The Republican Brain (38 page)

The basic story of how this happened closely parallels the story of the Scientific Revolution, which began in the mid 16th century. If you go back to the illustrious historians of Greece and Rome, you do find occasional pushes toward the sort of accuracy that is now an academic norm—particularly with a historian like Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War. But you also find much storytelling and mythos. The rigorous rules for identifying and handling original sources that now mark the profession didn't yet exist.

True modern history originates first in the Renaissance, and then especially in the so-called Age of Reason. How to ring in the change? To put it bluntly, historians started debunking mythology and nonsense that had been passed down uncritically over the ages. In one classic early case, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla conclusively proved in1440 that the “donation of Constantine,” a document allegedly from the 4th century that gave the pope power over much of the Roman Empire, was a forgery. As part of Valla's case, he showed that the text contained words that would not have been used in Constantine's time, like
satrap
—a classic historian's maneuver.

From there, what we now call the “historical method” gradually developed, often with many important contributions from religious scholars. In the 19th century came the development of a movement called “historicism” at the hands of scholars like the German Leopold von Ranke, who pledged “merely to show how things actually were.” For the historicists, the goal was to understand the past on its own terms, shielded from the presentist impulse to read it in service of some immediate goal or impulse—nationalistic, nostalgic, or outright political.

In other words, history was becoming more of a science. It was developing its own standards of objectivity. History can never, as Perlstein notes, be physics. Nor can it tell
all
that happened in the past—there's simply too much information. Historical evidence always has to be organized into some type of narrative, which inevitably involves some picking and choosing.

Nevertheless, good history can practice rigor, it can validate and refute vying accounts, and it can arrive at scholarly consensus. And just like science, it has a methodology and a community of scholars dedicated to enforcing the standards and norms associated with quality work.

However—and by now this will come as no surprise—the scholars who practice these critical techniques within universities today are overwhelmingly liberal. In Neil Gross's and Solon Simmons' survey of the politics of university professors, the ratio of Democratic voters to Republican voters among historians was 18.9 to 1. With economists, you'll recall, the ratio was roughly 3 to 1. Such figures lend at least a superficial validity to the standard conservative critique of academia—that it has its own raging biases—a critique that then empowers conservative counterexpertise and, ultimately, counterreality.

In the case of history, that critique takes a distinctive form: It levels charges of
historical revisionism
against the academic left. The argument is that rather than telling the traditional story of America as a land of liberty and opportunity (perhaps blessed by God), leftist historians who actually loathe the country have instead been telling stories about the evils of capitalism and the U.S.'s leaders, and trying to get those into the textbooks.

Revisionism
is often used as a term of opprobrium—with undertones of “Holocaust revisionism”—although technically speaking, every good historian engages in this process. New historical research is nothing if not an attempt to “revise” our understanding of the past by bringing to light new details and new interpretations. That's a good thing, most of the time. However, revisionism has also come to mean retelling history with an ideological agenda, and perhaps going so far as to deny past events (or fabricate them). Thus, the term has attached to the faux “historical” arguments used to support Holocaust denial and conspiratorial ideas about U.S. history, such as the notion that Franklin Roosevelt knew the Pearl Harbor attack was coming but did nothing about it, because he
wanted
us to be drawn into war.

There's no reason, however, that excessive or indefensible forms of revisionism should only be found on the left. In fact, as we'll see, many of the most abusive revisionist takes on U.S. history are of recent conservative vintage (although there really is some biased left-wing history out there to be wary of).

The conservative critique of revisionism sharpened greatly in the 1990s, amid charges of “political correctness” on the campuses. In a much noted 1994 op-ed in
The
Wall Street Journal
entitled “The End of History,” Lynne Cheney, wife of the later vice president and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, denounced a new set of National Standards for the teaching of U.S. history that, she said, delivered a breed of “politicized history” typical of the “academic establishment.” Cheney's chief complaint was that the new standards privileged the counternarratives of disadvantaged groups (native Americans, African Americans, women suffragists) over a standard U.S. history focused on the founders, the presidents, the wars, and so on. “We are a better people than the National Standards indicate, and our children deserve to know it,” wrote Cheney.

The critique in some ways culminated—as critiques often do—in the mouth of a president of the United States, George W. Bush. In 2003, as “WMD” failed to materialize in post-invasion Iraq, Bush accused critics of the war of engaging in “revisionist history.” Actually, the true revisionists in this case were to be found in the Bush administration itself. After the biological and chemical weapons that we went to war over weren't to be found, the administration began to goalpost-shift about its
causus belli
, suddenly stressing the importance of liberating Iraq's oppressed people or
preventing
the country from getting dangerous weapons (rather than on the pre-war claim that Saddam needed to be disarmed).

Nevertheless, we must concede that the critique of left wing “revisionist” history has some merit. Take the late Howard Zinn, whose
A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present
has sold over a million copies and greatly influenced many high school and college students. Alas, Zinn's account—allegedly focused on the people, rather than the powerful—has been severely criticized by other scholars, and not just on the right.

