developed that the inhabitants of a region should have a major say in who rules them. One can hardly say with confidence what the Crimeans, given a free choice, would prefer, and no alternative looks very satisfactory.

The first idea that comes to mind is a referendum. Let Crimeans vote for Ukraine or Russia. That would indeed resolve the issue if one side or the other won decisively, but there’s no good reason to expect that outcome. A close vote would leave the losers discontented and determined to try again, a pattern that we’ve seen in Scotland and Quebec, while nationalists in the losing party’s preferred partner would press their government to work for a reversal (not necessarily peaceful) of the electoral verdict.

Unpromising as a solution via referendum is, annexation without any formal expression of popular consent, or with a phony plebiscite like the farce of 2014, would be worse, for reasons that are too obvious to need stating.

What about independence? In different circumstances, an independent Crimea with its own national identity might obviate the current ethnic divisions. In the world as it exists, there are drawbacks. Eastern Europe doesn’t need a minuscule state (about the size of Houston in population and Vermont in area) in a strategic location, encircled by neighbors (Russia, Ukraine, Turkey) with motives for interfering in its affairs.

All in all, it seems that Crimea is not a “problem”. Problems have solutions. Crimea may have none. If, as somebody in the Biden Administration thinks would be a good idea, Ukraine recovers it by force of arms, that won’t bother me at all, but the event will be just another stage in the conflict, not its end.

GOP Turbulence, Then and Now

Hakeem Jeffries, an anti-democracy leader of the Democratic Party, has already spammed my e-inbox with half a dozen messages gloating about the inability of the Republican House majority to elect a Speaker and get started with legislative business. (As I had not known until today, Representatives cannot take their oaths of office until a Speaker is in place to swear them in. The most powerful member of the House is elected by men and women who have not yet made or renewed their oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States.)

Every news story about this stasis mentions that nothing like it has occurred for the past one hundred years, not since 1923, when nine ballots were taken before Frederick Huntington Gillett was elected Speaker of the House for the third time.

The current contretemps echoes the previous one in some ways. Speaker Gillett, like Speaker-aspirant Kevin McCarthy, did not stand out. First elected to Congress in 1892, he was a conventional Republican of his time and rose to the Speakership mostly through longevity. He followed a succession of domineering Speakers – “Czar” Reed, Joe Cannon, Champ Clark. He was chosen, in part, because he was not expected to be like them, and he wasn’t. He was a “go along, get along” type, more prominent on the Washington social scene than in the Capitol building.

When he first became Speaker, in 1919, the GOP had just reversed the eight years of Democratic control that had flowed from the Republican-Progressive split. In 1920, running under Warren Harding’s banner of “Return to Normalcy”, the Republican majority ballooned from 240-195 to 302-133. In the off-year election of 1922, though, Republicans, weighed down by scandals, lost a net of 77 seats, retaining 225 versus 210 held by Democrats and left-wing splinter parties.

The narrow majority included two dissident groups: “drys”, who demanded strict enforcement of the recently enacted Eighteenth Amendment, and a small cadre of progressives loyal to Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette (who would run for President as a third party candidate in 1924). Near the close of the previous Congress (the 67th, which, under the system then in place, adjourned sine die in March 1923), the drys had floated the idea of putting up a candidate against Gillett, who was reputed to be skeptical of Prohibition. That effort died out fairly quickly.

The progressives waited until the 68th Congress convened on December 3, 1923, to make their move. Then 22 Republicans voted for candidates for Speaker other than Gillett. Their object wasn’t to elect someone else. As the Boston Globe observed at the time:

The insurgents neither tried to elect nor to defeat a speaker today. They were aiming over his head at the machine behind him. Their object in blocking the election was to bring the Old Guard to terms in making up the Rules Committee and other powerful committees and in modifying the custom of railroading bills through the House without permitting amendments to be offered from the floor. [Boston Globe, p. 12 (Dec. 4, 1923)

After a day of negotiations, the factions reached a compromise, and Rep. Gillett was reelected on December 5th after nine ballots.

In some respects, the progressives’ complaint in 1923 resembles that of the present-day holdouts.

But what exactly do the these Republican holdouts want?

Texas’s Chip Roy, one of the original 19 rebels, offered this answer on the House floor yesterday: “I want the tools or I want the leadership to stop the swamp from running over the average American every single day.”

The statement is somewhat vague – the “leadership” Roy wants would be a speaker such as Jim Jordan of Ohio, but it’s not clear what “the tools” are that Roy could be given in exchange for a “yes” vote for McCarthy.

Roy elaborated somewhat in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday. “I need to make sure that the Rules Committee is structured in such a way that those of us who are what I would call fiscal conservatives” are able “to stop the sort of train of the swamp,” Roy said.

The great difference between the two sets of rebels is that the 1923 progressives were ideologically distant from the rest of the Republican Party. Their not-so-covert hope (which would be largely disappointed) was that, if the House rules were reformed, an alliance of progressives and Democrats would wield a majority that could block President Coolidge’s legislative agenda.

The 2023 malcontents have hardly any notable policy disagreements with the rest of their party. Perhaps Jim Geraghty is correct to say, “Right now, in the House, the GOP is a nominal or technical majority party with a large faction which has no interest in acting like a majority. They may well be happier being in the minority.” He quotes a recent (pay-walled) essay in the Financial Times, which argues that an irrepressible thirst for drama, rather than any incompetence in governing, “is what stops populists holding power for long”.

Put another way, fascism is about winning and doing. Populism is about losing and cocking a snook at the winners. As a movement, it is at its happiest as a large minority of the electorate: enough to sustain its own media ecosystem, provide earning opportunities for grifters and perhaps sway the official policy of the day.

The most vociferous of the GOP populists insist that Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell and their ilk don’t really want to win. But who is trying hard not to win this time? To quote Jim Geraghty again:

Every now and then, the hashtag “#DemsInDisarray” spreads on Twitter, and oftentimes it is fair. But a certain amount of internal friction and squabbling is more or less baked into the cake of being a majority party. You’ve got more members and more factions, all pushing for their priorities to be atop the to-do list. It’s not that, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Abigail Spanberger agree on everything. It’s just that they’re rarely willing to let those differences become such an issue that the party can’t get things done. Both the progressives and centrists – eh, let’s face it, hardline progressives and slightly less hardline progressives – believe they have a vested interest in a functioning legislative majority. Based on what we’re seeing on Capitol Hill this week, a small but pivotal number of House Republicans just don’t feel any obligation to help their party get things done.

Why are Democrats more frequently in the majority in legislative chambers? Well, it probably helps that all their members want to be in the majority.

A Christmas Miscellany

In this season, the Internet is filled with ruminations on the meaning and message of Christmas. I, too, made a feeble attempt at that genre when I was new to blogging. Though the post appeared on a site that has long since been deactivated and archived, it can be read here. Among the many reflections on the same theme appearing today, this one particularly impressed me.

The inimitable Mark Steyn, though convalescing from health problems, has again put together his annual Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols and Christmas Day with Mark and Friends. Both include a great deal of Christmas music.

Much of what we think of as “Christmas music” never mentions Christmas, yet songs like “Deck the Halls”, “Winter Wonderland”, “Let It Snow” and “Jingle Bells” are linked more subtly to the holiday. One may call them “winter songs”, but how many spring, summer and autumn songs can you name? Not zero, I suppose, but not hundreds either. In the light of the Son, flowers spring up in profusion. Even for those who do not comprehend that light, it is a source of good cheer and hope.

Hope in the worst of times. On Christmas Day 1944, American soldiers were defending the isolated outpost of Bastogne in Belgium against the German offensive that came to be known as the “Battle of the Bulge”. Surrounded by a force four times their size, the G.I.'s had little hope of relief. Yet when the German commander demanded surrender, General Anthony McAuliffe responded with one word: “Nuts!” Bastogne held, the Axis drive faltered, and four months later Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin.

