Reclaiming The Past

Tuesday was obviously a failure on many levels, but I think the most important one was cultural. What happened, happened because the Left's "Long March" through our institutions has finally come to pass; they have now misled a majority of Americans about the nature of society. Something has to be done about that. There are many fronts on which we need to engage liberals, but given my background, I'm going to talk about the one I know: History.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, but a lot of what gets put into history books these days is extremely inaccurate and twisted to fit liberal interpretations. Thanks to recent scholarship on the Right, many conservatives are well aware of the most insidious example: that conservatives and Nazis are somehow linked. That subject could be a post in itself, but suffice to say, even many academics are no longer willing to make this claim.

But there are lots of other cases. For example:

Hoover was a laissez-faire conservative. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although he certainly wasn't a socialist either, Hoover, who made his fame as a humanitarian in the Wilson administration, was a firm believer in intervention. One of the things he did following the Crash of '29 was to more than double the existing tax rate for people in top income brackets, while another was to sign the Smoot-Hawley tariffs into law, which strangled free trade. Many economists agree that it was these acts of government interference, not "rugged individualism," which turned a recession into a depression.

The Catholic Church collaborated with the Nazis. Some extremely popular and extremely bad scholarship has been written, alleging that the wartime pope, Pius XII, not only did nothing to assist Jews during the Holocaust, but allowed the Church to take part in the persecution. In fact, Pius and leading bishops publicly denounced the ideas behind Nazism, hid hundreds if not thousands of Italian Jews within Vatican property, and repeatedly intervened across Europe to stop deportations to death camps. Despite the fact that their interests contradict each other, many historians continue to paint the Church as an enabler of totalitarianism.

Industrial capitalism impoverished the working class. You can make whatever claims you want about the moral and social effects of industrialization, but statistically, it is indisputable that the average man's physical condition improved during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Between 1750 and 1850, for example, the average annual income in Britain, then in the swing of the Industrial Revolution, more than doubled, while the infant mortality rate declined by more than half. Figures from France and Germany, which industrialized later, support this data, regardless of what Marxist historians want people to believe.

These are just a few random cases of how the things historians, including ones I have worked with, teach to their students are often just flat wrong. Scary, isn't it? The extent to which youths are told things that aren't true? But before you ask, no, I don't think there's a conspiracy at work here. From my own observation, it goes a lot deeper than that.

In the first place, history, like most liberal arts professions, is increasingly obsessed with theory. In truth, it's been like this for a while; the first professional historians in Europe used their field to glorify the nation-state, after which came the Marxists, who see everything in history as evidence of class conflict, and then the postmodernists, who see everything as some kind of conflict, and on and on. This doesn't have to be a bad thing, but it tends to cause people especially wedded to a theory to reject or filter information that doesn't fit. Plus, most of them take it for granted that white males are always holding the levers of power and therefore are always oppressing everyone else.

Also like most liberal arts professions, its members are mostly leftists of some stripe, which tends to produce a groupthink effect. You don't have to talk to sociologists to figure this out; go to any Department office at a university, count up the number of LGBT support stickers, Bush-bashing "Doonesbury" cartoons, and "Power to the People" posters on professors' doors, and guess for yourself how easy it is to express conservative ideals in their midst.

Plus, you have the problem that history is an increasingly research-driven field; in order to qualify for their degree and entry into the fold, a student has to write a dissertation on some topic and explain why what he's saying about it is important. Only with so many students and a fixed number of issues to talk about, we've long since exhausted any meaningful discussion, and most students trying to qualify today are falling back on theoretics to justify their work. Hopefully, you can tell by this point that these facets of the profession are reinforcing each other and making it more liberal over time. And it's clearly dangerous, because if this is the only version of past events young citizens hear, they're going to start thinking that class conflict is real, that government action can solve anything, and other falsehoods.

Since I put "Reclaiming" in the title, obviously I should be talking about what to do about it, right? Well, I do, but any counter-measures conservatives take will be a long time in showing results. That's just the nature of it. Hopefully, if I can make it through graduation and then tenure-getting without being ostracized, I'll make my own small dent in things, as will other conservatives I know in the process of becoming professors. But those who are on the other side of it can do something too. Academia would go nuts if they read this, but often the popular histories you see at bookstores are better at informing readers than the "scholarly" publications created for the ivory tower's benefit. They cover more ground and don't bother with theory. I recommend grounding yourself in these.

There are probably many more things which can be done. But the point is that we start thinking about how to combat the Left's control of education and other professions. Ultimately, winning the electoral fight every four years is merely tactical. It's winning the battle for minds that produces a true strategic victory.