The Greatest Single Failure of the Conservative Movement
Remnant Review (June 18, 2012)
The greatest single failure of the conservative movement is the fact that no one has written the history of Western civilization in terms of the principles of the conservative movement.
Conservatives say that Western Civilization is superior to all others. I say: "Prove it." Show why. Then show how this came to be.
You cannot do this if you are an ethical relativist. Conservatives say they aren't. I say: "Prove it." Prove it with a comprehensive history of Western Civilization: a shelf of books, a college-level textbook, a high school textbook, and a website full of documentation.
I'm still waiting. Let me know.
If your principles do not enable you to understand the past, then your principles will not enable you to shape the future in terms of your principles. You are fighting to lose. You are in a lost cause.
If your principles of historical causation are vague, you will not understand how it is possible to get from the world in which we presently live, which we understand has been corrupted by false principles, to a better world in which positive principles have overcome negative principles in the operation of our institutions.
If you cannot do this, you will become the victim of Leo Durocher's summary of historical causation: "Nice guys finish last."
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY
In November 1955, 29-year-old William F. Buckley published a mission statement in the first issue of National Review, the magazine he founded after he failed to get Leonard E. Read to give him the rights to the name The Freeman, which Read controlled. It is a text of the era, as every relevant manifesto must be. It is still worth reading. It is known today, if at all, only for this statement, which appears in the final clause of the final sentence in the second paragraph. Speaking of National Review it says: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."
"Stop" is not an agenda. It is a cry of despair. You can't beat something with nothing.
He turned 30 a week later.
Buckley had become famous in 1951 with his book, God and Man at Yale, a critique of Yale's liberal Protestant theology and its Keynesianism. He offered no alternatives.
The mission statement announced this:
We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience.
What did this mean? He never got around to saying.
In 1954, he and his brother-in-law wrote McCarthy and His Enemies. He rarely referred to it again.
He later wrote a little book, Up from Liberalism (1961), which was fun to read. But he never wrote a book of lasting value. Here is a list of them. Not one shaped the thinking of the conservative movement. He was rhetorically gifted, but he spent his later years writing a dozen spy novels, calling on his experience as an ex-CIA employee. Skull and Bones members, which he also was, often went into the CIA. He wasted his gifts.
He is representative of the entire conservative movement.
THE MEMORY HOLE
One of the most powerful images to come out of 20th century literature is George Orwell's image of the memory hole. The hero of his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is Winston Smith. He is employed by the Ministry of Truth. The Ministry of Truth has a division of history. He is part of that division. His job is to destroy all evidence of the past that conflicts with the latest official position of the government. He drops documentation down the memory hole, which is a device to destroy paper.
Every movement has to have a memory hole. Every movement has an official history, or ought to have an official history. Every movement, if it expects to be able to influence the present, has to have a unique way of interpreting the past. This was made clear by Orwell in his book. I think this is the central message of his book regarding totalitarian systems. "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
This principle applies to all systems of government, civil and otherwise.
In the book, the government has the ability to spy on individuals in their homes. But there are limitations on such a procedure. There are not enough people in the government to monitor all the people in their homes. So, the main instrument of control was not the two-way television sets. The main instruments of control were associated with the flow of information. The government could control the thinking of millions of people by means of control over the flow of information, and this meant the control of information regarding the past. The book is premised on the idea that people do not remember the past clearly. So, if a group can get into control over they teaching of history, it can control the way people think about the present.
There is no conservative history of Western Civilization (capitalized). There is no prevailing textbook of historical interpretation. There is no prevailing theory of historical causation which is accepted by most people who call themselves conservatives. There is no graduate school that trains scholars in history, and which is also committed to a conservative interpretation of history. Not only does it not exist today, it has never existed.
Here we have a movement which seems to be gaining credibility, yet the members of that movement have only the vaguest understanding of the history of Western Civilization. The understanding that they do have has been shaped by heirs of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment was committed to the concept of historical causation which was antithetical to anything promoted by conservative social theorists, beginning with Edmund Burke and Adam Smith. The schools' textbooks have always been the enemy of the conservative movement.
The textbooks have been the means by which the prevailing establishment has told its story to each generation of voters, and the conservatives have yet to produce even a single volume of the history of the West, which reflects the concept of social order that is promoted by people who call themselves conservatives, and who speak in the name of conservatives.
