Why Are Liberals So Grumpy About the Course of American History?
An often heard charge against the American left, especially the section of it occupied by those in academe, is that they hate America. Columnist Suzanne Fields, writing in the Washington Times, laments the “America-bashing” found in history textbooks used in public schools. Sandra Stotsky in a report for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation agrees with this charge: “it is only America that can be shown as having an unending history of social strife, political repression, and political inequalities among racial or ethnic groups.” Daniel Pipes cites this as a long-time problem, declaring that the left in academe has “for some decades been the major American institution most alienated from the rest of the country” and liberal writer Marc Cooper writes from the Nation that “the American left—or at least a broad swath of it—is more alienated from its own national institutions” than other cohorts in other nations. Writers such as the enormously popular Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky seem to revel in this alienation, ever mulling over the litany of U.S. sins.
As a teacher of college-level courses on the history of criminal justice institutions in the United States I cannot help but agree. Many of the academics who write about this history highlight the many (admittedly) shameful aspects of our national past: vigilantism, slave patrols, racism, corruption and violence among our police, chain gangs and courtroom inequalities and injustice. While these tales should indeed be told (in the hopes of history not repeating itself) it is curious that this should be the focus of so many those on the left. The reason this should be curious is that if one examines our history in comparison to others', rather than measuring it against an ideal alternative, then this is history any liberal should celebrate. In many ways, the American Project is a liberal one.
Even before Americans landed on the soil of Virginia and Massachusetts (I focus on English settlers not with the intention to ignore or exclude the important histories of other groups, but to focus on the groups whose institutions would largely define our national experience) they possessed a rich liberal heritage. In comparison to the other European despotisms of the time the English people had struggled for and won several important freedoms and rights embedded in documents such as Magna Carta: habeas corpus, due process, common law protections, trial by jury and more. Before the American Founding as an independent nation the English Bill of Rights would bolster these freedoms and add more to the legal heritage of the colonists.
These charters of ancient liberties granted by a King to his people, though impressive, are eclipsed by the American Declaration (expressing the political and moral equality of all and the right of the people to rebel against tyrannical government), by the Constitution (limiting government and establishing a government by and for the people), and by the Bill of Rights (granting unprecedented rights to the citizens of the new nation). The Founding was perhaps the most liberal moment in history, as Eric Foner notes in the Nation: until this moment “doctrines of divine right and hierarchical authority had dominated political thought.” The Founding changed that.
As a criminal justice professor I tend to focus on what I call the “criminal justice Amendments,” numbers four through eight: The right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, the right against self-incrimination, the right to have the assistance of counsel, the right to a grand jury, the right to reasonable bail and non-excessive punishments. These were and still are in comparison to the rest of the world (including many industrial nations) relatively unheard of.
Other periods of American history have similarly liberal achievements. Jacksonian Democracy had shameful points, but it was also an unheard of period of expansion of democratic participation. The Civil War was fought over the largest shame in American history, slavery, but it also showed a nation willing to bleed to correct its mistakes. Reconstruction may have failed in its attempt to protect and uplift an oppressed minority, but it is a rare thing for a nation to even try such a thing (most historically simply went on oppressing at full speed). The Progressive movement was marred by class-based moralism, but it was also an earnest attempt to make government more effective and relevant in the average citizen’s life. The U.S. also came out on the right side in the two World Wars and the Cold War.
To celebrate our nation and its history is not to turn a blind eye on its flaws. Rather, in the tradition of Martin Luther King, it is to address the failings in the context of the beauty of the ideals. Our ideals. Ideals which need not take a moral back seat to any other set of ideals and ideals which a liberal can regard with pride. For academics to harp on the failings of our nation in history and not recognize the monumental achievements is not only political suicide and perverse, it is incorrect.