A New Thanksgiving Tradition

"Conservatives" (if by which you mean, apologizers for genocide) have taken up a new Thanksgiving tradition; defending their white ancestors from slanderous claims that they were somehow responsible for what was presumably the entirely unintentional killing of millions of Native Americans (via Sadly, No!):

Columbus Day? The start of a vicious subjugation. A Denver Columbus Day parade was marred last year by protesters who threw fake blood and dismembered dolls along the parade route.

Plymouth Rock? Weren’t the Native Americans here first after all? The 400th anniversary of the landing at Jamestown was renamed from celebration to “commemoration” in 2007 because “so many facets of Jamestown’s history are not cause for celebration.”

Medved, a passionate but not blind patriot, argues that our kids and the rest of us are being fed a tendentious history that wildly exaggerates the offenses of European settlers. The notion that “America Was Founded on Genocide Against Native Americans” cannot withstand scrutiny.

Like racism, genocide is a word that has lost its meaning through promiscuous overuse. Medved reminds us that the international “Genocide Convention” defines genocide as an act or acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.” In the clash of civilizations between European settlers and Native Americans, millions died. But the overwhelming majority of those deaths were attributable to diseases carried involuntarily by Europeans and spread to natives who had no natural immunities to these pathogens. That is a tragedy, but not a crime.

What of those smallpox-infested blankets that have received so much press? Medved examines the evidence and concludes “The endlessly recycled charges of biological warfare rest solely on controversial interpretations of two unconnected and inconclusive incidents 74 years apart.”

There were terrible injustices and massacres committed by Europeans against Native Americans and some running the other way as well. The more technologically advanced civilization prevailed — which is the usual course in human affairs. But the current fashion to distort that history into something like a war crime is, to say the least, overstated.

So essentially, if it can be proven that some white settlers somewhere didn't actually pass diseased blankets onto Natives, then clearly, they have no complicity in the fact that millions of Natives died in the process of having their land taken away from them.

This is beyond ridiculous. No one with half a brain who's ever read even one high school history textbook thinks that European colonists and their American (north and south) descendants didn't deliberately and purposefully take the land away from the people already living here, enslaving and killing them in the process. That's because that's obviously what happened, and only a fool can possibly argue otherwise. Only a tiny minority think that these settlers have any complicity for what were unintentional (though certainly not unwelcome) deaths of millions by virulent diseases like smallpox, and so arguing against such beliefs and proving that they didn't happen doesn't somehow also undermine the proposition that what took place is what we now would certainly refer to as genocide and ethnic cleansing. There are simply no other words appropriate to describe the brutal enslavement, mass murder, relocation and constant warfare that followed for hundreds of years after the settling of the New World.

Also, to describe this process as the "usual course of human affairs" is to demean the scale of what happened. Nowhere in the course of human history were two entire continents subjugated in the matter of a few centuries, with tens of millions killed in the process and hundreds of separate and entire cultures destroyed forever. There is nothing that has ocurred or could occur today that can possibly compare, short of the invasion of our planet by a "technologically advanced civilization" that results in the conquest of the world and the deaths of millions or billions of people. 

Now, one can argue that our ancestors were not particularly enlightened by our standards and so were only doing what they believed to be right or permissable. But this isn't the argument that Mona Charen is making. Instead she is playing a more traditional game, of downplaying the significance of what happened and deriding those who whine about the injustice of entire peoples being obliterated from the Earth. 

But why? Why take this holiday to write a column to say that essentially the destruction of the Native peoples of the New World wasn't really so bad? White conservatives like Charen feel the need to defend the traditional narrative that has supported the myth of American exceptionalism, as well as the pre-eminence of whites in that myth. To acknowledge the incredible injustice that was done to native inhabitants might cause someone to think about the deplorable conditions some Natives live in today, which might then imply that something must be done about that condition, which might then also imply that white privilege has not served to benefit all members of society, which might further imply that someone other than descendents of the people who destroyed Native societies should be running the show. I over-simplify to make my point, but no one more jealously defends power than those who fear they might be losing it and someone who feels the need to write a column explaining why the conquest of the New World wasn't so bad is insecure indeed. 

