Wilfred Reilly Exposes Liberal Historical Myths

Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula
By Wilfred Reilly
(Broadside Books, 272 pages, $25)

Ronald Reagan once quipped, “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” This observation from the fortieth president finds resonance in political scientist Wilfred Reilly’s book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me: Debunking the False Narratives Defining America’s School Curricula. The title is a less-than-subtle spoof of James Loewen’s 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, which critiqued mainstream conceptions of American history as overly Eurocentric and pro-American. Lies My Teacher Told Me was joined in that genre by others, including Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and, more recently, the New York Times’ 1619 Project.

What might have once been the raising of some valid quibbles has become a cure worse than the disease. Today, it is the Left that is pushing scholastic fictions into the cultural mainstream while larping as revolutionaries. 

Don’t underestimate the impact of this. Even Americans who are apolitical or disinterested in history have imbibed a great deal of false premises via cultural osmosis. For example, the 1619 Project and A People’s History of the United States are often assigned to American students. 

The leftist vision of history constitutes a sort of cultural hypochondria in which every past action by the West that fails to measure up to current standards needs to be agonized over, even as such violations by others are steadfastly ignored. “If the old myth,” Reilly writes, “was that American and the West could do no wrong, the new hotness is that every wrong is uniquely Western and American.” 

Reilly tackles some, but certainly not all, of the most common misconceptions about American and world history propagated by the Left. He methodologically and banally documents how the West was far from alone in its sins of imperialism, wars of conquest, and brutal slavery. Contrary to the notion that nonwhites were noble savages living in a proverbial Garden of Eden, they were just as willing to engage in the same enormities as their white counterparts. The Mongol and Ottoman Empires, for instance, were not misnamed — they were built through conquest and violence.

Reading the progressive histories, you’d get the idea that the choice for native peoples was between the British Empire and Wakanda, which makes for a fairly simple moral calculation. The choices more typically on offer in the real world — such as between the British Empire, the Sokoto Caliphate, or the Mughal Empire — were a good deal more complicated.

“History sucked, for almost everyone,” Reilly writes optimistically. That is not a positive, but it does provide much-needed context and perspective. If anything, what makes the West stand out is its sense of shame and moral obligation, which drove its efforts to curb and eventually abolish slavery and empire.

American history, too, is rife with misconceptions, and Reilly does not spare them. Did racist “white flight” ruin American cities? Not really; most of it can be explained via the improved transportation networks and increased wealth that made suburban life economically viable. Was the Red Scare a moral panic? Perhaps, but there was no shortage of real communist agents to be worried about. Did Republicans employ racism and channel backlash to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to flip the formerly blue South? If that were the case, it’s curious that the South embraced liberal favorite sons Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and that it did not become a true Republican bastion until the 2000s.

Was it wrong, and possibly even racist, to drop the nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of the Second World War? Without even mentioning the exhaustive Japanese atrocities throughout the Asia–Pacific Theater, the fact remains that the bomb persuaded Emperor Hirohito to break the deadlock in his cabinet and surrender. The human cost of a potential invasion and occupation of Japan — on both sides — would have been immense, meaning that the bombs saved far more lives than they took.

Perhaps the most obscene liberal lie is the notion that the United States made an indefensible decision to count African Americans as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment. Setting aside that free blacks were counted as full people, it must not be forgotten that the ideal outcome for the pro-slavery forces would have been for slaves to count as full people. Accordingly, “the ideal outcome for anti-racists,” Reilly writes, “would have been a decision to treat all Black slaves as zero-fifths of a person — reducing the legal population of the South as much as possible.” While obviously imperfect, the alternatives to the three-fifths compromise were a vastly more powerful slave-owning South with increased representation due to its enslaved population, or potentially no America at all. 

Myths about the past are troubling enough on their own, but they also have the alarming tendency to feed into myths about the present. Reilly asserts that modern liberal notions such as “cultural appropriation” and “microaggressions” perpetuate what he describes as the “Continuing Oppression Narrative,” the idea that there is ongoing oppression and systemic racism in modern society. 

Reilly shows the omnipresence of the “Continuing Oppression Narrative” via a study in which over half of “very liberal” respondents said that over one thousand unarmed black men were killed by police officers in 2019. In reality, only twelve such men were killed by police that year.

Reilly argues that sustaining the notion of systemic racism — in which group disparities are exclusively attributed to discrimination — is difficult because it runs up against the fact that racism can only be identified when race is the single factor causing unequal treatment. Reality, Reilly concludes, “remains complex, multivariate, and fascinating.”

Conservatives have much to say, but none of it will be heard unless they challenge the underlying historical assumptions that so many of our countrymen, countrywomen, and country-gender-non-conforming-persons hold to. On that score, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me is a necessary, digestible, and timely corrective.

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