David Brooks faces the truth of US history — and runs away

America’s so-called sane conservatives have had a lot of explaining to do since 2016, and even more since January of this year. How do they dissociate themselves from Donald Trump and still justify their own continuing belief in a conservative ideological project that is supposed to be good for America, but in practice has brought chaos, misery and poisonous social strife?

It would be more straightforward and honest of these anti-Trump conservatives to admit that postwar conservatism in America was all a lie, that they were dupes and that they finally saw the light. Or they could claim they were seduced by its darker, authoritarian strains, its temptation to worship power, and now they have finally saved their souls by renouncing this ideological devil. That is the well-worn path of sinners come to confession, or, in secular terms, Whittaker Chambers renouncing his allegiance to Stalin.

Instead, they typically reposition themselves as the immovable axis of correct values, and denounce their former ideological fellow travelers as heretics who profaned true conservatism. As they so often claim, I didn’t leave the party, the party left me.

This form of rationalization and denial is embarrassingly evident in a recent apologia by David Brooks, the New York Times’ notion of an ideal conservative. Writing in The Atlantic, Brooks says that the conservatism he enthusiastically discovered in the early 1980s was a movement bursting with ideas. There was a minority within the movement, he admits, who were not real conservatives, but reactionaries. At the beginning, they were barely worthy of notice.

I won’t bore the reader by recapitulating the process of his shocked realization, 40 years too late, that the reactionary “fringe,” as Brooks calls it, was the true core of the party, the seed of a poisonous fruit that required decades to reach its putrid bloom. It’s said that every confession is a species of boasting, and Brooks’s mea culpa, that he “should have seen this coming,” is in that vein: He was just too good-hearted to think his fellow travelers in the conservative movement capable of such iniquity.

Of course, maintaining one’s innocence requires rearranging history. It was mainstream conservatives, not some fringe, who perpetrated the Iran-Contra affair, invaded Iraq under false pretenses, enthusiastically tortured prisoners in the quixotic war on terrorism, and recklessly cut taxes and deregulated markets to pave the way for the biggest global financial crash since the Great Depression. It was mainstream conservatives who voted unanimously against Barack Obama’s rather tepid Affordable Care Act, itself a rehash of a Heritage Foundation proposal from the 1990s.

Brooks’ labored apologia is a history — his history — of recent American conservatism, a Manichaean fable of civilized, conscientious conservatives full of marvelous ideas and déclassé, knuckle-dragging right-wingers. But beyond its heroes-and-villains simplicity, the piece reminds us of a characteristic habit of conservatives.

Brooks distorts not only his own past, and that of the conservative movement, but the American past as well, since much of his piece is a Parson Weems-style potted history of our country, apparently written to vindicate his optimism that everything will come out right in the end. I have already written about right-wingers’ longstanding taste for distorting the record of the past to conform to their ideology. That kind of historical mythology is now the law in many Republican states.

In the Trump regime, conservatives now ladle their historical fairy tales down the throats of schoolchildren, at taxpayers’ expense. Whether this is due to deliberate malice, in the manner of Stalin airbrushing disgraced Bolsheviks out of photographs, or from the actual belief that nothing really bad ever happened in America over the course of the last 250 years, is anyone’s guess.

Brooks goes on to cite approvingly a real work of history, “What Hath God Wrought,” by the former Oxford and UCLA historian Daniel Walker Howe. That book is a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of America during the turbulent years from the end of the War of 1812 to the end of the Mexican War in 1848. Brooks sees it as an uplifting story of how an imperfectly founded country with flaws like slavery can nevertheless progress onward and upward, both technologically and morally, providing an optimistic object lesson for overcoming today’s political troubles.

Howe’s volume is worth an extended examination, if only to illustrate how actual history, written by a competent professional, contrasts with Brooks’s representation of it. Most important is the question of why his interpretation of American history is so skewed, and what it tells us about the conservative worldview.

The striking thing about Howe’s history is the way it refutes rather than confirms the “American exceptionalism” view of U.S. history as a chronicle of mostly uninterrupted progress. White males were shorter in 1850, on average, than they had been in 1800, and their average life expectancy was a full five years less. American cities registered more deaths than births, and continued growing only because of immigration from overseas and migration from rural areas. The nation grew and became increasingly industrial, but many eggs were broken to make the omelet, in the manner of Stalin’s forced industrialization of Russia. And this is before we consider America’s “peculiar institution”: slavery.

Prior to the period Howe describes, few Americans tried to defend slavery as a positive good. It was held, even in the South, to be a regrettable evil which the slave states would eventually abolish or allow to die out in some undefined way. But beginning around 1820, the year of the Missouri Compromise, slavery began to dominate American politics, suffusing even issues that one might think were unrelated, such as federal funding for infrastructure projects. Eventually, white elites in the South began to defend slavery as a beneficial and even benevolent institution, enlisting the Bible as scriptural support.

