October 19, 2017
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Falsifying American and Southern History to
Purify America: Victor Davis Hanson and George W. Bush Allies de facto Allies of Cultural Marxism
Friends,
Once
again, there is simply too much in my folders that I would like to share with
you. So, today, let me begin.
A
recent commentary I wrote (October 7) was picked up and then, after some
editing and slight reworking, published online this morning. I will pass on the published version to you.
It is a critique of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest attack on Confederate
monuments and, more specifically, his assault on the history of the
Confederacy, itself. Hanson enjoys a lauded reputation among the conservative
“establishment.” He writes regularly for National
Review, has shown up on the Rush Limbaugh program (a rarity for anyone
other than Rush), and has been interviewed on Fox News. So, you would think his
conservative “bona fides” are secure, yes?
But
Hanson is one of the most virulent anti-Confederate heritage individuals teaching and writing in the nation today and
has a history of not just denigrating the Old South, but attempting to draw
sharp distinctions between the South, especially the Confederacy—which for him is
synonymous with a defense of “slavery” and therefore “racist”—and the modern
“conservative movement,” which, since the seizure and consolidation of control
by those intellectual emigrants from the Trotskyite Marxist Left, the
Neoconservatives, has taken great pains to emphasize its full and total
acceptance of the “egalitarian myth” as the propositional principle on which
the American nation was supposedly founded.
The
great divide today is not between the establishment “conservative movement” and
the culturally Marxist Left. No; both
agree essentially on a vision of the basic foundational premises and promises
of this nation, even if disagreeing on how to reach those goals. The great
divide is between them both, with their narratives which originate on the Left,
and American traditionalist conservatives.
Hanson
can be persuasive and disarming. But his intent is, like other Neoconservative
writers, Jonah Goldberg and Dinesh D’Souza, to demonstrate that the modern
“conservative movement” is an acceptable partner within the iron clad limits set by the establishment, that it has
no connection to and is not in any way stained by opinions of those nasty “racists,”
those “Neo-Confederates,” those reactionaries who believe that America was
founded by families and communities of like religion and ethnicity who brought
their traditions and beliefs with them and who did not come to these shores to establish some “shining city of a
hill,” where universalized equality, same sex marriage, and affirmative action
would prevail.
Hanson’s
latest screed is an effort—the same attempt that Goldberg and D’Souza try with
considerably less intellectual credibility or respectability—to tie in the Old
South and the Confederacy to the historic Left. It is the same initiative that
all three writers engage in, to “purify” the movement by casting off any
remnant or reminder of traditional conservatism, the Old South, and anything
that would inhibit them from claiming the mantle as the real champions of
universal equality and human rights and, ironically, establish them—despite
their appropriation of the “conservative” label—as the real
progressivists.
Two
very prominent political examples of
Hanson’s views have been expressed in the past few days: first, by John McCain,
who specifically condemned “nationalism” and the view that the American nation
was founded on the basis of “blood and soil”; then, in a speech just given this
morning and aimed specifically at President Trump, former President George W.
Bush said practically the same thing, condemning “blood and soil” as basis for
the original American republic—indeed, it was almost as if McCain and Bush had
the same NeverTrump speechwriter.
Again, both men strongly endorsed the Neoconservative myth of a “propositional
nation,” based, according to Bush, on the “idea of human dignity” and “equality
for everyone,” values that must be shared (=imposed) everywhere in the world.
Bush, as well, implicitly endorsed an “open door” immigration policy.
In
other words, George W. is the historically ignorant fool we always suspected
him of being, and apparently relies on the tendentious intellectual pablum that
his speechwriter(s) spoon out….
First,
my published response to Hanson, followed by something I published about the
Bushes a little over three years ago. While a bit dated, most of what I wrote
then continues to be true today.
Dr.
