July 26, 2007
Another Great Rightist II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 07:00 PM EST Alex Burns posted today on what he thinks is a rule about admittedly dodgy polls about the people perceived to be the greatest leaders of nations. Conceding the silliness of some results, which may tell is more about the spirit in which some questions are answered than about the depth of popular conviction, he thinks such polls may "teach us something all the same. The conclusion I might draw is that right-of-center leaders from the recent past are generally the best focal points for popular nostalgia. Whatever their differences as leaders, Reagan, Salazar, Churchill, Adenauer, and de Gaulle are all remembered for their belligerent, can-do nationalism. This attitude may not always have produced the best policies, but it has allowed these men to live in popular memory as representations of supposedly more straightforward times." Maybe so, but here is another possibility: De Gaulle, for example, remembered as the greatest of Frenchmen because he stood against Vichy and Hitler, is admired as much as an imagined man of the left as of the right, in the Jacobin tradition of left patriotic militarism, and moreover as someone who restored republican government. De Gaulle was the man who outfought the French Communist Party for bragging rights to the Jacobin military tradition—a patriot rightist move—but then again, he was the man who decided to give up in Algeria, admittedly after overthrowing an elected government in a near coup, and he crushed a military movement that sought to hang on to Algeria. So de Gaulle was both a man of the right and something else; I am not certain his status in French eyes is fundamentally a tribute to his rightist incarnation. Churchill had once been a Liberal, he was never trusted by most Tories, and he preserved British parliamentary democracy against rightists who sought an accommodation with Hitler, some of whom feared the left more than National Socialism, and valued their empire more than a democratic order in Europe. Churchill was a liberal imperialist, an almost vanished species, not a conventional rightist, and he chose to lose the empire rather than preserve it at the price of any kind of liberalism. He said of his contribution that he had only been the roar of the lion—that the British people had been its heart. This sounds a bit like liberal democratic rhetoric. He was an aristocrat, but scarcely a simple rightist. Adenauer was an anti-Nazi, several times imprisoned by the regime, and he restored a German democracy; he was a rightist compared with the Social Democrats, a leftist compared with the actual and ghastly German right of very recent times. If the Germans most admired Bismarck, it would be another story. Reagan is tricky. For one thing, my honest guess is that Americans will go back to thinking Lincoln their greatest President, if they have ever really stopped, and (to say the least) Lincoln is not an obvious rightist. Americans also long admired Jefferson, not a rightist in his day or in ours, and also liked Washington, who declined both a throne and the leadership of a military dictatorship. Rightists get more rightist than Washington. For most of our history, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln were thought our greatest Presidents, and I do not rate very high Reagan's chance at keeping the top slot in memory. Stalin is credited with very literally saving his country, from people who vowed to murder or enslave every Russian, and looked to come close to doing it; part of his status derives from that association. Some also derives from a contrast of national prestige and order compared with current decline and chaos. Some of it may be a reluctance to concede the horrors of what was done in one's name, by people like oneself. And where is the competition for greatest democratic Russian leader? Yeltsin, who presided over chaos and immiseration? The Stalin ranking is mad and sad, but it does not make for a rule.
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