It’s easier, in a sense, to accept that we were never morally good and never civilizationally great than it is to accept that we had something great, and we squandered it. But that’s the truth. Two inconceivably destructive World Wars destroyed Europe’s soul, killed off many of its best men, and devastated the old aristocracies. Lopsided trade policy with China since the 1970s – based on the Pollyannish assumption that exposure to Western markets would bring democracy to China – has hollowed out America’s manufacturing base, displaced millions of heartland workers, and helped to create a geopolitical rival with a very different, and a much worse, regime.

A couple weeks back, Daryl Cooper’s appearance on the Tucker Carlson Show – in which Cooper opined that Winston Churchill bore much of the blame for the violence of World War II – broke the internet. In the aftermath, a host of commentators breathlessly piled on Cooper, accusing him of being a Hitler apologist, if not a Nazi himself – an accusation that would be laughable to any fair-minded person familiar with Cooper’s corpus of work.

Here’s what is really happening. Cooper has sensed, rightly, that much of the story we’ve told ourselves in Western civilization over the past 125 years has been a lie. We are told that the 20th century represents the triumph of Western humanism. This self-evidently correct viewpoint, we are told, is inevitably becoming a global consensus, ushering in the end of history. 

But most of the Western world is recognizing that this triumphalist story is wrong. In these conditions, we should expect broad revisions of the received narratives about the 20th century. Cooper’s conclusion, roughly speaking, is that the West is not as exceptionally good as we think. This is where he errs.

It has become fashionable on the right to attack men like the Founders and Churchill and even lesser critical figures like Reagan as villains rather than heroes. While none of those men were perfect, the moral gap between Churchill and Hitler (and the respective regimes they led) was indeed massive. As Nathan Pinkoski recently wrote, circumstances dealt Churchill a very difficult hand, and he played it to the best of his ability to maximize British interests. Similarly, the Founders, while not immune to criticism, were men of great moral character and intellect, and notwithstanding his several policy failures, Reagan restored, however briefly, some confidence and optimism to America. 

The big lie about the 20th century is not the mere exaggeration of these men’s moral character.

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