Better said, by Jonathan Chait, than I could: American historical memory is heavily inflected with sentiment. John F. Kennedy remains an iconic figure despite his negligible record. Ronald Reagan has won a legacy as the restorer of American hope and the winner of the Cold War, as if communism fell not as a result of its own dysfunction and four decades of Western containment but because no U.S. politician ever previously thought to tell the Soviets to tear down that wall. Partisan folklore does not inevitably give way to calm appraisal. Andrew Jackson, still introduced to schoolchildren as the hero of the common man, was a white supremacist with a fanatical hatred for any government role in economic development—a kind of 19th-century Ron Paul, but with a genocidal militaristic foreign policy. Ulysses S. Grant, taught as a corrupt and overbearing warlord, was also an effective champion of racial progress as both general and president. Two centuries on, the fog of mythos enveloping these figures has yet to dissipate.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 04:34:04 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015