"Example is the school of mankind," proclaimed Edmund Burke, the founder of
modern conservatism, "and they will learn at no other."
Burke was disparaging the folly of French revolutionaries who believed that
man could break the iron chains of history and create utopias through
willpower and planning.
This argument about whether history has anything to teach us has been the
essence of the left-right debate for most of the last two centuries.
Conservatives said: "There's nothing new under the sun." The left said:
"Until now!"
Karl Marx - with a lot of dialectical mumbo jumbo - was the most famous
champion of the need to change history, not interpret it. But my favorite
summary of this mind-set comes from Stuart Chase, the intellectual often
credited with coining the phrase "New Deal" for FDR. "Are our plans wrong?"
he asked. "Who knows? Can we tell from reading history? Hardly."
Now, this right-left divide is falling apart, as both sides search for a
guiding historical analogy for our current predicament.
The Bush administration is determined to convince the public that it is 1938
in Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is Hitler. Or that it's 1917 and Osama bin
Laden is a new Lenin. Others see Spanish Civil Wars in Iraq or on Lebanon's
southern border. I shudder to count all the folks who claim that Iraq is
Vietnam.
For many liberals of a certain generation, Vietnam is a universal peg,
fitting perfectly into analytical holes of any shape. Indeed, the closest
thing we get to a neat left-right divide on foreign policy these days is
between those who see Vietnam as the Rosetta stone of international
conundrums and those who see early 20th-century Europe as the universal
translator.
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