Michael Lind: Glenn Beck's Partisan Historians
[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.]
"Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back," John Maynard Keynes observed in 1936. And not only madmen in authority; lightweights in mass media, too.
Behind Glenn Beck's televised crusade against progressivism and Jonah Goldberg's bestselling tract "Liberal Fascism" is more than the usual attempt to smear political opponents by shouting, "So you agree with Hitler!" Beck and Goldberg are peddling dumbed-down versions of the history of the American center-left that originated with serious scholars on the American right. As Beck says of his frequent guest professor R.J. Pestritto's book "Woodrow Wilson and American Progressivism, "That book will make your head hurt but you will read things that you'd never knew [sic] in history."
So much nonsense has been written about the influence of the German-American political theorist Leo Strauss on the American right that one hesitates even to raise the subject. But the origins of the "progressivism-is-fascism" meme are to be found in the work of scholars influenced by Strauss, including Harry Jaffa, Pestritto, Thomas G. West and Charles Kesler. They are associated with a few conservative liberal arts colleges: Hillsdale College, Claremont McKenna College and the University of Dallas.
In their version of Straussianism, the American Founders established universal human rights as the only legitimate foundation for government. The enemies of natural rights liberalism are historicists and relativists who argue that there are no absolute values and that good and evil vary in different times and places. In the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln defended the idea of universal values against historicist, relativist Southern slaveowners who dismissed the Declaration of Independence because it claimed "all men are created equal." In the 20th century, neoconservative hero Winston Churchill defended universal values against Nazi amoralism....
The Straussian-inspired denunciation of progressives as amoral historicists and relativists who have more in common with Jefferson Davis and Adolf Hitler than with Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill is simply the latest in a series of smear campaigns against the center-left launched by American conservatives with the help of the highbrow right. From generation to generation, the details of American conservative historical mythmaking change, but the underlying pattern remains the same.
Once upon a time, we are supposed to believe, there was a golden age in which everyone shared orthodox conservative beliefs. Then a wicked intellectual introduced heretical ideas, and the world went to hell in a handbasket....
One can learn from reading Leo Strauss, a thinker far more subtle and interesting than his disciples. It is a pity that the epigones of Strauss lend their scholarly credentials to the oldest trick of right-wing populist demagogues: denouncing liberals as amoral, state-worshiping libertines.