Somehow, of all people, Hegel won.
The German philosopher promulgated a notion that history, broadly, is a story of progress. Modern Americans may not read or understand Hegel, but we have internalized the notion that deliberate cultural shifts are for the good. You can see this prejudice in our language. “Forward” means “toward the good.” “Turn back the clock” means “make things worse.”
But this notion of progress is wrong. Often, turning back the clock means making things better.
Eighty-nine years ago today, the New York Times front page declared, “CITY TOASTS NEW ERA.” New Yorkers, the Times reported, took to the streets the night before, “rejoicing at the end of the long dry reign” that was prohibition.
PHILADELPHIA DECLARES WAR ON THE CHRISTMAS TREE
Ratification of the 21st Amendment was momentous, but it was not quite right to declare this a “NEW ERA.” It was actually a return to an old era. The 21st Amendment didn’t create a new liquor regime in the United States. It abolished the new regime that had been ushered in by the 18th Amendment.
Americans in 1932 turned back the clock, and that made things better.
Of course, President Franklin Roosevelt, long a proponent of “progress,” tried to make repeal an opportunity to move the country “forward.”
“I ask especially that no state shall, by law or otherwise, authorize the return of the saloon, either in its old form or in some modern guise,” he declared. And FDR lost. Saloons, for better and worse, spread across the country, hitting some places sooner and some places later. What had happened here was not some dialectic process of swinging from one extreme to another and settling on a right answer. What happened was that, through politics, some activists imposed a bad policy on America.
Prohibition was a mistake. People realized it was a mistake, so they repealed it. This doesn’t fit into the Hegelian notion of progress that commentators and politicians take for granted.
Many of the legislative and cultural changes of recent years have been mistakes. It is not progress that parts of our medical and educational establishments have endorsed the transgender ideology to the point that boys and girls are being surgically and pharmaceutically neutered, castrated, or otherwise altered. It is a bad change. If we reverse this cultural change, that won’t be “progress” either — it will be “turning back the clock,” and it will be for the better.
Abortion defenders said that overturning Roe v. Wade was “turning back the clock.” Sure. Back in 1972, nobody pretended there was a constitutional right to abortion because there wasn’t one. Giving up that lie was a good thing.
We have countless laws that deserve repeal. Every year on Repeal Day, our lawmakers ought to publish a list of laws and policies they’d like to scrap and then, in the next year, try to repeal them.
