Historic Political Narratives You Disagree With

[WPADEM]

Use this thread to post historical narratives that deal with politics that you disagree with. Especially common ones.

[Aurelius]

The obvious ones:
-The "party switch" theory in its classic form (the parties have been remarkably consistent on core economic issues since at least the 1870s, and even from the 1850s to the 1870s there are strong internal continuities)
-Alexander Hamilton or John Adams as some sort of proto-liberal

Others:
-The idea that Polk's national expansion was done in the service of slavery
-That the American revolution was fundamentally conservative or liberal
-That the war of 1812 was not a victory for America for its own intents and purposes

[Vice President Christian Man]

Thomas Jefferson being a Conservative

[Wikipedia delenda est]

This notion that the Democrats were always "liberal" and the Republicans always "conservative", and the related notion that zealous Protestants have always throughout American history been extreme conservatives, and because Catholics were poor immigrants they must have been supporters of liberalism. Because somehow being anti-Catholic or against drinking or whatever is more telling of your place on the political spectrum than whether you think people should be slaves, willfully ignoring the actual opinions of radicals and liberals on what they referred to as "popery and slavery". It's freaking annoying how people on here have deluded themselves. I'm just going to leave some quotes here; apologies if you've already seen them (but apparently these things need to be repeated):

One represents the culture, the industry and progressive spirit of the North, and the other affiliates with the South and finds its main support in all that is left of an extinct system of barbarism. It sympathised with rebellion; resisted the abolition of slavery; fought against the enfranchisement of colored citizens, and to-day deprives them by fraud, violence, murder and assassination, of the exercise of that Constitutional right, in most of the old slave states.

[...]

One represents the culture, the industry and progressive spirit of the North, and the other affiliates with the South and finds its main support in all that is left of an extinct system of barbarism. It sympathised with rebellion; resisted the abolition of slavery; fought against the enfranchisement of colored citizens, and to-day deprives them by fraud, violence, murder and assassination, of the exercise of that Constitutional right, in most of the old slave states.

"Slavery," wrote Henry Adams in 1907, "drove the whole Puritan community back on its Puritanism." He was reflecting on his early teenage years in the 1850s, the time when he first tried to picture the forces arrayed against each other in America. "The Slave power took the place of Stuart kings and Roman popes" in his imagination, while on the other side the antislavery politicians became the new Puritan liberators, bravely battling tyranny and obscurantism. Growing up in Boston as a scion of a revolutionary family but somewhat adrift in the nineteenth century, Adams found that this image of an earlier struggle renewed his sense of community. His politics "were no longer so modern as the eighteenth century, but took a strong tone of the seventeenth." He was "no longer an isolated atom in a hostile universe, but a sort of herring-fry in a shoal of moving fish." Eventually he discovered that Massachusetts politics were more complicated and less pristine than those of his imagined Puritan past; patronage swaps and other Faustian bargains had to be struck with proslavery Democrats, bargains that were justified as tactical truces in the struggle against slavery and meanwhile served the career ambitions of Whig and Free Soil politicians. But that was to come later. For a thirteen-year-old, the sides were clearly drawn: it was the Roundheads versus the Cavaliers, and the Roundheads were on the side of God and the Republic.
Adams's adolescent typology was widely shared in the decade prior to the Civil War and felt with particular intensity during the war itself. For Northern antislavery spokesmen, the Puritans and "Pilgrims" - terms they often used interchangeably - had laid the groundwork for self-government in America by inculcating habits of hard work, self-discipline, and moral idealism. It was "the blood of those Puritans who planted themselves on these shores," wrote the abolitionist Theodore Parker, "which gave their descendants ad Power of Idea and a Power of Action, such as no people before our time ever had." In contrast, "the Southern States were mainly colonies of adventurers, rather than establishments of men who for conscience' sake fled to the wilderness." Unschooled in religion and morality, at least in comparison to the inhabitants of the "sterner and more austere colonies of the North," the people of the South were all too prone to accept the institution of slavery.

