Paleos distort history

Excerpt from here  (For those who are unaware of it, Jacobins were extremists of the French revolution)

Nor do I understand the fashion among self-styled paleo-conservatives to conflate the expansion of Western values—which imperialism used to do, whether Athenian, Roman, Holy Roman, Crusader, Portuguese, Spanish, French, British, or American—with “Jacobinism.” Was Charlemagne a Jacobin? Cortez? Kipling?  President George W. Bush, they say, is one for sure, though I personally was unaware that anyone in Crawford, Texas, had ever heard of such a thing.

But paleocons can sniff out a Jacobin as witchfinder generals once discerned witches. The paleos froth at any mention of the word Jacobin and use it as a self-mesmerizing, all-purpose sneer and slur. It has become for them what “fascist” was for the Left—a nervous tic that leads them to the most ahistorical absurdities.

For example, columnist Paul Craig Roberts avers: “The new emerging America is Jacobin. Its will to power has cast off restraint. Its inherent and unique virtue gives it the right—Bush says the duty—to exercise unlimited power in the name of enforcing American values elsewhere in the world.” Well, Britain used to take upon itself the moralistic right to close down slave traders in Africa, outlaw widow burning in India, and impose its values around the world under the banner of Rule Britannia, but would Roberts call the British Empire of Lord Salisbury and Queen Victoria, of Nelson’s navy and Wellington’s army, “Jacobin”? Constantine took on the right or duty “to exercise unlimited power in the name of enforcing” the Nicene Creed throughout the diverse peoples of the Roman Empire. Was he a Jacobin?

Another paleocon, Professor Claes Ryn, rails against the “imperialistic personality” and “new imperialistic ego” that “is shrugging free of the old American self and corresponding constitutional restraints,” which, he tells us, he sees both in the ill-behaved children at his neighborhood McDonald’s and in the “neo-Jacobins shaping U.S. foreign policy.”

Professors seem to have a particular affinity for this sort of nonsense, perhaps because they spend their days lecturing captive student audiences and can count on those students not knowing any history. But self-restraint and humility, such as these paleocons seem to imagine as the defining feature of some prelapsarian American past, would not be the first words that come to mind in describing the America that had no time for tolerating Indians and the 1763 Proclamation Line; whose founders wrote eagerly of an American empire that would be greater in extent, power, and wealth than Britain’s; that practiced mob violence (and war) to throw off its loyalty to the most liberal monarchy of its time because of an unwillingness to pay taxes for a war fought on its behalf; that annexed Spanish Florida; that forced the Louisiana Purchase and ignored arguments that it was unconstitutional; that invaded British Canada; that promulgated a doctrine (the Monroe) that laid claim to determining the political makeup of two continents; that ripped huge states from Mexico and declared them its own; and so on.

America’s “imperialistic personality” or “ego” is not new; it was here from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson referred to America as an “empire of liberty.” Some might remember textbooks that called the expansion of that empire America’s (self-assumed) Manifest Destiny, which extended all the way to helping our “little brown brothers” in the Philippines. This was not Jacobinism. And nor is the foreign policy of President Bush.

In fact, as John Lewis Gaddis points out in his elegant essay on American foreign policy, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, the national-security policy of President Bush is in fact the traditional American response to external threats. If, in John Quincy Adams’s famous phrase, America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, America nonetheless has never hesitated to send bayonets against monsters that might someday pose a threat.

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, June 1, 2005 at 10:38 AM in Conservatism
Comments (7) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Next entry: Assessing the state of EU-topia

Previous entry: Two hundred and forty-one comments and counting …