Our Liberal Heroes

IN OUR CONTINUING DISCUSSION about dishonest, biased historical writing, called "hagiography", we all agree what it is, why it is, and why we don't want it. Hagiography comes in all shapes and sizes. If you ever hear a conservative, for example, trying to turn George Washinton, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and last but not least Jesus Christ into conservatives, run for the hills, all the way to a good research library, or college campus. We all agree on motive and method. Good historical analysis requires facts. Conservatives embrace tradition, liberals, aka "progressives" embrace change. You could argue that there is some of both in all of us. George Washington may indeed have been a man of tradition, but when push came to shove, he fought, hard, for the right to make changes, radical changes, which is not conservative. Same with Lincoln. He built his career by straddling the fence on slavery, avoiding the issue, but, even before the war, when push came to shove, Lincoln did not agree with slavery, and the fact that he ended up abolishing slavery marks hims ultimately as a racidal change maker, not a conservative traditionalist. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were revolutionary in their time, intended to be so, radical game changers, and thus, once again, not at all "conservative". All of these people had conservative temperaments, and they all changed, drastically, responding to circumstances. Jesus was Jewish, through and through. He repeatedly affirmed the Old Law. But if you just look at the religion he inadvertantly started, how it spread, and changed the world as its membership grew, again, we have a person in Jesus who created a great deal of change in the world, truly upending tradition. Liberalism is about change, conservatisim is about tradition. "The world advances only because of those who oppose it", said Goethe. Our greatest heros our our greatest "for the good" change makers, like Martin Luther King, who was the opposite of conservative: MLK was, alas, a protesting, outspoken, peach marchin', change mongering socialist, aka, "liberal".