At the same time as Bastogne resisted daunting odds, other American soldiers, separated from their units, were lost in the winter landscape nearby. Three of them, one badly wounded, found their way to a remote cabin, where a German family had taken refuge from the fighting. What transpired there on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day is a tale that no fiction writer would dare to send to an editor, yet it is sober fact.

But a sober note isn’t the right one on which to finish a Christmas posting. Instead, let us start preparing for next Yule (only 365 shopping days left!) by perusing the Yelp reviews of Santa’s Home Delivery Service.

Merry Christmas to all!

Addendum: Seen too late for inclusion in the original post is another take on Christmas music, with the provocative thesis that the “definitive” versions of great Christmas songs do more to immortalize the singers that any quantity of other achievements.

Echoes of Robespierre

Law & Liberty has posted an interesting review by Daniel J. Mahoney of the English translation of the awkwardly titled Robespierre: The Man Who Divides Us the Most (Robespierre: L’homme qui nous divise le plus) by French political philosopher Marcel Gauchet. The Italian translation has a more descriptive title: Robespierre: L’incorruttibile e il tiranno. Tra libertà e Terrore: le memorie divise della Rivoluzione francese. If I had been the publisher, I would have called it Robespierre: The Union of Liberty and Terror.

Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) began his career as a provincial lawyer and advocate of humanitarian causes. One of his early works was “Discours sur les peines infamantes” (1784), which denounced the degrading punishments meted out by French criminal courts. In March 1789, he was elected to the Estates-General, the body that fomented the French Revolution. He swiftly became one of its most prominent members and rose to the top of the political scrum during the turbulent years that followed. By 1793, he was the leading member of the Committee of Public Safety and the most eloquent proponent of the Reign of Terror.

His ascendancy didn’t last. On July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II, in the Revolutionary calendar and, ironically, exactly one year after he took his place in the Committee of Public Safety), the National Convention, France’s legislative assembly, accused him of tyranny and ordered his arrest. The next day, after one of the wildest and most memorable nights in all of French history, he and a score of his followers were executed by the guillotine, that emblem of Revolutionary “justice”.

As Professor Mahoney observes, “Robespierre and the Jacobins have their contemporary partisans (and even imitators)”, both inside and outside of France.

For Robespierre is no ordinary tyrant, no man of unhinged ambition striving for power at any cost. In the early years of the Revolution, Robespierre spoke of nothing but the “rights of man,” of popular government, and the need to eschew any compromise with the remnants of the ancien regime. In his view of things, before 1789 one sees only tyranny, darkness, and oppression; on the other side of the chronological divide there is liberty, emancipation, and the dawn of the reign of the “rights of man.” But the transition required rivers of blood to flow. The “killing machine” that Robespierre became is inseparable from his uncompromising dedication to the “rights of man.” The “hero” and the “monster” are one and the same man fanatically dedicated to the same principles. This ought to give us pause.

Several of Robespierre’s traits have eerie echoes in our present day turmoil.

Immense political power was not accompanied by much interest in the mundane tasks of government. “In place of governing, Robespierre and his allies searched for enemies, discerning corruption and conspiracy everywhere.” Rarely attending sessions of the Committee or the Convention, paying scant attention to such crises as spiraling inflation, Robespierre warned in speech after speech that everyone who questioned his opinions was a conspirator against the principles of the Revolution. He often sounded much like Joe Biden excoriating “MAGA Republicans” while ignoring trivial matters like a looming rail strike, a porous Southern border and, by the bye, inflation.

Another audible echo is Robespierre’s rejection of all tradition and history. His principles were, like those of the today’s Woke fanatics, plucked out of his own head. He attributed them to Reason, while the Woke regard rational thought as one of the evils of Western civilization, but the consequences are the same in each case: a set of dogmas that rests on ipse dixit and justifies, indeed demands, the persecution of dissenters. Contemporary persecution is milder than Madame Guillotine, but exclusion from the Public Square and the destruction of livelihoods are far from benign.

Robespierre believed, too, that the nation should possess “une volonté une” (“one single will”). He would have nodded in agreement with the White House press secretary’s declaration, “If you are not with where the majority of Americans are, that is extreme.”

I wouldn’t go so far as to aver that the parallels between President Biden and Citizen Robespierre are exact. For one thing, the “Big Guy” doesn’t qualify for Robespierre’s sobriquet, “l’Incorruptible”. Nor does he possess Robespierre’s intellect, energy, eloquence and charisma. Nor is he in much danger of a Ninth Thermidor, however stridently he may proclaim the imminent danger of insurrection. He is the Revolutionary tyrant recreated as a Twenty-First Century caricature.

Lexical Pedantry

An essay on the American Mind web site calls attention to a phenomenon that is worth attending to, although the fact that our country’s 100 largest land owners hold 2.1 percent of the land area of the continental United States (up from 1.4 percent in 2007) may not portend the destruction of the American middle class, much less of democracy. That is a subject for another day. My pedantic side wishes simply to focus on one sentence: “In much of the American West, billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Ted Turner have created vast estates that systematically make the local population land-poor.”

No. People who own no land are not “land-poor”. The land-poor are those who own land but can’t afford maintenance, mortgage payments, taxes and other encumbrances. George Washington, for example, owned a vast estate, but, when he was elected President –

Despite his reputation as a man of great wealth, Washington was “land-poor” at a most inopportune time. To complete his journey to New York for the inauguration, he needed to borrow 600 pounds at a rate of 6 percent interest from Alexandria merchant Richard Conway.

The accumulation of residential and farm property by well-heeled investors may, indeed, owe much to the “land poverty” of those whom they buy out.

A Ukrainian Perspective on the Murder of Darya Dugina

One of my old college buddies sent me these gleanings from his recent visit to his son, who married a Ukrainian girl and now lives there. The son is fluent in Russian and follows the Russian media closely. Here is a summary of his observations concerning the murder of crackpot intellectual Aleksandr Dugin’s daughter Darya and its impact on the Russo-Ukrainian war:

1. Dugin was a marginal extreme Orthodox-nationalist with little influence on Putin or Russian opinion in general.
2. Blowing up his daughter has changed that situation overnight. She is now a martyr and his public statement about the matter is widely known and probably influential.
3. Dugin’s statement is that revenge is beneath us Russians as a nation; what is worthy of us is winning this war, and we must now unite our efforts to do it.
4. This is potentially a game changer, as Putin has lacked sufficient support for a general mobilization and all-out war effort. As my son puts it, Putin has avoided any inconvenience to the wealthy and powerful elites of Moscow and St Petersburg, who definitely don’t want their sons sent off to war. Nor does the military-age population of Russia’s large cities have any enthusiasm for killing Ukrainians.
5. I’ve seen how Russian atrocities have motivated my son’s Ukrainian friends to support all-out war, as in, “We’d rather die than submit to Russia.” That dynamic is capable of working both ways.

The first point is, by the way, consistent with Mark Galeotti’s appraisal of Dugin in The Spectator:

This murder will only add to the Dugin myth, one he himself has so assiduously developed. There are many in the West happy to take him at face value, as “Putin’s Brain” or “Putin’s Rasputin.” He is not, though, and never has been especially influential. He has no personal connection to Putin, but rather is just one of a whole breed of “political entrepreneurs” trying to pitch their plans and doctrines to the Kremlin. For a while, in 2014, he was in favor; his notions of Russia’s civilizational destiny and status as a Eurasian nation convenient to rationalize a land grab in Ukraine’s Donbas. Suddenly he was on every TV channel, his book Foundations of Geopolitics was on the syllabus at the Academy of the General Staff and he was offered a chair at MGU, Moscow State University, the country’s premier institute of higher learning.

