History Still Teaches Us to Hope
About 20 years ago, I received an email from a young man congratulating me on my good fortune in being hate-listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It is not pleasant to think back to what was then a rather dark moment in my life. At the time, the SPLC had not yet completely discredited itself by its wild accusations of “extremism” against just about anyone to the right of Chuck Schumer, and surviving their attack was not quite as easy for me as some might nowadays suppose. (RELATED: How the SPLC Targets Catholics and Other Christians)
My great sin — the Thought Crime for which the SPLC arraigned me — was to be a Southerner who was not ashamed of my ancestors, and to dare speak in defense of my beloved homeland. When I attended Jacksonville (Alabama) State University, I learned that the highway which bisects the campus was named for the most famous native of that region. Pelham Road memorializes Confederate artillery officer John Pelham, who gained fame as commander of J.E.B. Stuart’s “horse artillery.” During the Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862, Stuart, with two guns, held up the advance of an entire Union division for more than an hour, a feat witnessed by Gen. Robert E. Lee, who praised Pelham’s “unflinching courage.” Three months later, when the young major was killed in the Battle of Kelly’s Ford, Lee mourned the loss of “the gallant Pelham.” He was posthumously promoted to lieutenant colonel and buried in the city cemetery in Jacksonville, a site I have visited, contemplating the life of that young hero who died at age 24.
Virginia has recently dishonored the memory of Lee, and news this week made me think of that young man who emailed me two decades ago to applaud my refusal to bend the knee and tug the forelock in obeisance to the infernal Yankees. Quickly, I replied to his email and, upon learning that my youthful fan was then a graduate student at an eminent university, offered him some advice: Say nothing. Keep your reactionary beliefs to yourself, so that none of your professors or peers have the least suspicion of your traditionalist leanings. Don’t let your zeal lead you to damage your usefulness in the great work that is to be done, if the American project is to survive.
Something else that made me think of that moment was Jacob Savage’s viral article, “The Lost Generation,” about the decade of blatant discrimination against young white men in academia, journalism, and entertainment. The rage of Millennial and Gen Z youth is a phenomenon that has attracted widespread attention since the controversy over Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes nearly wrecked the Heritage Foundation. (RELATED: The False Prophet of the Digital Right: What Nick Fuentes Really Sells)
There is an appetite for destruction among them, a “burn-it-all-down” nihilism that is frightening to encounter.
Anyone working within the conservative movement cannot help notice the vehemence of some of these young people, especially when they so often erupt in blanket denunciations of Baby Boomers as hopelessly out of touch with their concerns, if not indeed complicit in the systemic misfortunes of which they complain. There is an appetite for destruction among them, a “burn-it-all-down” nihilism that is frightening to encounter. And, insofar as I have any opportunity to advise these young firebrands, my counsel is to calm down and work patiently with hope for the future. (RELATED: Bush Republicanism Can’t Win the Votes We Need to Save America)
Back in March, when the possibility of a government shutdown loomed if Congress could not agree on a new stopgap spending bill, one of my young MAGA friends enthusiastically advanced the idea that shutting down the government would be a good thing. No, sir, I explained to him, recalling the long-ago shutdown battles between Newt Gingrich’s GOP-controlled Congress and President Bill Clinton. Republicans never “win” a shutdown and, with the GOP holding the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress, there was no way they’d escape the blame. Whatever any hard-core partisans might say about the principles involved, ordinary voters hate shutdowns — it looks like amateur-hour incompetence to them — and it behooved Republican leaders to get a deal done. Speaker Mike Johnson managed to put together an agreement to avert the shutdown last spring, buying six months of time, but in the fall, it was Democrats who decided to shut down the government for a whole month, all the while trying to cast blame on the GOP.
What I was trying to offer my young MAGA hothead friend was the historical perspective on the situation, informed by many decades of political observation. If your direct involvement with politics began when Donald Trump came down that escalator in June 2015, it might be difficult for you to understand the long view of events that your elders bring to bear on such controversies. And, to invoke an old adage, we stand on the shoulders of giants. I was directly acquainted with some of those giants, including Phyllis Schlafly and M. Stanton Evans. Over the years, I had the opportunity to interview some old-timers who had been part of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, the spark that lit the fuse for the future Reagan revolution. Those old-timers were kind enough to give me advice that has been useful to me, and would be useful to some of these “burn-it-all-down” types, were they willing to listen to what any of their elders had to say.
“Let’s grow up, conservatives,” Goldwater famously told his supporters at the 1960 Republican convention, where they had hoped to stop the Establishment forces from nominating Richard Nixon. Goldwater said, “We want to take this party back, and I think some day we can. Let’s get to work.” And so they did, beginning a 20-year struggle that eventually put Ronald Reagan in the White House.
The tendency of GOP leadership to drift into Laodicean moderation — a weak “controlled opposition” to the radicalism of Democrats — is a perennial challenge for the grassroots Right. It is easy to become discouraged and to feel that your efforts have gone for naught because the cowardly elites in charge decided to compromise away everything you had labored to gain. Despite all the betrayals, however, there have been real achievements, and Trump’s amazing 2024 comeback election is proof that tens of millions of Americans still want to Make America Great Again. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: A Bush Family Comeback? Not No. Hell No!)
So, back to my email exchange with that young graduate student who had applauded me for being the kind of “neo-Confederate” worthy of denunciation by the SPLC. Having survived that episode, I later had the opportunity to meet the young scholar in person and reiterate to him my advice that he keep his political sentiments private. He did so, got his PhD, and has enjoyed a successful career, which I won’t describe in detail because I don’t want to blow his cover. Yet he is now in a position to influence and mentor youthful right-wingers, and I occasionally see his byline on essays written in very careful academic language, inoffensive and unlikely to provoke controversy. He is a wise fellow, playing the smart game, and no doubt counseling like-minded young scholars to do the same.
It’s almost Christmas, when we sing the “tidings of comfort and joy,” and I hope angry young men will reject the beckoning voices of darkness. Let them recall the “unflinching courage” of that gallant young artillery officer who stopped an entire division with just two cannons. And let them also remember what General Lee wrote to his former aide Charles Marshall in an 1870 letter:
My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor, in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future. The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.
The lesson is clear. Amid the most discouraging times — and “the present aspect of affairs” in 1870 was far more dire for Lee than it is for us now — we cannot “despair of the future.” We have a duty to remain optimistic, to keep the faith, and continue working steadily, no matter how much adversity confronts us. Be of good cheer, for history still teaches us to hope.
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