There are, in this world, a number of regime Narratives that you must endorse, or else.
That’s why presidential candidate Nikki Haley is in the woodshed right now.
She was asked: “What do you think the cause of the Civil War was?”
She should have answered: “Slavery.” But instead she answered with a bunch of word salad. Maybe she was trying to sound sophisticated.
Between you and me, and don’t tell your ultra-liberal friend, the civil war was probably just as much about the rising power of the North and the takeoff of the industrial revolution. Not to mention the moral culture of the North which then, as now, is all wrapped up in moral crusades. Added together, it would mean that the South would not be quite as powerful as in the first 70 years of the United States. And so the South resisted.
Like right now in the United States where our liberal friends are facing a decline in their power and the rise of populist nationalism and they don’t like it, not one bit.
I like to ask: suppose all the parties, North and South, had cooled their jets for 20 years. Would the South have been defending the peculiar institution to the death in the 1880s?
There are all kinds of other Narratives that you are not allowed to question.
The Jews and the Holocaust. The way we are taught these days, it seems as if the whole point of World War II was the Jews and the Final Solution. No doubt Hitler used The Jews as his Schmittian “enemy” in his rise to power. And the concentration of East European Jews in eastern Poland and western Ukraine were right in the middle of conflict between Hitler and Stalin. And there is no doubt that, especially towards the end of the war, the Nazis needed all the slave labor they could get. But the butcher’s bill was 20 million Russians, 9 million Germans, 5 million Poles and 5-6 million Jews (who would be included in the Soviet, Polish, and German dead). Compare with the UK at 450,000 and the US at 420,000, military and civilian.
New Deal. We are to believe that FDR saved capitalism from itself with his New Deal and union and Social Security legislation. Oh, and don forget the WPA. In fact, of course, the big government programs of the New Deal lengthened the aftermath of the Crash of 1929. Not that progressive Republican Herbert Hoover was any better.
Poverty Reduction. Our liberal friends want you to believe that the welfare state did it. Far-right whackos like me want to say that the market system did it. But look at this graph:
But really, what happened in 1950? Penicillin? The Green Revolution in high-yield crops? China and India getting with the capitalist revolution in the late 20th century?
I have a little problem in that I really don’t like regime Narrative. I always assume it is trying to hide something.
But what do I know?