But then the Kremlin decided against outright annexation of the Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics” and Dugin was no longer useful. The invitations began to dry up, MGU rescinded its offer, and he was back in the marketplace, hawking his books to the public and his ideas to the leadership. In the process, he mastered the art of retrospective thought-leading. In other words, of picking up on hints about what the Kremlin was about to do and loudly advocating just this move – and then claiming the credit. Overall, though, he has been more effective in selling himself to western alt-right circles – which to be sure, gives him some value to Moscow as an agent of influence – than to the Kremlin.

So this is the Dugin paradox, he is Schrödinger’s Ideologist: at once important and also not. He may not have real traction with the government, but his capacity to present himself as a profound thinker whose (often barking mad) ideas frame Kremlin thinking means he is considered important. And if people think him important, then to a degree he becomes important. Or rather, the myth of Dugin does.

The comparison of Dugin to Rasputin is ironic. While the false monk was undoubtedly an evil presence in the Romanov court, his opinions about foreign policy were pacific. He pleaded with Nicholas II not to enter the Great War. If the Tsar had listened, Russia might well have been spared a century of sorrow.

What Ukraine Means to Russia

Lest there be any misunderstanding, this post isn’t an exercise in tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner. I don’t believe that the historical links between Ukraine and Russia justify Tsar Putin’s program of uniting by force what are now two distinct countries. I do believe, on the other hand, that refusal to recognize that the Russian view isn’t simply an arbitrary and capricious excuse for naked conquest hinders the formulation of effective policies. One debilitating consequence has been an underestimation of Russians’ willingness to suffer for the sake of victory in the present war. A second is a lack of awareness of the possibilities for peace and reconciliation founded on a common heritage.

Ironically, many of the setbacks to Russia’s own war effort can be traced to its rulers’ misunderstanding of Ukraine. Thinking of the Ukrainians as Russians-at-heart oppressed by neo-Nazis, Putin prepared for a short war against an enemy that he thought would welcome liberation or, at worst, be ambivalent about resisting à l'outrance.

To Americans, it may seem that Ukraine is peripheral to Russia, just as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan were peripheral to the United States, perhaps important for reasons of state but incapable of arousing popular sentiment. There are, however, many reasons for Russians to regard Ukraine in much the same way that the Americans regard Great Britain, that is, as a land to which they have a long and deep historical and cultural attachment, in fact, as the original Russia.

The truth is that Ukraine is to Russia as Great Britain is the United States. Ukraine and Russia had no meaningful separate histories until the Thirteenth Century. After the formation of the first Rus’ state in the Ninth Century, the Grand Principality of Kiev was the center of the Rus’ lands. Attached to it were lesser principalities that were independent in their foreign and domestic policies and yet in some sense belonging to a single entity. Every prince was (at least notionally) descended from the dynastic founder, Rurik. Moreover, the principalities formed a hierarchy. When a prince died, the holders of the lower-ranked appanages moved up. The deceased’s heir had to start on the bottom rung.

The Mongol invasions in the 1240’s broke Rus’ apart. Ukraine fell under Polish domination except for the easternmost, largely unsettled region. The Metropolitans of Kiev, the foremost hierarchs of the Rus’ church, abandoned the city, eventually settling in then-obscure Moscow. Their see is ancestral, albeit in a complicated way, to the present-day Patriarchate.

The breakup of the Rus’ state and the political sway over its lands exercised by Mongols and Poles didn’t wholly sever the ties among the Rus’ peoples. In particular, Orthodoxy remained the common faith. St. Peter Mogila, elevated to a restored Kiev Metropolitanate in 1633, is one of the key figures in Russian Orthodox history. His Orthodox Confession of the Catholic and Apostolic Eastern Church was one of the earliest and most influential Orthodox responses to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the West. His educational reforms and patronage of printing likewise provided the tools needed to preserve Orthodoxy in the face of contemporary challenges.

In 1648, Ukrainians rebelled against Polish rule. After a long, bitter war, the majority of their territory gained independence. Establishing a stable government proved impossible, however. In 1654, the Treaty of Pereiaslav united Ukraine and Muscovy, although the unified Tsarist state was very different from medieval Rus’. During the Soviet era, schoolchildren were taught that the principal motive for the rebellion was Ukrainians’ fervent desire to join their Muscovite brethren in a single state – a dubious historical theory that was inculcated vigorously and is bound to have left a mark on the popular consciousness.

For the next 337 years after Pereiaslav, Ukraine (excepting the western regions that Poland held onto until Austria seized them in the Partitions) was an important part of the Russian Empire. Ukrainians held high positions in the Imperial Army, the Civil Service and the Russian Orthodox Church. Among the luminaries of Russian literature was Mykola Vasyl’ovych Hohol’, whom you know as “Nikolai Gogol”. Many Ukrainians agreed completely with the idea that there was no fundamental difference between the two peoples and adopted without qualms the designation of their territory as “Little Russia”.

These historical facts are not Putinist propaganda. One may find them in Orest Subtelny’s Ukraine: A History, a work that, it has been said, “seep[ed] into the consciousness of those at the forefront of the independence movement and embolden[ed] them”. There are, of course, other facts, such as emergence of a distinctive Ukrainian literary language and national consciousness in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the attempt by both Tsars and Bolsheviks to suppress Ukrainian identity, and, above all, the Holodomor, the Stalin-made famine that killed three or four million Ukrainians.

Soviet oppression led to consequences that haunt Ukrainian nationalism to this day. Ukraine’s hesitancy between evils during World War II is the frail scaffold supporting Putin’s calumnies about a “Nazi regime” in Kiev.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, many Ukrainians preferred the devil they didn’t know to the one that they did. Villages welcomed German soldiers with bread and salt, the traditional symbols of hospitality. Ukrainian collaboration with the invaders was widespread. Some went so far as to enlist in the invaders’ armed forces, which assigned them to such repulsive duties as policing extermination camps.

Needless to say, Adolf Hitler had no more use for Soviet subjects who assisted the Germans than for those who fought against them or tried to remain neutral. All were Slavic Untermenschen destined to be enslaved or starved. A German general said after the war that it was lost on the day that the Wehrmacht entered Kiev and raised the swastika rather than the Ukrainian flag. Once Hitler’s plans for the conquered lebensraum became evident, the leading Ukrainian nationalist groups fought both the Nazis and the communists, a noble effort (continuing for several years after the end of World War II) but doomed to failure.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine became, for the first time since the pre-Mongol era, an independent, self-governing nation. It is worth noting that in the referendum on independence from Russia (December 1, 1991), every administrative region in the Russian-majority Donbas voted at least 75 percent “da”. (The only relatively close vote was in Crimea (54.19% in favor).)

Ukraine is not alien to Russia, though it has been alienated. From that fact, we can draw some conclusions. First, the Russian war to subdue Ukraine stems from more than an appetite for random conquest. To attribute it to “security concerns” prompted by Kiev’s potential membership in NATO and the European Union is an obvious error. Russians of the Putin stripe would covet the birthplace of Rus’, were it as neutral as Switzerland, and they are unlikely to be appeased by any partial victory imposed by outside powers.

Second, the mutual history of the two countries could form the foundation for lasting amity. Peoples with close cultural and historical links don’t often become perpetual enemies. The United Kingdom and the United States are the classic example, but the same is true of Spain and its former New World colonies. There is no inherent reason why Kiev and Moscow can’t someday be as friendly as Washington and London.

Admittedly, reconciliation hardly seems possible in the midst of the present war, and a great many Ukrainians evidently want to treat Russia in the way that Black Lives Matter treats America, as an oppressive “colonial” power. Excising everything Russian from Ukraine will, however, leave very little of Ukraine, for Ukraine, not Muscovy, is the real, historical heart of Russia.

