This post at Crooked Timber considers the question of "guilt-by-association" vis-a-vis contemporary "progressives" and their century-old counterparts using the same name who also pushed eugenics. Surprisingly, I have to say I disagree with the notion that we to the left on the political scale do not owe some kind of thorough explanation as to these more scabrous details of our heritage. In them lie the roots of much of the white, middle-class arguments for a pro-life position, i.e., they sound an awful lot like Margaret Sanger (a progressive, advocate for birth-control, and eugenicist extraordinaire) saying that we don't need all these poor, dark-skinned people overwhelming us with their babies. We should be adult enough at least to admit there is something disturbing about a bunch of upper-middle class white women claiming they are speaking on behalf of the poor and minorities who might have different opinions.
In any event, another reason I find this fascinating is that, over the years as I've been reading and writing on the internet, I have come across many, many examples of people who take the Christian Church to task for, specifically, the Crusades, the witch-hunts, various pogroms official and otherwise, slavery, racism, sexism, and other sundry things progressives reflexively find distasteful. I have argued that (a) the Church does indeed need to agree that granting tacit or overt approval to these and scores of other crimes needs to be repented in the active sense of acceptance and doing something to counter; and (b) there are denominations out there that are doing just that, and congregations within denominations, and persons within congregations, all working to make amends by acknowledging these things as part of our collective heritage, and working to erase the stain from our current lives.
Would, I wonder, these same folks argue that we need not acknowledge the role of liberals in slavery. Would they argue we no longer need to make amends for the ongoing consequences of liberal support for policies that discriminate against African-Americans, Indians, Latinos, Asians. As I support government reparations to the ancestors of slavery, and would go further and support the same policy for the ancestors of Chinese coolies who were, in essence, imported slave labor brought here to help build the railroads, part of that stems from a sense of current debt owed due to past injustice. A person, a society, a group needs to understand and own the entirety of her and their own collective past, and accept the bad with the good, in order to move forward. Indeed, part of the problem with the contemporary conservative movement (as evidenced from the post linked) is the refusal of contemporary conservatives to accept, for example, that the ideological divisions of a previous generation were not also partisan (thus the Republican nonsense concerning the role of Republicans in passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, thus proving conservatives are not, in fact, racist).
Part of moving forward is a complete accounting for the past, not just those parts of which we are proud. This is true for individuals, parties, political movements, and whole nations. This is a lesson we forced on the losers of the Second World War; the victors of the First World War tried it a bit ham-handedly. In this case, I see no reason at all for we modern liberals to agree that, yes, progressive politicians and political activists of a century ago were, indeed eugenicsts. We should then take the next step and say, without shame, that it is remarkable how far our movement has become, indeed how scientific precisely because we are able, without any problem at all, to reject that kind of nonsense and embrace, and be embraced, by all sorts of persons precisely because they understand the goal of leftist politics is a better, more just society for all.
Virtual Tin Cup
