February 6, 2006
In a Previous Life I Was William Jennings Bryan Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 06:30 PM EST In a recent interview, the actor and director George Clooney said: “Yes, I’m a liberal, and I’m sick of it being a bad word. I don’t know at what time in history liberals have stood on the wrong side of social issues.” Interesting question. But here’s David Pryce-Jones, reviewing Paul Berman’s new book, Power and the Idealists, in the latest issue of National Review: “In modern times, the Left has been wrong about everything important—with the one exception of Nazism. Wrong about Stalin, wrong about Mao and Castro, wrong to support North Vietnam and the Sandinistas and Milosevic, wrong, wrong, wrong. And now the Left comes out to say that Saddam Hussein should have been allowed to stay in power . . .” Hmmm. Leaving aside a few quibbles about the differences between “Left” and “liberal,” or what constitutes a “social issue,” I think you could safely say that these two fellows seem to disagree. And yet both men’s statements can be defended—if you let them retroactively assign whatever position they like to the Left/liberal side. By the same method, I could make myself clairvoyant about the Super Bowl by looking up the winner of every previous game and saying, “Yup, I would have picked them.” Without this ability to make one’s own rules, however, the analysis gets a lot tougher. What was the “liberal” position on the Civil War—peace or equality? Would today’s liberals, transported back in time, have been gung-ho abolitionists, even at the cost of half a million or so dead? Or would they have marched on Washington with banners reading NO WAR FOR COTTON? Depending on your bias, you can call it either way. In fact, however, the question cannot be answered, because it assumes that today’s political categories would still have some meaning when applied to the United States of 1861—a time when the country was divided to the point of war over an issue that ceased to exist when the war ended. Trying to decide which side today’s liberals would have been on is like trying to decide whether, if you grandmother had wheels, she would have won the Indianapolis 500. Similarly, what would today’s liberals have thought about the Populist movement of the 1890s? To be sure, many of the social reforms the Populists called for were enacted in the succeeding decades. But the glue that held the movement together was a crazy plan to debase the currency, which fortunately for us all was quickly forgotten. Would today’s liberals have embraced a movement of the downtrodden asking for government assistance to protect them against the wealthy and powerful? Or would they have shunned them as a mob of uneducated red-staters with a pronounced anti-urban, anti-immigrant, white-supremacist bias? I’m reminded of the episode of Bewitched in which George Washington pops up in early-1970s America. In a nice touch, the thing that surprises him the most is that his birthday is being celebrated on a Monday instead of the actual date. But then—the entertainment industry having been Clooneyesque even several decades ago—Washington goes on to decry poverty, pollution, and various other 1970s ills, including racial prejudice. Watching this, I thought: “Right, George, you owned slaves—tell me about it.” Putting today’s political categories into a time machine is like putting them into a blender--there’s no way they’ll emerge intact. Yet even if it did make sense, that sort of argument still wouldn’t prove anything. Suppose you grant Mr. Pryce-Jones’s point that a long line of dictators have deserved to be removed from office, and that the Left has supported them all. Does that mean the Left must be wrong about Saddam Hussein? Of course not. Or if a conservative praises the accomplishments of the civil rights revolution, which liberals supported, is he or she required to support racial quotas because liberals support them now? Of course not. Each new issue must be considered on its own merits. Slavishly following the past—even the real past, let alone a slanted version cooked up to fit one’s requirements—is just as likely to yield the wrong answer as the right one. History gives us a wealth of examples, guideposts, food for thought, analogies, parallels, and aids to understanding. But it provides very few unambiguous lessons, and those tend to be general ones about human nature, philosophy, statecraft, and so on. Anyone who crudely projects today’s political divisions into the past in an attempt to bootstrap some historical support for a present-day dispute only shows the weakness of his or her own case.
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