“Weaponizing” the Eucharist

Pope Francis has granted a cardinal’s hat to Robert McElroy, the Bishop of San Diego, a move that left-wing publications are heralding, and some of their right-wing counterparts lamenting, as a repudiation of the Archbishop of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, who recently prohibited priests in his diocese from giving communion to abortion advocate Nancy Pelosi.

As to whether this act has anything to do with the Pope’s opinions concerning abortion (he recognizes it as murder) or Nancy Pelosi (probably as obscure to him as Roberto Fico is to you), I have no insight, though I suspect that, when a cardinal is appointed, the Vatican thinks about more matters than possible slights to American politicians. But I do want to say a word about Bishop McElroy’s argument that, when a public official is denied communion, “The Eucharist is being weaponized for political ends.”

After the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, Joseph Rummel, the Archbishop of New Orleans, appointed a committee to develop a plan for integrating the archdiocesan parochial schools as rapidly as possible. Even before Brown, he had made his opposition to segregation clear. In a 1953 pastoral letter, he stated:

Ever mindful, therefore, of the basic truth that our Colored Catholic brethren share with us the same spiritual life and destiny, the same membership in the Mystical Body of Christ, the same dependence upon the Word of God, the participation in the Sacraments, especially the Most Holy Eucharist, the same need of moral and social encouragement, let there be no further discrimination or segregation in the pews, at the Communion rail, at the confessional and in parish meetings, just as there will be no segregation in the kingdom of heaven.

Though it didn’t mention education, segregationists saw the letter as foreshadowing integrated schools. The appointment of a committee to carry forward that policy evoked vehement dissent from politicians, including prominent Roman Catholics. The archbishop proceeded for a long time as Bishop McElroy recommends, through pastoral mediation. But the day came when it was obvious that the sheep would not accept the guidance of the shepherd.

On March 27, 1962, Archbishop Rummel announced that parochial schools under his jurisdiction would be fully integrated for the 1962-63 school year and warned Catholics who publicly resisted that they were risking excommunication. Many of the dissidents ceased their opposition, but three, including Leander Perez, “the boss of the Delta”, became more strident. On April 16, 1962, the archbishop followed through on his warning. The three were cut off not only from communion but from all sacraments. (Perez and another of the excommunicants eventually repented and were received back into the church.)

Did Archbishop Rummel “weaponize the Eucharist”? Undoubtedly – and with greater force than Archbishop Cordileone has directed against Rep. Pelosi. If asked, would Bishop McElroy disapprove? Not a chance. Would he agree that abortion is a graver sin than segregation? No Roman Catholic could possibly disagree.

Archbishop Rummel was patient with Judge Perez and his fellow advocates of a sinful policy. He acted as a pastor until it became clear that they were adamant. Likewise, Archbishop Cordileone reached the conclusion that he had exhausted all pastoral means of reconciling Rep. Pelosi to the position of the Church to which she professes allegiance. Given the Congresswoman’s full-throated support for unrestricted abortion and her manifest contempt for all those who defend the sanctity of unborn life, the archbishop’s action is mild. In a real sense, he has done nothing. She, by her actions, has cut herself off from the benefits of the sacraments. It would be spiritual cruelty to humor her delusion that matters are otherwise.

An American Thermidor?

“Thermidor” is the conventional name for the movement that, on July 27, 1794 (9 Thermidor, Year II in the calendar that the French Revolutionary government had adopted as part of its attempt to erase the past), swept Maximilien Robespierre from power. On 8 Thermidor, tout le monde took it for granted that he was the dominant and domineering force in French politics. On 10 Thermidor, shortly after 7:00 p.m., he was decapitated by the guillotine. The day between those two became one of the most famous in French history and, as Colin Jones observes in The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021), probably the most thoroughly documented before the rise of the modern, all-seeing bureaucratic state.

Thermidor has become the symbol of the Revolution’s change of course, the moment when the murderous idealists of the Reign of Terror gave way to a successor generation of opportunists. That kind of “Thermidorian reaction” is a frequent phenomenon in radical movements. The Trotskyites applied the epithet to Stalin. As Thomas Sowell has noted,

The "betrayal" of ideals is a reiterated refrain in a wide variety of insurgent movements, whether moderate or extreme. Seldom is there a recognition that the institutional success of the insurgency has itself created new incentives attracting new kinds of people and sometimes reorienting some members of the original group. Another factor is that a successful insurgency often puts leaders of the insurgents into closer contact with knowledge that was either unavailable or not so vivid when the insurgents were outsiders, and thereby forces correction of plausible beliefs that will not stand authentication. [Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (Basic Books, 1996)

Just lately, there have been a few signs, tiny but perhaps prophetic, that the Woke Revolution may be less all-powerful than everyone has imagined. Netflix has given the back of its hand to employees who demand the right to veto “problematic” decisions about what shows to produce. (A pity that they don’t regard imitative, unimaginative mediocrity as problematic.) BlackRock, the mammoth money manager, has switched from championing “stakeholders” (that is, woke activists) to paying attention to stockholders. Jack Dorsey, pioneer in social media “content moderation”, has endorsed Elon Musk’s statement that Donald Trump should again be allowed to rampage on Twitter.

One very significant spoor has been overlooked as the result of misunderstanding. Last week, Republican Congressmen published a letter from an FBI insider revealing that the Bureau “created an internal ‘threat tag’ in fall 2021 to track alleged threats against school boards following an October 4 directive from Attorney General Merrick Garland”. The directive was indeed a scandal, but, as Andrew McCarthy has acutely pointed out, the recipients of the information about the threat tag misapprehended its true significance. Having complied with AG Merrick Garland’s directive pro forma, the FBI in practice ignored it. The “investigations” disclosed by the whistle blower were perfunctory.

The only matter in which the congressmen say the FBI interviewed a potential subject involved a complaint by a school board after a mother made a threat — “we are coming for you” – which the nice progressives at the board took to be a threat of potential violence because the mother was conservative and “a gun owner.” An FBI agent interviewed the mother, learned that the mother was upset about school policy and was working to get the school board replaced through the normal electoral process. The bureau thus quickly closed the matter. . . .

In the other two instances, it is not clear that the FBI even preliminarily investigated anyone.

In the first, the bureau got a patently politicized complaint, on what the congressmen derisively mock as the “snitch-line,” that a father who opposed mask mandates “fit the profile of an insurrectionist,” was a gun owner, etc. The bureau did not investigate the dad; the agents instead decided to question the complainant, who grudgingly conceded that he or she had no actual evidence. The FBI thus dropped the matter – and I imagine, after the visit from the agents, that complainant will think twice before doing something that stupid again.

In the other case, Jordan and Johnson claim that the FBI “opened an investigation of Republican state elected officials” because Democrats claimed that they “incited violence” by complaining about vaccine mandates. But it doesn’t appear that the bureau did anything active except close the case. The congressmen don’t allege that anyone was interviewed or that the bureau did any actual investigating.

In short, the attorney-general of the United States ordered subordinates to go after dissidents from the Woke agenda, and the subordinates ignored him. There is a certain parallel – not a rhyme but perhaps an assonance – to a key event on 9 Thermidor. The Paris city government, which opposed the decision of the National Convention (the French legislative assembly) to arrest Robespierre and his closest associates, ordered the governing bodies of the city’s 48 “sections” to call up their National Guard units to overawe the Convention members. Most sections responded by doing the opposite. The pro-Robespierre faction couldn’t summon enough support to make a decent fight.

What were the key facts about Thermidor?

First, it happened suddenly, at a moment when no one expected any upheaval. The timing was indeed adventitious. One of the men who turned most decisively and effectively against Robespierre acted because he feared that his mistress was in danger of the guillotine.

Second, the reason for the suddenness of the event was that Robespierre’s power rested entirely on perception. Men who called him a tyrant spoke only in whispers; each assumed that he was alone in his opposition. In fact, as the day proved, it was Robespierre who was isolated.