Boyd D. Cathey
===================================================================
Demonizing the South to Purify the Nation
Victor
Davis Hanson is one of the most lauded and applauded historians of the
“conservative establishment.” Honored by President George W. Bush, a regular
writer for National
Review, spoken of in hushed and admiring tones by pundits like Rush
Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, Hanson is rightly regarded as a fine classicist and
military historian, especially of ancient warfare. But like other authors who
tend to cluster in the Neoconservative orbit, Hanson strays far afield into
modern history, American studies, and into current politics—fields where his
fealty to a Neocon narrative overwhelms his historical expertise.
And like other well-regarded
writers of the Neocon persuasion—the far less scholarly Jonah Goldberg (in his
superficial and wrongheaded volume, Liberal
Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the
Politics of Meaning) and Dinesh D’Souza (in his historical
mish-mash, The
Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left)—Hanson when
he writes of contemporary politics or modern American history, writes with an
agenda. But, unlike them, his arguments are usually more firmly based and less
fantastical.
Like Goldberg and D’Souza and
other putative Neocon historians, Hanson is at pains to create a “usable past,”
to construct a history and tradition that buttresses and supports current
Neocon ideology. Thus, he strains to defend the concept of an American nation
conceived in and based on an idea,
the idea of equality and “equal rights.” And because of that, like D’Souza and
Goldberg, he must read back into American history an arbitrary template to
demonstrate that premise.
It follows that, as for other
Neocons, the Declaration of Independence becomes a critical and underlying
document for this historical approach. The words—“We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights”—become irreplaceably essential.
Avoiding the contextual meaning of the phrase and the meaning clearly intended
by the Founders, which was aimed specifically at the British parliament and the
demand for an “equal”—just—consideration for the colonists from across the
pond, the Neocons turn a very practical bill of grievances into a call for 18th century
Rationalist egalitarianism, which it was not. As the late Mel Bradford and more
recently, Barry Alan Shain, have convincingly demonstrated, such attempts to
read current ideology back into the Founding, runs aground on factual analysis.
But facts have little to do
with Neocon ideology. What is demanded is a usable past to support present
practice and to give legitimacy to the current narrative. It follows: if
the American nation was founded on the “idea” of equality, then any successive
deviances and variations from that idea are wrong and immoral, and, therefore,
in some way, “anti-American.” Thus, those Southerners who “rebelled”
against the legitimate—and righteous—government of the sainted President
Lincoln are become “traitors,” who not only engaged in “treason” against the
legitimate government of the Union, but through their defense of slavery, were
enemies of the very “idea” of America—equality.
How many times in recent days
in the debates over Confederate monuments and symbols have we heard echoes of
such a refrain from the pages of “conservative” publications like National Review or The Weekly Standard?
Or from certain pundits on Fox News?
And, more, those
Southerners—more specifically, Southern Democrats—who opposed the “civil
rights” legislation of the 1960s, who questioned various Supreme Court
decisions on that topic (beginning with the atrociously-decided Brown decision),
who enforced those evil “Jim Crow” laws, are not and never could have been real
defenders of the “American [egalitarian] idea,” and therefore, never could be
considered “conservatives.”
Confronted by unwashed,
rednecky “Southern conservatives,” most Neocons seek desperately to protect
their left flank from criticism from those of the farther Left.
They continually and in “alta voz” protest of their bona fides, of how
strongly they supported Martin Luther King’s crusade for equality (King was
actually a “conservative,” you see), of how they stood on that bridge in Selma
with the noble demonstrators—well, at least in spirit!—against the “fascist”
Billy club-armed police of “Bull Connor, and how they really do support “civil
rights” for everyone, including “moderate” affirmative action, “moderate”
feminism, yes to same sex marriage, and yes to transgenderism. Their fear of being
called out as and associated with anti-egalitarians far outweighs their fear of
confirming the cultural Marxist template, which, in their own manner, they both
sanctify and thus, assist to advance.
