No Past Golden Era

There was never a time when America was great. Or, to be more precise, there was never a time when America was perfect.

Note: This is part one of a two-part series. This first essay explores why conservatives make a strategic messaging mistake when they imply there is some Golden Era from the past we should emulate today.

Part two will address the idea of "progress," the premise of which is that we are getting closer to some end or goal, yet progressives identify no end or goal, making it impossible to know whether we are progressing, regressing, or merely spinning our wheels.

I do not expect these little essays to change national campaign themes or major cultural-political movements. That’s not my purpose. My purpose is to encourage and help others think clearly about the popular messages and labels of our day so that they can communicate with greater precision and truthfulness.

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Charlamagne tha God?

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Charlemagne

There’s a small and unusual private college in rural Michigan with a large national reputation. I used to teach there. I helped create their signature Constitution class that remains part of the core curriculum all students are required to take in order to graduate.

During my time there, in the office immediately next to mine, was a historian who specialized in medieval Europe with a particular focus on King Charlemagne—whose reign stretched from 768 to 814 A.D.—and who should not be confused with modern radio host, Charlamagne tha God.

I don’t think that professor is still teaching at that same college, but he did when I was there.

My medieval historian neighbor and colleague at that time was an affable fellow, and his admiration for Charlemagne was contagious. He loved to emphasize Charlemagne’s many incredible achievements, which are impressive and, in many ways, unmatched.

Among other things, Charlemagne:

• Unified Western Europe;

• Was crowned Holy Roman Emperor;

• Created a vast network of schools that later provided the foundation for many great European universities;

• Created one of the earliest networks of centers for organized health care, forerunners to what would later become hospitals;

• Was a formidable military strategist who extended his kingdom by conquering numerous enemies.

Perhaps most notably, Charlemagne spread Catholicism throughout Europe, converting large numbers of pagans into Christians. Charlemagne was a favorite son of the Vatican.

It is fair to say that my medieval historian neighbor viewed the reign of Charlemagne as the Golden Era of Western Civilization. In his opinion, everything that came after Charlemagne—including liberty thinkers such as John Locke, Adam Smith, and Montesquieu, and history-altering events such as the English Civil War and the American Revolution—represented a regrettable cultural, political, and moral decline within Western Civilization.

My medieval historian colleague opined that the world became worse after Charlemagne—much worse—not better. I imagine that if my former historian colleague could wave a magic wand, he’d wish we could return to the way things were in the late 8th and early 9th centuries under Charlemagne.

Just to tweak him a bit—because that’s the kind of fun guy I am!—I’d poke my head through his doorway every now and then, usually on my way to teach a class, and ask: “Hey, Harold, remind me how many thousands of human heads Charlemagne chopped off?”

He’d typically respond with some diplomatic version of, “F#@k off, Krannawitter!”

It turns out that Charlemagne was successful at converting pagans into Christians because he used terrifying and terrorizing large armies of sword-wielding soldiers. The demand from Charlemagne was simple: Convert or die.

Many chose death over false proclamations of beliefs they didn’t actually believe. The important point is that Charlemagne didn’t merely engage in religious persecution; he perfected it.

I liked to tease my historian neighbor precisely because he did not like talking about Charlemagne’s cruel slaughter and torture of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of human beings.

In those somewhat playful, somewhat combative conversations with my erudite office neighbor, it became clear to me that there is no Golden Era from the past. Point to any Golden Era and others will point to great injustices and cruelty.

No Golden Era

American conservatives are inclined to craft campaign and political messages using words such as restoring, returning, and recovering. These and related terms suggest that we can and should go back to some Golden Era from the past.

The problem is that within American history, there is no Golden Era from the past.

The most popular of all these backward-pointing conservative messages is Donald Trump’s slogan: Make America Great Again. Read that once more: Make America Great Again.

Let’s set aside the odd usage of “great,” which traditionally has been defined as large in size or capacity (as in, an ocean is a great body of water, or children have a great capacity to learn multiple languages when they are young).

Rather, reflect on the word again. To say we want to make America great again implies that America was great at least once before, sometime in the past.

If the MAGA slogan was presented as a syllogism, it’d go something like this:

1. America used to be great.

2. America is no longer great.

3. Therefore, we want to make America great again, like it used to be.

Here’s the rub: There was never a time when America was great. Or, to be more precise, there was never a time when America was perfect.

