Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Progressives' weakness is in American history. But will that weakness be exploited?

A little over a month ago I asked the question: Progressivism in culture: Where are progressives the weakest?. To recap, here are those cultural items:
  • Media
  • Academia/universities
  • Hollywood
  • Government
  • Sports
  • Protesting (Not rioting)
  • Religion/Churches
  • Social media
  • K12 schools
  • Corporations
  • Tech
  • Talk radio
  • Science
  • Law
  • History

A few were added by suggestions, those are italicized at the bottom. I added the last item, which is the subject of discussion here. One of the things I have noticed is how few conservatives engage in history and specifically American history.

American history is naturally conservative. The concepts and the reasons for why people did things to get out from under the thumb of authoritarianism and most importantly, the hard work they did going forward to keep themselves out from under that thumb and prevent that thumb from appearing is distinctly and uniquely American.

What I can't figure out is why so few Conservatives don't do more with it. Orwell wrote in 1984 that:

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

All I see are people around me stuck in the endless present, nonstop modernity. If there are a group of citizen historians out there that I don't know of, I'd like to find out where they are. You might not find so many who would say this, but I don't mind being wrong and I'd like to meet this group if I could just find it.(if it exists, of course)

So what makes history such a weakness to progressives in my view? Look at what progressives have done over the last 120 years. Their own actions are the proof. First, the progressives started out over 100 years ago just eating around the edges - our country's black heros from the Founding were removed; Founders start being quoted shorter and shorter, history books get lighter and lighter, Washington's birthday gets transformed into "President's Day", our Founders get re-written into basically seven people and the rest are completely wiped off of the table, the founding gets re-written from an action based on principles and liberty into (being solely about) base and cheesy economic issues. I could go on and on with this because it does continually build. The point is is that the erasure of our history has been slow and steady.

Why does that erasure matter? It's the single biggest effort of progressivism. They have moved heaven and earth to erase American past. Why? How does that help them?

And therin lies the secret. "How does that help them?" Once you ask that question, all the doors start opening. "How does that help them?" It doesn't take very long to get to the best spot of all.

"Does reviving American history hurt progressivism?"

Yes, it does. In doing such hard work over such a long period of time, they have shown us what hurts them the most. But it only works if we actively pursue it. We could do much to leverage it if we wanted to. Everything the progressives believe is outright lies, and its so easy to just simply tell the truth. But that may be a little bit more difficult than it appears.

I see it all the time, a new list of "Founders quotes" appears, and a large percentage of the list are totally fake or mis-quoted, and very few push back. Nobody questions it. To be fair, I don't either, for several reasons. Mostly, I hope to see some day where there are more conservative historians around and that isn't going to happen if I'm constantly on the hunt for the latest fake quote with a sneering pointer finger. That's just not constructive. But it does highlight one common refrain that demonstrates a real weakness of our own. If we don't actively pursue it, then what's left?

The biggest missing piece is simple curiousity. "Is that quote actually real, where does it come from, and Can I read the whole thing fully to take in that Founder culture and make that culture my own."

I'd like to hear if others disagree as to history being the single biggest cultural weakness that progressives have. This is not a political discussion. They are without any doubt in my mind weaker on history than the media, or hollywood, or in protesting. I'm not sure those can be debated. But let's see.

That's what makes my audiobooks (among other reasons) so important to me. I can highlight things that the progressives want to be hidden, which I know is a great thing. Also, my translations and my transcriptions are equally important in their own way.

There are other things a citizen historian could do as well, but there needs to be more infrastructure built up that precedes a simple "getting the word out" type of effort.

For now, I think its arguable that progressives won the war on history simply because they're the only ones who showed up during the battle. If we want to catch up, it is their most vulnerable position but it's not a quotable victory.

6 comments:

  1. Conservative prohibitionists enacted the 18th Amendment that destabilized the economy in 1920 and wrecked it in '29-33 via asset-forfeiture, libels, confiscation and prison. The consequences of this error--which summoned forth a 700% increase in the CPUSA--might be a good place to start.

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  2. Prohibitionists were a big-government lot. They were progressives.

    That and communists are fairly inconsequential particularly in the 1920s. Progressives are the problem. Progressivism is America's cancer.

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  3. "Prohibitionists were a big-government lot."

    So's Thomas Jefferson, if Liberty the God that Failed by Christopher A. Ferrara is to be believed:

    "Interring the Jefferson Legend

    "With his death approaching, Jefferson knew full well that 'the vagaries of life had left a vulnerable legacy,' as even a Library of Congress biography admits.[160] To fund the lavish life a retinue of slaves had helped make this possible, Jefferson accumulated massive debts that were satisfied in part by the post-mortem sale of his already heavily mortgaged human chattels. 'Fear for his reputation and public legacy led him to beg his closest friend, James Madison, to 'take care of me when dead.''[161]"

    "Today, libertarians are engaged in the same mission in defense of Jefferson. For without him, to whom can they point as an example of Liberty fulfilling its promises? What becomes of their defense of Liberty if even Jefferson, the very Apostle of Liberty, revealed that Liberty in practice means Power in disguise? Led by such dearly departed gurus as Murray Rothbard, libertarians of the so-called Austrian School hold fast to the idea, unsupported by any real evidence of comparative human happiness, that true freedom was won for America and the world with the overthrow of King George and the creation of 'republican government.' Firmly convinced that Liberty delivered what it was promised in 1776 (when? where? how?), libertarian historians draw a bright line at the beginning of the Lincoln era, depicting his actions as a betrayal of the principles of 'Jeffersonian democracy' expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Kentucky Resolutions, especially 'states rights.' The following is a typical example of this 'libertarian narrative'[162] of Liberty.

