10 Historical 'Facts' Only a Right-Winger Could Believe

By Roy Edroso, AlterNet

Posted on February 11, 2011
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Originally at http://www.alternet.org/story/149871/

AS YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED by following their writings, conservatives are not sticklers for historical accuracy, especially when they have a point to defend and not a lot of evidence to support it. Get a load, for example, of John Podhoretz explaining how the pro-choice Rudy Giuliani reduced abortions in New York City (though, um, not really) because he cut crime, which is one of “the spiritual causes of abortion.”

Liberal Fascism“; nowadays anytime a conservative talks about, say, Woodrow Wilson or Hillary Clinton, you may expect him to mention their resemblance to Benito Mussolini. They don’t even have to think about it, even when normal people are gaping at them open-mouthed like audience members at “Springtime for Hitler” — it’s part of the folklore that helps them understand the American experience.

The overarching task of the conservative historian is to rehabilitate the image of capitalism, even at its most red-toothed and -clawed. Not a hard job, as both our history and culture ceaselessly celebrate the innovative dynamism of American business.

unseemly wartime speculation, built enormous fortunes on the exceedingly generous terms of the times, which included bribery, monopolies, and stock manipulation, perverting the alleged power of the free market on their own behalf. They were kind of like the Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers of their day — except they never got caught.

Thomas E. Woods, Lawrence W. Reed, and Thomas J. DiLorenzo (better known now as a neo-Confederate) look at the robber barons’ dirty records and ask: So what? J.P. Morgan built a nice library!

Brad DeLong has noted, the grotesque inequity in American wealth that characterized their era has only one equivalent in U.S. history — that of our own time. And if one’s business is excusing the perfidy and criminality of today’s speculators and swindlers, it is helpful to make heroes of the speculators and swindlers who are their models.

9. Sputnik bankrupted the Soviet Union.

Sarah Palin. In her Fox News rebuttal to President Obama’s recent State of the Union, Palin said that the Russians’ “victory in that race to space… incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.”

pointed out that Palin’s version of history is confused on many points. But don’t tell that to conservatives. Among them, Palin’s charisma is so overweening that her bizarre POV is yet defended — in some cases, on the grounds that her “larger and more important point about history” was misunderstood (which then mutated into “Palin was right”), and in others just because, as a poster at Lucianne Goldberg’s site put it, “The left will have puppies because of it.”

Jonah Goldberg described as “the government tells the people what to do, and it relies on a handful of experts to get it done according to government specifications.”

Cleon Skousen claimed in the ’50s that the USSR built Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States. It kind of figures Palin would follow in that tradition.)

8. Galileo was a conservative.

neocon icon. Now they’re trying to do the same thing with Galileo.

portrayed Galileo’s ordeal as not so bad; why, the Pope didn’t even torture him, he just threatened to, and anyway the Church was only reasonably trying to “prohibit the circulation of writings which were judged harmful.”

Jonathan Weyer and Paul Feyerabend have amplified the theme, but their heady thoughts were brought crashing to earth by National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg, who in 1999 attacked the “ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin” on Galileo with easy-reading versions of the Catholic argument. (Dinesh D’Souza provided similar arguments at a slightly higher reading level.)

American Spectator called skeptic Lloyd Keigwin “The Galileo of Global Warming” and claimed he made a giant contribution to discrediting a movement that would impose a deadly energy clamp on the world economy….” More recently the “ClimateGate” scandal prompted a new wave of Galileo reclamation, with Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal lamenting, “The East Anglians’ mistreatment of scientists who challenged global warming’s claims… evokes the attempt to silence Galileo.”

Scan the blogs, and you’ll see plenty more of this stuff (e.g. “The Great Global Warming Inquisition“). Next stop: J. Robert Oppenheimer — Victim of a Liberal Conspiracy.

7. The Founding Fathers really tried to end slavery.

worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” The one “founder” Bachmann cited was John Quincy Adams, who was actually the son of the founder John Adams.

Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism, and others.

Fundamentalists, for example, frequently cite the founders’ verbal objections to the practice as the inspiration for abolitionism.

