One of the interesting aspects of the Tea Party Movement is the attempt by some of its proponents to change our conception of history. Sometimes, this makes sympathizers cringe and detractors gloat, but, usually, this is because conventional wisdom has a very warped sense of history and is threatened by a different narrative.
Thus, the scorn Michelle Bachmann received recently by suggesting that the Founding Fathers debated the concept of slavery. They did, of course, and the abolitionists lost, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a fight over the subject. Indeed, George Washington was converted by the debate and in his will freed all of his slaves, setting aside a large sum of money for their education (as was required by Virginia law for freed slaves). Although he was one of the richest men in the United States, this act eliminated the Washington family’s source of income. How many history majors at good universities know this? Not enough, obviously, to judge by the reaction of the educated class to Ms. Bachmann.
History is a prism with a million facets, each reflecting a different version of the past. But history is taught as if it has only a single facet, usually correct, but very two-dimensional. This is what makes history as she is taught so dull and history as she really is so rich. Conventional wisdom – taught in the school systems, indoctrinating students even in the best schools, becoming the fodder for unread Fourth of July articles in The New York Times – is threatened by a version of history that does not comport with its own. The past was infinitely more complex than simpletons in academia and the media would have it.
Take slavery for instance. The South was a far more complex place than we are led to believe by the history books. Alabama and Mississippi were the two richest States in the Union. There were a number of free African-Americans who owned slaves themselves, a few of them had large plantations with sizable numbers of slaves. What’s more, according to Martha Hodes, an NYU professor in her book “Black Men, White Women,” mixed marriages were not unusual in Southern states before the 1840s when states started to outlaw them (surely a sign of a guilty conscience). When the Civil War broke out, large numbers of African-Americans sided with the South and it was only the racism of the Confederacy which prevented them from using their services on the battlefield. Nor were whites oblivious to moral arguments against slavery: after they lost the Civil War, religious Southerners, asking why God had allowed their way of life to end, concluded that they hadn’t done enough to prevent abuses of slaves by their owners.
Does any of this make slavery less awful? No, of course not, but it affects how we look at ourselves today and has profound consequences for the future of the West. We tend to look at our slave experience as unique, a simple self-hating narrative of evil whites and helpless blacks, a narrative that makes all of us, black and white, to feel badly about ourselves. The result is that we have turned to beating ourselves up so much that we are blind to the fact that the same evil is still practiced today in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. We are so eager to blame ourselves that we have lost all interest in stopping the same crimes elsewhere.
Similarly, according to Rabbi Joachim Prinz, leader of Berlin’s Jews in the 1920s, there were a number of Jews sympathetic to Nazism and if you read the transcripts of Adolf Eichmann’s interrogation by Israeli lawyers, you’ll run across Eichmann’s dilemma of how to send a prominent Jewish Nazi from the Netherlands to the death camps. Nor were Communists determined opponents of the Nazis: long before the Russo-German Pact of 1939, Communists and Nazis joined in Weimar Germany to topple the Social Democrats from power.
Instead of trying to understand this phenomena, we choose to blame the German people in a particular era for Nazism. Here again is the preference for the simplistic version of history over the complex. The result is that today, factions on the left are engaged in barely concealed anti-Semitism which is all the more frightening for its respectability. (There is anti-Semitism on the right, as well, of course, but it is never as respectable as it is on the left and the most fervently right wing group in America - evangelical Christians – is also the strongest supporter of Israel outside of the Jewish community.)
We all like to feel superior to World War I generals, those “donkeys leading lions,” but this has the effect of distancing ourselves from the problems they faced and allowing us citizens of the 21st Century to show an arrogance about ourselves which is unbolstered by reality. In truth, the top military of the Great War were smart men and skilled soldiers, but they were experienced in a type of warfare where a major battle consisted of 20,000 cavalry attacking 50,000 poorly armed natives. Even Napoleon’s armies rarely numbered more than 200,000 men and General Lee’s troops usually consisted of well below 100,000 troops.
Suddenly these generals commanded millions of troops over hundreds of miles of front lines. On top of the command and control issues they faced, a whole range of new technologies – barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, airplanes, submarines, dreadnoughts, tanks, large scale artillery – changed the way war was fought. It is a wonder, not that huge and unnecessary numbers of deaths occurred, but that the military leadership adapted so quickly to a totally changed environment.
This is important because we have not improved our ability to adapt to change. A more sympathetic understanding of how the military of 1914 – 1918 evolved to meet the new world might help us to face our own challenges. As it is, we don’t use the examples of history to understand how the world is changing - from high tech changes to newfangled Wall Street products that blow up in our faces to the Arab Spring to the disappearance of America’s industrial might – and how to handle such change. We spend a fortune on seers of all stripes to predict the future, but precious little effort on looking around the here and now to figure out how to cope with what has already arrived.
So many of our modern problems are caused by a failure to understand history – tolerance of evil because we accept a comfortable narrative of the past over an uncomfortable one, a contempt for leaders of the past which prevents us from adapting to the changes we ourselves face and so forth – which leads to a sloppiness of thinking and an eye for the main chance among our nation’s leaders. This leads directly to politicians who get elected by demonizing their predecessor’s policies, policies which they immediately adopt for themselves once they get elected. It all makes for a staggeringly dull intellectual culture.
So, like it or not, agree with them or not, the Tea Party is the leading force for intellectual progress today. By making history a focus of their movement and by disturbing the drab liberal orthodoxies of our time, they are pushing culture out of the rut we are stuck in. Intelligent people on the left should welcome this, because it is their culture which has come to be trapped by their myths. Just as the popular, but failed premises of Franklin Roosevelt forced conservatism to reinvent itself for the better, so the Tea Party will challenge liberalism to move beyond its corrupt leadership and the bourgeois complacency of its followers into a movement far closer to its ideals than the kleptocracy that now represents it.
Thinkers of America unite! You have nothing to lose but the shackles on your brain!
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