The Neocon narrative stands
history on its head. Not only does it fail as competent history, it simply
ignores inconvenient facts, historical context, and the careful investigations
and massive documentation of more responsible chroniclers and historians of the
American nation, if those facts and documentation do not fit a preconceived
narrative. All must be written, all must be shaped, to demonstrate the
near-mystical advance and progress of the Idea of Equality and Human Rights in
the unfolding of American history. Thus, the incredibly powerful and detailed
contributions of, say, a Eugene Genovese (for example, his The Mind of the Master
Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview,
and various other studies), go basically for naught.
Victor Davis Hanson, in a recent essay, adds his own contribution to
this historical rewrite, examining what he calls Hollywood’s irrational
fascination with what he labels “Confederate Cool.”
It is not the first time he
has offered criticism of the Confederacy and Confederate history. In 1999 he
authored a strenuous defense of “Sherman’s March” to the sea and through the
Carolinas, declaring: “As for the charge that Sherman’s brand of war was
amoral, if we forget for a moment what constitutes ‘morality’ in war and
examine acts of violence per se against Southern civilians, we learn that there
were few, if any, gratuitous murders on the march. There seem also to have been
less than half a dozen rapes, a fact acknowledged by both sides. Any killing
outside of battle was strictly military execution in response to the shooting
of Northern prisoners. The real anomaly seems to be that Sherman brought more
than sixty thousand young men through one of the richest areas of the enemy
South without unchecked killing or mayhem.”
These comments are as
outrageous as they are untrue. Hanson ignores the findings of the very
detailed and scholarly study, commissioned by the state of North
Carolina, Sherman’s March through North Carolina, by Drs. Wilson
Angley and Jerry Cross (North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 1995),
as well as W. Brian Cisco’s impressively researched, War Crimes Against
Southern Civilians (Pelican Publishing, 2007), and Karen Stokes’ A Legion of Devils–Sherman in
South Carolina (Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, South
Carolina), plus contemporary accounts, that give the lie to his cavalier
dismissal of pillage and savagery by Northern troops along the march.
In his most recent foray into
Confederate bashing, “The Strange Case of Confederate Cool,” his argument goes,
if I may summarize it, as follows:
–Throughout the 1920s until at
least the 1960s (and even beyond), Hollywood and the entertainment industry
were kind, even partial, to the South, and in particular, to the Confederacy;
–But Hollywood and the
entertainment industry are on the Left;
–Therefore, there were
obviously certain elements of the Confederacy and the Old South that were
consistent with a Leftist worldview.
Here is the kernel of his
argument in his own words (I quote):
Can Shane and Ethan Edwards
[“The Searchers”] remain our heroes? How did the Carradines and the Keaches
(who played Jesse and Frank James) survive in Hollywood after turning former
Confederates into modern resisters of the Deep State?
The answer is a familiar with
the Left: The sin is not the crime of romanticizing the Confederacy or turning
a blind eye to slavery and secession per se. Instead what matters more is the
ideology of the sinner who commits the thought crime. And how much will it cost
the thought police to virtue-signal a remedy?
Folksy Confederates still have
their charms for the Left. All was forgiven Senator Robert Byrd, a former
Klansman. He transmogrified from a racist reprobate who uttered the N-word on
national television into a down-home violinist and liberal icon. A smiling and
avuncular Senator Sam Ervin, of Watergate fame, who quoted the Constitution
with a syrupy drawl, helped bring down Nixon; that heroic service evidently
washed away his earlier segregationist sin of helping to write the Southern
Manifesto.
Progressives always have had a
soft spot for drawling (former) racists whose charms in their twilight years
were at last put to noble use to advance liberal causes — as if the powers of
progressivism alone can use the kick-ass means of the Old Confederacy for
exalted ends….
Literally, it would take a fat
book to unravel Hanson’s farrago of misplaced asseverations.