Here's the deal: neither myself nor nobody I know wants to make anybody who happens to be descended of European conquerers (as I am in part) feel guilty while they're hefting that turkey leg to their face. We just want everyone, conservatives included, to acknowledge that what happened to the Native Americans, who died horrible deaths in the millions, whose civilizations and cultures were brutalized and destroyed, and whose land was taken from them as they were driven to near extinction, was really, really horrible. Why? Yes, so you'll pay attention to the conditions that many Natives find themselves in today. But also because a nation that acknowledges its mistakes and flaws is a humble nation, a nation that is more likely to act with restraint and consideration and less likely to act out of arrogance, hubris, or a desire for power. Why I would think that those traits are ones we would like to avoid these days is something you can probably figure out on your own.

Interesting Stuff

Because our focus has primarily been on the elections and all that entails, there are several items I've wanted to blog about but haven't had time to. So here I'll try to hit them all at once.

First, here's an interesting piece from Newsweek on the "flexitarian", which is sort of a hybrid between the vegetarian and the full-on meat eater. Given the unsustainability of factory farming and our meat-eating practices, any effort to reduct the amount of meat we eat is a good thing. And it has the benefit of reducing the suffering of animals consigned to factory farms. This should be the primary purpose in my opinion, but I realize that most Americans either don't care or aren't aware of how much suffering animals endure to produce cheap meat, dairy products and eggs. So despite the claim of a strident PETA official in the article that eating less meat is "beating one pig down the slaughter ramp instead of two" (as if the suffering of one less animal is something to be dismissed) I'm all for people simply doing the best they can to eat less meat. Change takes time.

Also, via Slashdot, Live Science has an article about a novel theory of the universe, that we live in a "cosmic bubble" that is simply one tiny part of an infinitely larger universe, a theory that provides an alternative explanation to dark matter for why our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. In short, our under-density part of the universe would warp space-time differently than the typically dense part of the universe we're observing when we look at things like quasars that are billions of light years distant; that warp then provides the illusion that those objects are rushing away from us at fantastic speeds. Honestly, I don't know if that's any crazier than the universe being comprised mostly of matter we can neither see no detect (or can we?) but there you go.

Speaking of all things dark, Slashdot has another interesting post on Google's efforts to make the "dark web" searchable. The dark web consist of things like PDF files and or scanned documents (like reports and academic papers) that now do not show up in search results. An even greater wealth of information may be at your fingertips soon.

PRI's The World has a good series of radio articles called "How Wars End." Amateur students of history such as myself, as well as the public at large, have acquired various myths about how wars in our history have ended. PRI, in interviews with historians, complicates our myths to some extent. There are several examples, but I found the one on the end of our civil war to be the most interesting. Most people presume that the war ended all at once that fateful day in April 1865 at Appomattox, and amateur historians like myself are aware that Lee turned down the idea of an insurgency that would drag the war on even longer. But the true story is a little more nuanced. It's not that greater facts are uncovered; rather, it's our understanding of the war's end that should be modified. Though there was no unified insurgency during the occupation and reconstruction of the South, southerners certainly did resist occupation with force, committing acts of terror against emancipated blacks and attacking northern forces. Twelve years of political violence eventually sapped the will of northern politicians to continue occupying the south, but even then the violence did not end, as acts of terror were perpetrated against blacks all the way up until and through the civil rights era. Again, this picture doesn't really present any new facts so much as it challenges our understanding of the end of the civil war, as well as the nature of insurgencies themselves. I recommend listening to the program in full.

Also, by now you've no doubt heard of the numerous instances of wrongly convicted men being freed in Dallas County by virtue of DNA testing. This is the direct result of Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins having launched an ambitious program to review hundreds of convictions to determine if men and women were wrongly convicted. However, not all District Attorneys and law enforcement agencies are as eager to expose or rectify their mistakes. Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that will determine whether convicted criminals have a constitutional right to DNA testing that could prove their innocence. The Ninth Court of Appeals said they do; we'll see what the Supreme Court has to say about that.

Also, the NY Times reported on Monday (feels like two weeks ago) that Afghan officials likely aided the Taliban in an attack on an American outpost in July that was very nearly overrun. This is yet another sign of the increasing nastiness of the war in Afghanistan, though it should hardly come as a surprise that some in the Afghan government (at the local level, or perhaps higher) have loyalties hostile to the Karzai government and our forces.

