There have been numerous takedowns of the online historian Darryl Cooper who villainized Winston Churchill and minimized Hitler’s crimes to Tucker Carlson. But why is rebutting this spurious revisionism important now?
Many pseudo-defenders of the faux historian have responded that they admire Churchill, but they resent his role as a founding myth for the Anglo-American liberal post-war led order. Postliberals don’t like this order, and they don’t like (classically) liberal democracy, hence the desire to bring Churchill down a few notches if not dethrone him.
According to an article by Nathan Pinkoski in postliberal and sometimes integralist friendly Compact magazine:
The myth of Churchill can’t last, because the geopolitical order with which he has been chiefly identified is coming apart. Churchill is set to become like his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough. His statecraft may continue to be admired by specialists, but the general public will know little more than a name.
And
Churchill’s devotees see him as a world-historic figure whose purity of moral principle during and after Munich kept Anglo-American hegemony true to its anti-totalitarian core. The Anglo-American hegemony is a liberal empire, a force for good in the world that resists and crushes the enemies of democracy. This myth suggests that all Anglo-American failures are failures of will. The Churchill myth is about stiffening Western resolve to fight enemies that it can always beat in a fair fight.
As Pinkoski notes, leftist counter-mythology sees Churchill incarnating white imperialism. And a new right-wing counter mythology, articulated with Cooper/Carlson surmises:
Anglo-American liberal imperialism is the source of the all-powerful egalitarian and democratic cancer consuming the West. Victories of the empire, such as World War II, are in fact defeats for Western civilization. By obsessing over Hitler’s evil, the adherents of this view believe, we distract from the evils that have overcome the West after his demise.
Both left-wing and right-wing counternarratives question whether the current West is worth saving or superior to its authoritarian enemies. (Compact editor Sohrab Ahmari defended Churchill, calling Darryl Cooper “nutty.”)
Postliberal Calvinist and confessional state advocate Douglas Wilson seemed largely to sync with Pinkoski’s perspective, noting that, “We are dealing with some sort of foundational and legitimating myth.” And “the post-war liberal consensus is an idol that has to fall sometime.”
Kindred spirit Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, agreed:
WWII is the founding mythos of our age and its official interpretation animates our political life and much of our political rhetoric. Attacking that narrative attacks the very ground of our political imagination and what informs our worst fears. Losing the narrative is like realizing that the religion of your youth–what seems so natural to you in adulthood–is false. It casts you adrift into a terrifying unknown. For their own safety and peace of mind, they need everyone to affirm and live out the narrative. The animating mythos around WWII is not just intellectual but felt as deeply moral. It is the Good from which all political goods derive.
And:
Regardless of the history, the ethos of Churchill hero-worship is “invade the world, invite the world.” They send you to invade foreign lands only to return to find your own country invaded, and you’ve become the villain.
And:
In sum, the main reason why they react so strongly to alternative takes on WWII is that WWII is the ground of their political imagination, their only moral-historical reference point, for both domestic politics and international relations.
For Wolfe, Churchill is an icon both for the post-war liberal world order and, even worse, neoconservatism, offering a distraction from the real threats, like immigration and cultural decadence.
Key to the anti-Churchill hostility among many ardent postliberals is that Churchill was the supreme champion of Anglo-parliamentary liberal democracy. He strove to incarnate the tradition of limited government in defense of liberty that dates to Magna Carta and amplifies through the Glorious Revolution, the U.S. founding charters, and subsequent democratic reforms that expanded liberty for all.
Perhaps Churchill most succinctly summarized his stance in a speech he wrote not for himself but for Queen Elizabeth at her 1952 coronation:
Parliamentary institutions, with their free speech and respect for the rights of minorities, and the inspiration of a broad tolerance in thought and expression – all this we conceive to be a precious part of our way of life and outlook.
A “broad tolerance in thought and expression” embodies what many postliberals ardently oppose as they espouse more restrictive alternatives more rooted in continental alternatives than the Anglo-American political tradition. Churchill wrote these words with his totalitarian adversaries in mind no doubt, both Communism and Nazism. But Larry Tye, in his recent biography of Senator Joseph McCarthy, asserts that Churchill, who disdained McCarthy, also had the then surging U.S. McCarthyite spirit in mind.
Threats to “broad tolerance in thought and expression” are not just totalitarian and external. They are constant in every free society, as fallen humanity’s inclination is to restrict, control, and punish in favor of an elect few.
Villainizing Churchill, even faulting him for WWII, is ultimately a critique if not rejection of the Anglo-American political tradition of limited government, self-rule, and free speech, with equal rights for all. Many postliberal critics claim this perspective leads to moral disorder. But some levels of cultural moral disorder are preferable to tyranny, which is itself the supreme moral disorder.
As another icon of Anglo-American liberty, revered by Churchill, and also despised by many of the same critics, once explained:
It is the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
As Lincoln said, and as Churchill knew, these two principles have always and ever will contend against each other. Tyranny prevails by passive default. Liberty for all endures through constant watchful labor.