The Right Thing

The Honor Code

‘Petticoat Duellists’ (1792)

Hulton Archive / Getty Images

How Moral Revolutions Happen

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Norton, 264 pp., $25.95

When President Obama excused his failure to help the abortive Iranian revolution in 2009 by saying that the protestors were “on the right side of history,” or when Harry Reid (himself “always on the right side of history,” according to the president) attempted to stigmatize Republicans as being like slaveowners for opposing the president’s health care bill because they were not (like the Democrats) “on the right side of history,” or when the late Edward Kennedy used to fulminate about “reactionary” Republicans—all were implicitly appealing to historicist assumptions inherited by the progressive left from Marxism.

So far, at least, if no farther, those on the right who identify Obamaism with socialism are right: “History” to Marx was a god-substitute whose will not only should be done but would be done, since we were all helpless to resist its predetermined course. As the name they have chosen for themselves suggests, American progressives, even when they have not been seduced into actual Marxism as many were in the 1920s and ’30s and then again in the 1960s, have always had something of a fascination with such historically determinist thinking. That’s why, I take it, they continue to use the language which presupposes it. They may not look forward anymore to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but they still find it easy to assume that history has a “side”—and that they themselves must be on it.