First, in impressionistically
reviewing American film history in the 1930s until the upheavals of the 1960s,
he makes an assumption that Hollywood was dominated and controlled by the same
ideologically cultural Marxism that owns it today. That assumption is not
exact. Indeed, there were Communists
and revolutionary Socialists working and prospering in the Hollywood Hills
during that period—the “Hollywood Ten” and Communist writers and directors like
Dalton Trumbo stand out as prime examples. And during World War II, such
embarrassing and pro-Communist cinematic expressions as “Days of Glory” (1943)
and “Mission to Moscow” (1944, and pushed hard by President Roosevelt),
proliferated.
But the fiercely
anti-Communist studio bosses back then, Jack Warner (of Warner Brothers
Studio), Carl Laemmle (Universal Pictures), Howard Hughes (RKO), Herbert Yates
(Republic Pictures) and Walt Disney, were anything but sympathetic to the far
Left. They were much more sympathetic to the power of the almighty box office
dollar.
And the Hollywood Screen
Actors Guild (SAG)—especially under the leadership of Ronald Reagan—attempted
to root out Communist influence. It was not uncommon to find dozens of
prominent actors supporting conservative or Republican candidates for public
office until the 1960s. For instance, during the 1944 election campaign between
Roosevelt and Governor Tom Dewey of New York numerous celebrities attended a
massive rally organized by prominent director/producer David O. Selznick in
the Los Angeles Coliseum in support of the Dewey–Bricker ticket.
The gathering drew 93,000 attendees, with Cecil B. DeMille as
the master of ceremonies and short speeches by Hedda Hopper and Walt Disney. Among those in attendance were Ann Sothern, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou,
Randolph Scott,
Joel McCrea, and Gary Cooper, plus
many others.
A majority of entertainment
personalities did support
FDR, just as did a majority of the American voting public, in those years. But,
significantly, it was not considered a “social crime” or “cultural sin” for a
famous actor back then to openly support a conservative or a Republican.
Hanson views an earlier
sympathy of Hollywood for the South as the expression of some Leftist
fascination—and a certain identification—with the South’s agrarian,
anti-establishment, and populist traditions, and its opposition to an
oppressive Federal government. Thus, he asserts the songster Joan Baez
could make popular “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and more recently,
post-Vietnam, director Walter Hill could, in “The Long Riders” (1980), turn
“the murderous Jesse James gang… into a sort of mix of Lynyrd Skynyrd with Bonnie
and Clyde — noble outlaws fighting the grasping northern banks and the railroad
companies.” And, torturously, he draws out a Leftist meaning.
He misunderstands the history.
Hollywood’s fascination with the Old South and its more or less successful effort
sixty or seventy years ago to portray the Confederacy with some degree of
sympathy reflected the general tenor of the times then, of the
desire for a united nation, of binding up old wounds—and especially when the
nation was apparently threatened by external forces: Nazism and Communism.
But that desire for unity and
that respect for the Confederacy and Confederate heroes would begin to evaporate
in the 1970s.
And the nature of the
Hollywood Left would also significantly change. The cautious leftward movement
of the 1950s—which mostly did not affect
Hollywood Westerns (most studios had their own separate “ranches,” separate
from any main studio “contagion”)—was transformed by the growth of a fierce and
all-encompassing cultural Marxism in the ‘60s and ‘70s, just as academia and
society as a whole were radically transformed. The modern anti-Southern,
anti-Confederate bias and hatred emitted by Hollywood and by our entertainment
industry today must be seen in that light, and not as simply the seamless continuation
of an older ambiguous relationship with the South.
Constructing this narrative
permits Hanson and other Neocons to write off the older, traditional South and
the Confederacy, while defending their precious narrative of the egalitarian
idea of America: “See,” they tell us, “the far Left actually identifies with
that anti-democratic, anti-American Southern vision which undermined our
progress towards greater unity and progress and”—of course—“equal rights.” The
Neocon narrative and version of history is, thus, kept unsullied and
ideologically pure, while the attempts by the farther Left to lump them in with
associated “neo-Confederates, racists, and the extreme right” are repelled.
The problem is—that view
actually undermines a clear understanding of our history and perverts the
American Founding and the intentions of those who cobbled together this nation.
