May 9, 2006
On Witches Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST If I wished him a happy birthday on the American Heritage blog, I’m sure John Steele Gordon would accuse me of betraying an unforgivably facile left-wing bias. I just seem to draw out the contrarian in him. Which is fine. But in his zeal to demonstrate the stupidity of liberals everywhere, Mr. Gordon has misconstrued my argument. I wasn’t likening seventeenth-century witches to members of the Al Qaeda terrorist syndicate. I was drawing on Professor Mary Beth Norton’s historical analysis of the Essex County witch trials to liken the threat of violent Indian incursions against northern Massachusetts settlements in the seventeenth century to the threat of future terrorist attacks today. Both threats are real. By extension, some things are not real. In 1692 many Massachusetts residents refracted their legitimate fear of Indians through the fantasy lens of witchcraft. In 2006 many zealous supporters of the Bush administration refract their legitimate fear of terrorism through the fantasy lens of a broad terrorist conspiracy. There are no WMDs in Iraq. There was no connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. But many supporters of the Bush administration insist otherwise, and we are mired in Iraq because of it. These conservative faithful are scornful of empiricism and prefer a faith-based, from-the-gut approach to governance that, come to think of it, would have pleased seventeenth-century Puritan ministers who believed in spectral evidence. Let me be more precise still. In Arthur Miller’s day, there were, to be sure, Soviet agents operating in the United States. But most—in fact, the vast majority—of individuals fingered by anti-Communist zealots were not Soviet agents. In 1692 there were indeed practicing witches in New England. But most of the people fingered by the special court were not, in fact, practicing witches. I hope this clarifies things. As for Mr. Gordon’s argument that it’s okay to imprison certain categories of people indefinitely, without trial, charge, or access to courts and attorneys—if he’s content with that reading of the law, than he only demonstrates my point about the bankruptcy of modern-day conservatism. Conservatives once placed a high premium on individual liberty. They have sold that important value for the cheap veneer of security. As for his argument that the Supreme Court has (thus far) allowed for these incarcerations, so they must be okay, the Supreme Court once declared that Dred Scott was property. That didn’t make it okay.
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