For several centuries the term "Puritan" was synonymous with democracy, enlightenment, rebellion against tyranny, freedom, and much else that was laudable. In the last century an entire reversal has occurred, making the term to mean repressive, hypocritical, censorious, prudish, and worse ... From 1620 to 1900 the great majority of commentators, including such non-Calvinists as Emerson, Thoreau, and Unitarians and liberals generally, expressed their profuse admiration of the Puritans.

Not only did Church officials perceive the Republicans to be anti-Catholic and associate them with the nativist riots that occurred during the prewar period, but prelates and priests also argued that the party of Lincoln represented the ill-effects of Protestantism in American society. Clergy considered the Republican antislavery platform and the party’s association with abolitionism to be examples of Protestant fanaticism. Although by 1860 nearly all Protestant sects contained an antislavery faction, almost all members of the Church—in both the United States and Europe—denounced abolitionism as a radical movement that opposed Catholic teachings. Catholic leaders considered abolitionism to be a product of Protestant liberalism which threatened to upend the social and legal status quo in the country. As abolitionists demanded an immediate end to slavery, despite American laws that protected the institution, Catholic leaders sought to preserve order by upholding the sanctity of the Constitution. Thus, prelates and priests believed that the Republican Party—the party of northern Protestants—endangered the stability of the country by advancing its antislavery platform. In particular, ultramontane clergy—like Francis Patrick Kenrick and Spalding—adhered to the belief that slavery remained a legitimate human relation that fit within a structured social hierarchy. Clergy referenced Catholic theology, doctrine, and dogma to offer an alternative course of action than the one pursued by abolitionists and antislavery Republicans. According to members of the American hierarchy, Catholicism defended national laws, protected the social order, and prevented political factionalism because it provided a central authority—the Church—to settle internal disputes. On the other hand, prelates and priests contended that Protestantism allowed for lawlessness, fomented social disorder, and led to political disunion because, without the acceptance of a central moral authority, Protestantism allowed each man (or woman) to become a law unto himself (or herself). Thus, not only did clergy oppose the Republican Party because of its perceived anti-Catholic stance, but prelates and priests also disparaged the party of Lincoln because it represented the interests of northern Protestants, a group that Catholics considered uninformed religious fanatics that fomented disunion.

[...]

Although the clergy in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri did not publicly endorse or campaign for a candidate in the presidential election of 1860, the majority of prelates and priests privately supported Stephen Douglas, the northern Democratic candidate from Illinois. The clergy’s antebellum experiences with nativism and anti-Catholicism forged a strong bond between members of the Church and Democrats. However, by the summer of 1860, the Democratic Party had divided into northern and southern wings, forcing Border State Catholics to decide between Douglas and John C. Breckinridge of the southern Democratic Party. Although some Catholics backed Breckinridge—particularly fellow Kentuckians from the western portion of the state—most members of the Church in the region supported Douglas. The northern Democratic candidate promoted unionism and vowed to uphold the status quo, which, to Catholic clergy, meant an adherence to the law and the preservation of social order. As Catholic historian William B. Kurtz explained, “Catholics’ faith and religious worldview, which emphasized stability over reform, also made them predisposed to favor a conservative and national party.” Douglas gained the support of Catholics because he advocated the policy of popular sovereignty to decide the fate of slavery in the West, opposed abolitionism, promised to protect the rights of immigrants, and promoted the sanctity of the Union by running a national campaign. For example, regarding the dispute over slavery in the western territories, the Douglas Democratic platform pledged to “abide by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States [the Dred Scott decision] upon these questions of Constitutional law.” Thus, clergy from the Border States viewed Douglas as the candidate least influenced by Protestant liberalism and most committed to the interests of the Church and the nation.