Third, while Robespierre incessantly excoriated the “foreign plot” to overthrow the Revolution, neither royalist émigrés nor British spies played any role in his downfall. (Imprisoned royalists and other personages of the “Right” in fact saw Robespierre as their “protector” against the prospect of an even more dreadful successor.) It was his own allies, fearful of the monster that they had created, who destroyed him and, in the course of doing so, repudiated the central elements of his policy.

Fourth – and now we come to a word of caution – Thermidor led to a better regime than would otherwise have existed but not to a good one. Robespierre’s “Republic of Virtue” was on the course to full-fledged totalitarianism. Its sequel was “merely” a series of dictatorships, culminating in Napoleon and leaving France with a permanent Left/Right cleavage that, more than two centuries later, has yet to heal fully.

Whether there will be an American Thermidor is unknowable, but should it happen, it will, I think, look much like its namesake.

Identitarian Scholarship

Last month, National Review devoted most of an issue to the “1619 Project”, the New York Times’s venture into rewriting American history so as to transmute a nation that most of mankind has seen as a beacon of liberty into a society imbued with slavery. NR disputed that characterization, as have many of the foremost American historians, including some who aren’t likely to agree with the magazine about anything else.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the foundress of the 1619 Project, tweeted a rebuttal, to which one of the contributors, Dan McLaughlin, replied. One tweet in the Hannah-Jones attack nicely illustrates her notion of scholarship. After posting a photo of the NR cover with the caption, “Picked up a tabloid [sic] to give myself a good laugh”, she declared, “Couldn’t find any women, apparently, and only one Black person, apparently, to write about a slavery project created by a Black woman. I am sure this is going to be very good.”

So the essential prerequisite for questioning the cogency of a position taken by a “Black woman” (judging by her appearance, Mrs. Hannah-Jones is more white than black, but let that go) is being of the same race and sex. Even one isn’t enough, for, as Dan McLaughlin observes, “she saves most of her ire for Wilfred Reilly’s essay”. Mr. Reilly is black but has the disqualification of having been assigned to the male gender at birth.

Although logic is, I have been informed, a white supremacist construct, I’ll be so bold as to employ it here. If Wilfred Reilly can’t legitimately criticize a “Black woman”, how can the latter criticize the work of white male Gordon Wood (as she does in a further tweet sneering at an advertisement for several of his books)? The inescapable implication is that, for the 1619 Project proponent, separate historical realities exist for people of different racial/sexual categories and evaluating them against one another is a worthless enterprise.

There’s much chatter these days about the threat of another civil war. I don’t give it much credence. So far as I can see, the twitterati comprise about 90 percent of the potential warriors. Still, if such a ghastly fate lies ahead, it will owe a lot to the compartmentalized, anti-rational mentalité of pseudo-thinkers like Nikole Hannah-Jones.

The Mystery of a Vanished Liberalism

Two items caught my eye today, reminders that American liberalism used to be far different from its current progressive incarnation. That it vanished so completely after the 1970’s, having dominated the country’s politics for about forty years, is an odd, under-analyzed historical phenomenon.

The first item came from John Hinderaker, one of the PowerLine blogging quartet. It was inspired by a conservative twitterist’s cheeky remark: “I think we made out pretty well in the Taibbi/Greenwald for Kristol/Wilson trade.” Mr. Hinderaker added:

Like other conservatives, I am grateful for the support we get from these liberals on issues like free speech, government overreach and the corruption of the liberal media. But this prompts a melancholy reflection: remember the good old days when the battle between liberals and conservatives was fought, more than anything else, over marginal income tax rates? Just 40 years ago, most Democrats believed in free speech and supported the Constitution.

Now, in contrast, we are fighting for our lives. Despite the clownishness of the Biden administration and the modern Left, the goalposts have moved a long way in their direction. Conservatives are being silenced on the most important information platforms, our Constitution is under overt attack, and the Democrats are a whisker away from making election integrity illegal.

For now, we obviously need to fight these life or death battles. But how long will it be before we return to the days when tax cuts and Social Security reform are the issues that divide the parties?

By serendipitous coincidence, the center-right Tablet last week posted a piece by Michael Lind, a liberal who, like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, often finds himself opposing left-wing ideological trends. In “America’s Asymmetric Civil War”, Mr. Lind analyzes the clash as one within, rather than between, states, pitting two elites against each other:

The social base of the Democrats is neither a few liberal billionaires nor the more numerous cohorts of high-school educated minority voters; it is the disproportionately white college-educated professionals and managers. These affluent but not rich overclass households dominate the Democratic Party and largely determine its messaging, not by virtue of campaign contributions or voting numbers, but because they very nearly monopolize the staffing of the institutions that support the party – K-12 schools and universities, city and state and federal bureaucracies, public sector unions, foundations, foundation-funded nonprofit organizations, and the mass media. By osmosis, professional and managerial values and material interests and fads and fashions permeate the Democratic Party and shape its agenda.

While the liberal Big Rich cluster in silver apartments and offices in trophy skyscrapers in the inner core of blue cities, the elites of the outer suburbs and exurbs tend to be made up of the Lesser Rich – millionaire car dealership owners, real estate agents, oil and gas drilling equipment company owners, and hair salon chain owners. This group of proprietors – the petty bourgeoisie, to use Marxist terminology, compared to the Democratic haute bourgeoisie and its professional allies – forms the social base of the Republican Party, despite efforts by Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Marco Rubio of Florida, and others to rebrand the GOP as a working-class party.

Mr. Lind doesn’t like either elite. His description of the “Lesser Rich” has touches of sympathy:

Unlike the flagship tech oligopolies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, whose executives and employees fund and sometimes staff the Democratic Party’s political operations, many small business owners struggle to keep up with the jargon and paperwork required to deal with elaborate environmental regulations or proliferating race and gender quotas in federal record-keeping and subsidies. In addition to helping their urban core constituents, Democratic policies, to the extent that they harm Republican businesses and industries, increase the Democratic share of national wealth, which can then be deployed further against the party’s Republican rivals.

That sympathy is nonetheless constrained. “But the fact that the local business owner can discuss hunting and fishing with his employees or may attend the same church does not moderate the ferocious hostility of most of the red-county gentry to anything that would raise the cost of labor for their businesses – a higher minimum wage, unionization, paid vacations, paid parental leave.” He asks, in a tone of lament:

If hourglass Democrats are dominated by urban managers and professionals linked to the national and global economies, and the diamond Republicans by moderately rich local business elites, then who speaks for the two-thirds of Americans who are working class, who lack college diplomas and must work for wages? The answer is: nobody. At 6% and falling, private sector trade union membership in the United States is lower than it was under Herbert Hoover.

The only time that the working-class majority had any real influence in American politics, as well as in their workplaces, was between the 1940s and the 1980s, when private sector unions were a force that both parties had to reckon with. Private sector unions have been annihilated in the last half-century in the United States because hatred of organized labor is one of only two areas of agreement between socially liberal Democratic Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, CEOs who donate millions to Black Lives Matter, and small-town Republican sweatshop owners and overseers who think Social Security and Medicare constitute “socialism.”

If my purpose were to argue with Mr. Lind, I would point out that the hostile force that has deunionized the private sector has been workers who overwhelmingly have no desire to be “represented” by labor unions that are themselves run by members of the elite that runs the Democratic Party. But that’s a discussion for another day. Mr. Lind is certainly right when he says that the kind of liberalism that existed from the late Forties, after it was freed from the dead weight of FDR and his cronies, until some time in the Seventies or Eighties – a liberalism that didn’t aspire to transform the country but simply to give the working class a larger share of the pie – today has all the political pertinence of the Divine Right of Kings.

