Matt Yglesias explains what's wrong with the conservative reaction to wokeness. A few years ago in the George Floyd era leftists attacked Hamilton for glorifying our racist found fathers. Lin Manuel Miranda responded with a comment something like, "They have a point." And now to this week:
Hamilton was killed in the woke fervor of the George Floyd and 1619 Project era. Nothing that painted the American Founding as flawed-but-ultimately-good was allowed to survive.
But, as Yglesias says:
No, this is what’s so crazy about this discourse — Hamilton is currently playing on Broadway and in London, their North America tour is in Denver right now and opening Philadelphia soon, international tours are playing Sydney & Dublin.
Conservatives vastly overrate the power of woke culture outside its academic home, which causes them to embrace all sorts of wickedness so long as it is anti-woke, and to think of politicians who oppose it as heroes, when every Republican politican in America only gains votes from such a stand.
The real problem in America is hysteria: hysterical beliefs about economic and social collapse, hysterical fear of the other party, hysterical fear of immigrants, hysterical fear of censorship, hysterical fear of the government. What I long for right now is for a conservative leader to come forward and proclaim, like Taft, a return to normalcy.
What I long for right now is for a conservative leader to come forward and proclaim, like Taft, a return to normalcy.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, it was Warren G. Harding's presidential campaign that popularized the phrase, not that of William Howard Taft.
Secondly, the phrase came to prominence in the direct aftermath of both World War I and the Spanish Flu - the former having killed (depending on how you estimate) around 40 million people, and the latter having killed another 50 million. This was the collective removing of almost 5% of the human population from the face of the earth (with Europe in particular losing a staggering 15% of its population), and it created scarcity and hardship on an unimaginable scale all around the world, but particularly in the developed and affluent West.
Third, even in that context, and the earnest desire of people to forget about the worst events ever to occur in all of human history up to that point... the sentiment was still naive and doomed to disappointment. People actively tried to get back to supposed "normalcy" (a malapropism ridiculed both at the time and still today), but the world was irrevocably changed, and no amount of pining for "the good old days" would undo the transformation.
Desiring a "return to normalcy" in the modern day is like pining for "The Age of Chivalry", or "The Lost Glory of Rome", or countless other absurd imaginings of mythologized pasts that never really were.
It was somewhat excusable (or at least understandable) as a election slogan in 1920, when the nation wanted nothing more than to forget the previous six years ever happened and politicians were happy to promise them the moon in exchange for votes. But to willfully endorse the same concept today, with full clarity of hindsight, and betraying so sign of self-awareness in so doing?
Surely you, an educated historian, can see the absurdity and inherent tragedy of your stated desire? There is no "return to normalcy". You can't go home again. And even if you could, you'd find the pre-Trump era was hardly ideal itself. Our national divide existed long, long before even then - it's just become more visible of late. It used to be masked by the pretense of politicians who wanted to give the appearance of everyone getting along. Now, the charade has been discarded, and the animosity and conflict that was always there is no longer being hidden behind socially agreed upon lies.
In other words... The Emperor was always naked, even when we all felt we had to pretend otherwise.
And that's not even touching upon the fact that Harding's view of "normalcy" was pretty abhorrent, in modern terms!
DeleteHe sought to return to a policy of Isolationism, of the sort that directly contributed to the first World War, and which would go on help bring about the second as well.
He also pushed to move back toward Gilded Age notions of business, commerce, and regulation - he was staunchly anti-Union, pro-Industrialist, and was quite happy to help ruin (or end) the lives of working men and women in order to line the pockets of his rich friends.
He likewise threw his support behind Nativist sentiments, supported brutal anti-immigrant legislation, and helped spark horrific race riots. In the same vein, his policies regarding American "territories" and the treatment of those peoples subject to American Imperialism but denied the protections and benefits of citizenship is quite the hideous legacy.
At the same time, for all his claimed support of a supposed "return to normalcy", he was in numerous ways far from the pre-war idea of what a "normal" president should be like. He openly exhibited blatant corruption and nepotism in the form of his "Ohio Gang", and yet the new post-war morality of the nation meant that the average person just shrugged their shoulders and didn't care. Likewise, Harding was notorious for the open secrets of his keeping mistresses and having affairs, including siring children out of wedlock - something unthinkable for a president in the present day! While most conservatives of the day were clutching their pearls over the emergence of Flappers and Jazz music, Harding was more than happy to indulge in both - at least, in private.
He also broke with conservative tradition by (suddenly and quite conveniently timed for his election campaign) endorsing women's suffrage. And then he went on to champion the (honestly, quite radical) Prohibition movement - and to then completely ignore its existence, with his raging alcoholism being yet another open secret of his presidency.
Honestly, it's kind of stunning that of all the presidential regimes you could have longed for, you pine for that of the ONE president who was widely considered the most corrupt and scandalous we'd ever had before Trump!