“Zinn's big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence,” writes the Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, a liberal and co-editor of the magazine
Dissent.
“
A People's History
is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.” One key problem, Kazin explains, is that Zinn is so busy painting a battle between the Little Guy and the Man—“a class conflict most Americans didn't even know they were fighting”—that “his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity.” If he doesn't understand these two phenomena, Zinn could scarcely be said to understand America—or, ironically, average working-class Americans, the much touted
people
of his title.

This is hardly an inconsequential oversight. Zinn's approach prevents those liberals and leftists who fall under its sway from understanding why middle- and lower-class Americans seem so often to vote against their economic interests—and for the Republican Party, the party of the wealthy. Such behavior is inexplicable if you're only able to think in terms of an egalitarian narrative pitting “people” against “the powerful.” However, it's very understandable if you recognize the psychological motivations that ground our politics, and that truly separate left and right—in turn allowing you to perceive that egalitarianism is only one moral impulse or intuition among many, and one that runs much stronger in liberals.

That's not the only problem with Zinn: His book even goes so far as to suggest that the U.S. entered World War II out of questionable motives: racism (against the Japanese), imperialism, business interests. Never mind, uh, Hitler's racist quest for world dominance. Clearly, conservatives have a point about left wing revisionism.

Zinn deeply troubles me, because I recognize his kind of thinking all too well among my intellectual compatriots. But thankfully, and in good Enlightenment fashion, it is liberal historians themselves, like Kazin, who have criticized him and set the record straight. Meanwhile, conservatives have taken a few cases of academic excess as an excuse to ignore academia entirely, and simply spin out their own reality—in the process far outstripping anything Howard Zinn has done.

For a telling case study, consider how right and the left have told the story of one of the lowest moments in American history—the disgusting forced internment of over 100,000 Japanese men, women, and children, the majority of them U.S. citizens, during World War II. Following upon Pearl Harbor, the roundup was centrally driven by racism, hate, and of course, wartime fear—leading, very predictably, to authoritarian responses and the demonization of out-groups. One newspaper columnist at the time wrote of Japanese Americans that we should “herd 'em up, pack 'em off, and give 'em the inside room of the badlands.” General John L. DeWitt, commanding general of the Army's Western Defense Command, put it like this: “The Japanese race is an enemy race, and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted.”

Howard Zinn highlights this event in
A People's History
, and you can hardly blame him. It really did happen, and it really can be used to cast our country in a bad light. But highlighting a real historical event is no crime. And it is
nothing
compared to the right-wing answer: Columnist and TV personality Michelle Malkin's 2004 book
In Defense of Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror.
In her book, Malkin rejects the historically established explanation for Japanese internment—which, not surprisingly, strongly emphasizes racial prejudice—and claims instead that we've all been laboring under a “politically correct myth of American ‘concentration camps.'” To the contrary, Malkin argues, there was strong evidence—in the top secret MAGIC cables from Japanese diplomats, which U.S. intelligence forces had intercepted—of a “meticulously orchestrated espionage effort” on the part of Japan, using Japanese Americans. And this, says Malkin, justified internment.

Historians, however, have sternly rejected her “speculation” about the MAGIC cables, as one scholar puts it. As a group of them wrote in protesting the book:

. . . This work presents a version of history that is contradicted by several decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the United States Army and an official U.S. government commission.

Sounds much like what you hear whenever the experts stand up to denounce bad science or bad economics—only it's history this time.

I lack the space to enumerate how many other important episodes from the American past have been subjected to a similar form of conservative revisionism. Books could (and will) be written on the subject; and at least one sweeping book of bad right-wing history is already in circulation—
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History
, authored by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. and published by the conservative Regnery Press (also the publisher of Malkin's book). From the Revolutionary Era up through the Clinton years, it's all there. To summarize it, here is the slap-down provided by one academic critic:

Suffice it to say that the book asserts that the American Revolution was no revolution at all; that the Civil War was not about slavery; that the so-called robber barons made America great; that the New Deal made the Depression worse; that the war on poverty made poverty worse; that Clinton's intervention in Bosnia was a waste of taxpayer money. Not only does Woods reduce complex events to these kinds of simplistic interpretations, he doesn't even acknowledge that rival interpretations exist. It's history not as analysis but as catechism.

My goal here is not to debunk all the separate conservative historical misconceptions in detail. What's important is to understand the emotional power of the right's historical counternarrative—seeing how conservatives intermingle their psychological needs with motivated reasoning to come up with false history. In the face of this, liberals can only respond by telling historical stories of their own,
better
stories than Howard Zinn's, because they will be both emotionally moving and also accurate.

And if we want to tell better stories, there is only one place to turn: the “Founding”—the story of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the men who wrote and signed these documents.