This serves to illustrate that much of the American political and social landscape of almost two centuries ago was eerily familiar, even if the labels were the reverse of what we perceive as customary today. The current Democratic Party has been the party of civil rights for the past 60 years; it was then the upholder of slavery and white supremacy. We roll our eyes at what a reactionary mess evangelical Christianity has become over the past several decades, but in the early 19th century it embodied a progressive Christian humanism and largely supported political reform, the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, public education and intellectual pursuits.

The presidents serving between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln have virtually disappeared from historical memory (with the possible exception of the vile James Buchanan), no doubt simply to blot out their sub-mediocrity. Certainly every Democrat who served as president during that period was awful; while Howe is a judicious historian who by no means rants at them, his recounting of their official acts is damning enough.

Martin Van Buren, the only American president whose first language was not English, was a manipulative and prevaricating weasel. James Polk was not only a slaveholder who increased his human chattel while president, but incited a war against Mexico which, by bringing new territories into the union, made an eventual civil war over slavery almost inevitable. Franklin Pierce, although a Northerner, fiercely defended slavery while signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act; he was a drunkard to boot. Buchanan, according to one biographer, was so sympathetic to slavery that his passivity (and even sly assistance to the South) in the wake of secession amounted to treason.

Against them were arrayed the Whigs, whose combination of bad luck and ineptitude has made them a byword for political failure. The two Whigs elected to the presidency, William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, managed to die early in office, and were succeeded, respectively, by John Tyler, who systematically betrayed Harrison’s platform in favor of Southern interests, and Millard Fillmore, chiefly noted for being claimed, in a famous hoax article by H.L. Mencken, as the first president to install a bathtub in the White House.

Apart from the fact that the very name “Whig” arouses mirth, the party’s besetting weakness was its attempt to remain a national party by straddling the issue of slavery and splitting the difference with temporary compromises that satisfied neither its northern nor southern supporters and eventually blew up the party. It is a sad commentary, and maybe a harbinger of the present era, that the antebellum Democrats succeeded because they were passionate — passionate in defending an evil cause, a rather depressing lesson on how to obtain political support from the American people.

Virtually every repellent feature we see now in Trump and his supporters was present in the so-called Jacksonian democracy: a hard-wired anti-intellectualism that disdained expertise, self-improvement and culture; a knee-jerk anti-government mentality masquerading as constitutionalism; white supremacy and a dedication to slavery and Indian removal; misogyny and enmity to the nascent women’s movement; a fondness for violence, mob “justice” and military force; and disregard for the rule of law. Picture Huck Finn’s Pap, and you have limned the archetypal Jacksonian Democrat.

Even Trump’s crazy economic schemes have their analog in Jackson’s destruction of the Second Bank of the United States and his crackpot Specie Circular, an executive order requiring payment in gold or silver to the government for sales of federal land. It was later repealed by Congress, but not before helping trigger the Panic of 1837, a long and deep depression.

But it was slavery that increasingly made the Democrats a nearly single-issue party. Their opposition to transportation projects and other infrastructure, though supposedly grounded in Jeffersonian principle, was a roundabout way of retarding industrial development and ensuring that slavery did not become an economic anachronism.

Supposed state sovereignty was another bulwark in protecting slavery. Democrats also largely opposed compulsory public education; who needed that, in a rural economy? Southern postmasters instituted a comprehensive censorship of mail to prevent antislavery literature from reaching the South.

Slavery even intruded into foreign policy: Secretary of State John C. Calhoun told the Senate that the U.S. had decided to annex the Republic of Texas explicitly to protect slavery from the (imaginary) British demand for abolition in return for the Texans receiving credit from London banks. Whenever a Democrat was president, US foreign policy worked to undermine British attempts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade.

The defense of slavery was the rationale behind the Democrats’ twisted definition of “freedom.” In practice, it meant the freedom of white males to own slaves and drive the original inhabitants of North America off their land. Southerners wrote elaborate polemics describing Southern society as the natural heir to Athens and Rome, and Southern Protestant denominations split off from their Northern coreligionists, claiming the Bible sanctioned slavery.

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Even the rise of a distinctive American popular culture was infused with defenses of white supremacy and slavery. Minstrel shows were an early iteration of country music that glorified “the Southern way of life,” as did the songs of Stephen Foster (born in Pittsburgh). This legacy continued for over a century in newly-invented media, with films like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, or the wildly popular recordings of Al Jolson, a Lithuanian-born rabbi’s son who sang in blackface.

