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Apostate No More; Little Pod Can Be Stopped; Which Side Are You On?

It will probably not cause anyone reading this to weep or wail to find out that Damon Linker’s blog, aptly called The Apostate (formerly at the now-defunct address of https://apostatelinker.blogspot.com/), is kaput only a couple weeks after it came into being (hat tip: Caleb Stegall).  That has to the most rapidly concluded book blog since John Podhoretz started […]

It will probably not cause anyone reading this to weep or wail to find out that Damon Linker’s blog, aptly called The Apostate (formerly at the now-defunct address of https://apostatelinker.blogspot.com/), is kaput only a couple weeks after it came into being (hat tip: Caleb Stegall).  That has to the most rapidly concluded book blog since John Podhoretz started up a blog to ask us if You-Know-Who can be stopped.  I believe the story of the blog is about to be made into a feature: it will be called Ten Days In May, which is exactly how long the blog lasted.  Some book blogs are interesting because, well, the books themselves are interesting and generate conversation and debate.  Other book blogs are dreary because the blogger/author thinks that he has just accomplished Something Great and deigns to share his tidbits of wisdom with the rabble.  Then there are JPod books, which I daresay probably generate neither interest nor great sales. 

So Linker’s blog is history.  Unfortunately, Victor Davis Hanson’s Pajama Medias blog is still very much with us, where he gives us offerings such as this:

My rule of thumb is that almost every current, know-it-all critic, whether a Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Chris Matthews (“we are all neo-cons now”), Francis Fukuyama, etc., at one time or another voiced support for removing Saddam and bringing war to Iraq.

One constant in their various escape hatches is that a particular lapse, a certain mistake alone explains their abandonment of earlier zeal—too few troops, disbanding the Iraqi army, not trisecting the country, the tenure of Donald Rumsfeld, etc.

In contrast, the simple truth is too bitter to confess: their support follows the pulse of the battlefield. When the statue fell and approval for the war hovered near 80%, few wanted to be on the wrong side of history. But fast forward three years plus: after well over 2,000 battle deaths, and chaos in Iraq, most not only don’t wish to be associated with the stasis, but contort to assure that they never supported the war in the beginning (hard to do with footprints on the internet), or were supposedly betrayed by the incompetence of others. 

Being someone who opposed invading Iraq from the day the word Iraq first crossed Mr. Bush’s lips on January 29, 2002, I am sometimes unimpressed with the nature of former war supporters’ conversions to the opposition.  Some of it is opportunistic, and very often the same people (many of them “centrist” Democrats, but not all) who admit they made stunning errors of judgement on Iraq feel no shame in offering their assessment of the new and even graver threats from (your country’s name here).  But that is not what I want to focus on today.  It is actually just on one line from Hanson’s post that I didn’t even notice the first time around:

When the statue fell and approval for the war hovered near 80%, few wanted to be on the wrong side of history.

Prominent people in punditry use this phrase “wrong side of history” all the time, along with “dustbin of history,” and so forth, so there is nothing uniquely Hansonian about this nonsense.  To make it clear that Hanson does indeed believe there are such sides and that being pro-war on Iraq is to be on the “right” side of history, I would note his de rigueur parallels with the War of Secession and WWII and the following amazing statement, which is followed by some explanation by Hanson: 

Everything and everyone now hinge on the outcome. [bold and italics mine-DL]  

The safety of millions of brave Iraqi reformers, the prestige of the United States and its military, the policy of fostering democratic reform in the Middle East, the end to the nexus between failed autocracies and scapegoating the West through terrorists; success of the Bush Administration; the effectiveness of the Democratic opposition; the divide between Europe and America; the attitude toward the United States of the Middle East autocracies; the reputation of the Islamic terrorists — all that will be adjudicated by the verdict in Iraq. Rarely have so many ideologies, so much politics, so many reputations been predicated on just a few thousand American combat soldiers and their Iraq allies.

So he seems to believe there is a “wrong” side to history (and, happily, I have always been on that side!), and more than that he seems to think that the outcome of the war will determine which side is which–though he is not seriously in doubt as to the outcome or which is the right side.  It is particularly egregious when Hanson refers to the “wrong side” of history, though, even when it is in passing, because as an historian he ought to know–if he knows anything–that history does not have “right” and “wrong” sides.  People on the political right would have every reason to be deeply depressed if there were two such sides, since that would mean that our steady retreat for several centuries was the result of a fairly inexorable and unstoppable historical process, which in turn would have some rather unfortunate implications for the reality of human freedom.  

