Readers here know that I have a Whiggish view of history. It's not the cool position to take because it could be characterized as a celebration of mostly dead, rich, white guys, so historians like the Beards and Howard Zinn would tell me I have it all
wrong. Nor is it a particularly intellectually respectable position since Herbert Butterfield's taking the Whig historians out to the woodshed in 1931.
But I stand by my Whiggishness because I take the long view, and because I do believe that there is meaning in history, that it is an unfolding drama, and that it has a point. And that while the 19th Century Whig historians got in wrong in the details, they got it basically right in the broad strokes. For Whig is a name we give to what I see as the particular Anglo-American manifestation of a transcultural, trans-historical archetypal impulse. Professional historians aren't allowed to talk like that.
For the archetypal Whig impulse in history is found wherever there is a movement
forward effected by flawed humans in historically ambiguous
circumstances usually against intense opposition of the archetypal Tories. It is driven by those spirits who, while they are men and women of
their times, still in some small part transcend their times, and in
doing so move everyone else forward, whether they want to move forward
or not.
Whig history is about Moses vs. the Egyptians, Socrates vs. the pious burghers of Athens, the early Christians vs. the Romans, Luther and later Galileo vs. the Roman Church, the Puritans vs. the Stuarts, the American founders vs. King George, the abolitionists vs. the slaveholders, the turn-of-the-century progressives vs. concentrated corporate power. It's the story of human growth in individuality and freedom. It's the story of science and critical thinking, and all the ways in which human beings have moved the ball forward against the opposition posed by entrenched power and entrenched thinking.
In each of these conflicts, both sides had respectable arguments; had you lived at the time, it would have been easy to see it from both sides–and difficult to choose sides. For the moderate of temperament, it would have been easier to see the flaws and shortcomings of the Whigs in these conflicts, and to sympathize with the Tories. Or to put it another way, Charles I was a S.O.B, but so was Cromwell. If it were only a question of choosing personalities, you wouldn't have much to work with. The abolitionists might have been insufferably sanctimonious, but they were right. Had you lived at the time, would you have resisted their arguments because you disliked their style?
If you consider yourself a moderate now, chances are, had you lived then, that you would have been more comfortable with the white supremacist conventional thinking than with abolitionist thinking. Conventional thinking is almost always proved wrong in such conflicts. It's not a question of personalities; it's not a question of who is likable and who isn't. It's a question of who, on balance, is moving the ball forward, and who is opposing that movement. And the people of each generation have to ask themselves which side are they on.
Cromwell might have been an awful human being, but he was on the right side of history. The fact is that a Puritan/Whig-driven England was politically precocious in the way it moved the ball forward in the 1600s, and American Whigs,
following suit, pushed what the English began to its logical
conclusion a century later. And since then pretty much any country with
any level of political maturity has caught up. That's progress, that's movement forward, and I make no apologies for being a "progressive" in that Whiggish sense, no matter how morally ambiguous each of these steps forward might have been, or how unlikable or unsavory some of the Whigs who effected these movements. It's not a question of purity, it's a question of whether, on balance, these people moved the ball forward, and we know who did and we know who opposed them.
So when we look back to our founders this Fourth of July weekend, I do so with gratitude. Sure, Jefferson was the first limousine liberal, and Hamilton the first bankster. Adams was a petty egomaniac. Washington was ridiculously vain and obsessed about his reputation, and the Franklin who spent the first part of his life wearing a leather apron spent the last part obsessed about being a "gentleman". They were racist, patriarchal, vain, etc., etc., None of them cared much about the little guy. But none of us completely
transcends our acculturation, and so it's ridiculous to expect that our
founders would have or to judge them by anachronistic standards. They were in so many ways men of their times with all the baggage that comes with that, but they moved the ball forward; they were on the right side of history, and we owe them a lot.
As founders, they laid the foundation, and it has been up to those who followed to build on it. And so those who followed either took the founders foundational ideas about equality and freedom and expanded them, or they fought against expanding them. The forces of opposition throughout the history of the West have always
had the same basic configuration–entrenched wealth and power allied
with the change-averse mentality of the appetitive, the complacent, and
the fearful. In other words the people who fear that they will lose more
than they will gain do everything they can to resist history's moving forward. It's pretty
basic. And entrenched power and wealth has always been clever about
enlisting conventional thinking and traditional values to support its
agenda. We've seen it over and over and over again in this country, and we're seeing it now in the Tea Party movement.
And this is the point that I want to make today. Since the founders did their thing, the ball has been moved significantly forward. The Founders did their part in their day, the Abolitionists did their part in their day, the turn-of-the-century Progressives and muckrakers did their part, and FDR and the New Deal Democrats did their part in the mid 20th Century. None of these did anything more than to do their limited part for their particular time in history. What the founders thought in 1787 is not sacrosanct. It was a good beginning; it wasn't the end. They did their job and accomplished what they could in their day, now those of us who carry the Whig impulse have to do our job in our day.
And it's by this logic that I would argue that the Tea Party folks, for all their celebration of the founders and the revolutionary rabble rousers, have it all wrong. Whatever the reasons for the revolutionary generation to be obsessed about taxes and tyranny in their day, those reasons have little relevance to our situation now. The situation we confront now is utterly different, and the power that must be fought against now did not exist then. Government isn't the enemy, concentrated corporate wealth and power is. And the weaker Tea Partiers make the government, the more vulnerable they make themselves to be oppressed in the long run by concentrated corporate wealth and power. Government is the only tool that can save them–and the rest of us.
The goal is not to weaken the government, but to take it back from its
co-optation by the Big Money Boyz. The Tea Party people are right to be upset about Obama's tight relationship with Wall Street, with the Insurance companies, with big oil, and who knows who else. It's dismayingly clear that the Democrats are as co-opted by Big Money as the Republicans. But Tea Partiers have to realize that this co-optation of the government by these interests is the consequence of policies initiated by Reagan which have not beem effectively resisted by Whigs in the last thirty years.
And now Ron and Rand Paul are simply not the answer. They and their followers may correctly understand the problem, but their Libertarian solutions will move the ball backward to the late 19th century when government pretty much let the Big Money Boyz do as they please. We've already figured out that doesn't work; we've already moved the ball past that. Libertarians and Tea Partiers are advocating policies that will push us back, even if they think they are moving the ball forward. They are sincere, many of them, but they are unwittingly supporting the agenda of the forces of opposition to the progressive Whig spirit about which I speak. We need a 21st Whig solution, not a 19th–and especially not an 18th century one.
Human beings and their motivations are complex, and so are the forces
driving historical change. But it really does come down to whether we as
individuals are, on balance, on the side of moving the ball forward or opposing that movement. We have to cut through all the rhetoric and
political posturing and moral ambiguity and wonkish policy fine points
and ideological thinking and ask ourselves: Who are the people in our day that are moving the ball forward? Who are opposing that movement forward? Which side are you on?
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