People organize themselves around hero myths, so if you’re going to tear one down as rabidly as Lew Rockwell’s tribe of libertarians are in the habit of doing you’re obligated to suggest a replacement. If we’re going for simple substitution I’d put in John Dickinson for Alexander Hamilton or whomever, Thomas Jackson for Abraham Lincoln, Charles Lindbergh for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Engelbert Dollfuss for Winston Churchill. One could say there’s an apple-and-oranges issue here, and you can’t put in a pilot for a president, but I don’t care.
I’m being quick and casual about it because the revisionist effort is starting to seem a little futile to me. Lincoln and Churchill aren’t likely to budge from the popular consciousness, regardless of how hard critics shove or how madly Victor Davis Hanson comes across in his writing. Revisionists might nip at the edges of a hero’s portrait and attract a few dissident intellectuals into their camp. Some people can sell a fair number of hero-bashing books, and that’s alright. But where does it go beyond that?
I don’t have the answer, but I’m sure there are limits to the project. Yet often hero-bashers can get pretty rabid and stirred up, as if they really aim to put all of these evil genies back in their bottles and won’t stop at anything less. I’m not categorically challenging anyone, but that’s how, say, Lew Rockwell and Tom DiLorenzo sound to me after a while. While I favor the niche right-wing historical narrative broadly presented by writers at this outlet and a few others, obviously the wider public is generally unreceptive. I don’t think shouting louder or gathering more evidence is going to change that fundamentally.
That’s mostly my personal prejudice. I’m more interested in finding out what other writers at this site think about hero-bashing. What’s the ultimate point and how much is too much? Having just finished a few books on Alexander Hamilton I’m also wondering, in light of Tom DiLorenzo’s stinging critique—How bad was Hamilton, really? Is he really a root cause of the problems we’re suffering today? I confess I’m prepared to admire him over Jefferson, who (to name one defect) saw entirely too much in the Jacobin cause.
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Hero Bashing
People organize themselves around hero myths, so if you’re going to tear one down as rabidly as Lew Rockwell’s tribe of libertarians are in the habit of doing you’re obligated to … [Read More]
Posted by Evan McLaren on September 09, 2009
The Usual Suspects