Perspective

     Sometimes it takes a long time to get the import of what a wise elder was saying.

     It’s been observed, by many other commentators, that the Left is fond of using the law, including the Supreme Law, the Constitution of the United States, to defend its own prerogatives, but is willing to have the law endlessly bent – I believe “reinterpreted” is the current phrase – to advance its initiatives, regardless of the law’s explicit terms. Needless to say (though, as always, I shall say it anyway), this is deplorable and indefensible in a nation that’s supposedly founded on explicit laws.

     I was reading Eugene Volokh’s commentary on NancyMacLean’s book Democracy in Chains, a seemingly tendentious, hyper-politicized treatise on the late James Buchanan – the economist, not the president – when something a high school American history teacher said came back to mind.

     That teacher opened our eleventh-grade American history class by telling us that the approach to American history taken by other teachers is to frame the subject as “good guys versus bad guys” in an ongoing struggle over who would control the U.S.’s federal government. In connection with this proposition, he noted that the typical eleventh-year American history course treats the period from 1921 through 1928, when Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were presidents, as a time when “the bad guys were in power.” Of course, they treat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s assumption of the presidency as the return to power of the “good guys.”

     Our teacher’s approach was quite different. He stated that the underlying theme of the course as he intended to teach it would be the eternal question of whether Man is basically good or basically evil. And indeed, he returned to that question on numerous occasions, in connection with the great controversies that animated American political discourse at various times.

     I puzzled over that orientation, being only fourteen years old and barely acquainted with the study of history. But if we note the attitude of the “progressive” Left in our time, and compare it to the “good guys versus bad guys” approach to American history, the parallels become all but overwhelming.

     For the contemporary Left is overt in its claims that it is the possessor of unquestionably superior wisdom and virtue. They’re the “good guys.” Moreover, that virtue entitles the Left to do anything and everything that would conduce to their aims – most especially, getting back into federal hegemony. Slander? Disruptions? Intimidation? Violence? Outright defiance of the law? These things are quite all right, the Left will tell you, in a Leftward cause.

     Needless to say, the tactics the Left allows itself are absolutely forbidden to us in the Right. We’re the “bad guys,” and the bad guys must be fought with every tool at the Left’s disposal, including the strict terms of the law.

     My old teacher’s focus on whether Man is fundamentally good or evil throws a harsh light onto such pretensions. He who claims that no moral constraints apply to him has arrogated the position of the Supreme Lawgiver, God Himself. Correct me if I’m wrong – I am rather old, and my memories of remote events can be a bit cloudy – but wasn’t that what Lucifer wanted?

     How much of the Left’s current self-apotheosis derives from the “good guys versus bad guys” orientation of teachers of high school American history? Of course we can’t answer such a question definitively. Nevertheless, the parents of high school age children should converse with them regularly about what’s being told them in their “Global Studies” classes. You might hear a few things to get your ears prickling.

     I owe that old American history teacher more than I ever knew.