By midcentury many leading American Catholics held that Catholicism melded more easily with the hierarchical and illiberal culture of the slaveholding South than with the ultra-democratic and commercial values of the Yankee North. This notion of the South as a kind of “quasi-Catholic society,” flawed and superficial as it was, would soon spread beyond American shores and exert a powerful hold over the Catholic elite of Europe. As the United States descended into Civil War, many of the Catholic monarchists, nobles, and reactionaries of the Old World came to regard the struggle between an abolitionist North and slaveholding South as a mirror image of the longstanding struggle between liberal democracy and reactionary monarchism that had roiled Catholic Europe since 1789. The Confederacy, on this view, was a traditional, aristocratic society besieged by the modern forces of democracy and industrialism embodied in the “Yankee Leviathan” of the North. Eager to witness the dissolution of the American Republic, the Catholic elite of France, Spain, Germany, Austria and Italy, including many of the leading representatives of the Holy See itself, would prove among the most stalwart allies of the Confederacy.

[...]

Moreover, the view of the Confederacy as a traditional, aristocratic society besieged by a revolutionary and ultra-democratic North was itself a key article of Confederate propaganda during the Civil War. Eager to enlist foreign allies and shape public opinion overseas, the Confederacy between 1862 and 1864 funded an extensive agitprop campaign in Europe aimed at reinforcing the perception of the American South as a conservative, traditional society at war with the radical and materialistic “Yankees” and “Puritans” of the industrial North. Particularly in France, Ireland, Spain, and Italy, a central pillar of this propaganda campaign was the argument that the aristocratic South was, in terms of culture, religion, politics, and national origins, a kind of colonial outpost of the Catholic Old World. To help disseminate this message, the Confederate government enlisted a number of American Catholic churchmen, including Rev. John Bannon of St. Louis and Bishop Patrick Lynch of Charleston, to travel to Europe as diplomatic agents. But this propaganda campaign also benefited from the more informal support of a wide array of pro-Confederate American Catholic clergymen, including Martin John Spalding, the intellectual luminary of the American hierarchy, who sought to leverage their Old World influence into stronger diplomatic ties between Richmond and Rome.

[...]

The ultramontane assault against the secular world, however, rarely applied to the world of urban machine politics, where support for the Democratic Party remained a hallmark of immigrant life. If anything, the ultramontane revolution actually strengthened Irish-Catholic attachment to the increasingly reactionary Democrats, which amid the bitter sectional debates of the 1850s emerged as the de facto party of the South. By steadfastly denouncing abolitionism as an outgrowth of “the Lawless liberalism” that had convulsed Europe, the ultramontane Church legitimized the proslavery stance of Southern Democrats and further estranged Irish-Catholics from the reformist impulse of the Whig and Republican parties. In truth, the democratic-republicanism of Irish-born radicals like Thomas Addis Emmet and Thomas O’Connor had always mixed uneasily with the proslavery apologetics of Jefferson and Jackson, and in this respect the ultramontane emphasis on tradition, order, and hierarchy helped resolve longstanding cultural differences between aristocratic Southern elites and hardscrabble working-class Irish. When Charles O’Conor in 1859 praised African slavery as an “institution ordained by nature,” he voiced a sentiment that would have rattled his father, the former political radical, but hardly seemed out of place to the reactionaries who dominated both the Catholic Church and the Democratic Party at midcentury.

[...]

In 1863 Father John Bannon of Missouri, an Irish-American Catholic priest serving as a Confederate agent abroad, published a series of pamphlets in Ireland addressed to the local Catholic clergy. Intended to quell Irish-Catholic support for the Union Army, which relied heavily on the enlistment of immigrant Irish, the letters cast the American Civil War as epic spiritual struggle between the “all-domineering materialism” of the Yankee North—a society purportedly defined by vulgar industrialism, rampant individualism, and a tawdry ultra-republican political culture—and the “remnant of Christian civilization” that still prevailed in the rural South. The spiritual conflict between North and South, Bannon insisted, owed to the very origins of the European settlement in North America. Whereas New England Yankees were the spiritual heirs of anti-Catholic Protestant radicals like Oliver Cromwell, the planters of the South were descended from the aristocratic families of Catholic Europe, and retained many of the pieties and prejudices of their Old World ancestors. In an age of ever-advancing secularism, liberalism, and materialism, the Southern planter class, much like the Roman Catholic Church itself, remained a pillar of conservative Christian culture. "The Southern People,” Bannon affirmed to his Irish-Catholic audience, were “by race, religion and principles, the natural ally of the foreigner and Catholic.”

