Former President Barack Obama liked to quote the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s line that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Of course, what was an expression of optimism for the moral reformer King was more in the nature of a victory spike of the football for a competitor in a zero-sum electoral contest like Obama.
More importantly, the belief that things are moving toward justice comes more naturally to believers in American exceptionalism, of which Obama isn’t one. He famously said that he believed in America’s exceptionalism only as much as “Brits” believe in British exceptionalism or Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.
But British and Greek exceptionalisms look to distant pasts and encompass the idea of decline, which, if not the opposite of justice, is certainly not positive. Britons may look with pride on the British Empire, but not without a twinge of regret that it has all but disappeared. Greeks may look back on the astonishing creativity of Athens 2,500 years ago, but not without recognizing that it was held down under the Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman empires for almost all the centuries since.
In contrast, the United States has a history that can be easily, if perhaps oversimply, interpreted as a story of continual winning. Economic growth — the exception rather than the rule before 1800 in European lands — has been cumulative over time. Cultural progress abounds: the abolition of slavery, equality for women, and civil rights for black people, all have advanced, though with some setbacks over the years.
In such an environment, it may seem natural to believe that, as a general rule anyway, things get better. Yet the long run of history teaches different lessons. Historians of ancient cultures and their archaeological colleagues can describe marked declines of civilization enough for one of them to title a book 1177 B.C.: The Year a Civilization Collapsed.
Edward Gibbon, listening to the monks chanting vespers on the steps of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, was inspired to write the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which came out in February 1776 and is still in print today.
Historians continue to dispute just how much and even whether the Roman Empire declined. But it seems indisputable that its military forces dwindled, its long-distance trade petered out, and its technological advances were forgotten. It took centuries for Europeans to figure out how to build a dome like that of the Pantheon in Rome, but there it is today.
In American politics over the last century, it has been the Democrats whose rhetoric proclaims them as the party of progress. Some of this has a Marxist base, the New Deal idea that a complex industrialized society should have an increasingly large government to protect and guide individuals.
To many since at least the 1980s, that argument seems antique. Big government has not managed to build a single mile of track for California’s high-speed rail line in 19 years, while the private sector has developed artificial intelligence at astonishing rates. Note also that in this century Americans, including recent immigrants, have been moving out of big-government states like New York, Illinois, and California, and into small-government states like Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.
Republicans under President Ronald Reagan and the two Bushes made the argument and provided some proof that market-friendly policies can produce more than big government. But President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” mantra suggests moving back to some unspecified moment in the past.
Perhaps to the low-immigration, high-family-formation, high-churchgoing 1950s in which Trump and his baby boom predecessors, Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, grew up. In any case, Trump’s inevitable retirement leaves Republicans uncertain and probably divided on what progress and decline mean.
For articulate Democrats, the focus has moved from economics — on which they make vague promises of more redistribution to the less affluent — and toward cultural issues. But on that, their confidence that the arc of justice moves their way has encountered some turbulence. They have seen American opinion do so on some issues, notably same-sex marriage, but not on abortion or immigration.
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Or, as the liberal economist Noah Smith argues, in their isolated communities — trendy central city neighborhoods, affluent suburbs and university towns — and sycophantic media, they have failed to notice that most Americans don’t believe, or aren’t moving closer to believing that “racial preferences in hiring, leniency toward petty crime and illegal immigration, and trans women on women’s sports teams are basic rights.”
My sense is that the arc of history moves around, and sometimes in a malign direction. Notably, among the sharply increasing antisemitism of the university Left (now installed in New York’s Gracie Mansion) and in the emergence of a less numerous but equally disturbing antisemitism on the fringes of the podcast Right from Southwest outposts to the woods of Maine. There are some directions where the arc of history should head toward never again.