Conservatives and History

The question of what “is” conservatism is perhaps unfair, if not unanswerable. Lots of people call themselves conservatives for different reasons. One friend says that conservatives accept the fallibility of man, while progressives strive for the utopian goal of man’s perfection. For instances that actually fit this description, I join him in favoring the former. Maybe that question gets us nowhere. It certainly didn’t go anywhere useful in this discussion of liberals vs. libertarians on Arnold Kling’s blog.

My conservative friend says that we began a decline about 100 hundred years ago with the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. My progressive friend says that a severe decline began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. If various groups do not fall into easily defined camps, at least we can consider what their views of history look like. My own view of U.S. history doesn’t see a long slide of decline anywhere. I see terrible years around the Civil War and from the First World War to the end of the second, roughly 1914 to 1945. You can get a taste of my view on history by looking at my post Relentless Revolution II and the other two posts on Joyce Appleby’s book, The Relentless Revolution; a History of Capitalism. We seem to be at some sort of hinge of history now, but it is always impossible to discern this when so close to the present. In retrospect, Appleby and others see the era around 1973 as a hinge. Who thought so at the time? In 1914, most people thought the war would be over in six months. Virtually no one foresaw how serious the Great Depression would be, although you can always find some individual somewhere saying things that most people thought was crazy that, in fact, turned out to be right. The story of this history is at least as interesting as a discussion of political principles, and much closer to considerations of evidence.

I am now reading Telling the Truth about History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, all professors of history at UCLA when the book was written. It appears to be the case that it has not been until the postmodern era that the meta-narratives that have defined how history has been written have been investigated. She talks about three that have been challenged in the recent past, the view of science as the model for history (which she calls “the heroic model of science”), the idea of progress which came from adoption of a scientific world view looking for the laws of history, and the powerful national sentiments that 19th and 20th century people draw upon for a sense of identity. These meta-narratives replaced the Christian one which saw man as fallen and time as an endless cycle. The meaning of time itself changed, as did the meaning of life. Time now had a direction. The meaning of revolution changed, from a circular repeat to a thrust forward. Of course, Marxism is a rather more specific meta-narrative, too. But so is laissez-faire capitalism. Both are demonstrably false. America as the torch bearer of the enlightenment is an even more specific narrative that motivated people in the U.S. in the early years and has a residual attraction today.

I will be returning to these issues in the future. There is a good review of Gordon Wood’s new Empire of Liberty; A History of the Early Republic from 1789-1815, that is presently not available on-line. Wood is my favorite historian of the revolutionary period. I also have on order Appleby’s widely admired book on the period after 1815 called Inheriting the Revolution; The First Generation of Americans (the first generation born as Americans). The world looked very different to them than the prior generation, and the world became different, so much so that most of the Founders lamented what had become of their country in their old age. I think we can see similar sentiments from the right and the left today. Things change, sometimes for the worse, but I think this overarching pessimism is misplaced. But again, that depends on a view of history, and evidence.

I have also ordered the book a commentator recommend, The Tea Party Revival, as it was not available locally. We will see what insights it provides. I expect that I will find the concerns about federal fiscal policy very relevant and attempts at religious social engineering misplaced. The questions about the power of the federal government is a complicated and interesting one, too. To that extent, we must acknowledge the fact that the power of the federal government was greatly increased by the sixteenth amendment authorizing the income tax, which was ratified February 3, 1913. But we must also recognize the facts of the massive increases in corporate power in the Gilded Age I talked about in my posts about the history of capitalism. Something else which seems clearly true to me is that the world has become more complicated over time. This has led law to become more complicated to deal with more complicated social and economic issues. The conservative criticism of the power of the federal government must acknowledge such facts to be persuasive.