Josh Marshall points out this snippet from David Brooks’s column in today’s New York Times:
I remind Oakeshott that he was ambivalent about the American Revolution, and dubious about a people who had made a sharp break with the past in the name of inalienable rights and other abstractions. But ours is the one revolution that worked, and it did precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn’t pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.
Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn’t even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any “plan” hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality.
It just so happens that I’m in the middle of Howard Zinn’s leftist screed historical survey of our nation from 1492 to the present, “A People’s History of the United States.”
Zinn makes the compelling argument that the American revolution wasn’t about “inalienable rights.” In fact , it was about the ruling class’s desire to free themselves from British taxes so as to become richer. End of story.
Sure, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal.” But that didn’t include the Indians who were systematically exterminated, it didn’t include slaves, and it didn’t include women. The colonies broke from Britain not, as we’ve come to believe, because of ideological necessity, but because the white guys who were running the show wanted to retain their power.
Zinn’s theories are steeped in gender and identity politics, yes, but he’s pretty convincing. I agree with Marshall: America has a long and rich tradition of “non-ideological pragmatism.” It’s shaped every international conflict from the revolution to the war in Iraq.