The conclusive proof of the extinction of that liberalism is that no one has any notion of what it would espouse if it did exist. With all due respect to Senators Hawley and Rubio, their “working class party” ideas amount to welfare for people who aren’t quite poor enough to receive it now. On the other side are arrayed zealots for socialism, the most effective formula for impoverishing workers that has ever been devised by the malignant ingenuity of man.

If the profession of history emerges from the present era with a few uncorrupted practitioners, some of they may have the interest, insight and diligence to address this mystery. I cannot begin to unravel it.

President Washington and Archbishop Tutu

The death of the Most Reverend Desmond Tutu, retired Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, evoked a response worthy of the passing of a Roman emperor, mutatis mutandis to accommodate a secular age. No incense will be placed on altars for the late clergyman. In lieu of that, he is lauded as “Africa’s moral compass”. It may be that the compass pointed his country toward a dysfunctional future, but, at the high tide of apartheid, the archbishop lived in a dysfunctional present. “Few people believed that apartheid could be ended without bloodshed.” Archbishop Tutu deserves much of the credit for the fact that the old regime gave way peacefully. Whatever South Africa’s troubles today, civil war would have made them worse.

An historical figure who was celebrated to a comparable degree when he died was George Washington, first President of the United States of America and the “indispensable man” in winning its independence. In some important ways, Washington does not parallel Tutu: On the one hand, the “tyranny” of King George and the British Parliament would have impressed any black Soweto resident circa 1980 as an extravaganza of liberty. On the other, Washington set his country on a course that led to the freest, most prosperous and most humane polity in the entire history of the world. Had he never lived, there is a strong likelihood that the very idea that “all men are created equal”, the idea for which Archbishop Tutu struggled, would have remained the exotic and implausible theory of a cadre of philosophes. Indeed, its mutilation at the hands of the French revolutionaries might well have discredited it forever.

Each man also had his darker side. President Washington accepted slavery as a fact of life, owned a large number of slaves and, if he sensed the contradiction between the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the reality of black Americans’ lives, never expressed it. For this lapse, he is now fiercely condemned by “Year Zero progressives”. Statues in his honor are defaced, destroyed or removed from public view. It will be no surprise if a movement soon springs up to rename the nation’s capital and the state that sits at its northwest corner.

Archbishop Tutu, a political and religious progressive (unlike most Christian leaders in Africa), accepted what has become the common progressive opinion of the state of Israel. Although that country is the only place in the Middle East where non-Jews can vote in democratic elections and live under the rule of law, he condemned it as an “apartheid regime”. He blamed the “Jewish lobby” for American support of Israel and championed Palestinian radicals who, wherever they hold power, lionize and subsidize murderers of random Jews and look forward to the advent of a judenrein state. His antisemitism was undisguised. (See “Further Reading” for details.) It was not, in fairness, the racialist antisemitism of a Hitler but a combination of archaic “Christ killer” imagery and unthinking acceptance of progressive orthodoxy.

To the extent that admiring obituarists took any note at all of the Archbishop’s Jew-hatred, they tended to brush it aside. One particularly galling piece claimed that he “identified with Jews”, because he likened apartheid to the Holocaust. If he sincerely believed that, then his accusation that Israel practices apartheid is tantamount to accusing the world’s only Jewish state of mass murder, a strange way of “identifying with Jews”.

We have, then, two men of admirable accomplishments who were not free from fault. According to some, we should evaluate their eligibility for posthumous honors by weighing the faults heavily and the accomplishments lightly, if at all. Progressives who apply that standard demand that Washington be exiled from the Hall of Fame. Consistency might seem to require that they demand the same for Tutu. They don’t, because they regard antisemitism as a venial sin when indulged in by their allies and, moreover, regard most consistency as a foolish hobgoblin. The rest of us, though, might want to ponder whether there are reasons to treat the American statesman and the African cleric differently, along with the broader question of what it means to erect a statue of, or name a town or a park or a street after, an historical figure.

Aside from quotidian concerns – places need designations, and unvaried numbers are boring – honors for the dead serve, I think, two purposes: They remind us of the depth of our history and serve as an incentive to leave footprints, however faint, on the sands of time. Accentuating the negative erases history or turns it into a merry-go-round focused eternally on the opinions of the present moment. It also reinforces the contemporary impulse to treat all opinions one disagrees with as moral failings to be exorcised by persecution rather than argument.

There are occasions for blotting out unmitigated villains. Josef Stalin scattered his name and images all over Russia. His millions of murders more than offset whatever worthy deeds can be found in his record. But the Stalins, Lenins, Hitlers, Maos and their devoted henchmen are exceptional cases. The default position ought to be that anyone once thought deserving of affirmative remembrance is entitled to retain it. Let condemnations be written in history books rather than by vandalizing the public square.

Further Reading: Jeff Dunetz, “What The Media Didn’t Tell You About Bishop Desmond Tutu”
Alan M. Dershowitz, “Should the Late Bishop Tutu Get a Statue?”
Judith Brown, “Desmond Tutu – an honored anti-Semite?”

This Week’s Dose of Gloom

The distinguished historian Andrew Roberts, writing on the Quillette web site, asks,

How will the United States react domestically should she be dislodged from her role of global top-dog power by China? As well as the obvious economic and strategic ramifications of an end to American imperium, there will be profound emotional and psychological effects on a society that has taken its hegemony for granted for more than three-quarters of a century.

Seizing on a couple of imperfect analogies, Mr. Roberts adopts “the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle – the five-stage process by which individuals deal with tragedy, bereavement, and a dawning knowledge of imminent demise” as his framework and the decline of the British Empire, beginning with the abandonment of India in 1947, as a comparable descent from superpower to run-of-the-mill nation state.

President Biden’s boastful reaction to the disaster in Afghanistan calls to the historian’s mind Prime Minister Attlee’s insistence “that India would remain part of the British Commonwealth (as it was still then designated) and attached to the Western anti-Communist bloc”, except that Biden was further detached from reality:

“Last night in Kabul,” Biden announced in the White House State Dining Room on August 31st, “the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan – the longest war in American history. We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety. … No nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today.”

In fact, plenty of nations have the capacity, will, and ability to lose wars, but the United States had not done it since Vietnam. And as Biden’s speeches and actions have subsequently shown, his administration is in denial about the message that defeat at the hands of the Taliban sends to vacillating allies and jubilant antagonists alike.

Britain then proceeded to “Anger”, the next Kübler-Ross stage, “manifested in the fury that greeted Anthony Eden over his invasion of – and subsequent withdrawal from – the [Suez] Canal Zone” in 1956 but “symptomatic of a deeper anger about Britain’s dwindling position on the world stage”. Mr. Roberts thinks that the “mid-term elections in November 2022 may see at least some outpouring of anger over American loss of hegemony”. It seems to me more likely that the multifarious domestic failures of the Biden Administration will overshadow its fecklessness abroad. Afghanistan wasn’t quite parallel to Suez. The American withdrawal was generally perceived as the product of the incumbent Administration’s ineptitude rather than of American weakness. By contrast, Britain was ordered by the United States to retreat from Suez and had no choice but to obey. There was no way to deny that it was no longer a first-class power on the world stage.

Still, something like Suez could shake our national confidence before Mr. Biden shuffles off the coil of office. Russia and China are each poised to invade and conquer an American ally, while the Biden crew has proved unable to arrest Iran’s rise in the Middle East. Any of those events would render any notion of “American hegemony” dubious, if not altogether fanciful.

Historical Britain and hypothetical America diverge further in the next stage, “Negotiation”. Britain negotiated with America to become its loyal, though not subservient, junior partner. America will not (one hopes!) offer itself as a junior partner to the Xi Dynasty, and it is doubtful, as Mr. Roberts says with distinct understatement, “that the United States can negotiate with her opponents and rivals successfully in an effort to defend a rules-based world order once she is eclipsed as the world’s pre-eminent superpower”. The only plausible “Negotiations” will conducted with ourselves, devising ways to re-bolster national self-esteem through imaginary achievements.