    "'Jefferson was the apostle of states' rights, enunciated in his famous Kentucky Resolve of 1798; Lincoln waged the bloodiest war in American history to destroy the Jeffersonian states' rights doctrine. Jefferson authored America's Declaration of Secession from the British empire, known as the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln's overriding purpose in his war was to destroy the secessionist and states' rights principles of the Declaration (while using slick rhetoric designed to pretend that he revered the document).[163]'

    "Missing from this historical cartoon are all the inconvenient details of Jefferson's career examined on the preceding pages, including these:

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  4. "* His drafting of legislation imposing a compulsory oath of loyalty to the Revolution and the State of virginia and renouncing loyalty to the King, providing severe legal penalties for refusal to take the oath, and punishing even "verbal crimes" against the Revolution.

    "* His call for the outlawry and shooting on sight of Tory counter-revolutionaries who should have been treated as prisoners of war, pursuant to a bill of attainder he himself drafted and pushed through the Virginia legislature.

    "* His imprisonment of political criminals in virtual concentration camps while revolutionary governor of Virginia.

    "* His meddling in French affairs while Minister to France, including outright conspiracy with Lafayette and the National Assembly in the overthrow of Louis XVI.

    "* His support for the early Jacobin massacres as expressed in the "Adam and Eve" letter.

    "* His lifelong ownership of slaves, some of whom he had flogged for attempting to escape, and his continued slave trading while President.

    "* His endorsement of state law prosecutions for 'seditious libel' against the President and Congress.

    "* His 'we are all Federalists' Inaugural Address.

    "* His expansionist acquisition of the Louisiana Territory and the subjection of its inhabitants to the federal government without their consent, even though he himself believed this to be unconstitutional.

    "* His supine acceptance of the drastic worsening of the lot of the slaves in Louisiana under federal law.

    "* His approval of an expedient and quite illegal 'amendment' of the Constitution by the Republican-controlled House to expand the definition of 'high crimes and misdemeanors' in order to facilitate the impeachment of his Federalist opponent, Judge Pickering, for drunkenness.

    "* His attempt to stage-manage the conviction and execution of Aaron Burr merely for allegedly planning to sever Louisiana from the Union, a prosecution based on an expansive interpretation of the definition of 'treason' rejected by the Supreme Court.

    "* His failed effort, following Burr's acquittal, to eliminate the independent, life-tenured federal judiciary from the Constitution--which he had earlier supported as essential to civil liberties--on the grounds that no branch of government should be 'independent of the nation.'

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  5. "*His support for General Wilkinson's military dictatorship in the Louisiana Territory in response to Burr's illusory 'threat' to the Union.

    "*His declaration that 'where the laws become inadequate even to their own preservation...the universal resource is a dictator, or martial law.

    "*His dictatorial embargo of American shipping, including the federal seizure of ships and cargo without due process.

    "*His instigation of 'treason' trials and his demand for the death penalty for American citizens who had merely attempted to recover their own property from federal agents.

    "*His retention of the entire fledgling federal bureaucracy, his expansion of the U.S. military, and his budgetary expenditures for federal projectes during his terms as President.

    "*His support for the federal military conquest of Canada and a federally prosecuted war against Great Britain as necessary to America's fina emancipation from 'tyranny.'

    "*His fervent advocacy to compulsory universal military service, which almost passed Congress during his presidency.

    "*His call for war on the secessionists of the Hartford Convention should they secede from the Union.

    "*His opposition to any restriction on the extension of slavery into the territories because it would divide the Union and impair property rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

    "* His scheme for the government-subsidized forcible separation of slave children from their parents and their deportation to Haiti or Sierra Leone.

    "*His support for the Monroe Doctrine, which made America the hemispheric policeman of Liberty.

    "*His entire grandiose vision of an 'empire of Liberty' whose center and summit would be a militarily mighty United States with armed forces raised through the compusory military service he advocated.

    "Not even Rothbard, who otherwise sings the praises of Jefferson and the 'libertarian creed' of the Founders, could ignore completely the truth about Jefferson's career. Wrote Rothbard:

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  6. "'The Jeffersonian drive towards virtually no government foundered after Jefferson took office, first, with concessions to the Federalists..and then with the unconstitutional purchase of the Louisiana Territory. But most particularly it foundered with the imperialist drive toward war with Britain in Jefferson's second term, a drive which led to war and to a one-party system which established virtually the entire statist Federalist program: High military expenditures, a central bank, a protective tariff, direct federal taxes, public works.[164]'

    "But where can one find any sign of the 'Jeffersonian drive toward virtually no government' if that very drive 'foundered' precisely when Jefferson took office, both as governor of Virginia and as President of the United States? It is easy enough for Rothbard (who fails to mention the tyrannical Embargo) to say that after Jefferson left office he was "horrified at the results" and "brooded at Monticello...." But these psychological touches do not alter the basic picture: When he actually wielded power, the Apostle of Liberty was no less vigorous than the Federalists and in fact far outdid them. Rothbard perpetuates the myth of 'Jeffersonian democracy' even as he admits the historical facts that explode it."

    Pages 237-39. And as far as the sources, they are the following:

    [160] "Thomas Jefferson: Legacy," http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/jeffleg.html.

    [161] Ibid.

    [162] Onuf, Jefferson's Empire, 85.

    [163] Thomas Di Lorenzo, "The Latest Defamation of Jefferson," www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo100.html.

    [164] Murray Rothbard, "The Libertarian Heritage: The American Revolution and Classical Liberalism," In For a New Liberty e-text excerpt lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard121.html.

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