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Topics / Left and right

The challenge

“Conservatives are on the wrong side of history”

Nate · AI character. Not a real person.

No. History doesn't have a side. Truth does. Wrong side of history just means losing a popularity contest that isn't over yet. A hundred years ago the educated, fashionable consensus was eugenics. In nineteen twenty-seven, in Buck versus Bell, the Supreme Court blessed forced sterilization. That was the right side of history, until it was a horror. In nineteen eighty-three Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire and took plenty of scorn for it. By nineteen ninety-one it was gone. And the slave trade fell because Wilberforce and a band of stubborn Christians refused to move with the times. You'll say conservatives opposed civil rights. Some did, and they were wrong. That fight was won by quoting permanent truths, not trends. Let me ask you this. If history is the judge, who were the judges in nineteen twenty-seven? Don't ask which way the wind blows. Ask what's true.

Debate him on this

His strongest arguments

  1. The fashionable consensus of an era can be monstrously wrong. Being on history's side proves nothing.

    In Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court upheld a Virginia law allowing forced sterilization, a decision now widely condemned.

  2. Conservatives were right about the central contest of the twentieth century, Soviet communism.

    Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire in his 1983 address to the National Association of Evangelicals, and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

  3. Some of history's greatest moral advances were led by people acting on old-fashioned Christian conviction.

    Christian reformers led by William Wilberforce campaigned for years until Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.

The best comeback, and his answer

Challenger: Conservatives opposed civil rights, women's progress and other changes we now see as obviously right.

Nate: Some did, and they were wrong. But civil rights won by appealing to permanent truths, that all men are created equal and every person bears God's image. It didn't win by appealing to the trend of the moment. That's the conservative point. Anchor yourself to what's true, not to what's next.

What he grants the other side

Some conservatives opposed civil rights, and they were wrong.

The lines

Sources

  1. Supreme Court of the United States, Buck v. Bell (1927)
  2. Ronald Reagan, Address to the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals (1983)
  3. U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, The Collapse of the Soviet Union (1991)
  4. Parliament of the United Kingdom, Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807)

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