It is a myth built on a poorly-constructed and poorly-interpreted bill of
historical goods. Or, as they say in eastern Carolina, “that dog don’t hunt.”
About Boyd Cathey
Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history
from the Catholic University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a
Richard Weaver Fellow, and an MA in intellectual history from the University of
Virginia (as a Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and
philosopher the late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State
Registrar of the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has
published in French, Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as
classical music and opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and
various historical, archival, and genealogical organizations.
Bush family liberalism: The ghost of Prescott Bush haunts us still
·
Politics
WASHINGTON, July 2, 2014 —
A history of the Bush family, beginning with Yankee patriarch and Wall
Street banker, Prescott Bush, is one of calculated pretense to being and
sounding like whatever best advances the political and financial fortunes of
the family. But down deep the Bushes, arguably, have never been
conservatives. In recent years, the Bushes have, it is true, sometimes sounded
“conservative,” but in the darker recesses of their thinking, they reject basic
principles that give essential life to conservatism.
Let’s go back and take a look at Prescott
Bush. He was the archetypal patrician New England “progressive”
Republican. Just read a few lines from the Wikipedia about him:
“Prescott
Bush was politically active on social issues. He was involved with the American Birth Control League as early as
1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of Planned Parenthood in 1947 [....]
“From 1947 to
1950, he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the
Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950. A
columnist in Boston said that
Bush “is coming on to be known as President Truman’sHarry Hopkins. Nobody knows Mr.
Bush and he hasn’t a Chinaman’s chance.” (Harry
Hopkins [a Communist fellow traveler] had been one of FDR‘s closest
advisors.) Bush’s ties with Planned Parenthood also hurt him in heavily
Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute campaign in churches
by Bush’s opponents; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost
to [William] Benton by only 1,000 votes.”
Prescott became US Senator from Connecticut
through appointment in late 1952, and he served until 1963. Continuing on from
the Wiki:
“On December
2, 1954, Prescott Bush was part of the
large (67–22) majority to censureWisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy after
McCarthy had taken on the U.S. Army and theEisenhower administration.
During the debate leading to the censure, Bush said that McCarthy had ‘caused
dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude and the
attitude he has encouraged among his followers: that there can be no honest
differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow
Senator McCarthy blindly, not daring to
express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions, or, in his eyes,
you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped
by the Communist line’ [....]
“In terms of
issues, Bush often agreed with New York GovernorNelson Rockefeller. According
to Theodore H. White’s book about the 1964 election, Bush and Rockefeller were
longtime friends. Bush favored a Nixon-Rockefeller ticket for
1960.”
This is the kind of silk-stocking,
Rockefeller Wall Street Republicanism that George H. W. and succeeding members
of the family inherited. And since 1992 the examples that confirm the
persistence of this same heritage among the Bushes continue to surface, almost
weekly.
Last September, for example, the latest
Bush “papabile,” Jeb, made cozy with Hillary Clinton. Here’s a brief
paragraph from The Washington
Times (September
13, 2013):
“HOUSTON, September
13, 2013 - On Tuesday September 10, Jeb Bush, chairman of the board for the
National Constitution Center and former governor of Florida, presented former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the group’s annual Liberty Medal. [!!!]
It is widely speculated that both
Bush and Clinton will run for their party’s nomination for the presidency in
2016.”
What this incident actually indicates is
something profound about the Bush “establishment” ethos. Indeed, Jeb Bush has a
whole bag of occasions where the ghost of Prescott has seeped out for–perhaps
unwanted–public view. It’s not just his strong support for Common Core and what
amounts to amnesty for illegal immigrants. A quick review of the Internet
offers numerous examples of the survival of the spirit of Prescott in this
latest representative of the clan.
