Why Obama’s Whig History Is All Wrong

Advances in human freedom are not inevitable.

‘The currents of history ebb and flow,” President Obama submitted this morning in Tallinn, Estonia. “But over time, they flow toward freedom.” This, it seems, is a favored formulation of our 44th president. Pontificating on the current state of the world, Obama is fond of chastising those actors who meet with his disapprobation by passively informing them that they are, in a cosmic sense, “wrong,” and that their behavior is incommensurate with the spirit of the era. The Islamic State, Obama has proposed “has no place in the 21st century.” Russia, meanwhile, is operating in both Crimea and Ukraine “on the wrong side of history.” At home and abroad, the president returns to this theme incessantly. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” he likes to intone, “but it bends toward justice.”

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