[...]

But perhaps nothing more strongly influenced the rise of ultramontanism in the American Church than the outspoken support of Protestant nativists, middle-class reformers, and urban evangelicals for the political convulsions that had roiled Catholic Europe. Covering the uprisings in Italy as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, one the leading organs of the Whig Party, Margaret Fuller, the Massachusetts-born reformer and litterateur, wrote glowingly of the Italian “cause for freedom” while condemning the backwardness and conservatism of the Catholic clergy. (She was particularly critical of the Jesuit Order, which she accused of being “always against the free progress of humanity.”) After nationalist forces conquered the Papal States and drove Pius into exile, a wide array of American Protestant luminaries, including Horace Greeley, voiced vigorous support for the Roman Republic, much to the horror of the nation’s Catholics. “They have plundered the churches—they have extorted money from the people—they have almost legalized assassination where ever their authority,” Hughes said of nationalist uprising in Italy. “And this is the phalanx recognized by Mr. Greeley as the Roman Republic.” Such objections, however, did little dampen American Protestant support for liberal nationalism. In the aftermath of the Roman revolution a number of leading European radicals, including Louis Kossuth of Hungary and Alessandro Gavazzi of Italy, made extended tours through North America, denouncing “popery” as a threat to human freedom while soliciting financial contributions for nationalist insurgents in Europe. Typically sponsored by leading American evangelicals, these lecture tours only reinforced the obvious parallels between anti-Catholic nativists in the U.S. and secular liberals in Europe. By the mid-1850s, the apparent links between European liberals and American Know-Nothings had all but extinguished the radical democratic strain of Irish Catholicism.

I apologize once again for posting and reposting such long quotations, but I want to show that I have evidence on my side and am not taking some radical or revisionist position. If Yankee or whomever decides to respond to this post, I'd ask that he respond specifically to the quotations I have provided and explain why those historians got it wrong rather than respond to whatever position he thinks I hold.

[Aurelius]

Can we not turn this into party switch thread #102348124587234527846?

[Wikipedia delenda est]

Can we not turn this into party switch thread #102348124587234527846?

Hey, it wasn't me who started it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I'm tired of these debates too but there are some things I'm not going to let just go unchallenged.

[Aurelius]

Can we not turn this into party switch thread #102348124587234527846?

Hey, it wasn't me who started it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I'm tired of these debates too but there are some things I'm not going to let just go unchallenged.

I listed it as one of five narratives I disagree with. Didn't expect what followed.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Can we not turn this into party switch thread #102348124587234527846?

Hey, it wasn't me who started it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I'm tired of these debates too but there are some things I'm not going to let just go unchallenged.

I listed it as one of five narratives I disagree with. Didn't expect what followed.

In so many ways, Henry has learned nothing and forgotten everything. Here it is a matter of time and place.

[darklordoftech]

That in the days of Reagan, Republicans weren’t any more hostile to immigration than Democrats.

https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/22/us/transcript-of-the-reagan-mondale-debate-on-foreign-policy.html

[Georg Ebner]

All!

At least in contemporary history (XXth, partly [late] XIXth) everything the average journalists, demagogues and popular pseudoScientists paint is per se wrong.