George Bush the Younger doesn’t escape
conservative scrutiny, either. Once again, there are various articles and
stories in print and on the Web detailing the emergence of the real “Bush
soul,” which is most definitely not conservative. A 2011 article in The Washington Monthly highlighted some of
the issues that separated him from conservatives: “Bush was wrong about
everything from education (NCLB) to health care (Medicare Part D), immigration
(comprehensive reform) to international aid (PEPFAR), national service
(AmeriCorps, USA Freedom Corp) to foreign policy (growing Republican skepticism
about Afghanistan).”
Liberal columnist Richard Cohen also noticed what he termed
Bush’s “neo-liberalism,” especially in education and the role of the Federal
government:
“Bush has extended
the [Education] department’s reach in a manner that Democrats could not have
envisaged. I am referring, of course, to the 2001 Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, better known as No Child Left Behind. I will spare you the act’s
details, but it pretty much tells the states to shape up or face a loss of
federal funds. It is precisely the sort of law that conservatives predicted
Washington would someday seek — and it did.”
Professor Jack Kerwick, in a fascinating
article in the journal, Modern Age ["The
Neoconservative Conundrum," Modern Age, Winter/Spring
2013, vo. 55, nos. 1 & 2, pp. 5-12], wrote recently of a philosophical
outlook that he identifies as partaking of the revolutionary “rationalist
mind,” using the measures and research of the late English conservative
political theorist Michael Oakeshott. Kerwick identifies this as essentially an
ideologically a priori approach to
statecraft, which rejects long-standing custom and the organicism of tradition,
in favor of an imposed, “progressivist” universal standard based on supposedly
self-evident “principles” born out of human reason. It was such a rationalist
mindset that guided Bush II through much of his presidency, and it was one of
the several reasons that made strong conservatives very uncomfortable with and
suspicious of him.
Events have come full circle. Back in 1992
I argued strenuously with some of my Republican friends that voting for Pat
Buchanan was the right thing to do. While admitting the deficiencies of George
the First, their main argument was that voting for Buchanan would only assist
Bill Clinton, and that a Bill Clinton presidency would give the man who
couldn’t keep his pants up the opportunity to name Supreme Court justices. When
I pointed out the Justices David Souter, Harry Blackmun, Earl Warren, William
Brennan, Sandra Day O’Connor, and other Leftists were appointed by Republican
presidents, responses were muted. They continued to insist that a primary
contest with Buchanan would weaken Bush in the 1992 general election. But
every poll, including immediate polls right after Buchanan’s famous “culture
war” speech at the GOP national convention, gave the lie to such spurious
charges. George H. W. lost because of what he did and what he said, and because
the American electorate listened to the insidiously seductive and polished
oratory and promises of “Slick Willie.”
Since George the First, the national GOP
has given us the following presidential candidates: Bob Dole, George the
Younger, John McCain, and the hapless Mitt Romney–not a real, philosophical
conservative among the lot of them. In fact, conservatives, who arguably
make up a majority of the Republican base, haven’t controlled the party
apparatus since Reagan. And even back then, based on the testimony of the few
conservatives who worked in the Reagan White House, Reagan permitted George H.
W. to control and fill most appointments from the get go. You can imagine what
types of folks were approved for service.
The specter of Prescott still casts a spell
over the Bush family. If a few more pusillanimous conservatives had not
run for “the tall grass” back in 1992, just perhaps we might have stopped the
contagion twenty-two years ago. Pat Buchanan was right in 1992, as he is today.
Begrudgingly, some of my friends who supported the Bushes then, recognize this
now.
All along, despite some pleasant words, the
Bushes have been enablers. As congressional Republicans continue to sell out
America on everything from immigration to the debt ceiling, conservatives need
to be told, once again, that the Republican “establishment” is not on their
side. Prescott Bush’s ghost lives and prospers at the RNC and in the halls of
the US Congress. Until it is fully exorcized (and the Karl Roves and John
McCains finally interred for good), this nation will have no real opposition to
the ongoing, steep decline into neo-Marxist multicultural totalitarianism.
No comments:
Post a Comment