After World War II, the American Right was joined in its longstanding ahistoricism by the American Left, though in a version which was very different—even complementary. The result was a national culture directed against time itself—against the very possibility of its own past and future. Americans threw history onto the ash heap of history.
So what is historicism? As I will use the term here, is the view that everything around us has come to be from something else, which somehow didn’t work out—otherwise, it would still be there. Thus, mammals are a solution to a problem with the dinosaurs, which was their inability to withstand the cold of a post-meteorite impact winter, while Adolf Hitler “solved” the constitutional weakness of the Weimar Republic by taking absolute power. History. including “natural history,” is thus a series of solutions to problems. To understand something that comes to be as a solution to previous problems, you have to understand those problems. All understanding must therefore have an historical component.
Historical derivation remains an important component of understanding today—scientists, for example routinely see themselves as solving problems bequeathed them by their predecessors. I’m pretty convinced, however, that a major anti-historical turn occurred in American political thought after World War II.
The American Right, to be sure, had long been ahistorical. According to Walter Schlamm, an associate of William F. Buckley’s whom Stuart Stevens quotes in his It Was All a Lie (New York, 2020).:
The Americn species (to the extent that there is such a thing) is of course populist rather than conservative—and for a very forceful reason: America happens to be the only society in creation built by conscious human intent…and developed by Europeans tired of Europe’s ancient commitments, and determined….on a ”new beginning” Stevens p. 84).
Schlamm is a bit hyperbolic here—both France and the Soviet Union were consciously designed to be “new beginnings—” but if we subtract the hyperbole, we have the standard view that the Founding Fathers cast aside the political projects of their European forebears and at least attempted something wholly new. Since adherence to tradition had been a major component of European conservatism since Burke, this resulted in a kind of political thought which, while calling itself conservative, had its foundation, not in history, but in “self-evident” truths—the main one of which, after World War II, was the sovereignty of the individual.
None of this wholly precluded historical understandin. Buckley’s famous characterization of the conservative as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’” presupposes that the conservative knows what he is trying to thwart, and in 1789, when the Founding Fathers put Schlamm’s insight onto the Great Seal of the United States, they did so in Latin—novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. (The phrase is taken from Virgil’s Eclogues.) But when conservative thinkers of the Cold War, such as Milton Friedman and libertarians in general, examined social phenomena, they judged them by how much they limited individual freedom. Allusions to history, such as Ayn Rand’s occasional invocations of Nietzsche, remained mostly window-dressing.
What was new after World War II was that the American Left also became largely ahistorical. Samuel Moyne, in his Liberalism Against Itself (New Haven, 2023) argues that, in the face of the spread of Communism (and before it, of Nazism), history could no longer be seen as Marx saw it—as an emancipatory march toward a future of equality and freedom. Rather, the outcome of history looked to be murder and dictatorship. The result was the rejection of history that Moyne places at the heart of Cold War liberalism:
No longer the agent of an unfolding plan to produce a better and more fulfilled humanity, liberalism had to be defended as an elemental and eternal set of principles that required the renunciation of “progress” (Moyne p.5).
The rejection of history during what is now known as the McCarthy Era became at times embarrassingly virulent. Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), for example, is a book so bad that saying you like it amounts, in my view anyway, to a confession of intellectual inadequacy. Popper, in fact, rejected historicism without having the leas idea of what history is. In his The Poverty of Historicism (1944) he excoriates historicism for claiming to deduce universal laws from the facts of history, supposedly enabling predictions. Universal laws are thus for him the goal of historical understsnding, as they are in science. But history is precisely a domain in which there are no universal laws; there is no law, for example, stating that a weak constitution, such as that of the Weimar Republic, must be replaced by a genocidal tyranny. The problems that a given historical development solves are usually unique to that case, and must be explored via concrete investigation. Hence one of Hegel’s legendary bons mots: the only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.
The postwar symmetry between Left and Right, then, consists in this: the Right rejected the moral authority that of the past, the Left of the future. The joint dominance of these two rejections produced an intellectual landscape which saw itself as without past or future, i.e. as eternal. Thus eternalized, the “American Way” became absolute; far from being a mere solution to certain problems of the 18th Century, it claimed validity for all times and in all places. America’s path to world domination (and the Supremee Court’s path to originalism) was philosophically clear.
One result of this has been a series of useless wars, each repeating the mistakes of the others and all marked by American surprise that other cultures—including the Afghan, Cambodian, Cuban, Iraqi, Laotian, Libyan, Somalian, Syrian, and Vietnamese—did not recognize the superiority of our ideas, or appreciate our efforts to spread them.
Another result was the failure of American political thought to take the measure of problems in American society. Not only did the fragility of American democracy go unremarked until Donald Trump forced it into view, but with the Right unable to question its absolute postulate of individual sovereignty and the Left restricted to its own “elemental and eternal” principles, American political philosophy in general remained strangely abstract. Thus, Charles Mills has pointed out that in John Rawls’ monumental A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA 1971), there is no treatment of racism. Indeed, Rawls’ fundamental approach of “ideal theory” thwarts any such discussion: confined to the universal principles that were all that was left of progressive thought after history had been excised, it was too abstract to apply anywhere.
It seems that Rawls, along with a great deal of American political thought, would subscribe to a comment made by arch-conservative William Buckley in his disastrous debate with James Baldwin: “the fact that your skin is black is utterly irrelevant to the arguments you raise” (Stevens p. 87). This is not merely an observation about Baldwin, but expresses a founding principle of postwar American political thought—a philosophical claim which disables philosophy itself.
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