By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
One of the most harrowing incidents in the Athenian
historian Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is the democratic debate
over the rebellious subject state of Mytilene on the distant island of Lesbos.
Thucydides uses his riveting account of the Athenian argument over the
islanders’ fate to warn his readers of the fickle nature of democracy.
Outraged by the revolt of the Mytileneans, the frenzied
Athenians suddenly assemble and vote to condemn all the adult males on the
island, regardless of the role any of them may have played in the revolt. They
are to be executed en masse for rebellion, on grounds of collective guilt. The
next day, however, cooler heads in Athens narrowly prevail. The radical demos
just as abruptly takes a second vote and withdraws its blanket death sentence
of the day before, voting instead to execute only 1,000 of the ringleaders of
the rebellion.
But what about the messenger ship that was dispatched
hours earlier to deliver the mass death sentence?
A second trireme is now sent off by the contrite
democracy with orders to the crew to row as fast as they can, in hopes of
delivering the reprieve in time. The relief vessel and its exhausted crew
arrive at Lesbos at the very moment that all the adult male islanders have been
lined up and are about to have their throats slit.
Thucydides uses the frightening story to warn of the wild
— and often dangerous — swings in public opinion innate to democratic culture.
The historian seems at times obsessed with these explosions of Athenian popular
passions, offering an even longer and more hair-raising account of popular mood
swings over invading Sicily. We forget sometimes that the Athenian democracy
that gave us Sophocles and Pericles also, in a fit of unhinged outrage,
executed Socrates by a majority vote of one of its popular courts.
American democracy has become increasingly Athenian, as
it periodically whips itself up into outbursts of frantic indignation. While
the government in theory still operates according to the checks and balances of
the Constitution, in reality, in the hyped Internet world of modern pop
culture, fevered passions can seize the majority of the population in a matter
of hours.
The idea of gay marriage in 2008 earned unapologetic
disapproval from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The liberal voters of
California twice rejected the idea in statewide plebiscites. But after years of
constant harangues in the media, boycotts, public ostracisms, and ad hominem
attacks on the integrity of skeptics, the liberal political establishment —
many of whose members are recipients of large amounts of cash from wealthy gay
donors — suddenly flipped.
A sort of collective hysteria took over from there. In
2008 there was common assent on the part of the Democratic party’s leadership
that the three-millennia-old belief that marriage involved different sexes
would prevail, while a separate rubric, “civil union,” would be invented for
homosexual couples. But by 2012 that notion was not merely outdated, but taboo.
Almost overnight, supporting the erstwhile Obama position of permitting civil
unions but rejecting gay marriage became tantamount to career suicide.
Ditto on illegal immigration. Barack Obama likewise swore
between 2008 and 2012 that he was no despot who by executive fiat could
legalize violations of immigration laws that had been passed by Congress. Yet
by 2015 anyone who would agree with Obama’s past vows is now rendered little
more than a nativist and xenophobe — so powerful is the Orwellian engine of
groupthink.
Take the Confederate-flag debate. What started out just
days ago as a reasonable move by the state of South Carolina, in the aftermath
of the Charleston mass shootings, to remove the Confederate battle flag from
public display on state property, within hours had descended into something
like the mob’s frenzy over Mytilene. We have now gone well beyond removing
state sanction from a flag that represented an apartheid society. Indeed,
Americans of the new electronic mob are witch-hunting the past with a
vengeance, as private, profit-driven companies seek to trump one another’s
piety by banning the merchandising of Confederate insignia. Meanwhile, our
versions of the ancient sophists and demagogues are hoping that the mob can
stay agitated long enough to go on to new targets, such as banning public
airings of Gone with the Wind or ending respect for public monuments of
prominent Confederate war dead.
At some point, the throng will exhaust itself, and
realize that while removing Confederate flags from state property was a
reasonable and overdue gesture, most of what followed was Mytilenean to the
core. Think of the contradictions that have already arisen from the mob frenzy.
One cannot today buy Confederate flags online, but one
can easily purchase Nazi insignia of the sort that flew over Auschwitz or the
hammer-and-sickle Communist banner that represented the Great Famine, forced
collectivization, and various cultural revolutions that led to 100 million
slaughtered or starved to death in the 20th century.
One can argue that the slave-owner Robert E. Lee fought
to perpetuate human bondage, but Lee never took delight in personally executing
without trial his ideological enemies, in the manner of the psychopathic,
pistol-toting Che Guevara, whose hip portraiture adorns all too many campus
dorm rooms.