Paul Gottfried, for example, has argued that “Presbyterian theologians spilled rivulets of ink doing what Cicero and Pliny never felt obliged to do, showing how in their society slavery was being elevated to solicitous education for a backward people. The fact that such arguments had to be provided… underscores the perceived need to humanize a ‘peculiar institution.'” So, like very young children in permissive households, the founders’ dim awareness of guilt excuses them from blame.

military suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion would have endorsed John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, or that George Washington, who tried to solve his dental challenges by having implanting in his gums teeth extracted from his slaves, was a precocious abolitionist. But when you hang out with people in tricorner hats and knee-breeches who think the Founders were guys just like themselves, it’s a little easier to suspend disbelief.

6. Teddy Roosevelt was a socialist.

Glenn Beck has helped turn that around, lambasting TR at last year’s CPAC and denouncing his words as “a socialist utopia” which “we need to address … as if it is a cancer.”

closely coincided with the socialist conception.” Pestritto was given room to defend his and Beck’s views in the Wall Street Journal. And the Ashbrook Center’s Ken Thomas concluded that Roosevelt “pushed centralization of power far further than circumstances justified.”

qualify their enthusiasm, saying while he went wrong with his statism, he did do some good things, like subjugate foreigners and so forth.

was he a socialist too? Now, instead of sputtering, they can just say yes.

5. Conservatives swept MLK and the Civil Rights movement to victory.

against the Civil Rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr.

defeated the Klansmen of the Democratic Party to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and realize King’s dream.

greater percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Act in both chamber. They generally don’t recall that nearly all the Democratic opponents were Southern, nor that President Lyndon Johnson, who had pushed for the Act, reflected afterward that the Democrats had “lost the South for a generation” — which turned out to be accurate, plus a decade or two, as Southerners abandoned the Democrats in consequence of their race-mixing ways.

criticism of the Civil Rights Act), conservatives will claim King and civil rights for themselves, and react to the continuing, massive disposition of black Americans to vote Democratic as an act of stunning ingratitude.

4. Margaret Sanger was all about the eugenics.

Reader’s Digest founder DeWitt Wallace — and followers of the pseudoscience of eugenics. This last was an unfortunate choice, to put it mildly, as eugenicists championed forced sterilization and even managed to get laws passed mandating it in some states.

hook for spreading the word about contraception, rather than the other way around; preventing unwanted pregnancy was her life’s work. Still, it’s a fair cop, and her eugenics endorsements — like H.L. Mencken’s anti-Semitic remarks and Robert Byrd’s Klan membership — are a dark spot on an otherwise admirable reputation.

as if it were still a popular movement, they usually don’t condemn the prominent churchmen and scientists who supported it, not the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, nor Charles Lindbergh, nor Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, et al. It’s always Sanger who symbolizes it — which is rather like portraying Ezra Pound as the head of the Third Reich. Not only lowly lunatic fringe figures, but also big-time wingnuts like Jonah Goldberg and Michelle Malkin take this approach.

Lila Rose Planned Parenthood sting reminds us, conservatives aren’t just against abortion — they’re against anyone who offers women any alternative to childbearing whatsoever. By portraying America’s First Lady of Contraception as an enemy of freedom, they may hope to mask their their own authoritarian ambitions.

3. Women were better off before they got the vote.

rather defensively insist that “conservatives and libertarians played central roles in drafting and ratifying” the 19th Amendment, so there. Others, like National Review‘s John Derbyshire, Ann Coulter and the editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, affect to be against women’s suffrage, either in clumsy emulation of H.L. Mencken’s playful remarks on the subject, or because they’re assholes.

Jacob G. Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation asserted that Americans were freer in the 1880s than they are today. When called on it, Hornberger said okay, maybe black people and women weren’t so free. But this prompted George Mason professor Bryan Caplan to ask, “In what ways, then, were American women in 1880 less free than men?” Their lack of franchise, sexual autonomy, etc. struck Caplan as irrelevant: Such women lived in an era before gun control of the Department of Education, so, he judged, they were by definition more free than now.

ran against Caplan, but he had his high-profile defenders. At the Atlantic, Megan McArdle said, “The overwhelming majority of women in 1880 would be positively horrified by the prospect of living my life. Not only is it flagrantly immoral, it violates much of what they themselves thought of as the core of womanhood. Should we get excited about women being denied the right to go to medical school, who did not want to go to medical school?” We may imagine 19th-century women who did not want to go to medical school raising their fists in approval.

