Conservatives Keep Mangling American History - Maybe That is Why Their Agenda is Anti-American
The mortgage crisis began in 2006 and it’s all President Obama’s fault—at least according to Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity recently blamed [1] Obama—“his policies, his economic plan, his fault”—for the mortgage crisis, ignoring who was actually president (that would be George W. Bush) as the housing market slipped [2].
Hannity’s is just one example of the selective memory and historical revision frequently on display in the conservative movement. Right-wing pundits, politicians and pseudo-historians are nibbling away at objective historical truths to rewrite history for present-day purposes, and hardly any topic is off-limits: glorifying the “Reagan Revolution” to children, sugarcoating the Jim Crow South and revising textbooks to offer a favorable view on Phyllis Schlafly—among many others.
Below, read about eight ways in which conservatives try to rewrite, sugarcoat or ignore aspects of American history.
1. Michele Bachmann on the founding fathers and slavery. Propelled to the front of the Republican field after her victory in the Iowa straw poll, Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann’s historical views are notoriously error-prone. In one her infamous gaffes, she said [3] the founding fathers “work[ed] tirelessly to end slavery” (in fact, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves) and that John Quincy Adams [4] was a founding father—he was born in 1767.
Bachmann was a research assistant to John Eidsmoe for his 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of our Founding Fathers, in which Eidsmoe wrote, “The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God. In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.”
....................
2. Secession was fine, dandy and legal. Texas Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry is fond of pro-secession comments [7]; in 2009, he joked [8] that “we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”
In his dreams. In fact, these attempts at humor sidestep what secession actually leads to: a nullification crisis, a Civil War, hundreds of thousands of casualties and the federal government as the victor anyway. And secession is illegal. In 1866 the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White [9] that Texas’s ordinance of secession was “absolutely null.”
...3. Forgetting September 11? Conservatives have an uncanny ability to misremember when the September 11 attacks occurred. In July, Fox News [12] host Eric Bolling said “we were certainly safe between 2000 and 2008?—?I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.” (In his “apology [13],” he accepted no blame: “Yesterday, I misspoke when saying that there were no US terror attacks during the Bush years. Obviously, I meant in the aftermath of 9/11, but that is when the radical liberal left pounced on us…. thank you liberals for reminding me how petty you can be.”)
A surprising slip came from ex–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In January 2010 he claimed [14] that “we had no domestic attacks under Bush.”
.....4. Mike Huckabee’s “Learn Our History.” Mike Huckabee’s cartoon history series is whitewashing American history. While claiming to engage children in an easy-to-digest format without “misrepresentations…historical inaccuracies, personal biases and political correctness,” personal biases somehow make an appearance [17]. Each video is produced with consultation from Learn Our History’s “Council of Masters;” one “Master,” Larry Schweikart, is the author of 48 Liberal Lies About American History, including “Lie #45: LBJ’s Great Society Had a Positive Impact on the Poor.”
In a DVD [18] on the “Reagan Revolution,” viewers are invited to “journey to a time when America suffered from financial, international and moral crisis:” Washington, DC, 1977. A knife-wielding African-American man demands “gimme yo’ money!” Ronald Reagan’s arrival—against triumphant music playing and a caption reading “one man transformed the nation…and the world”—changed all that for the better, the DVD suggests.
5. The New Deal did harm. Anti–New Deal views have long reverberated among Republicans. Bachmann [19] blamed FDR for turning a recession into a depression by passing “Hoot-Smalley Tariff” (never mind that it’s Smoot-Hawley and it was passed three years prior to Roosevelt’s inauguration). And a barrage of recent books, including FDR’s Folly, by Jim Powell of the Cato Institute, and Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man, blame FDR and the New Deal for prolonging the Depression. Newt Gingrich has praised [20] The Forgotten Man, with its anti-stimulus message, as a blueprint for a return to “Whig-style free-market liberalism.”
6. David Barton. An amateur-turned-“historian,” Barton is the founder of WallBuilders, a pseudo-historical organization “with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built,” says its website. One of his revisions [21] insists that John Adams claimed that government cannot exist without the Holy Ghost. In his presentations of the subject, Barton misunderstands Adams’s mocking statement about fervent believers in the Holy Ghost as historical truth, omitting succeeding sentences wherein Adams describes those beliefs to be “Artifice and Cunning.”
Barton’s claims about the religious roots of the country have been debunked from academics, even from Christian colleges. John Fea, chair of the history department at Messiah College, wrote [22], “Barton claims to be a historian. He is not. He has just enough historical knowledge, and just enough charisma, to be very dangerous.”
7. Texas Textbook Revisions. Last year the Texas Board of Education revised public school textbooks, expanding [23]discussion of Ronald Reagan at the expense of public figures like Justice Sonia Sotomayor, omitting reference to Thomas Jefferson as an Enlightenment thinker in favor of Protestant leader John Calvin, and offering favorable views [24] on Senator Joseph McCarthy, women’s rights opponent Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation.
Many historians opposed [25] the changes—but the board voted along party lines [26] to approve of the revisions. Nearly 5 million Texas students live with the result.
8. Jim Crow wasn’t that bad. Last December, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi sugarcoated Jim Crow–era Mississippi, saying [27] of his native Yazoo County, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” and, “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders.”
In reality, 1960s Mississippi was 42 percent black, of which only 2 percent were registered to vote, according to the nonprofit African-American Registry [28]. Civil rights activists were murdered [29] and students rioted [30] against integration. “Not bad” indeed!
The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were both based on Liberal political theory. Democracy itself is a liberal concept. As is small-r republicanism. The latter is tricky, trying to find the balance between individual rights and the other extreme where everyone, citing their individual rights, does anything they please. Conservatives plainly do not believe in balance. They believe the financial elite should have all the power and run the country instead of the people.
