Great Mistakes and Great Men
August 23, 2001

by Joe Sobran

     Some years ago a Catholic historian took stock of 
the Second Vatican Council, held in the early Sixties. He 
noted that the condition of the Church since the Council 
had far surpassed the darkest predictions and worst fears 
of the reactionaries.

     "Prophets of doom" are commonly held in derision, 
but they are often right. In fact they sometimes 
understate the worst possibilities, and events show not 
that they were correct, but that history held grim 
surprises even for those who were trying to imagine what 
could go wrong. Time may make a Cassandra look like a 
cockeyed optimist.

     Opponents of the U.S. Constitution feared that it 
would result in big government. They couldn't dream how 
big the federal government would actually become, far 
exceeding in size, scope, and power what had been called 
the "tyranny" of George III. Nor did they foresee such 
collateral results as the Civil War and U.S. involvement 
in two world wars.

     If those pessimists said to us now, "Well, we tried 
to warn you," defenders of the Constitution might reply 
that these things happened because the Constitution was 
abandoned or perverted. The pessimists might fairly 
argue: "But you said it was a foolproof plan! You said 
its built-in safeguards would prevent the centralization 
of power! Evidently you were wrong."

     Again, both sides in the Civil War expected a short 
contest. A few months of skirmishing, and everything 
would be settled. One pessimist warned that it might last 
three years and take tens of thousands of lives; it 
lasted four years and claimed 620,000 lives.

     One Southern senator nearly called it right. 
Alexander Stephens of Georgia warned that if the South 
seceded, it would mean a war the South could only lose. 
And in that case, the North would be able to do 
everything the South accused it of wanting to do. He was 
correct. Secession backfired, bringing on the South's 
worst fears -- and then some.

     Today the "isolationists" -- the patriots who wanted 
the United States to stay out of World War II -- are 
spoken of as if they were obviously wrong. But they were 
only wrong in failing to see just how bad the 
consequences of the war would be.

     Japan and Germany were defeated, but they were 
replaced by a far more terrifying enemy: the Soviet 
Union, which, shortly after the war, posed a threat to 
this country that Japan and Germany never did. Apart from 
seizing ten countries in Central Europe, the Soviets 
acquired a nuclear arsenal with which they could 
annihilate American cities. Before the war, nobody had 
imagined this even as a remote possibility. It was our 
alliance with the Soviet Union that enabled its spies and 
sympathizers to lay their hands on American nuclear 
secrets.

     In the Sixties, a few prescient people warned that 
escalating the war in Vietnam might result in a conflict 
as serious as the Korean War. Actually, more Americans 
finally died in Vietnam than in Korea.

     At about the same time, Lyndon Johnson declared "war 
on poverty." He pledged that if his new programs failed 
to "eliminate" poverty, they would be abandoned. 
Conservative skeptics warned that the programs wouldn't 
work, which was true enough; but none foresaw how 
devastating the welfare system would be to the cities and 
black family life. Yet even when the damage was obvious, 
the programs proved politically hard to reverse.

     One of the odd things about our mistakes is that 
after we commit ourselves to them, it becomes difficult 
even to perceive them as mistakes. We adapt to them, 
justify them, become dependent on them, and forget the 
alternatives to them, until we no longer have the mental 
detachment we had before we made them. They become almost 
impossible to disown, and we sacrifice our judgment to 
them.

     And over time, our wrong turns are normalized and 
exalted as steps in the epic of progress. Anyone who 
proposes to correct them is given the standard homily: 
"We can't turn back the clock!"

     It's amazing how seldom societies ask themselves, 
before making a fateful decision, some simple questions: 
What if this turns out to be a disastrous mistake? Will 
we be able to undo it?

     Maybe that's why history sometimes looks like a 
tragic trail of irreversible blunders, and why those who 
made them are commemorated as our greatest men. After 
all, who wants to build monuments in honor of pessimists?

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