There’s been a minor brouhaha over Thomas Woods’ Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (n.b. I haven’t read the book). Woods, a paleoconservative and frequent contributor to LewRockwell.com and The American Conservative, apparently takes a dim view of the North’s part in the Civil War (a.k.a. “The War Between the States,” a.k.a. “The War of Northern Aggression”(!)). Woods’ revisionism and his association with the unsavory League of the South brought down the wrath of the august The New York Times, which deemed it a “neocon” revision of American history.

The improbably named Max Boot took umbrage at this and penned a polemical review of Woods’ book at the Weekly Standard. Woods’ book, Boot correctly points out, is anything but a “neocon” rewriting of American history:

It tells you something about how debased political terminology has become when a leading light of the nutty League of the South is identified in the Paper of Record as a “neocon.” The original neocons, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, were former Democrats who accepted the welfare state, racial equality, and other liberal accomplishments while insisting on a more assertive foreign policy than the McGovernites wanted. In other words, pretty much the opposite of what Woods believes. Woods is a paleocon, not a neocon. His online writings (helpfully collected by the blog isthatlegal.org) seethe with hatred for everything that neoconservatism (and modern America) stands for. Just after September 11, he wrote that the “barbarism of recent American foreign policy was bound to lead to a terrorist catastrophe on American soil.” Just before the Iraq War, he wrote that the Bush administration had undertaken an “open-ended commitment” to wage “war after war against the enemies of Israel, at America’s expense.” He blames this “imperial bluster” on “the neoconservative stable of armchair generals.”

From the sounds of things, Woods falls into the all-too common trap of being unable or unwilling to distinguish between a critique of the North’s prosecution of the war and sympathy for the slaveholders of the South. It is possible and entirely consistent to hold that a) the Lincoln administration’s abridgement of civil liberties and its embrace of “total war” were unconscionable and b) slavery was a crime that cried out to heaven for vengance. Indeed, one might see behind the destruction wrought upon the South a kind of divine judgment for its sins. Also, both of these issues are distinct from the question of whether there is or was a legal, constitutional, or moral right to secede from the Union.

This is rendered more distressing because I think we could use an honest reappraisal of Lincoln’s conduct of the war, if only because appeals to Lincoln’s precedent are often used as justification for similar measures in our own time (as in the piece linked above). But this is hard to do when it’s tainted with Confederate apologetics.

For his part, Boot writes as almost a parody of a neoconservative. Is there any war he doesn’t think the US should have been involved in? It seems not, since he has recently called for a kind of helot army with which the US will spread “freedom” at gunpoint around the globe. To have to choose between Boot’s manic interventionism and Woods’ Confederate nostalgia is pretty unappealing.

Part of the reason that the NYT and Boot are both so appaled by Woods may be that the neoconservatism touted by Boot is really not that different from mainstream liberalism.

Reason‘s Tim Cavanaugh puts it well:

I think it says more about how contemporary liberals view themselves than about our “debased political terminology” that anybody at The New York Times believes a neocon “revision” of American history would even be possible, or that it would differ in any substantive way from the way that history would be written by The New York Times itself.

The genius of neoconservatism is that it’s exactly in step with the progressivist, middle-of-the-road, big state view of American history they teach in school: The Articles of Confederation resulted in a disaster that taught the founders the value of a strong central state; the Whiskey rebels were dangerous kooks, not unlike the Branch Davidians of our own time; “States’ Rights” has always been a code word for slavery; President Woodrow Wilson was a man of vision but sadly was unable to achieve his goals for an international order; the America Firsters were even kookier and more marginal than the Whiskey rebels, and the best way to deal with one is to sock him in the jaw like in The Best Years of Our Lives; many well intentioned folks on the left underestimated the danger of the Soviet Union, but the anti-communist witch hunts of the fifties were a regrettable overreaction (the Left didn’t become dangerous until the late sixties and early seventies, when it embraced separatist and militant views that undermined the politics of consensus that made this country great); real civil rights progress only came when the federal government asserted its power over the refractory states; September 11 shocked America out of its isolationism and freed President George W. Bush (an excellent man, but distressingly shortsighted in some matters) from his naive opposition to nation-building. And so on.

Leave aside how much of it you agree or disagree with. What would the neocons add to the official version of American history? That Winston Churchill should have been made King of the United States as well as Prime Minister of Great Britain? That we missed a great opportunity by not jumping into the Franco-Prussian War? That we should have intervened on Sylvania’s side against Freedonia? The folks at The Times may have a narcissistic interest in highlighting small differences, but you can’t misuse language forever. When liberals look at the neocons, they see themselves.