Posted by Jay Livingston
Thinking About the Unthinkable was the title of a 1962 book about thermonuclear war. The author was Herman Kahn. In an earlier book, Kahn maintained that thermonuclear war, like any other war, was both possible and winnable. Critics responded that to even bring discussion of such a war into the realm of rational debate turned the horror of mass annihilation into an acceptable idea.
A half-century later, Donald Trump is helping to bring the ideas of White nationalism – once closeted and unacceptable – into the realm of legitimate political discourse. At least, that’s the argument made by Emily Badger in the New York Times today* (here)
| Critics fear that Trump is inviting white supremacists out of the corner, helping ideas that have become widely reviled in America to be redefined as reasonable opinions — just part of the discussion. |
It’s what Pat Moynihan called “defining deviance down.” People can change their ideas so that what had once been deviant is now acceptable.
Unfortunately, it’s not always clear how norms change. People who write about the process wind up using the passive voice, a lot, as Badger does with both verbs in the second part of that sentence: “ideas that have become widely reviled”; “to be redefined.”
Who is doing the redefining?
It probably helps if the the green light on expressing those ideas comes from an important and mainstream source – the leader of the free world, for example. Or how about a respected magazine, not Brietbart or the Daily Stormer. And how about a “Senior Fellow” some place, just to give the whole thing the trappings of scholarship?
So here we have Arthur L. Herman, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, writing in the National Review. His article bears the title “Confederate Statues Honor Timeless Virtues – Let Them Stay” (here). If you have any doubt as to how wrong Herman is historically, read the Eric Foner piece I quoted yesterday, or see this article by Justin Fox at Bloomberg. Fox, in a footnote, cites a relevant statistic: in the 1890s in Alabama there were 177 lynchings.
What Herman does in his article is not so much defining deviance down but rather standing it on its head. Those 177 lynchings, he argues, were good times compared with the court decisions and passage of civil rights laws seventy years later. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP.
| [Robert E. Lee’s] dream of a new South descended into Jim Crow after he died. This is in fact the best argument that those who want these statues gone can make: that the “reconciliation” between North and South was done on the backs of blacks, and that the end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow were the price America paid to have peace in the aftermath of civil war. From a historical point of view, it’s almost convincing, even though what American blacks suffered under segregation was nothing compared to what liberalism has inflicted on them since the 1950s, as it destroyed their families, their schools, and their young men and women’s lives through drugs and guns and the gangster-rap culture “lifestyle,” which is really a death style. [emphasis added] |
For much of his article, Herman sounds like the stereotypical old White man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, though he’s barely into his sixties. Perhaps his views about the relative joys of Reconstruction and Jim Crow will fade as the people who hold those views age and depart this plane. But it’s also possible that when those views are given the official stamp of National Review and the Hudson Institute, they become, even for younger people, less deviant and more thinkable. No doubt, Herman Kahn, one of the founders of the Hudson Institute, would be pleased.
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* Badger cites two noteworthy sociologists, Tina Fetner and Sarah Sobieraj
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