I sometimes doubt if there exists a more vacuous, conceited expression of opinion than one that includes the rhetorical cliché, “on the right side of history”. Probably there is, but it happens to be one of my pet peeves. I know I will have to come clean over this and so I will mention it right at the outset. It's a phrase used most often it appears by some of my least favourite people, the first of whom I could list is Barack Obama.
During his notable December 6 2016 Oval Office address on terrorism, Obama said:
“My fellow Americans, I am confident we will succeed in this mission because we are on the right side of history.” I'm neither the first nor I suppose will be the last to point out that he used the phrase something like 15-times while in office. But then he is only recycling someone else in the way that we all do to some extent and he does seem to like to dwell upon history quite often in his public musings.
Discoverable a tad further down my little list is old Bill Clinton I might add who was fond of it, using it 21-times himself. Many do try the device on. Before those worthies, B-movie slow horse-riding cowboy and acknowledged by all the right people as a dullard in constant terminal decline, including the writers of British TV series Spitting Image as being firmly on the wrong side of history, Ronald Reagan had his own version. Speaking to our own UK Parliament in 1982, 'ole Rahnie Raygun' was heard to say, “The march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.”
Reagan used both translations of Trotsky’s phrase several more times, by the way. I think I preferred the so-called “dullard's” much more percipient usage personally, nevertheless the underpinning thought was just as flawed as Obama, Trotsky and Clinton's; even though he's definitely not among my least favourite people I might point out.
But aren't I being just a bit too pernickety here? Maybe proper 'men of destiny' are entitled to get away with this linguistic sleight of hand and I'm just being mean. After all, everyone knows what they meant. Can't I just give them some slack for a change? Their hearts are in the right place, after all.
Regrettably, anyone who uses that form of words, save as vehicle for comedic effect or sarcastic mischief would be situated on the wrong side of me. It is in error for it rests upon a dodgy assumption: namely that woven into the very fabric of time is a moral imperative forcing us all inexorably towards perfection. Rinsed by each day's weary evolution a mysterious stripping of Man's immorality would emerge: refined, purified, and like the chemical process of extraction through ignition dephlogisticated even, until the pure gold of modernity's benevolent spirit would one day fill us all.
Safely ensconced within this insider knowledge realisation, based upon precisely zero evidence we can therefore with confidence my fellow Americans, Guardianistas, Revolutionaries, Progressives of every stripe, remain assured that if we roll with history's ineffable process of Earthly sanctification and refrain from resistance to the grand project, find ourselves one day upon the right side of history.
Happily, we can also look down with aggressive kindness upon those who went before, excusing them, for they knew not what they did, their innate barbarism, their mediaevalist thought processes and their blatant racism, because as members of the privileged set benefitting from coming after, that is both our destiny and our heritage. I guess we were just born lucky then by coming so late to history's party in these enlightened days and yet I still remain on the wrong side of history.
You would have thought that if everything were working together for the moral good then by now we'd begin to see some fruits. You know, less barbarism, or better thinking on moral matters. An irrepressible tide of innate goodness and altruism by individuals everywhere would possibly have manifested itself. Any proposed answer to those questions can only provoke a conjectural reply.
Were I to suggest that humans have found ever more extreme ways to be cruel to each other, say by using the Final Solution as an example, of a retrogressive rather than progressive human development then I'm sure a proper Progressive would tut, shake his head and tell me that the Gestapo were merely, “on the wrong side of history”. Good will prevail given time.
That's the point in the end. That glib, scurrilous little weasel will be turned against me in order to shut me up. The adults have it covered off thank you very much. When the Obamas and the Clintons, and all part time cognoscenti wield it as a weapon they're not really arguing that things are getting better. They're already happy to assume that that's the case. No, it's there to signify to everyone else that they're on the team. That they're on message or PC to a tee. Most of all though, it's to instruct you that you cannot yourself get on to the right side of history unless you jolly well learn to change your tune.
James Gatehouse.