STEVE HAYWARD: The Unoriginal and Superficial Nihilism of the Right.
I once heard James Q. Wilson offer an extemporaneous synoptic account of the 20th century that I don’t think he ever published, but which I think is correct. It ran something as follows: We are mistaken in thinking the bad turn in our modern culture and political character was anchored in the 1960s. To the contrary, all of the intellectual roots of the direct assault on Western civilization were alive, in place, and advancing as early as the 1920s. Modern art—the visual expression of nihilism—was advancing as fast as the “existentialist” philosophy of Heidegger and others (like the Frankfurt School, widely noted in recent years for its delayed influence in America), who were taking the European intellectual scene by storm by the late 1920s. Marxism was also advancing. It is not an accident that the baleful effects of these intellectual currents landed first and hardest in Germany.
Wilson’s conclusion is that our modern rot was on the way early on, but were postponed in America by both the Great Depression and World War II. My slight adaption of this point is that when serious things are motion, no one has time for nonsense about what correct pronouns to use. Wilson thought that in the absence of the Depression and World War II, the derangements of the 1960s might have started happening perhaps in the 1930s or 1940s, because all the antecedent radical doctrines were already long in place and advancing.
This counterfactual is at least as plausible as the current speculations that if only Churchill had struck a deal with Hitler and preserved the British Empire, Western civilization would have fared much better since 1940.
Footnote: [a predecessor to Tucker’s recent guest, the late libertarian historian Ralph Raico’s] Churchill article opens thus:
“When, in a few years, the pundits start to pontificate on the great question: ‘Who was the Man of the Century’ there is little doubt that they will reach virtually instant consensus. Inevitably, the answer will be: Winston Churchill. Indeed, Professor Harry Jaffa has already informed us that Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century, but the Man of Many Centuries.”
Works for me.
Indeed. Whatever Churchill’s flaws and past misdeeds, history has proven him to be the right man, and the indispensable man, at the right time.