Years ago, reading Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, I was struck by a line early in the book, where he criticized the American Left for not remembering their own intellectual history. What struck me about it was that Goldberg seemed to be astonished by this revelation. It is tempting to think, upon learning something new, that you are the first person to have the insight. Young people tend to suffer from this, coming home from college convinced they know the secrets of the universe. In the case of the Left, Goldberg may have been the last person to notice the Left’s hatred of the past.
The other thing that was striking is that modern conservatives suffer from the same defect. Read any of the so-called conservative writers of the Official Right™ and you get the impression that the world began in 1938. Every bad guy in the world is Hitler and any hesitation about rushing into war is appeasement. More important, they think the great intellectual tradition of the Right starts with the day Bill Buckley penned God and Man at Yale. Everything before that is fairy tales and mythology from a foreign people.
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