By Rich Lowry
Friday, November 18, 2016
President Barack Obama won’t explicitly say that Donald
Trump is on the wrong side of history, but surely he believes it.
The president basically thinks anyone who gets in his way
is transgressing the larger forces of history with a capital “H.” In 2008, he declared
John McCain “on the wrong side of history right now” (the “right now” was a
generous touch — allowing for the possibility that McCain might get right with
History at some future date).
Obama has returned to this phrase and argument
obsessively. It is deeply embedded in his, and the larger progressive, mind —
and indirectly contributed to the Left’s catastrophic defeat on November 8.
The notion that History takes sides is a distant cousin
to the Marxoid idea that we are on an inevitable path to socialism, and borrows
heavily from the (genuine and very hard-won) moral capital of the abolitionists
and civil-rights movement. Obama likes to quote Martin Luther King Jr. for the
proposition that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Whoever is
considered on “the wrong side of history” by the Left is always loosely
associated with the opprobrium of slavery and Jim Crow.
This means that progressives wield History as a weapon,
and make it an occasion for constant self-congratulation. But there is a
downside in the accompanying sense of smug inevitability that is off-putting at
best and blinkered and self-deluding at worst.
For the Left, History is not a vast, unpredictable,
untamable force, but has all the characteristics of a stereotypical Whole Foods
shopper. History reads the Huffington
Post, and follows Lena Dunham on Twitter. It really cares whether
transgender people get to use the appropriate bathroom. History was probably
hanging out at the Javits Center on election night, and collapsed into a puddle
of tears right around the time Wisconsin was called.
The political dangers of this point of view should now be
obvious:
It assumes that certain classes of people are retrograde.
Why would Democrats bother to try to appeal to working-class white voters if
they are stamped with the disapproval of History?
It becomes a warrant for all manner of overreach. History
evidently favored trying to get nuns to sign up for contraceptives they didn’t
want and forcing small business to bake cakes for gay weddings.
And, if History is thought to have an ascendant electoral
coalition (and a hell of a data operation), it creates an unjustified sense of
political inevitability. This is what the theorists of the “emerging Democratic
majority,” and most pundits on the left, bought into.
All that said, the evidence was pretty good for the
proposition that welfare-state programs, once ensconced, could never be
reversed and therefore must enjoy the approval of History. This assumption
pervaded the Obamacare debate. Senator Harry Reid lambasted Republicans for not
“joining us on the right side of history” and compared them — of course — to
defenders of slavery.
In retrospect, History might not have been so enamored of
sprawling legislation based on faulty economic premises. When Republicans pass
a repeal bill, it will constitute the most significant rollback of the welfare
state ever.
Another progressive assumption is that the nation-state
is bound to decline, as supranational institutions like the European Union grow
and cross-border migrations increase. In a trip to Germany in April, President
Obama deemed Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming a massive wave of migrants as
“on the right side of history.” Never mind that its recklessness has caused a
backlash that is still brewing. Obama believed the same of his own
latitudinarian views on immigration, apparently never imagining people might
consider it progress to tighten our borders rather than render them more
porous.
Now, a president who so confidently associated himself
and his cause with the tide of the future has presided over a political wipeout
that will send much of his legacy into the dustbin. If nothing else, History
has a keen sense of humor.
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