[WPADEM]

The obvious ones:
-The "party switch" theory in its classic form (the parties have been remarkably consistent on core economic issues since at least the 1870s, and even from the 1850s to the 1870s there are strong internal continuities)
-Alexander Hamilton or John Adams as some sort of proto-liberal

Others:
-The idea that Polk's national expansion was done in the service of slavery
-That the American revolution was fundamentally conservative or liberal
-That the war of 1812 was not a victory for America for its own intents and purposes

I have a few problems with the party switch theory as well. I think I would argue on how the parties have changed voters through the decades as an alternative.

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

That founding fathers can be entirely characterized in 'liberal vs conservative terms'. Like John Adams and Charles Pinckney both had similar political beliefs as Federalists. At the time the populace would have thought that. You can't characterize the founding fathers as left or right just based on their opinions of slavery.

[SInNYC]

What I disagree with:
America was founded as the land of religious freedom. Related to this, a state religion is always a bad thing.

Why:
America was the land where England sent its religious extremists. Some like Puritans were Taliban-like, while others like the Quakers were just considered odd.

As far as state religions, I would argue that the lack of a state religion is what led to today's fundamentalism. For all practical purposes, New England had a state religion, and isn't particularly religious today. Southern colonies were Anglican (and less religious than the rest of the nation), but the church didnt have much influence in sprawling rural areas, which led to every idiot interpreting the scriptures in his own nutty way. Sometimes its nice to have scholars interpret sources - imagine if you were teaching a class in your specialty and every student googles up some nonsense and claims you're wrong because google says so.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I am not sure what is more absurd: claiming the Puritans were equivalent to the Taliban, or suggesting this was a good thing.

[WPADEM]

What I disagree with:
America was founded as the land of religious freedom. Related to this, a state religion is always a bad thing.

Why:
America was the land where England sent its religious extremists. Some like Puritans were Taliban-like, while others like the Quakers were just considered odd.

As far as state religions, I would argue that the lack of a state religion is what led to today's fundamentalism. For all practical purposes, New England had a state religion, and isn't particularly religious today. Southern colonies were Anglican (and less religious than the rest of the nation), but the church didnt have much influence in sprawling rural areas, which led to every idiot interpreting the scriptures in his own nutty way. Sometimes its nice to have scholars interpret sources - imagine if you were teaching a class in your specialty and every student googles up some nonsense and claims you're wrong because google says so.

Could you elaborate a little more? Are you arguing that Religious freedom contributed to our current climate.  It's an interesting theory that I find intriguing, though it might be pretty unpopular. I have heard it proposed that much of our divisions go back to Enlightment era factions that never resolved their differences.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

"Versailles caused the rise of the Nazis and WW2" is a popular one that is blatantly false.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

I am not sure what is more absurd: claiming the Puritans were equivalent to the Taliban, or suggesting this was a good thing.

"If they hung a few troublesome old women, the good that they achieved was more than compensated for by any errors they may have committed." - George Fitzhugh

[SInNYC]

What I disagree with:
America was founded as the land of religious freedom. Related to this, a state religion is always a bad thing.

Why:
America was the land where England sent its religious extremists. Some like Puritans were Taliban-like, while others like the Quakers were just considered odd.

As far as state religions, I would argue that the lack of a state religion is what led to today's fundamentalism. For all practical purposes, New England had a state religion, and isn't particularly religious today. Southern colonies were Anglican (and less religious than the rest of the nation), but the church didnt have much influence in sprawling rural areas, which led to every idiot interpreting the scriptures in his own nutty way. Sometimes its nice to have scholars interpret sources - imagine if you were teaching a class in your specialty and every student googles up some nonsense and claims you're wrong because google says so.

Could you elaborate a little more? Are you arguing that Religious freedom contributed to our current climate.  It's an interesting theory that I find intriguing, though it might be pretty unpopular. I have heard it proposed that much of our divisions go back to Enlightment era factions that never resolved their differences.