The British “Depression” stage is easy to recognize: the “total bipartisan commitment to national decline” that marked the 1970’s. America’s similar stage will predictably make our present troubles look picayune:

When the United States recognizes that it no longer matters in the world as it once did, that key allies are distancing themselves and flirting with China, that the global organizations erected by Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks no longer guarantee her primacy, and that there is little she can do about it, then depression will hit America. It will leave her confused, morose, and liable to turn in on herself politically. It will be an ugly time.

Which brings us to the fifth and final stage, “Acceptance”. That Britain emerged from “Depression” –

was almost entirely down to one person, Margaret Thatcher. The Falklands War seemed to arrest the lamentable drift and surrender since Suez, and the spectacular victory in the Cold War, in part due to her close alliance with Ronald Reagan, finally provided closure after the loss of Empire. Although she could never again be top-dog power, Britain’s replacement by her close ally was palatable because the Special Relationship had been shown to work well for both countries and also for the wider world in ridding the world of Soviet Communism.

But that is an impossible outcome in a world dominated by a totalitarian Red China, unless America is transformed into an unrecognizable place. Mr. Roberts hopes that “the United States can grasp the leadership of the West once more instead of wallowing in self-destructive and profoundly decadent obsessions with its own faults, real and imagined”. That is a feeble hope when the most powerful forces in our culture regard “wallowing in self-destructive and profoundly decadent obsessions” as the essence of virtue.

Nothing in history is inevitable. In many ways, the outlook for America appeared similarly grim and gloomy in 1979, the year epitomized by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis. Yet from that nadir our land rose again, both shaking off stagflation and defeating the most serious totalitarian threat in human history without a catastrophic war. Perhaps Bismarck will once again be proven right about God’s “special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America”. We may pray and hope.

MSM Time Travelers Report Pearl Harbor

(December 7, 1941, Associated Press) Honolulu, Hawaii: Airplanes dropped bombs and torpedoes on the naval base at Pearl Harbor this morning, causing damage to shipping. An official statement by the U.S. naval command alleged that the airplanes were carried to within attack range by ships that had come from the direction of the western Pacific Ocean. The motive for the alleged attack is unknown.

Immediately after reports arrived from Honolulu, President Roosevelt asserted, without evidence, that the attack had been perpetrated by the Empire of Japan, which he has frequently blamed for widespread unrest in China. The Roosevelt Administration’s hostility toward Japan is linked by many to racism.

Rep. Jeanette Rankin of Montana, a frequent critic of the President, issued a statement decrying his “steps toward war”, which she called “a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute”. Senator Gerald Nye of Oklahoma called for an investigation of the “true causes” of the “so-called attack”, saying that it could have been staged by industrialists hoping to profit from American involvement in foreign wars.

Sources in the State Department who asked not to be named disclosed that many diplomats are of the opinion that the only way to avoid a disastrous conflict is to bring Japan and the Chinese government to the negotiating table. “The United States must serve as an honest broker,” said one official. “We can’t do that if we overreact to far away events in the Pacific Ocean that pose no immediate danger to American security. Even if Japanese airplanes were involved, it is likely that they were rogue elements attempting to provoke a military clash.”

Experts on Japan noted that the country’s Shinto religion has been heavily influenced by Buddhism, which rejects militarism. They also pointed out that the history of American interference in the Far East has aroused resentment among the Japanese. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry illegally entered Japanese territorial waters with a squadron of warships to deliver an ultimatum to the Emperor. He returned the following year with a larger force and compelled the Japanese government to accept the Treaty of Kanagawa, which has become a symbol of Western imperialism.

A further affront to Japanese sensibilities took place in 1905, when the United States, ostensibly serving as a neutral mediator, pressured Japan into accepting the Treaty of Portsmouth, which deprived it of many of the gains that it had made during its war with Russia and denied it reparations for the cost of defending itself against Russian aggression.

Since 1931, when Japan supported a secessionist movement in Manchukuo, relations between it and the U.S. have become further strained. The Roosevelt Administration has refused to recognize Manchukuo and has denounced Japan’s defense of its ally.

Congress is expected to open debate tomorrow on what response to make to the Pearl Harbor incident. Opinion appears to be divided sharply between hawks who want to “punish” Japan and less bellicose figures who believe that it is vital to understand the Japanese point of view and avoid hasty actions. There is also concern about whether the American economy, still suffering the effects of the Hoover Administration, can afford a major military buildup.

Statues, Statues Everywhere!

Destroying monuments and erasing names from public buildings is a favorite activity of revolutionaries, as we have seen in the past year and a half. When you think about it, this iconoclastic impulse is odd. The dead don’t care whether their statues are displayed on street corners or their names are attached to schools, military bases or municipal landfills. Most of the public is indifferent, too. Does one American in ten know that Fort Bragg in North Carolina (scheduled for renaming as soon as a commission can find a sufficiently pure replacement) is named after a Confederate general (one who, incidentally, contributed more to the North’s victory than Union generals like John Pope and Ambrose Burnside)? Even fewer, I’m sure, know anything about Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley, whose name was erased a few days ago from a building at Rutgers.

To our contemporary iconoclasts, however, it is very important to scrutinize the careers of men like Bragg and Bradley, indict them for their faults, ignore the possibility that they possessed virtues, and seek to condemn to oblivion what little imprint their footsteps have left on the sands of time.

Braxton Bragg was an easy target, since he fought in support of a real insurrection (as opposed to the farcical one that is now decried by President Biden as “worse than the Civil War”).

The iconoclasts must look further for Justice Bradley’s offenses. Two of his Supreme Court opinions are held against him: United States v. Stanley, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), which held that the Fourteenth Amendment restricts only state action (a position unquestioned even by the Warren Court in its headiest days), and his concurrence in Bradwell v. State, 83 U.S. 130 (1873), which contains much lofty rhetoric on the centrality of motherhood to civilized life. That’s an unpopular viewpoint in many contemporary quarters, but did anyone ever embrace it because a building in New Jersey bore the name of someone who wrote in its defense?

What do the iconoclasts gain from their successes?

First, they can bask in the feeling that they, who have found these motes in our ancestors’ eyes, are morally superior to both those ancestors and the deplorable folk who overlooked their wrongthink. Their spirit is what Our Lord warned against when he said, “Judge not, that you be not judged.”

Second, they move the nation closer to “Year Zero”, to the time when America will have no history except the version woven by the revolutionaries. Demonizing little remembered figures strengthens the progressive tale that the United States has been a consistent force for evil in the world. The evisceration of the Braggs and Bradleys likewise makes it easier to attack better known figures and to envelop all dissent from progressive dogma in a blanket of prejudice.

Third, each cancellation adds weight to the notion that, as Hamlet reflected, a “dram of eale [evil]” casts doubt on “all the noble substance”; in other words, that merits can never outweigh faults, leaving aside the exception always made for those who profess the revolutionary catechism with unstinted and uninquisitive enthusiasm.

Iconoclasm fits well with a totalitarian mindset, for smashing the past is the necessary preliminary to building a future on a foundation of fantastical, unproven ideas, while sweeping away the remnants is an essential precaution against counterrevolution. How can it be countered? The iconoclasts, embalmed in their own self-righteousness, are not open to persuasion, and arguing in defense of each target is a tiring game that gives the impression that the iconoclasts have at least some valid points on their side.

My suggestion is that we throw more targets at them, until they collapse from exhaustion. It isn’t just that the time they spend constructing cases against figures whom they never heard of before will distract them from worse pastimes. One of their vulnerabilities is that substituting new historical figures for the canceled ones contradicts the image of America as an eternal cesspit of villainy. Hence, for example, Bradley Hall at Rutgers will from now on be known only by its street address.

