{"id":8595,"date":"2015-08-10T21:55:10","date_gmt":"2015-08-11T04:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8595"},"modified":"2015-08-16T22:03:38","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T05:03:38","slug":"historys-complexity-should-discourage-liberals-cheap-retroactive-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/historys-complexity-should-discourage-liberals-cheap-retroactive-morality\/","title":{"rendered":"History\u2019s Complexity Should Discourage Liberals\u2019 Cheap Retroactive Morality"},"content":{"rendered":"
by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online<\/a><\/div>\n
\n
\"Photo
Photo via NRO<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

S<\/span>ome Democratic-party groups are renouncing their once-egalitarian idols, the renaissance genius Thomas Jefferson and the populist Andrew Jackson. Both presidents, some two centuries ago, owned slaves. Consequently, the two men have been suddenly deemed unworthy of further liberal reverence.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In Connecticut, for instance, the state Democratic party has removed the two presidents\u2019 names from an annual fundraiser previously known as the Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey Dinner.<\/p>\n

There are lots of strange paradoxes in the current frenzied liberal dissection of past sins.<\/p>\n

One, a historic figure must be near perfect in all dimensions of his or her complex life to now pass progressive muster. That Jefferson is responsible for helping to establish many of the cherished human rights now enshrined in American life apparently cannot offset the transgression of having owned slaves.<\/p>\n

Two, today\u2019s moral standards are always considered superior to those of the past. Ethical sense supposedly always improves with time.<\/p>\n

However, would the American society of 1915 have allowed a federally supported agency such as Planned Parenthood to cut apart aborted fetuses to sell infant body parts?<\/p>\n

Ivy League\u2013enrollment figures suggest that some of these universities have capped the number of Asian students. Is this really much different than the effort to curtail Jewish enrollment at Ivy League schools in the 1920s?<\/p>\n

Three, the sins of the past were hardly all committed by racist, sexist, conservative white men.<\/p>\n

Under the new morality, should we not also condemn the Aztec king Montezuma as a Hitler-like war criminal? No society prior to the Nazi Third Reich had so carefully organized and institutionalized the machinery of mass death that each year executed tens of thousands of sacrificial human captives from conquered neighboring tribes. Perhaps San Diego State University should stop using the nickname \u201cAztecs\u201d for its sports teams, given the fact that the Aztecs practiced slave-owning, human sacrifice, and ritual cannibalism.<\/p>\n

The Zulus are often portrayed as saintly indigenous people, brutally colonized by rapacious British imperialists. That\u2019s not quite the whole story. Earlier in their pre-British history, the Zulus\u2019 King Shaka adopted the sort of military imperialism and internal police state that would have made Joseph Stalin proud. By the time of his death in 1828, Shaka\u2019s army had killed more than 1 million Africans through systematic imperial conquest and mass executions.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

Applying the morality of the present in crude political fashion to ferret out the supposed race, class, and gender immorality of the past is a tricky thing. Picking saints and sinners can boomerang in unexpected ways.<\/p>\n

Will Democrats now also damn America\u2019s most openly racist president since the pre\u2013Civil War era \u2014 the liberal saint Woodrow Wilson?<\/p>\n

Wilson successfully led the U.S. in World War I, tried to organize a global League of Nations \u2014 and was an unapologetic Southern racist in word and deed. It was Wilson who fought the integration of the U.S. military and did his best as president of Princeton University to deny talented African Americans admission.<\/p>\n

Should Princeton focus only on that disreputable aspect of his legacy and thus change the name of its vaunted Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs?<\/p>\n

Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren is worshipped as a progressive icon who through his work on the Supreme Court helped enshrine a liberal agenda. But no American was more responsible for incarcerating Japanese-Americans in internment camps. As California\u2019s attorney general, Warren, in conjunction with liberal President Franklin Roosevelt, fanned racist paranoia and stripped constitutional rights from tens of thousands of U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n

Should we therefore wipe away any mention of \u201cThe Warren Court\u201d or Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal? Or do history\u2019s liberal sinners alone win special exemption from today\u2019s liberal witch hunters?<\/p>\n

Should we regard civil-rights advocate Malcolm X as unworthy of attention, or instead as a complex historical persona?<\/p>\n

By present ethical standards, was Malcolm more than just a convicted thief and avowed Communist who dismissed Martin Luther King Jr. as \u201cchump,\u201d declared that he was \u201cglad\u201d when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and talked of black superiority as he condemned whites as \u201cdevils\u201d?<\/p>\n

The architect of Planned Parenthood was the feminist family planner Margaret Sanger. Shouldn\u2019t Planned Parenthood denounce Sanger\u2019s legacy, given her eugenics agenda that deliberately sought to focus abortions on minority communities?<\/p>\n

The past is not simplistic \u201cgotcha\u201d melodrama in which we convict figures of history by tabulating their sins on today\u2019s moral scorecards.<\/p>\n

Instead, history is tragedy. It is complex. Moral assessments are dicey. With some humility, we must balance past and current ethical standards, as well as the elements of the good and the bad present in every life.<\/p>\n

And we must avoid cheap, politicized moralizing that often tells us more about the ethics and ignorance of today\u2019s grand inquisitors than the targets of their inquisitions.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 2015 Tribune Media Services, Inc.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online Some Democratic-party groups are renouncing their once-egalitarian idols, the renaissance genius Thomas Jefferson and the populist Andrew Jackson. Both presidents, some two centuries ago, owned slaves. Consequently, the two men have been suddenly deemed unworthy of further liberal reverence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[187,99],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2eD","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11628,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-progressive-race-to-the-bottom\/","url_meta":{"origin":8595,"position":0},"title":"The Progressive Race to the Bottom","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 29, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review The old Democratic party championed the working classes, wanted secure borders to protect middle-class union wage earners, and focused generous federal entitlement help on the\u00a0citizen\u00a0poor. 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