My Name Is Neo
Tim Cavanaugh | February 21, 2005, 1:40pm
You may have been following the story of Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (Ph.D!), and the growing popularity of his Politically Incorrect Guide. If not, dig the outrage here and here. Arts & Letters Daily helpfully refers us to this critical pan from Max Boot:
I FIRST BECAME AWARE of Thomas E. Woods Jr.'s Politically Incorrect Guide to American History when the New York Times Book Review took note of its rise on the paperback bestseller list and described it as a "neocon retelling of this nation's back story." A neocon retelling? What would that be, exactly?
I have no interest in Max Boot, except to wonder whether that's really his name or a holdover from his punk rock days. For what it's worth, I was unpersuaded by Boot's arguments for why involvement in World War I was a vital national interest and amused by his defense of Bill Clinton's adventures in the Balkans. Nor for that matter, am I going to read the Woods book, whose complaints about the Civil War sound like an old whine in new bottles—for anti-militarist polemics I'll take Randolph Bourne every time, and for anti-militarist polemics with a frisson of Confederate apologetics, give me Gore Vidal. What's got me madder than a Civil War reenactor with chiggers in his wool underpants is the incredible description The New York Times used in touting the book. It's got Boot angry as well:
It tells you something about how debased political terminology has become when a leading light of the nutty League of the South is identified in the Paper of Record as a "neocon." The original neocons, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, were former Democrats who accepted the welfare state, racial equality, and other liberal accomplishments while insisting on a more assertive foreign policy than the McGovernites wanted. In other words, pretty much the opposite of what Woods believes. Woods is a paleocon, not a neocon...
I don't read The New York Times much, and the relevant bestseller list just gives the title and author; no description. So who's the slimy little communist shit, twinkle-toed cocksucker who doesn't know the difference between Norman Podhoretz and J.E.B. Stuart in his rakish hat with ostrich plume?
I think it says more about how contemporary liberals view themselves than about our "debased political terminology" that anybody at The New York Times believes a neocon "revision" of American history would even be possible, or that it would differ in any substantive way from the way that history would be written by The New York Times itself.
The genius of neoconservatism is that it's exactly in step with the progressivist, middle-of-the-road, big state view of American history they teach in school: The Articles of Confederation resulted in a disaster that taught the founders the value of a strong central state; the Whiskey rebels were dangerous kooks, not unlike the Branch Davidians of our own time; "States' Rights" has always been a code word for slavery; President Woodrow Wilson was a man of vision but sadly was unable to achieve his goals for an international order; the America Firsters were even kookier and more marginal than the Whiskey rebels, and the best way to deal with one is to sock him in the jaw like in The Best Years of Our Lives; many well intentioned folks on the left underestimated the danger of the Soviet Union, but the anti-communist witch hunts of the fifties were a regrettable overreaction (the Left didn't become dangerous until the late sixties and early seventies, when it embraced separatist and militant views that undermined the politics of consensus that made this country great); real civil rights progress only came when the federal government asserted its power over the refractory states; September 11 shocked America out of its isolationism and freed President George W. Bush (an excellent man, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters) from his naive opposition to nation-building. And so on.
Leave aside how much of it you agree or disagree with. What would the neocons add to the official version of American history? That Winston Churchill should have been made King of the United States as well as Prime Minister of Great Britain? That we missed a great opportunity by not jumping into the Franco-Prussian War? That we should have intervened on Sylvania's side against Freedonia? The folks at The Times may have a narcissistic interest in highlighting small differences, but you can't misuse language forever. When liberals look at the neocons, they see themselves.
In a related story, Honest Abe tops a new poll of our favorite presidents.
Evan Williams | February 21, 2005, 2:23pm | #
"If you want to talk about America-hating professors, here's someone who hates nearly everything about the last 140 years of US history. Yet only a handful of right-of-center commentators -- Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com, Max Boot in The Weekly Standard -- have spoken out against the book. Where's the outrage? Is this the kind of ideology conservatives want to be associated with? Does anything labeled ''politically incorrect" get a pass?"
