11 Leftist Myths About American History
The Left tells a story about America. It goes something like this: Once upon a time, a group of brutal white colonial Christians arrived in North America from a far-off land. They brought with them disease, murder, and rape. They savaged the natives, enslaved people across the earth, and founded a country based on racism and sexism. That country’s founding document — the United States Constitution — was an ode to the propertied class, to sexism and racism, to slavery itself. America has never been able to escape those sins, and only the growth in power of the federal government controlled by people of the Left has been able to carve away at that dark legacy over time — but that legacy will never be erased, except by a complete reshaping of American society and politics.
Conservatives tell a different story. European colonists arrived in America in order to establish a country founded on principles of liberty and religious toleration. America is guilty of many sins in its past — but the principles enshrined in the Constitution are eternal and good. The Constitution’s central natural law principles laid forth the notions of individual liberty and rights to one’s own labor — and over time, those rights would be perfected in the United States, not through centralized government, but through good people struggling to bring about change through blood and sacrifice and persuasion. The growth of an overreaching federal government now threatens those very liberties in the name of tearing away at the system upon which our freedoms and prosperity is based.
There’s an enormous difference between these stories. It would be foolish not to acknowledge the sins of the past. But it would be far more foolish to throw away America’s glorious history in the name of wiping away the greatest system of government ever devised by man, and crippling the freest philosophy ever implemented in governmental form.
Myth 1: The U.S. Constitution is no longer relevant.
Fact: The U.S. Constitution is a timeless document.
On June 24, 2016, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals — an appointee of Ronald Reagan — announced that he no longer thought studying the Constitution was worthwhile. He wrote, “I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, day, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation (across the centuries — well, just a little more than two centuries, and of course less for many of the amendments). Eighteenth-century guys, however smart, could not foresee the culture, technology, etc. of the 21st century. Which means that the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the post–Civil War amendments (including the 14th), do not speak to today.”
This isn’t rare in the legal world of the Left. Leftists who speak of a “living Constitution” generally mean that the Constitution itself is irrelevant, dated, a vestige of a different time and place. The founders, they suggest, would never have structured our government the way it is if they had only known about iPhones and wireless internet. In 2001, then-State Senator Barack Obama told public radio that it was vital for Americans to “break free” of the Constitution in order to promote government-created “economic justice.” Obama explicitly stated, “We still suffer from not having a Constitution that guarantees its citizens economic rights.” By this, Obama meant that the government was not empowered under the Constitution to do much beyond ensuring so-called negative rights: rights that exist because no one can violate them. He wanted so-called positive rights: rights to goods and services provided by others via the government.
The founders recognized that, which is why the Constitution of the United States is a timeless document. The Constitution was created to deal with flaws in human nature, not to cope with technological advancements: we may have better means of communication than we did in 1787, but we don’t have better people. People are the same as they ever were.
The founders constructed the Constitution on the basis of three main realizations about human beings. First, they realized that human beings are imperfect, selfish, driven by self-interest. They will go to war with each other to assure the victory of that self-interest. The founders agreed with the central theory that without government, man reverted to constant warfare: “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The only way to solve this conundrum was a great and powerful ruler. They believed that such rulers were similarly capable of brutality in their own self-interest. They adopted this philosophy from John Locke, who wrote, and I'll paraphrase: "If rulers invaded the rights of others, they ought to be curbed."
So, how could society survive without an all-powerful ruler checking men? By a series of mutual checks and balances. As James Madison famously stated in Federalist #51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
Checks and balances were designed to prevent government from overreaching its boundaries; only widespread agreement could overrule such checks and balances.
Myth 2: America was founded on slavery.
Fact: The Northern Founders wanted to abolish slavery.
One of the most-uttered myths regarding the United States is that it was “founded on slavery.” This statement is used to justify everything from affirmative action to federal transfer payments to low-income minorities; it’s used as a scapegoat for elevated levels of black crime and for black educational underperformance. It’s also a wild overstatement.