This has been a problem within the conservative movement as far back as 1789. The people who have written the textbooks are the victors. This is a fundamental principle of historical interpretation: the victors write the textbooks. This is never taught in any department of history to undergraduate or graduate students. The departments never admit that they exist as the heirs of the victors.
The interpretation of the American Revolution was first formulated by defenders of the American Revolution. Their books are long forgotten, but their interpretations have carried down to the present. One of the authors was Mercy Otis Warren, a brilliant historian. The other major historian was David Ramsey. Nobody reads their books today, and nobody except specialists in the history of historiography has ever read their books in the last 150 years. Only specialists are aware of the books. But there is no question that they were written from the point of view of the victors of the war.
THE CONSTITUTION
The history of the United States Constitution was not written by the Anti-Federalists. While a lot of people think that there has been a great cover-up regarding the assassination of President Kennedy, nothing compares to the academic cover-up of the illegal coup d'état by the men who attended the Constitutional Convention. Even to speak of that event as a coup d'état is considered unpatriotic. The definition of patriotism is always established by the victors in the war which led up to control by the present establishment.
In the same way that a person who walks into his own home does not smell anything unique about it, but a person who has never been in the home instantly smells the unique odor of that home, so is the individual who reads a standard textbook about the history of his country. In the same way that we think that we do not speak with an accent, but any person from outside our region instantly recognizes the accent, so is our understanding of our past. We have been subjected to the same story, over and over and over, all of our lives, so that we are unable to detect the specific odors of our nation's textbook history. We do not hear the accent of our textbook understanding of the past.
A successful revisionist history movement is a movement that gains such complete control over the interpretation of history that no one recognizes that, at some point, it was revisionist history. When revisionist history becomes establishment history, the establishment which teaches this version of history has been successful.
Two things change after a revolution. The second thing that changes is the legal order. The first thing that changes is the official history of the pre-revolutionary era.
Conservatives remain on the fringes of American social life, political life, economic life, academic life, and media life. They are growing in influence, but they are still on the fringes. The mark of their fringe position is not that they do not have money or power. The mark of their fringe position is that virtually nobody within the conservative movement has ever read a single book on the history of the United States that is written from the point of view of the conservative movement.
Part of this problem is that the principles undergirding the conservative movement are in fact at war with each other. The libertarian interpretation of history, which is best seen in four volumes of Murray Rothbard's history of colonial America, is very different from any standard conservative view of the history of the coming of the Constitution.
Yet, even here, most conservatives are completely unaware of the history of the Constitution. They have no real understanding of how it came into existence, and they surely have no understanding of the Anti-Federalist movement which opposed the constitutional convention, and which predicted a massive centralization of government if the Constitution was ratified.
The Anti-Federalists were right, and the three anonymous authors of the Federalist papers were wrong. Not only were they wrong, one of them, Alexander Hamilton, deliberately lied about the degree of centralization that he knew the Constitution would impose on the American people. Madison went along with this, for he was the real genius behind the Constitution, but within 10 years of the writing of the Federalist papers, Madison was a dedicated political enemy of Hamilton.
Here is another example. It is related to what I have already said about the Constitution. There is no history of Constitutional law written from the point of view of the limited-government position of Madison.
Hamilton is the darling of modern American historians, and he is the darling of those who write the histories of constitutional law. Why? Because Hamilton is correctly perceived as the genius who set forth the principles of the centralization of government. He made only one mistake: he did not understand that the real power in the new government would be the Supreme Court. None of them saw this, and as a result, there is no conservative position on limiting the power of the Supreme Court to shape the legal order. Everybody accepts the sovereignty of the Supreme Court over the system, despite the fact that, specific in the Constitution is the power of Congress to remove virtually all aspects of American jurisprudence from the authority of the United States Supreme Court. That fact is right in the Constitution, and yet almost no one in the conservative movement has ever been aware of the fact that that provision exists. I earned a PhD in history, and my specialty was colonial America, but I was unaware of the implications of that section of the Constitution until I was informed about it by conservative author Dan Smoot in the early 1980s, long after Smoot had retired and ceased writing. I was blind to it, despite the fact that it was right in front of me. It was hidden in plain sight.
I have waited for over 50 years for a conservative specialist in the history of Constitutional law to write a textbook that shows, case by case, election by election, how the United States Constitution became what it is today. It is today the plaything of the liberal establishment. The members of the Constitutional convention would not recognize the legal system of the United States today. They would not believe it possible, with the exception of Hamilton, that the Constitution could become the means by which a centralized political order would gain control over 30% of the economy, and it would have unchallengeable authority over the interpretation of law by a 5 to 4 majority on the Supreme Court.
