July 26, 2007
Another Great Rightist III Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:35 PM EST Thanks to Fred Smoler for his thoughtful response to my musings on greatness polls. I particularly appreciate his insights on de Gaulle; I was not aware of some of the complexities of his place in French memory. Upon reflection, it probably makes more sense to classify de Gaulle as a nationalist first and a rightist second. I think it’s safe to say the same of Adenauer and Churchill, although it’s also true that virtually anyone looks moderate or liberal in comparison with Nazis. As much as he stood up for liberal values in opposing Hitler, Churchill was pretty reactionary when it came to Ireland and the empire, and he failed to champion the postwar social programs that Britons wanted. Mr. Smoler is right that Churchill was no “simple rightist,” but I’d assert that a rightist he was, all the same. On Reagan, I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Smoler’s analysis. One sentence in Mr. Smoler’s paragraph on Reagan spurs a further thought. I try to stick to the rule that one shouldn’t attempt to draw conclusions from bad data, and these polls are certainly bad data. But as I’ve already broken this rule, I’ll go a little further. Mr. Smoler writes, “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.” I think this is true, and I would not expect many of these rankings to be the same in 50 years—so maybe these surveys tell us more about the times we live in than about the way nostalgia works, in general. Even with the complications Mr. Smoler points out, there’s at least the semblance of a pattern that people today are reminiscing about right-of-center nationalists from the recent past. I suggested in my last post that this had to do with a popular yearning for “supposedly more straightforward times.” Mr. Smoler’s observation that most of these “greatest” men—all of them but Salazar and Reagan—were accomplished anti-Nazis, seems to confirm this. If there’s one international conflict remembered for its moral clarity, World War II is it. In the midst of our comparatively muddled struggle with Islamic extremism, one inclines toward sympathy with this nostalgia. To reiterate, it’s likely foolish to draw any serious conclusions from these polls. But if we’re ever fortunate enough to live in generally peaceful times, I wonder whether we would find people choosing Martin Luther King, William Shakespeare, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Louis Pasteur, and Johannes Gutenberg as their “greatest” forebears.
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