I used to respect much of the work that I saw from Cathy Young here at Reason, but this one sounds like it's from another person. Hmmm.
Oh, the HORROR! Woods doesn't like...LINCOLN! Honest ABE! The traitorous monster. Yes, as the public school system has taught all of us, Lincoln is a great american hero. Until you read the actual history of his actions, bordering on a tyrant, torturing deserters, suspending habeas corpus, etc. Lincoln was no hero, and only someone who just took their elementary school textbook as the final word on everything. But this example illustrates Young's entire argument, which is, namely, the same argument that every other critic who disapproves has made: namely, that since Woods doesn't agree with what we all accept as common knowledge, then he
must be wrong, he
must be an America-hating traitor.
Hogwash. Anyone who has actually read his work, either in print or at LRC, knows that he is neither. The rest of her rant is based on this gem of a hyperbolic ad hominem: that, since Woods is a co-founder of the League of the South, that, one should surmise, means that he is wrong.
I am sorely disappointed in Ms. Young's departure from reason, and wholehearted embrace of low-down tactics such as this. Her only saving grace is that she did actually pull a couple of specifics out of the book and attempted to refute them, which is more than I can say for most of the other critics...but even that wasn't very complete or coherent. And the last paragraph, well, Ms. Young might as well be writing for the Times instead of Reason (yes, I know, this wa sa piece for the Globe), because dredge like that belongs elsewhere.
I'm not just saying that because I disagree with her either. I disagree with many writers @ Reason, but I still respect their arguments and their argumentative style. It's just sad that something this pathetic could come from a writer here. Can't win em all, I guess.
David T | February 21, 2005, 10:13pm | #
BillyRay: To determine the percentage of white southerners who owned slaves by counting all individual whites regardless of age and sex is as silly as to "prove" that only a small minority of mid-twentieth century Americans owned cars--after all, look at all those children who didn't!
BTW, it is wrong to argue that even the Nullification Crisis was solely
about economics. So far as the Nullifiers were concerned, it definitely
had a slavery aspect. A few quotes:
John C. Calhoun: "I consider the Tariff, but as the occasion, rather than
the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no
longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick institutions of the
Southern States, and the consequent direction which that and her soil and
climate have given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation
and appropriation in opposite relation to the majority of the Union;
against the danger of which, if there be no protective power in the
reserved rights of the states, they must in the end be forced to rebel, or
submit to have . . . their domestick institutions exhausted by
Colonization and other schemes, and themselves & children reduced to
wretchedness."
Governor James Hamilton: "The same doctrines 'of the general welfare'
which enable the general government to tax our industry for the benefit of
the industries of other sections of this Union, and to appropriate the
common treasure to make roads and canals for them, would authorize the
federal government to erect the *peaceful* standard of servile revolt, by
establishing colonization offices in our State, to give the bounties for
emancipation here, and transportation to Liberia afterwards. The last
question follows our giving up the battle on the other two, as inevitably
as light flows from the sun."
George McDuffie (Senator and later Governor): "Any course of measures
which shall hasten the abolition of slavery by destroying the value of
slave labor, will bring upon the Southern states the greatest political
calamity with which they can be afflicted...It is the clear and distinct
perception of the irresistable tendency of this protecting system to
precipitate us upon this great moral and political catastrophe, that has
animated me to raise my warning voice..."
William Harper: "in contending against the Tariff, I have always felt
that we were combatting the symptom instead of the disease. Consolidation
is the disease....To-morrow may witness [an attempt] to relieve your free
negroes, first; and afterwards, your slaves."
Congressman Robert Barnwell: If South Carolina yielded "full supremacy"
to the Northern majority, "there are some changes in the very forms of our
*domestic* policy to which they could scarcely persuade us quietly to
submit. And there are no changes, however vital and subversive of our
most absolute rights, which fanaticism and misguided philanthropy would
not attempt."
Angus Patterson, a leading state legislator: "If the Tariff were all we
had to fear, I might be disposed to advise longer delay...[But] one of the
avowed objects of the Tariff is to favor free labor, as it is called, at
the expense of slave labor--to render the latter species of labor
unprofitable and indeed valueless, and thereby incline and force us to
assent to a system of emancipation, through the agency of the General
Government..."
