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Why the Right Has Fallen Victim to Wishful Thinking

by P.M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Illinois and is a syndicated columnist. Please consider contacting your local newspaper to carry his column.

In the April 10 edition of Slate, founding editor Michael Kinsley sketched a portrait of America's consensus on the seemingly erstwhile Iraq Question ("Unsettled: Victory in the war is not victory in the argument about the war"). "We've won," he wrote on the majority's behalf, and "there is no quagmire. Saddam is dead, or as good as [dead]…. It was all fairly painless…. Those who opposed the war look like fools. They are thoroughly discredited and, if they happen to be Democratic presidential candidates … they might as well withdraw and nurse their shame somewhere off the public stage. The debate over Gulf War II is … over … and the anti's were defeated as thoroughly as Saddam Hussein."

Few would contest that Kinsley's portraiture bears a striking resemblance to today's national hubris. Virtually no inward questions are asked any longer, while comfortable conclusions are easily and readily drawn. Rare is the bird at the office watercooler who wonders aloud if we haven't gone over the edge of cockiness, if we're thinking clearly about consequences, or if we're thinking at all. Most are too busy praising our $1-billion-a-day military for thumping nearly undefended piles of sand and rubble to be bothered by perspective -- historical or predictive -- and the rest, one supposes, are too busy worrying about Bush Recession II to much care. Whether from acute exhilaration or chronic distraction, we're floating on a bubble of nationalist conceit.

It's a bubble easy to pop, which Kinsley promptly does merely by asking a few rather obvious questions; obvious, that is, to those still unpersuaded of Gulf War II's nobility, or those simply of a searching mind. Just how, for instance, was "Operation Iraqi Freedom" the effect of 9/11's cause? What of the looming threat once posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? Did it -- did they -- ever exist as the president's much-vaunted war justification claimed? What are the ultimate financial and human costs of dethroning one man? How many others have we turned against us? Was the invasion worth rankling so many old allies and laying waste to the United Nations' legal standing? Is pre-emptive war ever a just war when grounded in auto-defensive concoctions of others' purported may's, maybe's and might's? Will, as a matter of consistent policy, other nations' human rights violations now trigger U.S. belligerency?

However rhetorical Slate's chief editor intended some of these questions -- and these are but a few of the full itemization -- he concedes that answers are still in the offing. For now, history's jury deliberates, so the war's proponents should ideologically "chill out for a while" and their dovish counterparts should stand tall with intellectual rigor intact. At least, that is, till a verdict is in.

Notwithstanding his admonition against rushed judgments, Kinsley makes clear that though he "hope[s] to be proven wrong," as a war opponent he wholly expects to be proven right. So far the preponderance of evidence appears to be on the opposition's side and, of course, the burden of proof rests with the war's prosecutors.

Mr. Kinsley's position is that of a realist. Oddly enough, or so some might think, it's the Bushie ideologues -- those who get teary-eyed over Realpolitik stuff -- who conversely are simply betting on the come line and, no doubt, praying for vindication. This showdown is a classic reflection of 20th-century role reversals among progressives and conservatives. The American Century began with the former as little more than yearning ideologues and the latter as hard-nosed realists. It ended with quite the opposite.

The reason, in part, is that progressives had history on their side and began folding historical knowledge into contemporary opinion. More on that in a moment. Conservatives, on the other hand, chucked objective history lessons during the onset of the Great Depression. As legendary historian Richard Hofstadter first outlined New Deal political transitions in his 1955 masterpiece, The Age of Reform, progressives did while conservatives fiddled. To overcome economic and social devastation, FDR's Brain Trust tried most anything that might work, using government and empirical data as the tools of salvation. If something didn't work, they just tried something else and to hell with ideology. Progressives were morphing into realists.

Naturally, the new economics horrified conservatives. But rather than pitch forward-looking solutions to a desperate public, they began prattling about idyllic yesteryears when the needy didn't exploit government (only the unneedy did that). In short order, conservative politicians metamorphed into bottomless wells of platitudes about imaginary good old days ruined by sinister government intervention. They continued fiddling and fine-tuning ideological fantasies until they got right with the New Right of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then, by commercializing politics, opening the floodgates of demagoguery and tapping every known white middle-class prejudice, the Newt Gingriches of this world became Network-Peter Finch-like prophets of political fancy. George W. is merely the latest and most successful of the Age of Demagoguery's idols.

Today's progressives not only use history profitably -- which I swear, we're getting to -- a good number of them have history as their paycheck. Just as today's Common Man -- you know, the still-paranoid Right -- loves to protest, it is unmistakably true that the history profession is filled to the brim with intellectually incestuous Lefties. Some came that way, others became that way upon exploring the repeated disasters of the Right's plutocratic dreams.

As historians they not surprisingly happen to know some useful things about history and use them as well, as do progressives in general more so than others. Both know the common futility of the best-laid plans -- the gotcha of unintended consequences -- whether from the Left, Center, or Right. They know, for example, that in so many ways and for so many years, the losing South won the Civil War. They know of WWI's forsaken expectations, of Woodrow Wilson's idealistic demise. They know of the succeeding war's aftermath and its reversal of fortunes at home, of the whiplash of so-called McCarthyism and the death of anticipated and attainable social promise. They know of the best and the brightest's tragic arrogance throughout not one, but several presidential administrations. The dashed hopes of classical liberalism, the exhaustion of reform, Reconstruction's quickly trashed social and political aspirations, progressives' early care and feeding of white backlash. None of these samplings was expected; rather, predictions to the contrary ruled -- and therein lies the norm.

That is where Kinsley & Co.'s realism and historians' empiricism amiably meet on the unsettled Iraq Question. The weight of evidence -- lost historical hopes and analogies -- indicates a coming bust in the Middle East. Realists feel it and reality-based historians and progressives sense it. Only the Right's reigning ideologues choose to ignore what there is of the past's concreteness and proceed on wishes and wants. They do so not at their peril, but ours.

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.