People who
lack a scrupulous attitude toward history are prone to trivialize it with
faulty analogies, a tendency especially prominent in the cavalier ease with
which they invoke the name of Adolf Hitler, a leader in whom unspeakable evil
joined with the arbitrary control of tremendous power in a fashion with few
parallels in modern times. Those
parallels do not come close to applying to any American president, including
the current one; and I have resisted the rise of Hitler-trivializing disguised
as Trump-bashing. Rapidly developing
events of the last week, however, certainly have me thinking about Germany in
the early ‘Thirties.
I refer to
street brawls in Kenosha and Portland in which Americans animated by political
passion have gunned down compatriots.
Some years ago, quite by accident, I had to become an expert on a book
called Out of the Night by Richard
Krebs, pseudonym Jan Valtin. You may
well never have heard of it, but it was the best-selling book in this country
in 1941. It purports to be the autobiography
of a German merchant sailor and Communist agitator active in the German,
Scandinavian, and Belgian seaports beginning in the late ‘Twenties. Its vivid, blood-curdling accounts of the murderous
street fighting between Brown thugs and
Red thugs are undoubtedly founded in the direct reporting of actual experience. And chilling experience it was. “Valtin” reports the instructions received
from his Party boss, Heinz Neumann, as
he sent his warriors into the streets:
“I want to see bodies!” The command was obeyed in melees of red flags
and swastika banners. Well, we seem
pretty far advanced in importing the model to the streets of American cities,
with, no doubt, some pretty terrible people on both sides.
But what
are the “sides,” and are there only two of them? I don’t know the name of the architect who
determined the layout of the building in which the French National Assembly
gathered in the late eighteenth century, but that person’s possibly unconscious
contribution to modern political history was enormous. For it was essentially the furniture
arrangements in that auditorium that established the durable paradigm of the
political “left” and the political “right”—a paradigm that despite its manifest
inadequacy continues to hold sway over the minds of our politicians,
journalists, and opinion-makers, who habitually use the terms with an
undeserved confidence in the certainty of their meaning. In general “left” refers to what is new and
experimental, what is progressive in terms of its tendency towards explicit
leftist goals believed to be desirable, and what maximizes the perceived needs
and desires of social groups and classes deemed to have been unfairly retarded
by other groups and classes unfairly possessing unshared resources and political
power. Leftists feel little constraint
from historical precedents—at least from the ones of which they disapprove,
which means most of them—and some would like to abolish history
altogether. (One of the lines of the Socialist
“Internationale” goes “Let us make a blank slate of the past.”) Conservatives, on the other hand, reverence
what they take to be the tried and true, custom, tradition, inherited social
and religious institutions of very long duration. They are not blind to historical sins
and injustices of the past, but as they
rarely espouse notions of human perfectibility they tend to avoid, when
speaking of their ancestors, the historical opprobrium they would not wish for
themselves. “In seeking to add to the treasury of truths which
comprise the capital acquired by the human race, we are the successors of our
pious ancestors, who loved the good and the true in the form received in their
time”. So wrote Ernst Renan, one
of the great radical intellectuals of the nineteenth century. And he continued: “ The most distressing
error is to believe that one serves one’s country in the calumny of those who
founded it. All a nation’s ages are the leaves in the same
book. The true progressives are those who begin with a profound
respect for the past.”
But how
useful is the left/right paradigm? I
have come to the conclusion: not all that useful. From the
historical point of view the traditional oppressors of freedom of action,
speech and thought would seem definitely to have been from the right: arbitrary rulers (Caligula), bigoted
and obscurantist religious authorities (Torquemada), tyrannical bureaucracies
(the Star Camber), and so forth. These
people were forever telling you what you couldn’t do, wear, make, write, say
and of course, drink. I am so old that I
grew up in a dry county where the Baptists and the bootleggers joined in silent
collusion to augment the social piety of the former and the bank accounts of
the latter at the expense of some poor farmer who liked a beer now and then.
But already among the French revolutionaries we get the tyrants from the left
and the puritan Jacobins of the Committee on Public Safety. Tyranny frequently comes under the promise of
protection. Lenin’s Cheka was “an organ
of social protection.” Both the Antifa
extremists in Portland and the teen-aged gunman in Kenosha were in
place—uninvited and unauthorized, of course—ostensibly in order to protect the
public from the alleged dangers presented by rampaging racists on the one hand
or vandals and looters on the other. The
mention of Lenin can remind us that the champion criminals of the twentieth
century were brutal Marxist ideologues in Russia, China, and Cambodia whose accomplishment
in human destruction, laid out in the statistics of The Black Book of Communism, make the achievements of the Third
Reich in that department seem comparatively modest. The most shocking display of the myopia of
the intellectuals of the 1930s was the belief, still alive and well in today’s
academic world, that there was a huge chasm separating Socialism under Stalin
from National Socialism under Hitler.
Left? Or right?
Lord
Falkland, a sort of hyper-Tory of the seventeenth century, uttered the
following memorable principle: “When it is not necessary to change, it is
necessary not to change.” Whatever you
might think of the doctrine, it at least invites the application of mental
discrimination in the adjudication of ideas.
There are in our country things urgently in need of change, several of
which are gathered within the slogan of “Black lives matter”. There are suggested changes it would be
lunacy to implement, such as “Abolish the police.” It does absolutely no good either to conflate
the two or to assign them to pigeonholes of left or right.
We ought to
be able to agree on some shared good ideas without violent controversy about
ideas on which we do not agree. Here the
rediscovery of the Center is much to be desired. Democratic government should aim to give
everyone a voice but nobody a veto. The
good and the true as seen by the founders of our nation and enshrined in the
Declaration of Independence seem good and true to me still today. The fact that we have as yet failed to
implement good and true ideas fully is a moral rebuke to us, not an exposure of
the debility of the ideas themselves.
The situation actually presents an exhilarating challenge. For if government of the people, by the
people, and for the people should vanish from the earth, the tragedy would be
much greater than it would have been at the time of Gettysburg. For there are now three hundred more million
Americans to be betrayed than there were then, and untold millions of others
anxiously watching from beyond our shores.