Hype

You've probably heard the story about the massive panic inspired by Orson Welles' legendary 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds. Professor Michael J. Socolow says it just didn't happen the way everybody thinks it did (via Nick Gillespie at Hit & Run):

The "War of the Worlds" broadcast remains enshrined in collective memory as a vivid illustration of the madness of crowds and the deeply invasive nature of broadcasting. The program seemingly proved that radio could, in the memorable words of Marshall McLuhan, turn "psyche and society into a single echo chamber." The audience's reaction clearly illustrated the perils of modernity. At the time, it cemented a growing suspicion that skillful artists — or incendiary demagogues — could use communications technology to capture the consciousness of the nation. It remains the prime example used by media critics, journalists, and professors to prove the power of the media.

Yet the media are not as powerful as most think, and the real story behind "The War of the Worlds" is a bit more complex. The panic was neither as widespread nor as serious as many have believed at the time or since.

Nobody died of fright or was killed in the panic, nor could any suicides be traced to the broadcast. Hospital emergency-room visits did not spike, nor, surprisingly, did calls to the police outside of a select few jurisdictions. The streets were never flooded with a terrified citizenry. Ben Gross, the radio columnist of the New York Daily News, later remembered a "lack of turmoil in front of CBS" that contrasted notably with the crowded, chaotic scene inside the building. Telephone lines in New York City and a few other cities were jammed, as the primitive infrastructure of the era couldn't handle the load, but it appears that almost all the panic that evening was as ephemeral as the nationwide broadcast itself, and not nearly as widespread. That iconic image of the farmer with a gun, ready to shoot the aliens? It was staged for Life magazine.

Socolow blames a media that fell in love with the story, Welles' own tendencies towards self-aggrandizement, and a really bad telephone survey. Revise your collective memory accordingly.

Judges Are Not Good Historians

Or, more accurately, Supreme Court Justices are not inclined to be good historians, as this LA Times article explains:

This year the Supreme Court relied more than ever on history and the original meaning of the Constitution in deciding its major cases.

In doing so, however, the court has drawn criticism from some historians and legal experts who say the justices' readings of history were less than scholarly. And the justices sometimes disagreed sharply on the historical record, demonstrating that divining the original meaning of the Constitution is no small matter.

The court's new focus on history drew the attention -- and some snide blog postings -- of legal historians who faulted the justices for selectively citing cases and writings to bolster their favored view.

"Neither of the two main opinions in Heller would pass muster as serious historical writing," Stanford University historian Jack Rakove wrote on a blog called Balkinization.

Neither Scalia nor Stevens is a "competent historian," University of Texas at Austin professor Sanford Levinson wrote in another Balkinization posting. Their work is "what is sometimes called 'law-office history,' in which each side engages in shamelessly (and shamefully) selective readings of the historical record in order to support what one suspects are predetermined positions."

Here's more from the Levinson post, which I read when it was published:

If one had any reason to believe that either Scalia or Stevens was a competent historian, then perhaps it would be worth reading the pages they write. But they are not. Both opinions exhibit the worst kind of “law-office history,” in which each side engages in shamelessly (and shamefully) selective readings of the historical record in order to support what one strongly suspects are pre-determined positions. And both Scalia and Stevens treat each other—and, presumably, their colleagues who signed each of the opinions—with basic contempt, unable to accept the proposition, second nature to professional historians, that the historical record is complicated and, indeed, often contradictory. Justice Stevens, for example, writes that anyone who reads the text of the Second Amendment and its history, plus a murky 1939 decision of the Court, will find “a clear answer” to the question of whether the Second Amendment supports a “right to possess and use guns for nonmilitary purposes.” This is simply foolish. Justice Stevens pays no real attention to a plethora of first-rate historical work written over the past decade that challenges this kind of foolish self-confidence, as is true also of Justice Scalia. There is no serious discussion, for example, of Saul Cornell’s fine book A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control, but many other examples could be offered, from various sides of the ideological spectrum.

Both Scalia and Stevens manifest what is worst about Supreme Court rhetoric, which is precisely the tone of sublime confidence when addressing even the most complex of issues. The late Victoria Geng once wrote a marvelous parody of Supreme Court decisions in which, among other things, the Court announced that “nature is more important than nurture.” We wouldn’t take such a declaration seriously. It is not clear why we should take much more seriously the kinds of over-confident declarations as to historical meaning that both Scalia and Stevens indulge in.

