How Not To Think About History

The problem with Glenn Reynolds and the other contributors to the Instapundit blog is that they're intellectual welterweights at best. Reynolds is a transhumanist who used to talk a lot about Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity, not so muich lately, probably because like the melting of the polar ice, it was supposed to happen but hasn't. He's also a libertarian, which is a different way of saying he's an Ayn Rand cultist. I've never been able to find out if he has a contract to have his head frozen when he dies.

The other day I ran across a link on that site to an odd essay purporting to explain what's happening, “Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century”, which is actually just a link to yet another essay, the sort of thing they love at Instapundit.

The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century”. The phrase recognized that to speak of “the nineteenth century” was to describe far more than a specific hundred-year span on the calendar; it was to capture the whole spirit of an age: a rapturous epoch of expansion, empire, and Enlightenment, characterized by a triumphalist faith in human reason and progress. That lingering historical spirit, distinct from any before or after, was extinguished in the trenches of the Great War.

So wait a moment. World War I happened because the 19th century went on too long? (I used to get in a lot of trouble in college and grad school for asking questions like this in class.) Eventually I found some contrarian professors who explained that it was a serious error to hypostatize centuries, to treat an abstract entity as if it has real qualities. For example, the 18th century was the Age of Reason. Thus Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) was a rationalist, which he definitely was not.

Or David Hume (1711-1776), who said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”. The essay continues,

R.R. Reno opens his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods by quoting a young man who laments that “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century”. His paradoxical statement captures how the twentieth century has also extended well past its official sell-by date in the year 2000.

So Trump happened because the 20th century went on too long, but that was only because the 19th century started early but ran late.

The spirit of the Long Twentieth could not be more different from that which preceded it. In the wake of the horrors inflicted by WWII, the leadership classes of America and Europe understandably made “never again” the core of their ideational universe. They collectively resolved that fascism, war, and genocide must never again be allowed to threaten humanity.

But wasn't it a major theme of much literature in or about the inter-war period the disillusionment with the noble cause of the "war to end wars"? What about Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and its epigraph from Gertrude Stein, "You are all a lost generation", or Whittaker Chambers in Witness describing the formative effect his travels in post-Versailles Germany had on him? In fact, there is a whole post-World War II literary school that simply echoes the 1920s cynicism, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

In fact, Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory discusses in detail the effect of the widespread destruction on literary disillusionment, but one of the key literary works he cites as an example is Heller's 1961 Catch-22, set in World War II with an overall Marxist-Leninist subtext. Indeed, the essayist who traces 20th-century thought to "never again" idealism completely neglects Viet Nam-era disillusionment with establishment foreign policy.

On one hand, the historical view that the Zeitgeist must eventually glance at the calendar and update itself, especially if it's getting late, is an absurdity. On the other hand, if the explanation for Trump isn't that the 20th century went on too long, what's a better explanation?

I still have to fall back on the populist writer Ferdinand Lundberg and The Rich and the Super-Rich. His explanation for the state of American society from the post-Civil War period onward is that it had been dominated by an oligarchical class made up largely of the extended families and descendents of the industrial robber barons. They were in a position to control media, dominate intellectual life by endowing foundations, universities, and private schools, control religious institutions like The Episcopal Church, and place themselves or their hirelings at policy government levels in both parties.

There was a strong consensus among this class on the social agenda. It was dominated by the late 19th century paradigm of Fabian socialism, whereby the upper class, driven by fear of the Marxist proletarian revolution, would temporize and co-opt working class demands with gradual but meaningless reforms whose intent was to provide an illusion of progress while keeping the upper class in place. A secondary goal after the civil rights movement was to temporize with the threat of a helter-skelter race war by a program of token concessions to minorities.

It seems to me that the explanation for Trump is the loss of this consensus among the upper class. One factor is the receding fear of a world proletarian revolution due to the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist model by the 1990s. Another is that the expense of both the Cold War style military strategies and Fabian social programs has become unsustainable. The token concessions to minorities have also proven ineffective, while they reduce the morale and productivity of the working class overall.

This reassessment is by no means unanimous, in part because a substantial part of the upper class recognizes that whatever happens to the population at large, they can still pay off whomever needs to be paid off, and within their gated communities and exclusive condos, life will go on. What seems to have occurred, though, is that a new wealthy class has come up with fewer ties to the established foundations, universities, and other institutions. It's new money that comes from another generation of technical innovation that makes the older consensus less relevant.

But the older consensus dates from the 19th century, not the post-World War II period. It seems to me that Trump happened because he was able to form a working majority among the wealthy that would entertain a new paradigm that as yet isn't fully formed.