Concerned Women for America celebrated the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment thus: “Women Won the Right to Vote 90 Years Ago; Conservative Women Still Fighting the Media for a ‘Place at the Table.'” “90 years after the 19th Amendment,” wrote Lori Zingaro at RedState, “Democrats are actively seeking to figuratively repeal the amendment” — that is, by promoting “the myth of a wage gap” between men and women and disapproving of Sarah Palin. Thus, she said, Democrats “are striving for a form of reverse-suffrage, wherein every woman must walk in lockstep with their ideology, or you are not a ‘real’ woman.”

2. Darwin is a menace to Western Civilization.

cool with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. But they’re usually discussing the science of evolution — and on that score, they still can’t bring a majority of Republicans onto their side.

have long believed and still believe that, in the words of Center for a Just Society Chairman Ken Connor, Darwin would have us believe that “God is simply a creature of our imagination. Human beings emerged gratuitously from the primordial ooze. Since we are the product of mere chance, we have no inherent dignity, value or worth.” And that just ain’t right.

How the Cambrian Fossil Record Disproves Darwin, and so on.

Dinesh D’Souza noted that, while “evolution does seem to turn many Christians into unbelievers,” the discovery of evolutionary principles didn’t sour Darwin himself on God — Darwin’s own bitterness over the death of his child did that; and when the evil Thomas Huxley later tied evolution to atheism, the embittered atheist Darwin supported him by becoming “increasingly insistent that evolution was an entirely naturalistic system, having no room for miracles or divine intervention at any point.” If Darwin had been in his right mind, of course, he’d be singing Glory Hallelujah.

Peter Lawler made a noble effort, writing that as Darwinism shows that “our happiness comes from doing our duty to the species as social mammals. .. this account of who we are is basically conservative. It promotes family values—including such insights as people who come from large families are generally happier….”

Jonah Goldberg iced the cake with his statement that while “I disagree with those who would lump Darwin with Freud and Marx… I don’t think one can glibly say that just because the book was scientifically correct (speaking broadly, we’ve discovered lots of new things since then) and pioneering, doesn’t mean it can’t also be harmful. Darwinism certainly led to many horrors and abuses across the ideological spectrum….”

goes way back and, despite the efforts of some pointy-heads, conservatives aren’t backing off it anytime soon.

America’s prominent historians, you will hear nothing but good from them about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who shepherded America through the Great Depression and the Second World War.

went to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt, and FDR welcomed their hatred. For some years they were obliged to keep their anger at FDR on the down-low — after all, wasn’t Reagan a Roosevelt fan? Plus there were many more people then than now who actually remembered that presidency, and it didn’t play well to contradict their memories.

The American Conservative. “The New Deal was harmful medicine for a struggling economy,” claims The American Spectator. “Faced with a similar crisis, there cannot be more than one in a hundred who would now recommend FDR’s specific curatives” — at least, not among the hundred the Spectator would ask.

right-wing factotum Amity Shlaes called The Forgotten Man, all about how FDR prolonged the Depression, has gained a place of honor on conservative bookshelves. As you may imagine, the Wall Street Journal reviewer loved it — “Ms. Shlaes rightly reminds us,” he wrote, “of the harmful effect of Rooseveltian activism and class-warfare rhetoric.” The reviewer did mention that “one question that Ms. Shlaes never quite answers is just what Roosevelt should have done to beat the Depression beyond practicing a Coolidge-like passivity.” But no true conservative would need to ask such a question: Of course FDR should have done as Tea Partiers counsel be done for our current depression: Cut the deficit and screw the poor.

criticized by John Updike (what does he know about books? Or the Depression? Oh, he lived through it? Well, what does he know about books?) Ross Douthat leapt to condemn Updike’s “solipsistic flapdoodle”: “FDR could have given us the fireside chats and the rhetoric of government action” that Updike’s dad admired, said Douthat, “and yes, even the stronger safety net without the counterproductive attempts at centralized planning and the relentless scapegoating of business.”

always eager to explain how FDR’s disastrous presidency — to which the American people, for reasons unknown, returned him for four terms — is an ominous warning for the allegedly similarly socialistic Obama.

Roy Edroso is proprietor of Alicublog.

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