Ouch. Of course, the nature of the legal profession encourages bold pronouncements of the historical record even where such confidence is completely unwarranted. It is natural for all people to pick the strongest arguments for their position while minimizing or ignoring the rest, but the legal profession raises this to a high art. Lawyers are trained to pick the strongest precedent and make a case for why it should be followed, while dismissing or minimizing (but not ignoring) adverse precedent, even when that adverse precedent is obviously more compelling. This makes for clever legal arguments, but it also makes for terrible historical analysis. Historians are of course no more neutral than you and I, but at least the historical profession values highly the goal of neutrality; historians are taught to seek the one correct answer, and where there can be no such assurances, to acknowledge that the historical record permits no easy answers. A historian who cherry-picks from the historical record to arrive at a pre-determined conclusion is a poor historian indeed, but such a trait is highly valued in the lawyer.

Unfortunately, Supreme Court Justices seem to be unaware of the differences in the two professions. Assured of their own rightness, and encouraged by the nature of legal argument and writing, they draft opinions and dissents which, as Levinson states, adopt a "tone of sublime confidence" that is frequently completely unwarranted, at least when it comes to questions of legal history. One must be given to wonder the value of an opinion that is founded on such shaky historical ground, but to the Supreme Court, I suppose it is the tone of complete confidence that matters the most.

The Battle for History

If you know anything about history (the subject, not specific facts of) you know that the study of history ("historiography") has long been defined by academics by the understanding of the works of two of the world's greatest historians, Herodotus' "The Histories" and Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War." Anyone who has taken a college course on world history has probably heard the now long accepted tenet that both works represented two very different approaches to history, with Herodotus representing the "narrative" (and hence unreliable) style which seeks to survey history as widely as possible and where the author makes few judgments about what is or isn't reliable, authoritative or authentic. The work of Thucydides has come to represent the opposite approach, the neutral and "scientific" study of history where the historian seeks to understand all sides of a historical question and makes judgments about what is or is not reliable, leading the student or reader to natural conclusions regarding an historical event. Of course, as with any explanation or analogy that provides or easily leads to a "black and white" understanding, the truth is more nuanced. An effort has been underway for decades now to ressurect the reputation of Herodotus as a true historian, as well as to shine some light on the true nature of Thucydides' work. A new review by Peter Green in the New York Review of Books cast some light on both of these trends. The study of history has itself evolved over the last hundred or so years, and surprisingly, modern methods have come to mirror the approach of Herodotus:

That current trends in historiography echo, to a quite remarkable extent, the methods and assumptions of Herodotus is undeniable. The widespread use of social and ethnographic anthropology as an investigative tool is only the most obvious instance. Herodotus' observations about different customs and cultures—which in fact take up the greater part of the first half of the Histories, as he surveyed the various regions of the Persian empire—make him a groundbreaking anthropologist. Personal motivation (as opposed to abstract trends) and the influence of women in public affairs are very much back in the picture. The new understanding of oral transmission provides a satisfying answer to those who dismissed Herodotean anecdotes as mere crowd-pleasing digressions, and sheds fresh light on his careful evidential distinction between seeing (opsis) and hearsay (akoê). Many of the Persians, despite belonging to the Barbarian Other, come off with honor and dignity in his pages, even during the final narrative of Xerxes' invasion. Such insatiable and open-minded curiosity about the unfamiliar, including one's (undemonized) enemies, got him labeled philobarbaros by Plutarch, but today counts strongly in his favor.

In other words, an ethnographic approach to history that was dismissed as unreliable in college courses I took only ten years ago, has actually in recent decades become a valuable tool to modern historians (as it should, as in truth historians and anthropologists study the same thing, only at different times.)

Academics, for all the criticism about their lives in crystal towers above the frays of modern men and women, are actually extremely sensitive to political changes (as they are either in the leading forefront of such change, the elite of conventional political society, or the victims of political change.) Thucydides approach to history, with his focus on war as the dynamic for change and the central role of "great men" of history, was appealing to the imperalists and monarchists historians and philosophers of the 17th, 18th and 19th centures:

During the past half-century, however, Thucydides' almost superhuman reputation has come under severe critical scrutiny, while Herodotus' stock has correspondingly risen—a fact to which Robert Strassler's new Landmark volume of translation and commentary bears substantial witness. The change does little more than belatedly reflect a fundamental revolution in Western cultural values that has taken place during the last two hundred years. Greece, in particular the Athenian democratic ideal, only came to be privileged over Rome after the Greek, French, and American revolutions gave imperialism a decidedly shopworn look. Thucydides' main virtue for the seventeenth-century monarchist Thomas Hobbes had been that "he made me realize how silly is democracy." (This is hardly surprising. For true democracy Thucydides had no more time than did that aristocratic intellectual Plato; he welcomed the authoritarianism implicit in Pericles' de facto rule as first citizen, and his favorite acknowledged form of government was in fact a limited oligarchy.) The swing toward idealistic republicanism was further developed in the English-speaking world by the banker George Grote's unprecedentedly liberal History of Greece, published in twelve volumes between 1846 and 1856, which praised not only democracy but the Sophists as the true heralds of freedom.

This was the most radical change in Western assumptions about the ancient world since the Renaissance, and it prepared the ground for many other changes. Alexander the Great, for example, hitherto looked up to as the imperialist conqueror par excellence, now had to have his career of conquest explained and justified as a crusade designed to bring Hellenic culture to the benighted East (Victorian missionary work in Africa and Polynesia helped to support this view of him). The century-long struggle by feminists from the suffragette movement onward meant that eventually their automatic exclusion from the Thucydidean historiographical canon would be seriously questioned. Later still, first post-colonialism and then globalization meant a vast change—not always appreciated for what it was, or even, sometimes, noticed—in assumptions made about both other nations and one's own when studying the historical evolution of ancient society.

So, as our political climate changes, so too does the political thought of the academics changes. As the History Channel is a testement to, the preferred focus of the amateur (and presumably male) historian is on war and the power of individual men to sway the course of world events. But as academics have come to realize, great change in the world can be bred in the smallest of events involving (presumably) the least signficant of people, and war is frequently less a harbinger of change than a response to it. Herodotus, with his explorations of custom, his broad and all inclusive approach to history, and his unwillingness to provide conclusions for the reader (neutrality has long been lauded but seldom practiced by historians who, armed with the completeness of their knowledge and the confidence of their intellectual prowess, have usually been more than willing to arrive at conclusions for their students and readers) now suddenly is the inspiration for the approach of modern historians.

Vietnam and Iraq

Analogizing about history is always iffy even for professional historians, but historical analogies are most dangerous in the hands of people who are too ignorant to know better. That's how you end up with comparisons like this:

President Bush defended his ongoing military commitment in Iraq by linking the conflict there to the Vietnam War, arguing Wednesday that withdrawing U.S. troops would lead to widespread death and suffering as it did in Southeast Asia three decades ago.

"One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 'reeducation camps' and 'killing fields,' " Bush told a receptive audience at the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention.

Well, that's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is to acknowledge that we killed millions of people forestalling a unification that we ultimately did not have the power to prevent, and produced untold bloodshed by not permitting the conflict to be resolved in the only way it could be resolved. Which actually sounds a lot like what we're doing in Iraq right now, but the President won't make that comparison.

UPDATE: The Vietnamese are somewhat rankled by the inapt historical comparison (via War in Context):

...people in Vietnam, where opposition to the U.S. intervention in Iraq is strong, said Thursday that Bush had drawn the wrong conclusions from the Southeast Asian conflict.

"Doesn't he realize that if the U.S. had stayed in Vietnam longer, they would have killed more people?" said Vu Huy Trieu of Hanoi, a veteran who fought against the U.S. troops in Vietnam. "Nobody regrets that the Vietnam War wasn't prolonged except Bush."

Well, Bush and many other right-wing Americans who adopt a historically revisionist view of the war. Our President could learn something from a man who actually fought in the war however.

Bush v. McKinley

One interesting nugget that I got out of Josh Green's profile of Karl Rove and his legacy is the fact that Rove appeared to base his political strategy around the desire to force a "realignment" similar to the one that occurred during the era of President McKinley. Here's Rove himself, quoted in Green's article:

“Everything you know about William McKinley and Mark Hanna”—McKinley’s Rove—“is wrong,” he told Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker in early 2000. “The country was in a period of change. McKinley’s the guy who figured it out. Politics were changing. The economy was changing. We’re at the same point now: weak allegiances to parties, a rising new economy.” Rove was suggesting that the electorate in 2000, as in 1896, was ripe for realignment, and implying, somewhat immodestly, that he was the guy who had figured it out. What was missing was an obvious trigger. With the economy soaring (the stock-market collapse in the spring of 2000 was still months away) and the nation at peace, there was no reason to expect that a realignment was about to happen.