Slavery was a grave moral evil. It was also common at the time of the founding. The United States did indeed tolerate slavery, and the southern states fought for the continuation of slavery during the Civil War. But virtually all countries in human history also supported slavery during that time, including African countries shipping Africans to the Americas in chains. The first European country to ban import of slaves to its colonies was Denmark in 1803; Britain only outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1807; the United States passed legislation banning the new importation of slaves beginning in 1808. Britain only passed gradual abolition of slavery in 1833; Denmark only abolished slavery in 1846, France in 1848, Brazil in 1851; and the United States in 1862. To pretend that the United States was unique in regard to its history with slavery would be historically ignorant. That does not justify American slavery (nothing does), but it does provide vital historical context.
The Constitution of the United States is frequently seen as enshrining slavery, but the so-called three-fifths clause was an attempt to do the opposite. The whole question of popular apportionment rested on whether to count slaves as full people for purposes of representation. To do so would have put the slaveholding south at a significant advantage: they would have counted slaves in their population, not allowed them to vote, then used their increased representation in order to re-enshrine slavery. As James Madison noted, the delegates from South Carolina fought for blacks to be counted as whole people so as to include them “in the rule of representation, equally with the Whites.” The three-fifths compromise was designed to curb the South’s expansionist tendencies with regard to slavery by preventing them from stacking the electoral deck. The Constitution also allowed slave importation to continue until 1808 — but Congress moved in 1807 to end it there.
Then, of course, the United States fought a great and massive Civil War to free the slaves, in which over 620,000 Americans died, nearly half the total number of Americans to die in all wars combined. The economy of the United States was not built on slavery — in fact, the South’s economic power was dismal compared to that of the north, which is why the north was able to overcome the south during the Civil War.
Myth 3: Segregation was imposed socially.
Fact: Segregation was imposed governmentally.
The Left constantly repeats that government is necessary in order to stop discrimination between private parties. Government does intervene to stop uses of force between private parties, of course. But you have no right to my services and I have no right to your services. This argument leads leftists to say that if we don’t allow government to intervene in order to force me to serve you, widespread, rampant discrimination will break out. They often cite Jim Crow in defense of this notion.
That’s nonsense.
Segregation was governmentally imposed, not socially imposed. The whole reason that government was necessary was so that those who would not abide by social racism were forced to do so.
Myth 4: Hoover was a conservative.
Fact: Hoover pursued the same policies FDR did.
One of the great myths of American economic history is that Republican President Herbert Hoover stymied a recovery from the Great Depression by pursuing conservative economic policies. That simply isn’t true. Hoover actually pursued substantially the same policies FDR did after Hoover lost the 1932 election — FDR just doubled down on them.
In 1930, Hoover imposed the so-called Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which crippled global trade; global trade dropped to a small fraction of what it had been when Hoover took office thanks to his protectionist policies, which were designed to boost agricultural prices. He also blew out the federal budget — in 1929, the federal budget was $3.1 billion; by 1932, he had increased it to $4.6 billion, a nearly 50 percent increase. In real dollars, Hoover actually doubled the federal budget, since the Great Depression came along with deflation; his deficits actually ran higher than FDR’s until World War II.
Myth 5: FDR saved the American economy.
Fact: FDR made the Depression great.
FDR is on the dime and was elected to four terms as president supposedly thanks to his legacy of single-handedly saving the American economy from the throes of the Great Depression. This is utter hogwash. In fact, FDR’s policies greatly lengthened the Depression and made it far worse than it otherwise had to be.
FDR’s own economic ignorance is legendary. The true reason Democrats think of FDR as a hero is because he was a brutal class warrior who jabbered about “heedless self-interest.”
But in reality, according to Professors Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian of UCLA’s Department of Economics, FDR’s policies prolonged the depression by at least seven years.
Myth 6: The Great Society made life better for black people.
Fact: The Great Society significantly slowed economic progress for black Americans.
While the Left likes to blame the stagnant rates of increase in black prosperity on slavery and Jim Crow, the truth is that government involvement is far more to blame. The Great Society programs of President Lyndon Johnson, touted as a sort of reparations-lite by Johnson allies, actually harmed the black community in significant ways that continue to play out today. According to former Air Force One steward Ronald MacMillan, LBJ pushed the Great Society programs and civil rights bill out of desire to win black votes: “I’ll have them n*****s voting Democratic for two hundred years” he reportedly said.
