Politics and Memory

Douglas

The politics of postmodern progressivism (PMP) cuts bloodily across the grain of political memory.

PMPs are not concerned with hiding their extreme programs or methods, both of which are of necessity unorthodox, boastfully so, and revolutionary.

One of the reasons so called “cancel culture” does not alarm the PMPs is that, like revolutionaries everywhere, they purposely aim not to please but to repeal and then readjust culture and politics along revolutionary lines. Engraved on Marx’s tomb in Highgate Cemetery, North London are the words “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways [Marx was thinking chiefly of Hegel]. The point, however, is to change it.” In the progressive world view, change serves as a substitute for what Hegel regarded as the movement of spirit in history.

In the Leninist-Stalinist period, Marxist-Communism succeeded in this project only too well. Through the use of force alone, against a backdrop of mass murder and imprisonment of political contrarians, the map of newly liberated Baltic States and Poland, which quickly disappeared from Soviet maps, was radically altered. Soviet Communists destroyed all countervailing force, first in Russia, then Ukraine, then Poland, then in the Balkans, then in East Germany – where the Dark Star of Soviet Communism (1917-1989) -- finally collapsed in a heap of Berlin Wall rubble.

What canceled the Marxist-Leninist culture in states over which the Soviet Union had achieved mastery was in part military force. But the resistance also embodied the revitalization of what pre-Marxian philosophers might well have called the prematurely buried memory of Western European liberty that dominated thinking and culture from the pre-Socratic philosophers in Greece well into the postmodern period.

It is force without sociological and cultural borders – operating outside the limits of reason, outside the borders of morality, outside the bounds human nature itself – that creates masters and slaves. In The Rebel, a masterful study of the totalitarian itch in Western culture, Albert Camus writes, “Mastery is a blind alley… The master serves no other purpose than to arouse servile consciousness, the only form of consciousness that really creates history. The slave, in fact, is not bound to his condition, but wants to change it. Thus, unlike his master, he can improve himself, and what is called history is nothing but the effects of his long effort to obtain real freedom.”

The postmodern progressive view of U.S. history is preeminently a denial of progress. Racism has not moved since the founding of the country in 1619, the new founding date established by the New York Times. The country was founded on racism, the Times asserts, when the first African American slave set his manacled foot on American soil. The arc of history, allowing no movement on racial attitudes in the United States, is horizontal, without any vertical dimension. The anti-racist spirit is lacking because the historic  arc of liberation, as concerns racism in the post-Civil War period, is exactly what it was in 1619. The cultural electrocardiogram shows the patient has flatlined. Any progress in race relations is illusory. 

The perfect postmodern PMP curriculum on racism in the United States would pass over unremarked Henry David Thoreau’s under-taught essay on “Slavery in Massachusetts,” Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation,” Fredrick Douglas’ remarks on the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, Ida B. Wells Barnett’s valiant, ultimately successful fight against lynch laws, Martin Luther King’s heroic struggle against Jim Crow laws, his justly celebrated “I have a Dream” speech… and much more.

Depicting the real arc of progress on race relations in the United States from its genuine founding in 1788, when New Hampshire became the critical ninth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, would show indisputably that the arc of liberty, deeply etched in the spirit of mankind, bends upward. Both Lincoln and Douglas knew this well. Martin Luther King’s speech was let loose upon us, like rolling thunder, from the steps of the Lincoln memorial, where words from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural continue to roll forth like thunder:

“The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

An unexpurgated, non-canceled view of history would also show that liberty is a fiery chariot in which the slave bypasses the self-serving ambitions of his master: “Unlike his master, [the slave] can improve himself, and what is called history is nothing but the effects of his long effort to obtain real freedom.”

The upward movement, away from slavery towards liberty, begins as the recollection of a memory deeply hidden in the body of humankind that reaches beyond one’s immediate experience. Fredrick Douglas, though wrapped in chains, was free the moment he discovered the upward movement of the spirit of history in which the slave at long last seizes his eternal moment of freedom.