The assertion that someone or something stands on “the right side of history” often is used like a blackjack in an old noir film: to knock someone dissenting from conventional-wisdom-in-the-making out cold.
In March, a fan of Turkey’s President Recip Tayyip Erdogan asserted that alleged foreign policy successes of the neo-Ottoman, suit-and-tie Islamist support his claim to be “standing on the right side of history.” Implicit message? Don’t doubt the Big Man.
In 2024, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program declared that President Joe Biden’s State of the Union message showed Republicans “on the wrong side of history.”
The “right side of history” claim was invoked frequently by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Obama also employed the phrase’s fraternal twin, authored by 19th century minister and Transcendentalist Theodore Parker and favored by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., that “the moral arc of the universe is long but bends toward justice.”
But another 19th century writer dispensed with the reverend’s belief in a four-line poem. Wrote Stephen Crane in “A Man Said to the Universe”:
“A man said to the universe:/ ‘Sir, I exist!’/ ‘However,’ replied the universe,/ ‘The fact has not created in me/ A sense of obligation.’”
The beliefs that history contains a right and wrong side, and that creation follows an ultimately just moral path, are simply ahistorical.
To the Greeks and Romans, the words histor and later historia stemmed from those for inquiry, the seeking of knowledge by recording and explaining past events to arrive at truth. That those events exemplified right or wrong sides or revealed a universe headed toward justice were philosophical or theological beliefs. The historical record does not support them.
Those who claim to be standing on the right side of history from conviction rather than an urge to silence dissenters imagine their unsubstantiated assumption is a self-evident proposition. But writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 2015, David A. Graham eviscerated Obama’s frequent recourse to “standing on the right side of history” or “on the wrong side of history.” Such phrases, said Graham, “suggest a tortured, idealistic, and ultimately untenable vision of what history is and how it works.”
A clearer vision of history than that of Erdogan’s supporters or former presidents Obama and Clinton and of MSNBC strongly suggests that peace, for example, is not “on the right side” and war “on the wrong side.” Though creative individuals expand knowledge and where they do that material well-being accumulates, nevertheless, greed, envy, lust, desire for power and intolerance remain among the constants of human nature. At the level of national or sub-national groups, human nature periodically leads to war.
In a morally just war good struggles against evil. Nothing is inevitable about victory of the former over the latter. Rather, if the right side does prevail, it does so because good men and women of courage, intelligence and resourcefulness defeat evil men and women who would impose the wrong side. No “moral arc of the universe” decides the outcome.
Minorities, and sometimes majorities as well, know this truth. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks taught that Jews, who are commanded to act on the hope things can improve, know from history not to believe optimistically that they inevitably must.
In fact, the Torah portion Shoftim, (Deuteronomy 16:18 – 21:9) instructs us, “Justice, justice thou shall pursue.” Pursue, not expect it to unfold eventually of its own accord.
President John F. Kennedy concluded his 1961 inaugural address with this formulation. “… [W]ith history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”
I wrote in From Elvis to Trump, Eyewitness to the Unraveling that rather than a moral arc bending toward justice, history may resemble a broken corkscrew, one human beings use repeatedly to pull up meanness and sorrow along with the good. If so, then the direction of movement “must depend on the relative strength of Viktor Frankl’s two post-Holocaust ‘races.’” Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived Nazi death camps, asserts in Man’s Search for Meaning that the only significant human “racial” division is that between those who are decent and those who are not.
To give history a right side, to bend a universal moral arc, we must join those who are decent in the pursuit of justice. We must because history strongly suggests that justice will not arrive on its own.
Eric Rozenman retired last year as communications consultant for the Jewish Policy Center. His book The David Discovery: A Novel of the Near Future, is forthcoming.