In essence, the Great Society drove impoverished black people into dependency. In 1960, 22 percent of black children were born out of wedlock; today, that number is over 70 percent. The single greatest indicator of intergenerational poverty is single motherhood. As Thomas Sowell writes, “What about ghetto riots, crimes in general and murder in particular? What about low levels of labor force participation and high levels of welfare dependency? None of those things was as bad in the first 100 years after slavery as they became in the wake of the policies and notions of the 1960s.”
Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began. Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”
As for the Great Society itself, poverty rates in the United States have remained largely unchanged: the government spends $9,000 per welfare recipient per year in the United States, and yet Americans had the same poverty rate in 2013 as they did in 1963. Living standards have improved, but dependency has not decreased — except when Republicans attempt to decrease it with acts like welfare reform.
Myth 7: The Republican Party switched into the racist party.
Fact: The Democratic Party remained the racist party.
One of the favorite refrains of the Democratic Party, attempting to escape its history of racism, slavery, and segregation, is that in the 1960s, the Republican Party hijacked racism and the Democratic Party abandoned it. Citing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the turning point, Democrats point out that the formerly solid Democratic south moved gradually into the Republican camp, while the Republican north turned more Democratic over time. This, they say, was clearly the result of racism coming to the fore in the GOP.
There is little evidence to support this contention.
Myth 8: Americans lost the Vietnam War.
Fact: Politicians lost the Vietnam War.
In Vietnam, the United States beat the Viet-Cong soundly militarily. Then, at the Paris Peace Accords, the Nixon administration determined that it no longer wished to participate in the war, and decided to pull troops. They pledged further military assistance in terms of hardware for the South Vietnamese. Nixon triumphantly announced, in terms rather reminiscent of President Obama’s triumphant Iraq withdrawal announcement 38 years later, “Now that we have achieved an honorable agreement, let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies, that would have abandoned our prisoners of war, or that would have ended the war for us, but would have continued the war for the 50 million people of Indochina.”17
Myth 9: The economy is better because of Democratic presidents.
Fact: It’s difficult to credit particular politicians with economic benefits.
Democrats and leftists routinely state that they have a better record on the economy than Republicans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton declared that “the economy always does better when there’s a Democrat in the White House.” She has claimed before that Republican presidents are responsible for more recessions, and her husband claimed that since 1961, Democratic presidents have produced 42 million jobs, to just 24 million under Republicans.
There’s some truth to these numbers, but they miss the central point: presidents do not create jobs. The private sector creates jobs. The government’s impact on the private sector extends far beyond the executive branch. The claim that Democrat presidents are good for the economy is a simplistic talking point. And if Democrats disagree, ask them why President Trump’s job creation record was so good in his first year. Will they give him credit, or rightly say that the economy is a bit more complicated than that?
Myth 10: George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction.
Fact: Intelligence agencies gave Bush flawed information.
The common wisdom now suggests that President George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. This silliness has been parroted by members of the Left (Michael Moore) and the Right (Donald Trump). The reality is more complicated: The entire international intelligence community was convinced that Saddam Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; Hussein himself telegraphed such intentions; there’s even evidence that WMD were smuggled out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks leading up to war.
First off, such a lie would presuppose a motive for the lie. If you wanted to invade a country with a serious record of human rights abuses and foreign invasions, would you really rely on shoddy arguments to do so, knowing they would immediately be debunked upon conquering that country? Those who scream “war for oil” never seem to acknowledge that the United States didn’t get any oil out of the deal, or that Bush could have come up with a far more plausible reason to invade than phantom WMD.
Myth 11: Barack Obama presided over a massive economic recovery.
Fact: Obama presided over the weakest economic recovery in modern history.
Advocates for President Obama say that he inherited a rotten economy from George W. Bush, proceeded to save it, and then ushered in a massive boom in growth and prosperity. And while it is true that George W. Bush left Obama with a mess, the main driver in alleviating that mess — for good or ill — was not Obama’s stimulus package or auto bailouts, but the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) pushed by Bush into law in October 2008. By the time Obama took office, the economy was already bottoming out. By the second quarter of 2009, the economy was already on the rebound, and moved into positive territory in terms of GDP growth by Q3 of 2009.
Obama then proceeded to place heavy restrictions on banks and other financial institutions, raise taxes, increase spending, and create a wildly unpredictable regulatory climate. The result: the weakest peacetime recovery in modern American history.
