We’ve heard a great deal lately about the “wrong side of history.” It is one of the president’s favorite ways to describe whatever side he isn’t on, and it’s been a phrase on the lips of progressives for quite a while. Among the myriad problems with the notion of a “wrong side of history,” as many critics (including me) have long argued, is that in the domestic sphere it is a call for one’s opponents to surrender to the inevitability of defeat, and in the international sphere it is deployed rhetorically to avoid deploying anything real.
So, for example, on the home front, liberals insist that opponents of same-sex marriage should give up now because they are sure to lose eventually. And on the international stage, when Barack Obama castigates Vladimir Putin for being on the wrong side of history, what he’s really saying is, “Don’t worry, we don’t need to do anything, History and her long moral arc will do the heavy lifting for us.” No wonder the British historian Robert Conquest complained that the phrase has a “Marxist twang.”
Still, there’s an implicit assumption that things have been going in the right direction for a very long time and that there’s no reason to believe they will have a serious course correction in the future. It’s always comforting to believe that the unfolding evolution of the universe is your co-pilot. Unfortunately, not only was Yogi Berra right when he said that predictions are hard, “especially about the future”; it turns out that predictions about the past are hard, too. For any prediction of how the future will unfold is really an implied statement about how you think the past will — and should — be understood. All arguments about politics, in the grandest sense of the word, are arguments about what constitutes a “usable past,” in Van Wyck Brooks’s famous phrase.
We are all familiar with the idea that what we do today has consequences tomorrow. There is no shortage of high-school-yearbook-ready quotations on this subject. But the present can change the past as much as it changes the future. And while I don’t quite mean this in a literal way, I don’t mean it entirely figuratively either.
For instance, for several generations, 1917 loomed as one of the most significant dates of the 20th century. When the Soviet Union was a going enterprise, expanding its borders and sowing mischief and doubt within ours, it was an open question whether the future belonged to Marxism-Leninism of one sort or another. That made the year of the Bolshevik Revolution incredibly relevant. But when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, suddenly 1917 became less important. Of course, it didn’t lose all significance, but its grip on the present and the future no longer occupied our attention in the same way.
Or consider September 11, 2001. On that day, or shortly thereafter, we all swung our telescopes to a different historical horizon. Suddenly 1923 (the year the Ottoman Empire disappeared) and 1932 (the year the Wahhabis solidified their control of Saudi Arabia) shot up the rankings of the most significant dates of the 20th century. Many of us cleared space on our bookshelves to accommodate our new reading lists, replacing dusty tomes on Communism with books about Islam. In the blink of an eye, Sayyid Qutb nudged aside Karl Marx in our pocket demonologies for the same reason.
This is what the philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood was getting at when he remarked that “every new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to old questions, must revise the questions themselves.” Or as The American Interest’s Adam Garfinkle once put it, “What interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present.”
Consider Barack Obama’s plight. I think it is fair to say that the president subscribes — or at least that he did until recently — to two complementary narratives about the past. The first is that America has historically done more to harm the world than to help it. His intellectual roots are solidly within what Jeane Kirkpatrick dubbed the “blame-America-first crowd.”
The second narrative flows from the first; it states that our problems in the Middle East are the consequence of George W. Bush’s Iraq War, which was itself the climax of the first narrative. In countless speeches — in Berlin as a candidate, in his first inaugural, in Cairo, in his announcement of the Afghan troop surge, in his commencement address at West Point, etc. — Obama has laid out a vision, or at least a version, of the world in which, if we stopped overreacting to jihadism, jihadism would stop overreacting to us.