The Unoriginal and Superficial Nihilism of the Right

The continuing controversy over Tucker Carlson’s promotion and apparent approval of the heterodox revisionist views of Darryl Cooper raise two discrete questions. First, what are the facts about Churchill, Hitler, Nazism, and America’s involvement in World War II. The facts that bear on these matters are extensive, and subject to dispute or alternate conclusions. It is a necessary argument to play out, but also fruitless because it is endless.

Second, the factual arguments are likely beside the point for these revisionist arguments are surely driven more by an animus toward our current circumstances, and a backcast to the inferred failures of figures like Churchill to have “saved” Western civilization. This is a philosophical-cultural disposition more than it is an open reconsideration of the facts. Even without the specious and hence difficult to refute counterfactual scenarios that Western civilization today would be more robust and respectable but for the stubbornness of Churchill to protract the European war, and America’s supposedly foolish intervention, there is a narrative whose logic runs as follows: everything was great in America, and Britain, before the War, and the War destroyed it all, setting us on the ruinous downward path to our present decadence. As one Twitter comment runs: “I don’t understand the feverish adoration of Churchill. How can anybody survey the state of the West today and conclude that he rescued civilization? What exactly did he save us from?”

The first thing to be observed is that Cooper’s arguments are neither true nor original. While other authors such as Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson, and Andrew Roberts have pointed out that Cooper’s account parallels earlier Nazi apologists, no one has yet noted the work of the late libertarian historian Ralph Raico, who made much the same case against Churchill in the late 1990s, though to be clear and allow no misunderstanding, Raico was in no way a Nazi sympathizer or apologist—he came by his libertarian narrowness honestly. He cannot be swept up along with David Irving or Pat Buchanan.

Raico wrote several versions of his attack on Churchill, updating it several times before its final published version in 2010, “Rethinking Churchill.”

There are several passages in the essay that sound close to what Cooper and Carlson seem to think: “Churchill was, as [Christopher] Hitchens writes, ‘the human bridge across which the transition was made’ between a non-interventionist and a globalist America. In the next century, it is not impossible that his bulldog likeness will feature in the logo of the New World Order.” [Emphasis added.]

A libertarian of some prominence (now also sadly passed away) sent me a copy of the original version of Raico’s article when it appeared in 1997, asking for my reaction. If you’ll bear with me, here is my complete response:

March 13, 2001

Dear -----:

Many thanks for sending along Ralph’s Churchill article.  You asked for my thoughts; surely you have heard the old saying, “Be careful what you ask for. . .”

I can pick a quarrel on nearly every page; on some pages, probably three or four quarrels. I think Ralph is guilty of the usual sins of someone out to build a prosecutor’s case against someone: selective or limited context quotation, willful blindness to contrary facts, circumstances, or reasonable alternative interpretations, but above all, an unreflective historicism that judges someone from another time according to our contemporary standards of judgment, rather than according to the horizon of common understanding of the time in which the person lived and acted.

It would require a piece probably twice as long as Ralph’s to untangle or dispute his approach to the various particulars he has assembled; it might even require an entire book to get to the root of the matter.  And I am sure it would be futile.  At the most fundamental level, the disagreement between admirers and critics of Churchill (and to a lesser extent Lincoln—his case is more complicated because of the constitutional issues involved) is a profound disagreement about the nature of political life.  This argument goes quite beyond the case of Churchill.  Ralph suggests the ground of the fundamental argument in a paragraph on page 259:

In 1925, Churchill wrote: “The story of the human race is war.”  This, however, is untrue; potentially, it is disastrously untrue.  Churchill lacked any grasp of the fundamentals of the social philosophy of classical liberalism.  In particular, he never understood that, as Ludwig von Mises explained, the true story of the human race is the extension of social cooperation and the division of labor.  Peace, not war, is the father of all things.

This is a remarkable passage.  Just on the surface, one notes that Ralph is criticizing Churchill for not grasping what one of the great minds of classical liberalism was just beginning to articulate at the same time (Ralph’s footnote to von Mises cites his work published in 1927—virtually contemporaneous with Churchill’s essay).  One wonders if Ralph’s own work would withstand this kind of freewheeling historicist criticism 75 years from now.  More significant, though, is Ralph’s deprecation of conflict in human affairs.  Is it really the case that the former Yugoslavians of today are just slow learners, or that the Israeli-Palestinian problem can be solved by making Arafat and Sharon read von Mises together at Camp David?  If “the true story of the human race is the extension of social cooperation and the division of labor,” then how does Ralph explain the nearly nonstop record of conflict in history (never mind wars—how about crime or terrorism??) that Churchill quite reasonably observed as of 1925? 