Instead, Rove’s idea was to use the levers of government to create an effect that ordinarily occurs only in the most tumultuous periods in American history. He believed he could force a realignment himself through a series of far-reaching policies.

Of course, I immediately question historical claims by a political operative whose efforts have succeeded and then failed spectacularly in short order. Green himself neither critiques nor bolsters Rove's analysis, but I found myself wondering if some historian was reading Rove's parallels to the McKinley era and questioning them as well. Via Andrew Sullivan, I find that Daniel Larison thinks Rove is off-base:

Rove's first mistake was to believe that Mark Hanna had accomplished something truly significant. That the party of industry and corporations prevailed in the era of industrialisation is not the product of cunning strategy or conscious realignment--it is the result of the social and political changes that had taken place in the country that undermined the base of support for an agrarian populist candidate such as Bryan. Rove's errors were not merely political, but stemmed from a misreading of the very McKinley years he claims to admire and that he wishes to imitate.

A more compelling comparison between the GOP under Bush and an early twentieth century center-right party's fate might be the Conservative-Unionist government during the same period in Britain, which was thrown out in 1905 (and again in 1906) in a massive repudiation of the government. Like Rove's strategy, the Conservatives and Unionists had ridden the wave of jingo nationalism of the South African War in the Khaki Election, which preceded their political collapse by a mere five years. The parallels between the two parties, and between the elections of 1900 and 2002 and 1905-06 and 2006 are intriguing.

However Sullivan chose to quote an earlier paragraph in Larison's post that is a little jazzier:

There is something very strange about the people who have assembled themselves around the President over the past few years. Many of them seem to have an outsized sense of their own world-historical importance, and many of them are convinced that they have a superior understanding of the lessons of history, but their grasp of history never seems to escape the generic, the vague and the facile. Weak analogies drawn from a limited range of American references are the order of the day--today we are refighting WWII, tomorrow Iraq is like the pre-1787 Confederation and the day after Adhamiya is a new Selma.

The public in general should always be wary of historical analogies coming from the mouths of politicians and their propagandists. Frequently these politicians wish to bolster their campaigns by standing on the shoulders of giants (like Churchill) who, had they any say in the matter, might not welcome the dead weight.

Modern Conservatism is a Fraud

Witness these examples below. In an article regarding what traits modern conservatism shares with fascist philosophy:

Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops. Liberals think of conservatives as potential future allies; conservatives treat liberals as unworthy of recognition. Liberals believe that policies ought to be judged against an independent ideal such as human welfare or the greatest good for the greatest number; conservatives evaluate policies by whether they advance their conservative causes. Liberals instinctively want to dampen passions; conservatives are bent on inflaming them. Liberals think there is a third way between liberalism and conservatism; conservatives believe that anyone who is not a conservative is a liberal. Liberals want to put boundaries on the political by claiming that individuals have certain rights that no government can take away; conservatives argue that in cases of emergency -- conservatives always find cases of emergency -- the reach and capacity of the state cannot be challenged.

And another, not irreconcilable approach (via Digby):

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.

The tactics of conservatism vary widely by place and time. But the most central feature of conservatism is deference: a psychologically internalized attitude on the part of the common people that the aristocracy are better people than they are. Modern-day liberals often theorize that conservatives use "social issues" as a way to mask economic objectives, but this is almost backward: the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality. Economic inequality and regressive taxation, while certainly welcomed by the aristocracy, are best understood as a means to their actual goal, which is simply to be aristocrats. More generally, it is crucial to conservatism that the people must literally love the order that dominates them. Of course this notion sounds bizarre to modern ears, but it is perfectly overt in the writings of leading conservative theorists such as Burke. Democracy, for them, is not about the mechanisms of voting and office-holding. In fact conservatives hold a wide variety of opinions about such secondary formal matters. For conservatives, rather, democracy is a psychological condition. People who believe that the aristocracy rightfully dominates society because of its intrinsic superiority are conservatives; democrats, by contrast, believe that they are of equal social worth. Conservatism is the antithesis of democracy. This has been true for thousands of years.

Hyperbole? Oh, many would like to think so. And many conservative would argue that these contentions are ridiculous (of course they would; only hardly wants to be on the side of fascists and aristocrats.) But I don't think so, and the history of the last six years bears me out.