Are We the Bad Guys?
Reflections on Churchill
A couple weeks back, Daryl Cooper’s appearance on the Tucker Carlson Show – in which Cooper opined that Winston Churchill bore much of the blame for the violence of World War II – broke the internet. In the aftermath, a host of commentators breathlessly piled on Cooper, accusing him of being a Hitler apologist, if not a Nazi himself – an accusation that would be laughable to any fair-minded person familiar with Cooper’s corpus of work.
Here’s what is really happening. Cooper has sensed, rightly, that much of the story we’ve told ourselves in Western civilization over the past 125 years has been a lie. We are told that the 20th century represents the triumph of Western humanism. This self-evidently correct viewpoint, we are told, is inevitably becoming a global consensus, ushering in the end of history.
But most of the Western world is recognizing that this triumphalist story is wrong. In these conditions, we should expect broad revisions of the received narratives about the 20th century. Cooper’s conclusion, roughly speaking, is that the West is not as exceptionally good as we think. This is where he errs.
It has become fashionable on the right to attack men like the Founders and Churchill and even lesser critical figures like Reagan as villains rather than heroes. While none of those men were perfect, the moral gap between Churchill and Hitler (and the respective regimes they led) was indeed massive. As Nathan Pinkoski recently wrote, circumstances dealt Churchill a very difficult hand, and he played it to the best of his ability to maximize British interests. Similarly, the Founders, while not immune to criticism, were men of great moral character and intellect, and notwithstanding his several policy failures, Reagan restored, however briefly, some confidence and optimism to America.
The big lie about the 20th century is not the mere exaggeration of these men’s moral character. To the extent that Churchill is too much of a comic book hero in the mind of many modern Americans (an image that no doubt is more complicated than often presented), that is a small, commonplace lie. It is a side issue. The big lie is the assertion that the 20th century was one of Western dominance, i.e., that it is the century in which Western civilization won. The truth that so many are searching for is that – far from winning – we actually lost, badly. The 20th century started with Western civilization (ordered liberty, reason, and Christian faith) closer to world domination than any civilization had ever been, including Rome. Today, Western democracies are on the verge of self-inflicted collapse. Liberty has given way to anarcho-tyranny, reason to expressive individualism, and Christian faith to cultural Marxism and/or Islam.
We’re no longer dominant demographically. We’re no longer Christian. We’re no longer free. And increasingly, we’re no longer rich. That is the lie that has dominated us, and that is the lie that so many struggle to see.
It’s easier, in a sense, to accept that we were never morally good and never civilizationally great than it is to accept that we had something great, and we squandered it. But that’s the truth. Two inconceivably destructive World Wars destroyed Europe’s soul, killed off many of its best men, and devastated the old aristocracies. Lopsided trade policy with China since the 1970s – based on the Pollyannish assumption that exposure to Western markets would bring democracy to China – has hollowed out America’s manufacturing base, displaced millions of heartland workers, and helped to create a geopolitical rival with a very different, and a much worse, regime. We beat some of the communist state actors, but – as Solzhenitsyn noted in his Harvard commencement speech – we lost the soul of our culture and universities to Marxism. Trillions of dollars and thousands of Americans’ lives spent on adventurism in the Middle East has yielded essentially no return. Mass migration to Western Democracy is recreating, in our homes, the very conditions from which migrants flee in the first place. In Europe and elsewhere, our Western beliefs and ways of life have broadly failed at persuading the much more fertile and expansionary Islam.
Even as our nation faces soaring substance abuse, mental and physical health crises, plummeting birth rates, exploding homelessness and ballooning sovereign debt, we continue our quixotic attempts to save the whole world, both through foreign aid largesse that we can’t afford, and acceptance of almost unthinkable levels of refugees.
The truth is, we haven’t been even trying to win in 125 years, and it’s finally catching up to us.
But our culture is good, and it is great, and if we accept what we’ve lost and commit ourselves to trying to win, we can restore our position and our proper trajectory.
Image Credit: Unsplash