Liberals have always understood that they had to maintain control over the interpretation of the Constitution. So, liberals have written histories of Constitutional law. These histories have generally focused on the power of the court, and they have tended to ignore the power of politics in shaping the opinions of the court. The history of Constitutional law has never been written in terms of a discussion of the political battles and the ideological battles that separated members of the court. Only rarely is there a discussion of where the justices came from before they were members of the court, and on whose payrolls they sat.
If a movement does not have an interpretation of how the prevailing legal order became authoritative, that movement has no understanding of the way in which the political world works. If it has no understanding of the way in which the political world works, it is going to be impotent with respect to changing the political order. If you do not know how you got here, you do not know how to get wherever you are going.
This is the reality of the conservative movement. Conservatives are not interested in history, and even if they were, they would not know where to find a textbook which would show them what happened.
You would think that someone would have written such a textbook. There is one multi-volume series aimed at high school students, written by historian Clarence Carson. It is not a bad book, but it is virtually unknown. He was a trained historian, but he was never able to get his book assigned to high school students. It is six volumes long, and on an A to F scale, I would probably give it a C+ or a B-. I have never seen it footnoted by anybody.
THREE MISSING PIECES
There are three things that every historical presentation should include. First, there should be a discussion of the great ideas which shaped the past. History is not the history of the class struggle; it is the history of the struggles of groups with rival confessions of faith. Second, there should be a discussion of how the various movements, especially the victorious ones, financed themselves, beginning in the early stages and extending to the present. Third, there should be a discussion of the way in which the various groups communicated their ideas to intellectuals, and from intellectuals to the masses. In other words, the writing of history should involve the following rule: follow the confessions, follow the money, and follow the media. Any historical account that does not do all three is not an accurate account. And yet, as far as I know, this has never done in any textbook history of the United States -- or even a monograph.
Robert Nisbet had a phrase: ideas do not reproduce ideas the way that butterflies reproduce butterflies. In other words, we have to consider carefully the historical context in which certain ideas were developed, and through which they became either failures or dominant positions. Confessions of faith are crucial, but they do not stand alone. They are implemented in historical contexts. To write accurate history, the historian must have some concept of cause-and-effect which enables him to make conclusions about how certain confessions of faith became dominant in a region or in a culture.
Let me give you an example of how historians can miss the boat. The Encyclopaedia Britannica put out a series of books: the great books of the Western world. There had been similar book publishing projects in the past. Over half a century before, a famous set was known as the Harvard Classics. What made the EB series different was a two-volume set called the Syntopicon. Here, you could look up 102 key ideas, and the index would take you to those sections of the entire series that dealt with the particular idea. This was extremely handy.
Years later, the general editor of the series, Mortimer J. Adler, made an interesting admission. The team of researchers had forgotten a key concept. Long after the Syntopicon was published, he looked up the word "equality." It did not appear. He understood the magnitude of the omission. There are few ideas in the history of the last 250 years that have been more influential politically than the concept of equality. It was added only in the 1990 edition. Yet the team had worked from 1943 to 1952 to create the Syntopicon.
This is why education is so important. This is why the writing of textbooks is so important. This is why the author of a textbook that is read by lots of people is so important in shaping their thinking. It is not that he forces them to think about something merely because he says that such and such is true. His power is in his ability to exclude any consideration of crucial aspects of the past. The ability to skip over certain facts of history is central to the power of the textbook writer.
Every establishment must maintain its power by excluding facts that are inconvenient for strengthening the legitimacy of the establishment. Legitimacy is the crucial factor undergirding every establishment. The writing of history is crucially important to maintaining the legitimacy of every establishment.
No textbook writer has the ability to persuade the readers of something that most of his peers disagree with. He can reinforce the prevailing view of the intellectuals of his day, as well as the people who are dominant in his field of study. He speaks as a representative of a broad sweep of opinion within his particular academic guild.
Where he gets his power, and where the guild gets its power, is by suppressing all memory of events and individuals who opposed the individuals who were victorious in the great battles for the hearts and minds of the voters. The suppression of historical facts, and the selection of other historical facts to put into the textbook, combine to shape the thinking of each generation.
