Past & Present

It is a conservative who asks in his article about Rick Perlstein’s history book Nixonland: “Are you experiencing cognitive dissonance?”

The conservative is J. Patrick Coolican, and the article is posted on a popular conservative blog called Politico.com. I repeat “conservative” so much here as an ironic illustration that the likes of Coolican put too much emphasis on that.

To a pundit, that label is all important. Like the real one, the political pundit’s bible begins with “In the beginning was the Word”.  But in their creation story the genesis of a brain begins with either the word “conservative” or “liberal”. All else in their worldview unfolds from either the one label or the other.

 Coolican’s point — the article’s “hook”, as reporters call it — about Perlstein and the new book on President Richard Nixon (1969-74) is that the author and the book are liked by conservatives even though Perlstein is a liberal. And the headline for the review is “Historian Bridges Left-Right Divide”.

My own point is that I disagree with this review’s starting assumption: that it is remarkable that a history book about a conservative movement can be both written by a liberal and be worth reading by conservatives. 

In fact, it is sad and laughable that anyone would find that remarkable. It is a symptom in part of punditry’s harmful influence, but it is even more so a sign that this idea of ”a divide” is overdone.  As I said above, Coolican puts too much emphasis on the labels.

I’m still trying to get my hands on the book without buying it in hardback. (I’m not so poor or miserly that I refuse to buy any hardback history books, and I, unlike some historians who would never stoop to such a level —  do read journalistic, popular histories. But such histories are usually good for only one read, except if they cover what I teach and have the good anecdotes that transfer well to the classroom. But I don’t teach U.S. history per se.) But I gather the book is thinner on theory, historiography or archival work (despite what Coolican’s review says) than , say, works on Nixon by Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor whom I have met. And Perlstein has a blog and is out there as a public figure.

So I gather Nixonland is a book meant to be popular, meant to be tossed around in the talk among political types. Perlstein means to argue — based on the articles about it and not my reading of the book itself — that the roots of conservativism today that are found in the 1960s are illuminating but largely forgotten. That’s valuable work to make that point, and interesting to contrast with how visible is the role of the roots of today’s liberalism within the 1960s. To attack today’s liberals, the 1960s have been overblown into ready-to-use cliches of dirty hippies who spit on veterans or militant blacks in Oakland scowling and armed to the teeth.

I’m glad Perlstein’s book is out there, because it seems more serious and beneficial than the books that contain history from the well-heeled conservative pundit establishment (some have called it vast and a conspiracy). Books such as Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism come to mind, or one by Ann Coulter that tried to resurrect Senator Joseph McCarthy’s reputation.

Those two books are examples of things written by and for conservatives for the sake of conservatism, of which there are many more examples that do not even try to use history to make their “points”. And self-described liberals such as Michael Moore or Al Franken churn out the same genre from their foxhole on their side of the spectrum.

It’s from this ideological battleground that Coolican comes when he is seemingly surprised by Perlstein’s book on Nixon. How can it be that a conservative would find value in reading a book by a liberal?

In Coolican’s brain this fact produces cognitive dissonance. I pity that brain.

The journalist Jeff Shear is mentioning President George Bush’s use of Neville Chamberlain and “appeasement” when Mr. Bush discusses Iraq. But it’s not just Mr. Bush, I’m afraid. The fact is, on any given day in Washington, some politician somewhere is lazily trotting out the term “appease” in order to slime an opposing view, no matter what the topic of discussion.

So, although his piece is interesting, Mr. Shear doesn’t decry the politicians’ overuse and misuse of the battered figure of poor old Neville, who of course granted Adolf Hitler’s wish to annex a chunk of Czechoslovakia, and thereby supposedly assure “peace in our time.” If Mr. Shear won’t, I will.

The Bush administration’s parallel between Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Adolf Hitler in 1938 is forced. Whatever you may think of President Bush and the Iraq War, you have to admit that the position of Saddam Hussein in relation to world leaders in 2003 was far different from the demanding, threatening posture of Adolf Hitler among the leaders of Britain, France, and Italy at Munich in 1938.

But “appeasement” — which in my view means the granting of an aggressor’s demand in the hopes it will stop aggression — has come to mean in common political usage any position on an issue that doesn’t itself exude aggression. Bringing up Chamberlain is supposed to make the mentioner seem not only manly, but also historically informed, I guess.

Did good ol’ Abe Lincoln believe that Congress should not criticize a president’s war moves?

Eric Foner nails conservative pundits who in the last week or so invoked Lincoln to condemn the latest Congressional resolutions and attempted resolutions that condemn President Bush’s escalation of the Iraq War, which the White House terms a “surge”.

Conservatives should think twice before invoking Lincoln’s words, real or invented, in the cause of the Iraq War and before equating condemnations of Bush’s policies and usurpations with treason.

Foner, one of the most visible and, to his credit, politically engaged historians in the U.S., builds the case that Lincoln would instead by troubled by the executive power that has been usurped to conduct the present Iraq War. For evidence, Foner documents Lincoln’s reaction to President James Polk’s aggression against Mexico in the 1840s.