Bill Barr recently said, when asked about whether history will judge him badly, “Well, history is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history.” A lot of people were surprised at Barr’s saying that, since it’s most famously attributed to Hermann Goering, and his lack of concern during the Nuremburg Trials. It’s often taken to mean that Goering thought there is no truth, and truth is socially constructed, so it would seem that Barr was taking that stand.
I’ve come to think that probably isn’t what Goering meant, and it probably isn’t exactly what Barr means either.
Barr was invoking a version of what, in argumentation scholarship, is called “the appeal to Galileo.” Barr was saying that he might be condemned by future historians, if his side didn’t win, just as Galileo was condemned at the time. That’s probably what Goering was saying. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he thought future historians would be defining truth. I think it’s more likely that both Barr and Goering were claiming the position of a truth-teller who, if their side lost, would be demonized.
And here I just have to pause and say that there has not been a political group as prone to whining about being victimized as the current concatenation of fanatical GOP/fundagelical/white men committed to toxic masculinity since the slavers whined that abolitionists made them feel sad.
(One thing I never got to explore in the book about proslavery rhetoric or the books on demagoguery was the role of toxic masculinity.)
Barr and Goering are (were) implicitly claiming to be Galileo, Socrates, Ignaz Semmelweis. And, in that comparison, they inadvertently showed how the comparison was wrong. Barr recognizes that the Trump Administration might (let’s be honest, will) go down in history as the most corrupt, disorganized, damaging, short-sighted, and incompetent Administration in the history of the United States.
I don’t think he’s saying that he believes he is part of such an incompetent and corrupt administration. The problem with working for a narcissist, as (oddly enough) Albert Speer observed, is that first-rate people won’t work for them, so you’re surrounded by third-raters. And third-rate thinkers like Barr are particularly prone to the Dunning-Kruger phenomenon, and over-estimate their competence and expertise. They aren’t smart enough to see that they aren’t that smart.
[As an aside, I have to say that I think it’s funny that Speer didn’t realize how his observations about the Hitler system preventing the hiring of really good people applied to him as well. But it did.]
I think Barr is saying that he believe that if he and Trump fail to create a political system in which the most anti-intellectual, authoritarian, partisan, racist, short-sighted, and greedy parts of the GOP are in control of every part of a government that operates without accountability or constraints (so much for wanting small government), then “the libs” will write histories that represent the Trump Administration badly.
This is projection.
While I think that researchers in media and political science rely on the false binary (or equally false continuum) of left (Dem) v. right (GOP) means that they misrepresent our ideological map, it’s very clear that “both sides” do not engage in misrepresentation of the other side to equal degrees. People and media who self-identify as conservative are more likely to promote lies, fail to check sources, engage in motivism, and privilege loyalty to group over any other values. When presented with that research, an awful lot of people who self-identify as conservative say the research must be biased because it doesn’t show both sides are equally bad.
They don’t realize that, by having that reaction, they’ve confirmed the research.
Were the research better, I think, it would show that not all people who self-identify as conservative are irrationally factional, that there are places all over the political spectrum (not continuum) where people are equally unwilling to believe that there might be intelligent and good-willed disagreement. If we could have research grounded in that understanding of political affiliation as a spectrum rather than a binary, then we could have a good discussion about how people think about politics that doesn’t reproduce our demagogic culture (in which every issue is reduced to which group is better).
But, back to Barr. Barr is more concerned about his side winning than about having a justice system that is blind to identity (the whole point of Justice’s blindfolds is that she doesn’t know who she’s judging—it’s the original position). Barr doesn’t want a system in which all people are treated the same; he’s rabidly and irrationally partisan. If he succeeds, then he’ll make sure that all histories treat him and Trump as heroes. He is the one who will write history to celebrate the winners.
But that isn’t how “winning” history works. Galileo’s persecution was much more complicated than people think, and the main problem was that his argument for heliocentrism was more accessible than others. Socrates was ordered to drink hemlock, not because the Athenians wanted to silence someone who spoke the truth, but because many (not all) Athenians believed him to be involved with the Thirty Tyrants. What made him a martyr wasn’t that he pissed everyone off with the questions he asked, but his refusal to escape the death sentence—his insistence that the law applies to everyone (which is pretty nearly the opposite of what Barr has argued, since he has argued that Trump is above accountability or any laws). The other case that gets invoked in the “I am speaking the truth but They will silence me” is Semmelweis. But Semmelweis also doesn’t show that the winners write the history. Semmelweis lost in his lifetime. And we know about him because people reconsidered.
For a hundred years, the slaver version of the Civil War was the dominant narrative. It lost the war, and won the history. Now it’s losing the history.
The most uncharitable version of what Barr said is that he is an amoral social constructivist of the worst kind, Machiavellian to the core. In my experience, that kind of person is rare. Machiavellians do claim foundational truths–they end up insisting that Machiavellianism is true.
More common is the sociopathic Machiavellian who is incapable of perspective-shifting; they just don’t think there are other perspectives. [Every once in a while, I run across people, all over the political spectrum, who think perspective shifting is bad—that’s a different post.] I think Barr is in that category of not really understanding that, not only are there other points of view, but that they might be right.
The charitable reading of Barr is that he believes that he is a victim (that is, criticized) for speaking the truth, but, he thinks, if he fails in his endeavor to substitute a one-party state for a democracy, then his opponents will treat him as he has been treating them.
[That’s another post—people who feel justified in oppressing the other side because, if the other side got into power, they would do the same –but it’s logically, empirically, and ethically indefensible. It’s never been associated with sensible policies.]
What Barr said is open, I think, to two interpretations, and neither of them makes him look like an ethical or reflective person. One is that he’s the worst kind of power politics shoddy-Nietzschean epistemological constructivist—might not only makes right, but it makes truth.
The second is that he feels a victim because he thinks he’s Galileo. But he isn’t. Galileo had a lot of evidence for his arguments, as even his opponents acknowledged he did, and Barr knows about Galileo because history isn’t written by the winners in power politics.
In other words, Barr’s saying “History is written by the winners” (most famously attributed to Goering) shows why he’s really not someone who should be head of the DOJ. Either he’s someone who thinks the Nazis were right in their power politics, or he’s someone who hasn’t really thought about his own argument.
He might be both.