Accuracy in Media's Don Irvine interviewed me today for AIM's podcast. Therein, we discuss A Conservative History of the American Left and the 2008 presidential election. Turn your computers up to eleven and listen here carefully.

My computer only goes to 10 :(

Marty DiBergi: It's very pretty.

Nigel Tufnel: Yeah, I've been fooling around with it for a few months.

Marty DiBergi: It's a bit of a departure from what you normally play.

Nigel Tufnel: It's part of a trilogy, a musical trilogy I'm working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don't know why.

Marty DiBergi: It's very nice.

Nigel Tufnel: You know, just simple lines intertwining, you know, very much like - I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, and it's sort of in between those, really. It's like a Mach piece, really. It's sort of...

Marty DiBergi: What do you call this?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, this piece is called "Lick My Love Pump".

Dan,

I've raised this question before, but don't you think that it could be the lack of patience/rigor, and the reliance on emotion is the reason why the libs often 1) don't know that it's been tried before, 2) think the status quo is insufferable and must change and 3) breeds a "hunger" for change and, if needed, revolution?

All the bad stuff is of course the fault of the old regime, if you don't look too far. The reason that there could be a memory hole is because doing what you did is just too boring/hard.

Sea King: I think the reasons you cite may be contributing factors, particularly the "boring" factor. I don't find combing through archives or reading old books boring. But I realize I am a distinct minority. I think this contributing factor to the ignorance of the Left's history could just as easily be laid at the feet of the Right, who prefer a '60s creation story in part because it relieves them of the responsibility of researching a difficult topic. For the Left, a more recent creation story is self-serving because the people telling the story also get to be the gods of the narrative. Not wanting to own past mistakes, a preference for seeming "new," and the obsession with making a future that excludes time to examine the past all are explanatory factors of the Left's amnesia.

Dan, thanks for your reply. Actually, I think I was too superficial. I contend that there is a slovenliness to liberal thought (of course, not just on their side), and have attributed that to "laziness", and I agree that it seems only a contributing factor as well.

In light of what you said, I find that on both sides there is a memory hole. For example, I just found out that, had I been diligent enough to look around in theology, I would have seen that I owe much of the flavorings of my own brand of belief to Karl Barth. In fact, I believe that a lot of the evangelical movement owes a good part of its force to Barth. I've always detected a hint of Kierkegaard in it, and Barth is inspired by Kierkegaard in his rejection of liberal theology and "higher criticism" which makes up a good portion of fundamentalism.

So, the "memory hole" is simply a gap between what happened and what is known. It seems to be the standard structural gap. Both the immediate left and industrial-pragmatic right could equally ignore history. It seems that the left is just more dismissive about the past it does not know, where the right might be overly reverent to it.

I still feel that "not wanting to own past mistakes" doesn't say it right. Sure there is a inherent desire to think the new way is the right way, but in many cases it's just a ignorance of the way things were. I believe that many, many people just don't know how "modern" Nazism was meant to be--although that's complex as well. It's hard to call it "liberal" because it was disenchanted with the liberal reforms it had seen. Hitler even writes negatively about "liberalism". And they did hearken back to Teutonic myth, but that comes after they passed through the sieve of a type of materialism that decided that race and culture is all one had in the world.

Surely, nobody could accuse David Hume of being "reactionary" or "conservative". But Hume, having passed through debilitating skepticism, decided that tradition is about all one could go on to live one's life. He could write that all books that aren't about numbers should be thrown into the sea, so that no one would repeat the nonsense of old, and everyone would be centered on science. But as he tore everything apart, and decided he didn't know any reason why he "ought" to do anything. Tradition was the only thing he could go by.