How the Cold War got started

Dick Morris talks in his video today about why the Cold War started. He relies heavily on Henry Kissinger's book Diplomacy. Watch the video here.

Cheap, politicized moralizing

At Investors Business Daily historian Victor Davis Hanson tells us that

There are lots of strange paradoxes in the current frenzied liberal dissection of past sins.

One, a historic figure must be near-perfect in all dimensions of his or her complex life to now pass progressive muster. That Jefferson is responsible for helping to establish many of the cherished human rights now enshrined in American life apparently cannot offset the transgression of having owned slaves.

Two, today's moral standards are always considered superior to those of the past. Ethical sense supposedly always improves with time.

However, would American society of 1915 have allowed a federally supported agency such as Planned Parenthood to cut apart aborted fetuses to sell infant body parts?

Ivy League enrollment figures suggest some of these universities have capped the number of Asian students. Is this really much different than the effort to curtail Jewish enrollment at Ivy League schools in the 1920s?

Three, the sins of the past were hardly all committed by racist, sexist, conservative white men.

...Applying the morality of the present in crude political fashion to ferret out the supposed race, class and gender immorality of the past is a tricky thing. Picking saints and sinners can boomerang in unexpected ways.

Will Democrats now also damn America's most openly racist president since the pre-Civil War era — the liberal saint Woodrow Wilson?

...The architect of Planned Parenthood was the feminist family planner Margaret Sanger. Shouldn't Planned Parenthood denounce Sanger's legacy, given her eugenics agenda that deliberately sought to focus abortions on minority communities?

...The past is not simplistic "gotcha" melodrama in which we convict figures of history by tabulating their sins on today's moral scorecards. Instead, history is tragedy. It is complex. Moral assessments are dicey. With some humility, we must balance past and current ethical standards, as well as the elements of the good and the bad present in every life.

We must avoid cheap, politicized moralizing that often tells more about the ethics and ignorance of today's grand inquisitors than their targets.

Read more here.

The Orwellian engine of groupthink

Victor Davis Hanson notes that

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.

...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.

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 toFranco 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.