How about a campaign to name every significant building that currently lacks one and to erect a new generation of statues of great men and women? Thousands of significant but little recognized figures have contributed to our Nation’s greatness. There is no shortage of candidates.

The iconoclasts, rather than the iconodules, would then be on the defensive. As they contrive objections to anyone and everyone who is put forward, their pettiness, dishonesty and hatred of the America that exists will come more clearly to the fore and, we may be confident, will become less and less palatable to those who don’t share their mania.

Quote of the Day

Andrew Roberts, “In defense of King George III”:

I grew a beard during lockdown, which I’m now going to keep because my wife Susan has called it ‘piratical’. There was a time when I was as pogonophobic as the next man, but no longer. ‘I hate your beard,’ David Starkey told me at a drinks party recently. ‘I didn’t bring her,’ I replied. ‘I’m only here for you.’

No, the quote has nothing to do with King George. It’s from a miscellaneous set of musings that begins with a mention of the author’s current book tour promoting his forthcoming biography of George III, The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III (not to be confused with Jeremy Black’s George III: America’s Last King (2006)). Those of us whose forebears were loyalists look forward eagerly to its publication.

Putting Our Ancestors on Trial

Yesterday I wished readers a Happy Human Sacrifice Abolition Day. Today let me expatiate on the increasingly common practice of treating history as a court room and our ancestors as either the accused in the dock or their innocent, wholly meritorious victims.

Columbus Day is the starkest instance of this phenomenon, though I expect it to spread in time to Independence Day and Washington’s Birthday. After that, it may reach the holiday named after Martin Luther King, Jr., the racist agitator who wanted to judge people by “the content of their character” without regard to intersectional identities of victimhood. President Biden’s Columbus Day proclamation had two themes. One was the “lasting contributions to our Nation” made by Italian-Americans. The other, longer and clearly more heartfelt, questioned whether that Nation was worth contributing to:

Today, we also acknowledge the painful history of wrongs and atrocities that many European explorers inflicted on Tribal Nations and Indigenous communities. It is a measure of our greatness as a Nation that we do not seek to bury these shameful episodes of our past – that we face them honestly, we bring them to the light, and we do all we can to address them. For Native Americans, western exploration ushered in a wave of devastation: violence perpetrated against Native communities, displacement and theft of Tribal homelands, the introduction and spread of disease, and more. On this day, we recognize this painful past and recommit ourselves to investing in Native communities, upholding our solemn and sacred commitments to Tribal sovereignty, and pursuing a brighter future centered on dignity, respect, justice, and opportunity for all people.

The President also issued “A Proclamation on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, 2021” that elaborates on the “vibrant and diverse cultures” of “American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians” in contrast with “the centuries-long campaign of violence, displacement, assimilation, and terror wrought upon Native communities and Tribal Nations throughout our country”. His occasional Veep came out of the Clueless Protection Program to deliver a speech lamenting how European “explorers ushered in a wave of devastation for Tribal nations – perpetrating violence, stealing land, and spreading disease”.

It is certainly true that European immigrants to what is now the United States – no doubt the Vice President wishes there had been a big, beautiful border wall back then – fought wars with the Indians, occupied and farmed land over which (by European notions) native tribes held sovereignty, and carried with them diseases that had never before been present in the New World (and which Europe would have been happy not to suffer). But it is also true that millions of people who had lived in poverty or under tyrannical rule in the Old World found in America better lives for themselves and their descendants and that the nation that eventually emerged from European colonization was the first to be founded on an unprecedented conception of “government of the people, by the people and for the people”. It is conceivable that, had America remained the dominion of the Indians, our modern ideas of liberty and democracy would have taken root and flourished somewhere else, some other time. It is less conceivable that the time would have arrived already.

Our backward facing “progressives” don’t want to talk about any of that. They are most interested in passing moral judgment on the settlers. For present purposes, I’ll set aside arguments about the accuracy of their accusations and instead question the purpose of the inquisition. Two points are striking:

First, the inquisitors are, by and large, people who deny the existence of universally binding moral code. They insist that individuals create their own values and are not beholden to archaic moral precepts (or even, to an increasing extent, to the facts of biology). Yet that relativistic perspective is exchanged for the spirit of Torquemada when the past comes under scrutiny. It’s a fact of our era that those who have no church are the most zealous to burn heretics.

Second, the judging is far from even-handed. Did Europeans, in the Old World or the New, engage in wars whose objective was to capture enemies who would then be ritually sacrificed to appease literally blood-thirsty gods? Were any of them cannibals? Was slavery absent among the Indians? Did tribes never seize others’ territories, exterminate their menfolk and force their women into sexual servitude? For those crimes the progressive prosecutors never render indictments.

Why the discrepancy? Is it because the prosecutors see nothing wrong with human sacrifice or cannibalism and are unaware of Indians’ enslavement of other Indians (and of whites and blacks, too, after those races arrived in the hemisphere)? That sounds implausible. The self-evident explanation is that the aim of the historical inquest isn’t to discover malefactors but to instill feelings of shame and guilt in their descendants. It is a political tactic designed to silence opponents without the bother of grappling with their arguments.

The same tactic is available to the Right, of course, though conservatives who deploy it get much less media amplification. For roughly a hundred years after the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of Jim Crow, and resistance to integration was led almost exclusively by Democrats. Democratic Presidential candidates, including those like Adlai Stevenson who ostensibly supported civil rights legislation, balanced their tickets with Southern segregationist running mates. If all historical records between 1954 and 2020 were lost, a future historian might credibly hypothesize that the Democrats’ embrace of critical race theory descended in a direct line from “massive resistance”.

How America evolved from minuscule colonial outposts into a great and free nation is a fascinating story. If we are going to pass judgment on the dramatis personae, we should do so with awareness of the virtues of what they brought forth rather a prurient emphasis than on what we now perceive as their vices. Contrary to Mark Antony, it often happens that the good that men do lives after them, while the evil is interred with their bones. And if we do feel called upon to be judges, our verdicts shouldn’t be dictated by how aptly they will serve contemporary polemical purposes.

Happy Human Sacrifice Abolition Day!

In 1492, slavery, extraordinary forms of torture, cannibalism and human sacrifice were common practices in the Americas. The two most powerful states, those of the Aztecs and the Incas, were tyrannical autocracies. Hernán Cortés overthrew the Aztec empire in part because his handful of soldiers possessed superior weaponry and in larger part because Montezuma’s oppressed subjects joined forces with the foreigners.

The soi disant “progressives” who topple statues of Christopher Columbus and decry the European arrival in this hemisphere as a great historical malady will never be reasoned out of their antipathy. They were, so far as I can tell, never reasoned into it. They are moved by a deep, emotional loathing for the America that now exists, an America where chattel slavery has been abolished, the law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, cannibalism exists only as a movie plot device, and human sacrifice is inconceivable. They’re welcome to their preference for 1491, but I, for one, do not understand it.

President Biden issued proclamations for both “Indigenous Peoples’ Day” and “Columbus Day”. He wasn’t, however, triangulating. Both documents make it clear that he regards the country of which he is the highest elected magistrate as a tree growing from poisonous roots. No wonder that he wants to eradicate its past and build a utopian fantasy in its stead.

Further Reading: Dan McLaughlin, “Why We Celebrate Columbus Day”
John Hinderaker, “Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day?”
Jeff Flynn-Paul, “The myth of the ‘stolen country’”
Armando Simón, “The Historical Falsification of Columbus’ ‘Crimes’”
Gene Vallorani, “An Italian-American Defends Columbus Day”
Thom Nickels, “Philly’s Battle of Columbus”
Glenn Reynolds’s annual Columbus Day post

A September 11th Freebie

What if the American intelligence community had been doing its job in September 2001 and had arrested the 9/11 conspirators as they boarded their flights? Click here to see one possible answer.