Let me explain what I mean when I say there are no right or wrong sides in history before someone fears that I am endorsing some kind of moral indifference and relativism in the affairs of the world.  To be on the “right” side of history invariably means that you picked the side that happened to win.  It is an arbitrary valuation that suits the interests of those who have greater power.  This is the kind of thing that people with power or those who believe in the efficacy of Macht will affirm in complete seriousness.  It’s not exactly might makes right, but might demonstrates right.  It is a modern, secular kind of trial by combat.  There are ancient and medieval precedents for this kind of thinking (the Kharijites are a good example of believing literally that victory in battle = right and legitimacy), which still make the claim no more true.  In this sense, conservatives throughout the West have supposedly been on the “wrong” side because we have gone from reversal to reversal with few concrete successes to show for our efforts.  But you cannot be on a “wrong” side for the same reason that you cannot adhere to a “lost cause” (see T.S. Eliot)–there are no “gained causes” and there is no right side of history.  If we believe that Progress is a myth, we must believe the same thing about the Right Side of History, which is simply a part of the myth of Progress. 

Speaking of right and wrong sides implies a definite, discernible and necessary direction to history that simply does not exist.  If there is a direction to secular history, God alone knows what it is, and He has not told us the secret.  There are general, long-term trends that you can find in any period of human history, but they do not all tend in the same direction.  To be European and cosmopolitan in the 19th century was to be on the “wrong” side of history; now many would hold that defenders of the nation-state are on the “wrong,” that is to say, losing side.  In another century the nationalists will be in full stride all over the world (they are already picking up plenty of momentum)–or the categories of allegiances will be of an entirely different kind as we return to tribal or religious conflicts (all of which were supposed to be part of what fatuous people might call “the politics of the past”). 

Normally when people are talking about “right” and “wrong” sides of history they mean “my side” and the other guy’s–it is a self-justifying story you tell yourself about your inevitable, historically-mandated triumph over your rivals.  A good way to know that this is a bogus way of thinking about history is to see how many of the defeated and destroyed empires of the last hundred years believed themselves to be fated to dominion over the world because historical inevitability favoured them and their system.  Today democratists tell us the same story about the global spread of democracy, and Fukuyama can say without irony that history is “against” this or that ideology or policy.  How does he know?  Because obviously history is “for” his ideology and policy, as it must be.  

In similar fashion, secularists in the 19th and early 20th century triumphantly expected religion to wither away and die–not because there was any good anthropological or historical reason for thinking this was the case, but because they wanted it to be true and had developed a theory about the irrationality of religion and the increasing rationality of modern man, which would have to result in religion’s downfall, that made it sound somewhat plausible.  Iraq war supporters might describe opponents of the war as being on the “wrong side” of history, not because it was obvious that deposing Hussein would usher in any of the good things they promised that would have made it an epochal, revolutionary change, but because it lent an aura of moral superiority and historical inevitability to the success of their project.     

When people say that so-and-so was on the wrong side of history, this invariably means that he was on the losing side of a war or a revolution, and when they say “wrong” side they usually mean it very much in terms of moral judgement.    This is what it means 95% of the time it is used.  Likewise, when your ideas are allegedly consigned to the “dustbin of history,” it is almost always because you lost a war.  Wars, in this view of history, prove the supremacy and value of some ideas over others.  This is simply untrue, but it does help explain why people who believe this–or at least talk as if they believe this–are perfectly happy to endorse wars for ideological causes, because they are already convinced that winning wars will vindicate and “prove” their ideas right.  Incidentally, that is why there are so many on the left and nominal right emphasising incompetence as the central flaw of the administration.  While real, dissident conservatives have stressed the evils of the administration’s ideological tunnel vision, incompetence has been the buzzword for all of the former war supporters who have since seen the light.  The script goes something like this: intervening militarily to democratise rogue states and enforce nonproliferation regimes is more or less a good solution, but this crowd has simply screwed it up too badly.  There are also those who are zealous war supporters but who focus on administration incompetence as a way of exculpating the ideas tied to the war–democratisation, interventionism, preemption, etc.–from the judgement that they think defeat in war imposes on whether ideas are sound or not.  Four out of five times these days when you find a born-again war opponent, he will cite his support for the principle of doing what we did in Iraq but will also lament the poor execution.  This is rather like the wisdom of the man who says, “If only I had been allowed to drive the car off the cliff, we wouldn’t have crashed.”

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