There is a belief common among some on the left (beginning with William Appleman Williams, Gar Alperowitz and other postwar revisionist historians) as well as right-wing paleoconservatives and neo-isolationists (represented by The American Conservative and the Lew Rockwellites), that the Spanish-American War of 1898 was a sea-change in the national character, leading more or less directly  to the 20th century’s series of foreign interventions and an imperialism founded on overseas military bases and commercial penetration.

Without belaboring the point, Howe provides abundant evidence to the contrary, arguing that imperialistic expansion was in the very DNA of the young republic. As soon as the U.S. narrowly avoided extinction in the ill-advised, badly executed War of 1812, it was hot to grab Florida from Spain, extort Texas from the newly formed Republic of Mexico, prize the Pacific Northwest from Russia and Britain, and push surviving Native Americans off the lands they held by treaties solemnly concluded with Washington. And throughout the decades before the Civil War, there were numerous “filibusters”: expeditions by private, freebooting U.S. citizens to take over portions of Central America, Mexico, Cuba and even Canada.

From the moment of Mexico’s independence in 1821, its foreign ministers faced a barrage of American “offers” to buy Texas or California. These were often backed by threats of varying subtlety. (Trump has resurrected this type of thinly veiled gangsterism in his efforts to pry Greenland loose from Denmark.) Polk’s maneuvering into war with Mexico in 1848, complete with a phony border incident as a casus belli, bears comparison with Hitler’s attack on Poland for its purposeful aggression.

To continue the analogy, the way was clear for an invasion of Mexico only after the U.S. had concluded an agreement with Britain over division of the Pacific Northwest, long a bone of contention. Why did the U.S. accept peaceful agreement with Britain? Because Britain was a world power it didn’t want to fight (remembering the near-catastrophe of 1812), in much the same way that Hitler felt constrained to come to agreement with the Soviet Union before he felt free to conquer Poland. With the Brits neutralized, Polk could proceed to expand the country to the southwest.

The Democratic New York Herald was exultant: “We can now thrash Mexico into decency at our leisure.” Abraham Lincoln, then a young Whig congressman, was less enthusiastic, describing the conflict as “a war of conquest to catch votes.”

Brooks insists on seeing all this as an edifying story of a nation’s rise, albeit with a few bumps in the road. He views the Whig Party, at that time the party of the rule of law, public education, industrial development and expansion of rights, as the party of the future, despite its weakness against the Jacksonian Democrats.

But the Whigs dissolved as a party almost a full decade before Southern secession, and the political imbalance in the country only got worse. The political history of the U.S. from 1820 on has typically been presented as a series of compromises over slavery to stave off secession, but in reality, every “deal” from the Compromise of 1820 onward was a victory for the pro-slavery faction, and each victory set the table for the further advance and legal entrenchment of slavery. By the time of the Dred Scott decision (nine years after Howe’s chronicle ends), the South had reached the goal line: the right to own slaves was constitutionally established everywhere in the country.

It is difficult to imagine what optimistic lessons can possibly be drawn from an era that set the stage for the bloodiest war in American history, a conflict that caused more deaths than all other American wars combined. And will we ever know the final result of that war? “How the South Won the Civil War,” a well-received book by Heather Cox Richardson, eloquently argues that the North’s victory was ephemeral.

Brooks’ view of history, as reflected in his interpretation of Howe’s narrative, is merely an extension of his presentation of his own experience within the conservative movement over the last four decades. Just as he refuses to see the embedded evils of “real” conservatism, instead believing that an extremist fringe staged an illegitimate takeover of a  movement brimming with excellent ideas, he balks at seeing the American past as a distinctly mixed picture, one containing its share of tragedy and atrocity, whose legacy marks us still, and whose outcome is by no means clear.

Conservatives like Brooks will always seek refuge in a sanitized past in order to avoid honest confrontation with present conditions. If slavery wasn’t that bad, and was in any case abolished, why bother engaging with painful examinations of present inequality?

They are not alone in pursuing vindication through history. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But this statement has been frequently misquoted and transformed, with Barack Obama saying, “The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.” Obama’s subtle and possibly unconscious change from the cosmological to the temporal is significant in showing that liberals, too, think that history is somehow predetermined in their favor.

As a glance at the world today will tell us, from the battlefields in Ukraine and the abattoir of Gaza to the ICE detention centers here at home, the arc of history bends in no certain direction. The view that history is teleological, that it is goal-directed, is a fallacy believed in by Christians, conservatives, liberals and Marxists alike. But it is not only wrong; it is harmful.

The arc of history is a narcotic that robs us of human responsibility, in allowing us to believe in some mysterious mechanism that will make things come out right by a sort of magic. Much elite political commentary of the last decade, with its talk of institutions and guardrails, is a species of whistling past the graveyard. In truth, an era — our era — is only as good or bad as the citizens who live in it; there is no historical process to bail us out.