One of the (very few) blessings of an age in which the edgiest fringes of the right-wing media ecosystem define themselves in opposition to the staid establishmentarian consensus is that it allows proponents of that staid establishmentarian consensus to recycle all the arguments they once deployed against the Left. Take Winston Churchill, for example.
If you spend an unhealthy amount of time engaging with politically oriented social media, you’ve been unable to avoid a recent fracas ignited by Tucker Carlson’s decision to platform and fête a figure who argues that Churchill was the real archvillain of the 20th century. We’ve been here before.
“Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies,” wrote retired U.S. Navy captain and former NASA engineer Scott Kelly in 2018. What was Kelly’s sin? He had the temerity to advocate Churchillian generosity of spirit by advising his comrades in the Democratic Party to observe “in victory, magnanimity.” That was the beginning and end of his insolence, for which what seemed like the entire population of the internet came down around his shoulders. “I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views,” Kelly meekly pledged before hastening to add, “which I do not support.”
Kelly slinked away, but his tormentors did not deserve their appeasement. Like so many of his colleagues, Kelly had become convinced that the power on his side of the aisle had migrated toward a class of activist that had no tolerance for nuance and discretion. The “greater truths” about our pasts to which we should all be committed are not illuminated by a fuller understanding of its subjects. Rather, those details distract from and obscure history’s sweeping narratives.
When it came to Churchill, what modernists should believe is that he was an imperialist and a colonialist. Imperialism and colonialism are bad, therefore. Such thinking led historical revisionists on the far left to allege that “Churchill has as much blood on his hands as Hitler does” long before Carlson and his band of castaways started parroting the act.
We don’t need to go into all the ways in which this reductivism renders its adherents embarrassing curiosities (like I said, this is a well-trodden road). What’s more interesting is the psychological tendency that leads the intellectually curious to couple a reflexive hostility toward consensus with erudition. They seem to think that they sound smart when they insist that one of the foremost saviors of enlightened, liberal democratic civilization was, in fact, the author of our modern discontents. It’s a twist, a form of sprung logic — a clever reboot of a tired old property. But what do they get out of it?
The objective seems not to be to convince others of their outlook. The arguments they offer are unconvincing, and those arguments tend to be accompanied by veiled threats of coercion, which explains the limited effort applied to compelling argumentation. The goal seems to be to make a spectacle of themselves in the hope that you will regard their heterodoxy not as mulish contrarianism but clever iconoclasm.
The cinder-block wall of stupidity into which Kelly ran headlong isn’t new. Left-wing historians long ago made a vocation out of forcing posterity to fit a preconceived framework and, thus, advance their preferred political objectives. Their rank-and-file followers get hooked first on the sense of exclusivity enjoyed by anyone so uncommonly enlightened that they can peel back the veil that elites have drawn over the hideous deformities of our collective heritage. That psychological buzz wears off, of course. But by that point, they’re fully committed to the bit.
The Right’s most provocative freethinkers keep stumbling into the Left’s oldest ideas and marketing them to us as eureka moments, not because they’ve unearthed complexities that history had forgotten or because some new research has found that public-sector interventions in private affairs really are efficient, profit-maximizing schemes. They’re selling you on that sense of exclusivity. It doesn’t even matter what they’re retailing so long as it is packaged as forbidden knowledge they don’t want you to know.
Kelly bowed to that pressure at the time because it seemed to much of the Democratic establishment that the oppositional defiant personality disorder patients organizing themselves into Twitter mobs had real electoral clout. The 2019 primaries and Joe Biden’s victory in them largely (though not wholly) disabused Democrats of that notion. Republicans haven’t gotten the message yet. If they ever do, a lot of what they feel that they must pretend to take seriously today will be a source of profound embarrassment.
Earlier versions of this post identified Scott Kelly as his twin brother, Senator Mark Kelly.