MUZZEY
I have argued in the past that the most important historian in the history of United States was David Saville Muzzey. Almost no one has heard of him. At least 100 million Americans read one or another edition of his textbook on American history, yet I doubt that any of them remember the name of the author. Nobody remembers the name of the authors of a high school textbook. Yet Muzzey was overwhelmingly influential in the history of the 20th century, because, from 1911 until at least 1966, it was his textbook that was assigned to the vast majority of Americans who took a required course in United States history in high school. Even when he was alive, rival publishers could never figure out what it was about his textbook that sometimes outsold all of the other textbooks combined. He shaped the thinking of Americans regarding the history of United States for half a century, 1911 to the early 1960s.
Muzzey was a liberal. He was a liberal Presbyterian, and he was a political liberal: a Progressive. He hated colonial American history, because colonial American history was overwhelmingly Christian, and even worse, from his point of view, it was Calvinistic in the early days. He attended an anti-Calvinist Presbyterian seminary, Union Theological Seminary of New York City. This was a major pastoral training institution of Protestant theological liberalism from 1875 until the late twentieth century. I have discussed it at length in my book Crossed Fingers.
Muzzey devoted one brief chapter to the history of America from 1620 to 1750. In other words, he dropped the first 130 years of America down the memory hole. He got away with it.
There have been many influential historians in American history. They have usually been academic historians. They have exercised their influence by persuading other historians of the accuracy of their version of American history. But this is the long-neglected fact: it was Muzzey who took those interpretations and boiled them down into a form that could be read by 100 million high school students. It was not that they remembered the textbook which they read in high school. It was that this textbook reinforced the liberal establishment's concept of what made America great.
I know of only one person who has ever recognized the importance of Muzzey: Frances FitzGerald. Her book, America Revised (1979), is a study of the history of public school history textbooks in the United States. She recognized that he shaped the thinking of several generations of Americans.
She takes the standard view of humanist historiography: there is no such thing as objective history (p. 16). Therefore, whoever controls the writing of the textbooks shapes the thinking of the general public. She calls textbook editors the arbiters of American values. She calls the publishing companies "the Ministries of Truth for children" (p. 27). (She knows her Orwell.) She also insists, as good humanists always do, that "The truth is everywhere political" (p. 31).
I am now going to tell you something that virtually no Americans understand. I recognized it in the late 1960s, when I was in graduate school. Libraries, meaning university libraries, do not buy and shelve textbooks. Anyway, the better universities do not. (One mark of a substandard private college library is it does have textbooks on the shelves.) Textbooks take a lot of space, and shelf space is always at a premium in an academic library. So, because textbooks come and go, and are revised every three or four years, libraries do not store them.
This means that it is virtually impossible to write a history of academic opinion as reflected in the textbooks. I am speaking here of collegiate level textbooks, meaning lower-division textbooks. There is no library you can go to, with the exception perhaps of Columbia University, where virtually all of the high school textbooks are available. Nobody reads them. Nobody is expected to read them. But in order to understand the shaping of American opinion, you must understand something about shifting academic opinions, as reflected in the most widely assigned textbooks, both in high school and college. You can't. The only book I have ever seen on this with respect to American history is FitzGerald's book.
Think of all the other fields of study where you would want to know what the textbooks taught. A classic example of this is the textbook that was used in the Dayton Tennessee high school in the early 1920s, which John Scopes supposedly used to teach evolution: Hunter's A Civic Biology. In fact, Scopes never recalled teaching evolution in the classroom, but the textbook surely did teach it. The only reason why you can find that textbook online today is because of the Scopes trial. It was deeply racist, and was built on the fake science of the day known as eugenics. That textbook reflects the opinion of the leading scholars in the leading universities of that era. The eugenics movement was committed to the sterilization and non-reproduction of central European immigrants, blacks, and non-Nordic peoples. It is an embarrassment to modern liberals, who like to picture the Scope's trial is the triumph of rationality. It was in fact the triumph of racial bigotry. But this story is known only to specialists in the history of eugenics movement. Only one Hollywood movie has ever presented it, Alleged (2010), which hardly anybody has seen. (It is a pretty good movie. Brian Dennehy as Clarence Darrow was first-rate. He outdid Fred Dalton Thompson, who really is a lawyer.)