Kind of. "We" did not have religious freedom in general as a good chunk of colonies, especially the Puritan ones, permitted no others. But in the south where there was relative religious freedom, partly because of its rural nature, people were free to have their own interpretations.

When you have a state religion, you either join it or opt out completely (sometimes secretly). Many countries in North Europe have state religions, but natives have essentially opted out and these countries are among the least religious in the world. The state religion may also avert this opting out by modernizing, in which case change is top down and quick. In countries without state religions, people also have the choice to make up their own interpretations (perhaps led by street preachers), some of which are worse than the state religion. Obviously, this doesnt happen everywhere but I think thats a reason for the south.

I think its generally accepted that the so called Great Reawakenings were a reaction to the Enlightment, but it led to fundamentalism in places that werent tied to a strong existing church.

As far as UST's post above claiming I suggested the Puritans and/or the Taliban are a good thing (other than in an ironic way), I am speechless. But then the internet wouldnt be the internet without such misintepretations.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

As far as UST's post above claiming I suggested the Puritans and/or the Taliban are a good thing (other than in an ironic way), I am speechless. But then the internet wouldnt be the internet without such misintepretations.

You compared the Puritans to the Taliban. Then you credited their embrace of a state church with the secularism of present-day New Englanders, which you clearly admire (a hilarious take for many reasons, but moving on). I do not have to misinterpret anything to make this take look very silly.

[Agonized-Statism]

-That the American revolution was fundamentally conservative or liberal

In the confused modern sense or the classical sense? Because it was pretty clearly predicated on the liberalism of the Enlightenment (something that encompasses both modern "liberals" and "conservatives") versus contemporary mercantilism.

[Aurelius]

-That the American revolution was fundamentally conservative or liberal

In the confused modern sense or the classical sense? Because it was pretty clearly predicated on the liberalism of the Enlightenment (something that encompasses both modern "liberals" and "conservatives") versus contemporary mercantilism.

I was speaking about the modern sense, in which partisans try to claim the Revolution was an expression of their party's current principles. However, even in the Enlightenment sense, there was a faction of Patriots who had no interest in liberal reforms and simply wanted for the Americans to be able to govern themselves as they had largely been able to before the British abandoned salutary neglect. For these folks it was a matter of restoring an ancient right, not innovating new rights.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

For these folks it was a matter of restoring an ancient right, not innovating new rights.

Every historical event has different people backing things for different reasons, that is a given.

That said, The American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution before it get categorized as "Conservative Revolutions" in that they were waged to restored traditional balances of power, rights and such forth that were being undermined in some fashion, in contrast to the more radical revolutions of France and later Russia.

This concept is at the heart of American Conservative thinking as it developed in the 20th century, and it has its root with Edmund Burke who was arguably the first to espouse a distinction that made both the Glorious and American Revolutions justifiable, while the French Revolution was not (or depending on your exact point of being horrified, the excesses thereof after a certain point. Even Burke himself championed the push for liberty, but grew horrified once the mob stormed Versailles and took King Louis XVI back to Paris).

It was from that perspective that he wrote his famous "Reflections", though it took more than a year to be published.

A case could be said that the early "Federalist" movement was a precursor to Burkean thought, as it too reacted to mob rule and sought to dial back "democratic excess" for the sake of preserving the Revolution from devouring itself.

[TDAS04]

I don’t think the parties switched, but I strongly disagree with anyone who says Abraham Lincoln was a conservative.

However, I also disagree the notion that Nixon was a liberal, or that Kennedy was a conservative.

[darklordoftech]

The narrative that Republicans never had a rural element to them until the 21st Century.

[Aurelius]

I don’t think the parties switched, but I strongly disagree with anyone who says Abraham Lincoln was a conservative.

However, I also disagree the notion that Nixon was a liberal, or that Kennedy was a conservative.

I hate applying liberal and conservative labels to earlier stages of American history before we were poisoned with the mindset of classifying things as left/right, but Lincoln strikes me as a progressive conservative.