When Have Conservatives Been on the Right Side of History?

Corey Robin has recently wrote a book called The Reactionary Mind, which seeks to trace the continuities and fundamental attributes of political conservatism throughout the centuries and among a range of prominent people, from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. One of the major themes to be drawn from his analysis is that the fundamental essence of conservatism, everywhere and in every period, is the defense of privilege.

If this is true, it does much to explain the conservative argument, no matter the context or time period. Defense of privilege equates to defense of the wealthy, defense of businesses, defense of males, defense of whiteness, and so on.

If conservatives have consistently been on the side of the haves and not the have nots, then when have they been on the right side of history?

Currently, mainstream conservatives are against gay marriage, minority rights, and universal healthcare, while they are also skeptical of the merits of climate change, renewable energy, and electoral reform - things that will in the not-too-distant future be looked back upon by bewildered young people as being backwards, obtuse, and reactionary.

But conservatives were also against things that are now perceived as abominable: they went to great lengths to preserve slavery, then later to protect segregation and fought to keep policies that benefited minorites, such as the Voting Rights Act and Affirmative Action, from being implemented; conservatives were against women's suffrage, against most laws that benefited organized labor that we now take for granted (minimum wage laws, over-time pay, the 40-hour work week, paid vacation, etc.), have consistently been against immigration or anything that threatened white, affluent, heterosexual, Protestant males in general.

The major policies in the United States that have benefited the vast majority of society and helped to create a more tolerant, more equal society have in the past 80 years come exclusively from liberals and progressives, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Even the laws that a Republican president signed into law, such as the Clean Air Act under Richard Nixon, have come about only when the Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress.

In Europe, conservatives historically were vehemently mobilized against the vast majority of society that was not an aristocratic, white, Christian male and had no qualms about justifying the use of violence to repress movements that sought to promote voting rights, minority rights, and increases in democracy.

If mainstream conservatives, conservative thought, and conservatism as a political movement in general have consistently been on the side of privilege, then they have also consistently been on the wrong side of history. But this does not mean that they have never been on the right side.

Conservatives in Europe were correct about totalitarianism, whether in its fascist or communist variant. Though Neville Chamberlain, as a Conservative Prime Minister, pursued a policy of appeasement in dealing with Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, this was controversial even among his own party. The man who succeeded him, Sir Winston Churchill, was a consistently vocal and aggressive opponent of fascism. Later, when many on the Left had become enamored and apologized for the violent excesses of the Soviet Union, Churchill and conservatives called it what it was - totalitarian. Of course, French and British conservatives both supported the maintenance of imperialism (though they went about its decline in different ways).

Edmund Burke and other conservatives did not just protest against the French Revolution, they believed it to be a terrible idea. Indeed, their warnings in the early stages seemed especially prescient after the country descended into wide-ranging pandemonium, with citizens being indiscriminately murdered and movements such as The Terror and the Committee for Public Safety emerging. Napoleon Bonaparte may have introduced certain "progressive" reforms onto the Continent, but European conservatives decried his reign for what it was - a tyrannical dictatorship.

While those on the Left have had their fair share of poor decisions - supporting Mao's overseeing the starvation of millions in China, for example - conservatism has much more often than not been on the wrong side of history. Even when they have been correct, such as when confronting the French Revolution, the rise of totalitarian communism, and fascism, conservatives have also had a tendency to go overboard in their zeal - see Joseph McCarthy's fanatical rants about communist subversion or the appalling record of imprisoned minorities that have resulted from conservative crime laws.

If, as Dr. Martin Luther King said, the arc of moral universe bends towards justice, then it is not due to conservatism that it is being bent that way.

Being Black in America

When Bill Clinton was elected to his first term as President of the United States, he was called by some America's "first black president". He was called this because he grew up poor with a single mother, played the saxophone, and liked McDonald's.

White males who wear "gangster" clothes, listen to rap, and "talk black" are derogatorily called wiggers; that is, a white person who seeks to emulate what he perceives to be African American culture, and by doing so, "becomes" black themselves.

This unfortunate conceptual framework of thinking is pervasive and fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be black in America. Being black isn't being poor, being a "gangster", listening to rap, being in jail, talking "black", growing up without a father, or living in the "ghetto". All of these are results of being black, not causes.

What it truly means to be black in America is something no white person can experience for themselves, no matter how hard they try or how willing they may be to understand. Being black in America means having dark skin in a white-skinned country. It means being discriminated against in a myriad of ways for something that is beyond your control, something which you never had a choice over.

In 1959, the journalist John Howard Griffin used medication to artificially darken his skin so as to appear African American. Overnight, he went from being white to being black. His book, Black Like Me, tells the story of his experiences traveling through the Deep South states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi at a time when segregation was the law of those lands. People he had befriended as a white man did not recognize him as a black man, and if he told them who he was, the difference in treatment was of a degree that astounded and frightened him. Griffin began to understand in a way that almost no white American could what it meant to be black: receiving the "hate stare" from white people who had no reason other than his skin color to hate him; having to travel far distances just to enjoy simple comforts like using the restroom, getting a bite to eat, or drinking some water; in Mississippi he was warned not to look at anything but the floor when a white woman was in the same room - the consequences could be deadly. When, as a black man, Griffin went to stay with some of his white friends, they had to do so with the utmost secrecy, lest someone were to see a "Negro" getting "uppity"; the scandal would have ruined his friend's reputation at best, and at worst resulted in violence.

Griffin, at several points, was unable to take it - the constant wariness, the desperate struggle merely to survive and avoid trouble from white authorities, the pervasive and all-encompassing hatred he received for nothing that he had done wrong. After nearly having a complete breakdown on a few occasions, Griffin was able to "rub the black out" of his skin and thereby pass a white person; he could return to the white world, whereas every other black person had to stay in their societal oppression.

The movie A Soldier's Story is about segregation in the U.S. Army in the Deep South during World War II. Different themes of racism are explored - including the self-inflicted wounds received and given by other black soldiers. Some of the African American soldiers are embarrassed when one of their fellow black soldiers does something to "set the race back" in the eyes of the whites. Others question "what kind of a colored person" a black officer is who lambasts other black soldiers for giving the whites reason to disrespect blacks. In the end, a black soldier yells "They still hate you!", meaning that no matter what they did or how they acted, blacks would remain oppressed because it wasn't about their actions but about their skin color.



The murder of unarmed African American 17-year old Trayvon Martin has left many Americans wondering if the person who fired the gun would have avoided arrest as well if he were black.

Being black in America is walking down the street and being wary that a police officer might decide you look threatening enough to check you out, and maybe mistake a wallet or a green card for a pistol. Being black is being the Other. Being black is having to work twice as hard to achieve the same result as a white person, to prove that you're "pretty good for a black girl" or for "being a testament to his race". Being black in America is being a representative of your race to others. It's having Black History Month instead of being included in "regular" American history. It's being accused of being lazy, ignorant, sexually lascivious and criminal - whether implicitly or explicitly.

Being black in America is having dark skin in a white-skinned country. All of those other things that are associated with African American culture - like crime, poverty, rap, hip-hop, being a gangster, being on welfare, growing up without a father - are results of the ingrained racism and superior advantages embedded in the societal structures of the United States that are afforded to whites and non-whites.