So, the broadest academic opinion of any era is subject to the law of the memory hole. The establishment's key ideas, as presented in high school and college textbooks, cannot be read and evaluated by any subsequent generation. We cannot see which ideas came to the forefront and which ideas were scrapped. Eugenics certainly was one of those ideas. It was widely popular from about 1905 until 1935. Eugenics was the foundation of the forced sterilization movement, which began before 1910, and which was still in effect in the mid-1950s in the United States. Only because Hitler had his bureaucrats deliberately copy the original state laws from United States regarding forced sterilization, and only because he did so in the name of Darwinian eugenics, did eugenics become politically incorrect in the late 1930s. You cannot find this story in the textbooks, either. This fact has been dropped down the liberal establishment's memory hole. The funding of the eugenics movement by the Rockefeller Foundation and other establishment charitable organizations is not a well-known story.
THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
No institution has been more effective in stamping out conservatism in the United States and everywhere else than the tax-funded school system. If I were given the choice of which to get rid of, the income tax or the public schools, I would not hesitate for a moment. I do not care if the federal government taxes my income, so long as local governments do not tax my income in order to fund the public schools. The battlefield for the hearts, minds, and souls of Americans has been fought in the public schools more than in any other arena. The political battlefield is secondary, every four years, to what is primary: September through May, except for paid holidays. We got the income tax because of the public schools. We did not get the public schools because of the income tax.
Conservatives think they are fighting the good fight by regaining local control over the public schools. First, that is impossible. The courts will not allow it. State funding undermines it. United States Department of Education undermines it. But, most of all, the New York City textbook publishing establishment undermines it. What does it matter who controls the hiring and firing of public school teachers, when all of the classrooms in the state have to assign specific textbooks? The textbooks are the key to American education, and they always have been. That was the point Frances FitzGerald made in 1979. The textbook system has always been known as the American system. It was the way in which the establishment has maintained control over the content of education, knowing that the teachers were relatively unskilled and uneducated college girls. The system has always functioned to use the college girls to impart the prevailing climate of liberal academic opinion to the students, who are forced by law to be subjected to be indoctrination.
I care not a fig for who controls hiring and firing in tax-funded schools. I care about the establishment world-and-life view which is in the textbooks. The schools are simply the distribution centers of the textbooks.
I do not understand why conservatives are always in a dither about who controls the public schools, when the real problem has to do with compulsory education, tax funding, accreditation, and control over textbook publishing. It has almost nothing to do with hiring and firing, or the salary level, or the competence of the classroom teachers. The American system has always assumed that classroom teachers are incompetent. This is why so much emphasis has always been placed on the content of the textbooks.
The fact that the conservative movement has never put together textbooks in every field at the high school level or even below is indicative of the complete lack of self-consciousness of the leaders of the conservative movement. They have poured tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, into putting out position papers against this or that piece of federal legislation, which has not blocked any piece of legislation in 40 years. As I have said, the one exception was the Equal Rights Amendment, and that was stopped because Phyllis Schlafly organized women to stop it. It had nothing to do with large donations to inside-the-Beltway think tanks in Washington.
All that money has been sunk down a rat hole, which is the conservatives' equivalent of the memory hole. Nothing comes out of it.
There have been lots of unemployed academics who could have been employed to produce a high school level textbook in each of the social sciences and humanities. It would not have taken much money to encourage such a publication. This has not been done, ever, by any organization that claims to be either conservative or libertarian. This has been the case ever since the mid-19th century. It has certainly been the case ever since the consolidation of the Progressive movement in the election year of 1912. Obviously, it has been the case since 1945, which is been the era of dominance by the liberal establishment in every area of public life.
Today, there is no excuse. It no longer takes a quarter million dollars to put out a textbook. It can be done online free of charge. All it takes is time. And yet, over 15 years since the World Wide Web arrived, there has been no well-known conservative academic in history, government, economics, or literature who has bothered to sit down and write a textbook in his field, along with primary source documents illustrating the textbook. It could have been profitable. But not one conservative or libertarian has bothered to sit down and do this obvious task in the field of history.
I am certainly responsible. I got my training history. But I decided, sometime around 1960, but what I really wanted to do was reconstruct economics along biblical lines. So, I did not pursue my job as a historian. I could have done it, but I had other fish to fry. Murray Rothbard could have done it, but he had other fish to fry.
If I live long enough, maybe I will put together a comprehensive history class in Western Civilization and United States history. It will involve videos, PDFs, texts, audio, and anything else I can think of. But that will come only after my work in economics is finished, and that is likely to take another 10 years. This assumes I will survive another 10 years.