There have always been serious injustices and significant problems within the United States. When conservatives point to a period from the past, as some kind of Golden Era to which we should return, critics and political opponents point to the injustices and problems of that era as the goals conservatives want to achieve—just like when I used to tease my colleague about Charlemagne, his injustices, and the imperfect world in which he lived.

Let’s start with the most obvious: All of American history prior to the Civil War and the Republican-led 13th Amendment—which includes the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, the Administrations of President George Washington, etc.—was a history of slavery.

When you say you wish we could go back to the Founding, critics respond: “Oh, so you want to go back to the days of legalized slavery?”

What about after the Civil War? Maybe conservatives want to return to the peace and prosperity of the 1920s, including the fiscal and constitutional conservatism of Calvin Coolidge?

That was also the same time as the second wave of the Ku Klux Klan—when that Democratic terrorist organization was at its worst, threatening black Americans, burning their homes, raping, lynching—as well as the peak of Jim Crow. Critics will pounce: “So you want to go back to the time of the KKK and Jim Crow segregation?”

What about the 1950s? Surely the 1950s were wonderful, right? Not for everyone. Certainly not in many parts of the country.

Even though the Supreme Court had declared racially segregated schools to be unconstitutional in the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education, taxpayer-funded public schools across the United States refused to admit black children.

Jim Crow policies and practices remained in place, and racial tensions were intensifying. The 1950s brought us the Cold War, a global nuclear arms race, children learning that ducking under a desk will protect them from thermonuclear vaporization, American involvement in distant places such as Korea and Vietnam, McCarthyism, and growing complaints among women that would become the modern feminist movement.

Say you want to return to the 1950s and your opponents instantly brand you as someone who hates black people and wants women confined to kitchens and bedrooms.

To repeat: There is no Golden Era in American history. There was never a time when America was perfect. There were times when some things were better than today, sure, but they were always accompanied by other injustices and problems that were worse.

When conservatives design marketing and campaign themes that point, explicitly or implicitly, to the past, they provide political ammunition for their opponents. By pointing to the past, conservatives are almost encouraging critics to label and brand conservatism as a movement that aims at recreating the worst injustices and problems from the past.

Timeless Principles Rather Than Past History

The reason is that conservatives often focus on past periods of time—past periods of American history—rather than focusing on the true and good principles upon which America was founded.

There was never a time when all Americans were good people or good citizens. But the principles of the American Founding—the self-evident moral truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence—are always good, always beautiful, always right, because they are timeless and universal.

Those principles are the foundation of justice, the seeds of liberty.

The reason there was never a time when America was perfect is because there have always been some Americans—sometimes more, sometimes fewer, but always some—who fall short of those principles, who ignore those principles, who give in to unjust temptations and passions and violate moral and political self-evident truths.

That doesn’t mean those self-evident truths are untrue. It means people, including Americans, are imperfect. The principles of the Declaration of Independence are always true. Americans, however, do not consistently live up to them.

Americans have never fully lived up to the standards of their own good principles. Americans have a special challenge that few people have faced: Most nations, tribes, and clans throughout history did not set high moral standards and principles to which they held themselves accountable. They couldn’t fail because they had no principles to betray. Americans did. And, precisely because the American principles are true and good, individual Americans—being human-all-too-human—have often fallen short of those principles.

The problem, however, isn’t with the principles. The problem is the people. People are messy. People are inconsistent. People can be good sometimes, principled sometimes, and not-so-much other times.

That is why it is a philosophical and marketing mistake to point to some historical period from the past as what we should replicate or emulate today. No. We should not replicate or emulate imperfect Americans from the past who betrayed the good principles of the American Founding.

I, for one, certainly don’t want to go back in time and return to slavery or Democratic domestic terrorism inflicted by the KKK or women not voting. I don’t want to go back further in time when life spans were short, disease was common, desperate poverty was the norm, and the only way to acquire riches was by conquest and theft.

I don’t want any of that. I don’t want to conserve any of that.   

An intelligent, wise, and principled conservatism today should aim at improving ourselves by rising up to our own noble political standards and self-evident moral truths. A good conservatism today would aim at transforming the constitutionally illegitimate administrative state that now rules us without our consent—and that incentivizes corruption, dependency, and a host of terrible social pathologies—into a truly self-governing constitutional republic that features virtuous, responsible citizens and provides equal protection of the laws for the equal individual rights of each and every American.

There is no period of time in American history worth conserving, at least not in toto.

What is worth preserving and conserving and honoring and protecting, in toto and verbatim, are the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal,” that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” among which are “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

A conservatism dedicated to conserving those moral truths would be a conservatism worth conserving.