Present politics mostly define the degree of past sin and
the appropriate punishments, as the revolutionary mob decides in an instant
which particular historical figure deserves the most immediate ostracism and
should be Trotskyized from our collective memory. Should we now remove the
racist Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill? Even in my small town in central
California there are schools named Jackson and Wilson. Apparently our
Depression-era educators thought that the one Democratic president was a
populist reformer, the other an idealistic internationalist. Yet both were
abject racists, at least as we understand the charge today. In fact, no
president of the 20th century disliked blacks in general and integration in
particular as much as the Southern segregationist Woodrow Wilson, although he
adroitly cloaked his racial hatred with a thin veneer of liberal academic
respectability as president of Princeton University and author of several
progressive tracts.
The writings and speeches of Margaret Sanger, founder of
what evolved into Planned Parenthood, trumped the biases of Wilson. Her
progressive version of eugenics fueled much of her family-planning agenda. She
saw reproductive rights as inseparable from discouraging the supposedly less
gifted (in her view, mostly non-whites) from having lots of children.
Should Al Gore give one of his trademark teary public
confessions and, in vein-bulging angst, apologize to blacks for misrepresenting
his senator father’s racist votes against civil-rights legislation? Should Bill
Clinton join Gore on the podium to feel our pain and say he is sorry that
regional Clinton–Gore campaign affiliates often plastered “Clinton–Gore ’92” on
the Confederate battle flag in an effort to get out the supposed redneck vote?
Will Hillary Clinton join in too and apologize for her 2008 declaration —
delivered during her heated, racialized primary struggle with Barack Obama —
that the polls showed “how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working
Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states
[Indiana and North Carolina, where primaries had just been held] who had not
completed college were supporting me.”
Planned Parenthood is as likely to disown its progenitor
as Princeton University is to change the name of the Wilson School of Public
and International Affairs — and as the Clintons are to publicly repent for
their past appeals to blue-collar whites. Apparently, on the one hand, we must
understand that there are inveterate haters and symbols of unrepentant racism
that should be excised from the body politic, and, on the other hand, there
remain well-meaning progressives of the past, who were unfortunately captives
of their times and said or wrote things (often spoken in the heat of passion,
or taken out of context today) that they did not quite mean. The record of the
latter group, according to modern liberal tastes, is unfortunate — but is
fortunately overshadowed by their greater liberal accomplishments.
Consequently, the mass hysteria against anything that reeks of past racism will
be carefully steered clear of monuments honoring the pro-segregationist J.
William Fulbright or former Klan leader Robert Byrd, or other liberal heroes
like the racist states’-righter but Watergate icon Senator Sam Ervin, who, 20
years before Watergate, authored “The Southern Manifesto,” which encouraged
opposition to the desegregation of schools.
There will be no liberal watchdog or enlightened
corporation that goes after the federally funded National Council of La Raza
for its racist nomenclature, which can be traced back to Franco and Mussolini.
We cannot properly damn the liberal Earl Warren or the progressive McClatchy
newspapers for their 1941 racial rah-rahing that helped convince the progressive
Roosevelt administration to implement the Japanese internment.
The damnation of past segregation by race does not extend
to censure of present segregation by race in campus dorms and meeting places.
No one cares much that the liberal racism that prompted Woodrow Wilson to
discourage blacks from attending his beloved Princeton logically continues with
the modern Ivy League university adjusting SAT scores and GPAs to ensure that
Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” in Princeton’s incoming class: In both
cases, utopian racialism by enlightened social engineers cannot be judged by
calcified notions of color-blind fairness.
These outbursts of public frenzy at supposed enemies may
reflect grassroots furor, but they are also orchestrated by progressive grandees
who are inconsistent in their targeting of history’s villains — offering
context and exemption for liberal fascist and racist thought, speech, and
iconography, while connecting their present-day political rivals to the
supposed sins of the country’s collective past. Manipulating the past, in other
words, becomes a useful tool by which one can change the present.
In another analysis, Thucydides reminds us, in regard to
the stasis at Corcyra, that in frenzied efforts to reconstruct both the past
and present to fit ideological agendas, “Words had to change their ordinary
meaning and to take that which was now given them.” So they do today, as the
mob makes the necessary adjustments in going from one obsession to the next.