“Peace, not war, is the father of all things.”  As Churchill said in another context, “True—but not exhaustive.” If Ralph qualified this by saying that all good things—or progress, rightly understood—depended upon peace and cooperation, I should readily agree.  But good things and progress are not the sum total of human experience, unless you are some kind of latter-day Whig, which Ralph here seems to be. You need not be a Straussian to suggest that Aristotle had it right, and Ralph, following von Mises, has it wrong.  As Aristotle might put it, classical liberalism is an account of the best regime, but best possible and best likely are two different things. Chance and necessity will always interfere: chance for the reasons that are ironically best understood by the Austrian economists (i.e., the subjectivity of individual preferences).  It seems to me that Ralph averts his gaze from the contingent nature of human life, which is where necessity unfortunately intrudes.  In the most extreme case, the dictates of self-preservation sometimes require that the inevitable conflict of human life be met with equal or greater force.  It is all very well for Ralph to say that England faced no serious threat to its survival in 1940 (a very dubious claim that I’ll accept simply for the sake of argument), thus making Churchill’s war unnecessary or immoral; but what, exactly, is Ralph’s advice for the French, over whose soil the tanks were marching?  Is not coming to the defense of a friend and ally an aspect of “social cooperation”?  His silence about this aspect of the case at hand strikes me as a selective extravagance.

To put the case much more simply, it might be said that Ralph never seriously asks the question, “Compared to what?”  Ralph’s approach to political life tacitly assumes the immanent realization of the theory of the spontaneous order, which is where libertarian political philosophy intersects with Marxism: both believe in the withering away of the state, and of the possibility of human life without tragic outcomes.  Given such a premise, there is virtually no political leader that would meet with Ralph’s approval. While reading his article a fragment of our argument from 10 years ago came back to me.  I asked him a form of the “compared to what?” question: whom among historical leaders did he admire and think worthy of praise?  Grover Cleveland, came Ralph’s answer. A fine person, to be sure, but would Grover Cleveland, faced with the circumstances of 1932, or of 1940, have been able to be elected, or if elected, able to govern in the same fashion as he did in 1890?  Not likely.  In the end, the championing of Cleveland reveals Ralph to be amazingly ahistorical for a trained historian.  I’m not sure whether Ralph is a pacifist (a wholly honorable creed, even if misguided in my opinion), but if he is something close to it then any political figure who prosecutes a war will be morally offensive to him.  Even the hardheaded pacifism of Ralph’s classical liberalism is nonetheless utopian.

As long as we live in an imperfect world, no set of rules will be self-enforcing, which means there will always have to be rulers.  This is why it is necessary, if we are serious about politics, to study Machiavelli—not because we believe he is good, but because we fear he may be right about some of the central aspects of political life.  A libertarianism that deprecates politics and politicians—though not without ample reason—nonetheless blinds itself to the necessity for a statesmanship of liberty, which requires, in our current age, a politician or cadre of politicians who combine the intransigence of principle with the popular skills necessary to appeal to the mass public in a democratic age—in other words, our times require someone to bring Machiavellian skill in the service of liberty. The combination is nearly impossible to conceive, let alone realize in practice—which was Aristotle’s main point.  It is hard enough to find a practical politician who understands what’s wrong with the regulatory state beyond “it costs a lot of money.” 

Well, these are a few thoughts.  The point in one sentence is that it is not possible to even have an argument about the merits of Churchill (or Lincoln) if the two sides of the argument have radically different ways of understanding political life.  But that is a more interesting argument than whether Churchill was a warmonger, an insincere free-trader, a racist, a Darwinist, or any of the other indictments Ralph makes.  I should only want to add that I like Ralph, and have profited from his wide learning in other subjects.

Cordially,

Steve Hayward

I followed up, by the way, with an invitation to Raico to have an in-person debate on the Churchill question, but he declined. He said he found my approach to the issue to be “too philosophical,” which I regarded as a compliment, however unintended.

There’s a second major point to contest with this whole scene, and it is the assumption that Western civilization, and/or American culture, was healthy and hearty before World War II, and it was only the aftermath that deranged everything and brought us to our current rot, as seen especially by the appalling Olympic opening ceremonies in Paris in July.

I once heard James Q. Wilson offer an extemporaneous synoptic account of the 20^th century that I don’t think he ever published, but which I think is correct. It ran something as follows: We are mistaken in thinking the bad turn in our modern culture and political character was anchored in the 1960s.  To the contrary, all of the intellectual roots of the direct assault on Western civilization were alive, in place, and advancing as early as the 1920s. Modern art—the visual expression of nihilism—was advancing as fast as the “existentialist” philosophy of Heidegger and others (like the Frankfurt School, widely noted in recent years for its delayed influence in America), who were taking the European intellectual scene by storm by the late 1920s. Marxism was also advancing. It is not an accident that the baleful effects of these intellectual currents landed first and hardest in Germany.

Wilson’s conclusion is that our modern rot was on the way early on, but were postponed in America by both the Great Depression and World War II. My slight adaption of this point is that when serious things are motion, no one has time for nonsense about what correct pronouns to use. Wilson thought that in the absence of the Depression and World War II, the derangements of the 1960s might have started happening perhaps in the 1930s or 1940s, because all the antecedent radical doctrines were already long in place and advancing.

This counterfactual is at least as plausible as the current speculations that if only Churchill had struck a deal with Hitler and preserved the British Empire, Western civilization would have fared much better since 1940.

Footnote: Raico’s Churchill article opens thus:

“When, in a few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great question: ‘Who was the Man of the Century’ there is little doubt that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably, the answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa has already informed us that Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.”

Works for me.