Congressman William J. Grayson to his constituents: "if the tariff were
oppressive merely" patience "might well be deemed a virtue...But you
assert it to be unconstitutional. This it is that authorizes and requires
you to act...Allow Congres to make their will the limit of their power,
and prepare to see it exercised in a shape, the very shadow of which must
strike you with horror." (I don't think he simply means higher tariff
rates...)
Robert J. Turnbull, planter and pamphleteer, in his series of essays
called *The Crisis* which helped spark nullification: "...these words
'general welfare' are becoming every day more and more important to the
folks, who are now so peacably raising their cotton and rice, between the
Little Pedee and the Savannah. The question, it must be recollected, is
not simply, whether we are to have a foreign commerce. It is not whether
we are to have splendid national works, in which we have no interest,
executed chiefly at our cost...It is not whether we are to be taxed
without end...But the still more interesting question is, whether the
institutions of our forefathers...are to be preserved...free from the rude
hands of innovators and enthusiasts, and from the molestation or
interference of any legislative power on earth but our own?"
All quotes from William W. Freehling, *Prelude to Civil War: The
Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (Harper Torchbooks
edition 1968), pp. 127, 198-9, 256-7.
There's not much point in arguing further with you, though: no matter how many secessionist quotes I could find that said it was about slavery, you would say it wasn't about slavery...
Gary Gunnels | February 21, 2005, 11:21pm | #
BillRay,
Sorry David, but Lincoln opposed slavery into the new territories because he wanted them reserved for free white people. Lincoln was a racist after all.
So? He was a product of his time. And of course none your statements would compel me to support the Confederacy.
As Alexis de Tocqueville traveled around the country in the 1830s he wrote about slavery and racism. The further north he went, the worse the racism and no where was racism worse then in states that never had slavery or had since abandoned it.
Do read his book. Alexis de Tocqueville quite liberally castigates all of American society - North, South and West - for the treatment of Native Americans and blacks.
Sorry David, again as you well know, the tariff in the late 1820s and early 1830s almost sparked secession. Just as the northeastern states talked secession after the Louisiana purchase fearing the agricultural states would have more power than the banking and commerce states.
You mean 1832 re: South Carolina. Jefferson and Madison argued secession during the controversy over the Alien & Sedition Acts; many New Englanders were caught with the fire of it over the War of 1812; many New Englanders were also caught with the fire of it over the slave power aggrandizing war with Mexico; etc. Idle threats of secession were common throughout the history of the early Republic.
Only a very small percentage of southerners owned slaves.
Wrong and untrue. Such claims don't include the wives of slave owners, nor the children; indeed, they are quite disingenuous. Its funny to see you suckered in by this myth. Actual slave ownership in the South - counting wives and children as slave owners - ranged around 50% at any time. Of course this makes sense, since the average slave holding was 19-20 slaves. And of course remember, by 1860, four out of every nine Southerners was a slave; that makes slave holding ubiquitous and central to the Southern economy, culture, etc.
David T.,
You are exactly correct in your analysis.
Slag,
To the modern revisionist, it is this choice, yes. But to the participants, it was a choice between "Favoring the Confederacy's right to secede over slavery" and "Not favoring the Confederacy's right to secede over slavery."
No one is of course talking about the practitioner's viewpoint; we're discussing the modern perspective of the issue (indeed, to be frank, despite his bluster, so is Woods). And don't give me some fallacy of "historical essences" either.
To repeat: the war was over the secession and the secession was over slavery. I realize this chain of causality is too complex for revisionist ex-historians. Why it proves to be so difficult I cannot say.
One wonders, did I ever argue with this point? No. You are just making shit up. BTW, if you understood 1% of the modern historiography of the Civil War you would realize that very few make the claim that you claim they make. You are indeed arguing against a position which is a marginalized, minority view, just Mr. Woods is. You and he have to make strawmen to make your arguments look credible apparently.
