When Liberals Blame Their Mistakes on ‘America’

Folks liked the last sidebar thing I did on the Labor Theory of Value, so I figured I’d do it again. I am always keen to provide subscribers with extra value!

That said, I don’t claim to be breaking new ground here or even exhausting the subject—I’ve written a lot on this and if you’ve followed me for a while some of this will be familiar. 

So where to begin?

How about a passage from Liberal Fascism:

In the liberal telling of America’s story, there are only two perpetrators of official misdeeds: conservatives and “America” writ large. progressives, or modern liberals, are never bigots or tyrants, but conservatives often are. For example, one will virtually never hear that the Palmer Raids, Prohibition, or American eugenics were thoroughly progressive phenomena. These are sins America itself must atone for. Meanwhile, real or alleged “conservative” misdeeds—say, McCarthyism—are always the exclusive fault of conservatives and a sign of the policies they would repeat if given power. The only culpable mistake that liberals make is failing to fight “hard enough” for their principles. Liberals are never responsible for historic misdeeds, because they feel no compulsion to defend the inherent goodness of America. Conservatives, meanwhile, not only take the blame for events not of their own making that they often worked the most assiduously against, but find themselves defending liberal misdeeds in order to defend America herself.

Okay, I’ll show my work. Let’s start with eugenics. Everything about eugenics was progressive. In the U.K., the “minority report” that laid the groundwork for the British welfare state, Sidney Webb wrote that, ‘‘No consistent eugenist can be a ‘laissez faire’ individualist unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!”

But let’s move stateside. Oliver Wendell Holmes, was once hailed by progressives as arguably the greatest jurist of the 20th century. He was “truly the impersonal voice of the Constitution,” according to Felix Frankfurter. In 1927 he authored the infamous opinion in Buck v. Bell, which allowed for the forced sterilization of “unfit” women. “Three generations of imbeciles is enough,” he proclaimed. Shortly after his decision, he wrote a letter to his friend, the socialist Harold Laski, “I … delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day—and felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform.”  The decision was 8-1. The sole dissenter, Pierce Butler, was a conservative Catholic (Holmes accused Butler of voting based on his religion. “He knows this is good law,” Holmes remarked.)

Virtually all of the progressive economists who laid the groundwork for the minimum wage, the welfare state, etc., were soaked-to-the-bone eugenicists and they supported those policies on eugenic grounds (If you’re interested in any of this, you must read Thomas Leonard’s brilliant Illiberal Reformers). The New Republic was in favor of eugenics—either “positive” or “negative” or both—and so were Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Woodrow Wilson, and virtually the entirety of the progressive intellectual elite. The Tuskegee experiments were more complicated than the story of American racism we’re often taught, but they were racist and they were downstream of this progressive tradition.  Meanwhile, the world’s foremost opponent of eugenics was G.K. Chesterton, a conservative, or if you prefer, reactionary Catholic. 

But let’s move on. I could recite all the perfidies of the Wilson administration, but you’ve heard me do that a million times. FDR—not “America”—was responsible for putting Japanese in internment camps. FDR, not the American right, championed the Davis-Bacon Act, which by design locked blacks out of good union jobs. The justice who authored the majority decision in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment, was Hugo Black, a former Klansman. He left the Klan in 1927, but as a senator he led filibusters on civil rights and anti-lynching laws while supporting the New Deal with passion. FDR put him on the court because he wanted a “thumping, evangelical New Dealer.”

Jim Crow laws in the South were promulgated by Democrats, the segregationist party. And before you go on about how they were all southern right-wingers waiting to jump ship to the Republican Party decades or a century later, many were also progressives, like Hugo Black or the execrable Josephus Daniels.  Sen. William Fulbright, once a hero to modern liberals (and a mentor to Bill Clinton), for his opposition to the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon, was an avid segregationist. 

And then there’s anti-communism. Let’s get it out of the way: Joe McCarthy was bad for the country, bad for conservatism, and bad for the cause of anti-communism. I have a ton of caveats I could make after those stipulations, but there’s no reason to get sidetracked even more. Suffice it to say, I think the cause of anti-communism was just, righteous, and necessary, and the fact that McCarthy was a drunk demagogue doesn’t change that fact. But if you’re someone who thinks anti-communism or “McCarthyism” were synonymous, or even if you allow that they were different but still think they were bad, you’re left in a precarious position when it comes to scorekeeping. That’s because anti-communism was a wholly bipartisan affair. 

Communist intellectuals successfully won the fight over this narrative, convincing generations of writers that anti-communism was either an evil emanation of the right or proof of America’s reactionary paranoid style.  The Palmer Raids and the whole first Red Scare were directed and fomented by the Wilson administration. (It was the Republicans who let all of Wilson’s political prisoners, including the socialist Eugene V. Debs, out of prison.) But, much like the coverage of Joe Biden, when these bad things “unfolded” the president disappears from the story, even though he was the Unfolder in Chief.  

As for the second Red Scare, it’s fine to criticize the excesses, but it’s worth remembering that the American Communist objections to the tactics of the second Red Scare were entirely opportunistic and hypocritical. When the House Un-American Activities Committee, founded by progressive Democrat Samuel Dickstein, went after German sympathizers in what Leo Ribuffo has called “the Brown Scare,” Communists and liberals alike cheered. They had no problem with what would later be called McCarthyite tactics. Communists handed over lists—they “named names!” of alleged German sympathizers to the government. Walter Winchell went on the radio and read names of alleged fascists and Nazi sympathizers saying “These are Americans we can do without.” In 1938, when the Committee turned its eyes on Communists, American Communists loyal to Stalin, once again had no problem naming names—of Trotskyists. It was only when the Committee cast its gaze at the Stalinists that it suddenly became an existential crisis for American liberty. Don’t hold your breath for Hollywood to make a movie that includes those pesky details. Oh, and by the way, the House Un-American Activities Committee, under Dickstein’s leadership, also issued the infamous “Yellow Report” which made the case to FDR to round up the Japanese.

Now, I could go on. But, I’ll just make a simple point. None of this is to say conservatives—or America itself—lack their fair share of mistakes, crimes, and outrages. But if you think your “side” is never wrong, you are enslaved to a tautology: Liberals can do no wrong so if wrongs happen at the hands of liberals, it must really be the fault of the other team—or America itself.