Fumbling to find another item on the Internet this morning, I found a recent speech from Steven F. Hayward, who has spent much of his professional life researching and comparing Churchill and Reagan.
The speech takes Al Gore to task for invoking Churchill and his language for the cause of global warming alarmism:
In An Inconvenient Truth Gore ratchets up the comparison, making out skeptics of his eco-apocalypticism, or doubters of the proposed remedies such as the Kyoto Protocol, to be the moral equivalent of Nazi appeasers. Gore cites the conclusion of Churchill?s 1936 speech attacking appeasement: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”
After offering examples of a more historically appropriate reference to Churchill — Reagan’s comments during the debate over SALT II in the Carter years — Hayward returns to Gore:
Whereas the mistake of the arms control process was trying to turn a moral problem into a technical problem, Vice President Gore is trying to turn a technical and economic problem–greenhouse gas emissions–into a moral problem of the same dimension as totalitarianism. And one of the further oddities or ironies of this case is that then-Congressman and later Senator Gore was one of the few liberals who resisted the attempt to turn the underlying moral dimension of the arms control problem on its head with the idea of the “nuclear freeze”–the simplistic idea promoted, as Harvey Mansfield pointed out, by people who thought Ronald Reagan a simpleton. Throughout this bitter controversy, Gore remained firmly in the camp of arms control technocrats, offering some serious and thoughtful ideas in the field, such as the single-warhead midgetman missile. The more you look at Gore?s useage of Churchill in connection with climate change, the more it looks like a clumsy attempt to boot the foot of an athlete or elegant dancer in a wooden clog.
If the writing interests you, you might enjoy Hayward’s short book Greatness (Crown Forum, 2005). A solitary rainy day would give you enough time to read this account of the remarkable similarities between the man who warned of the Iron Curtain and the man who did more than anyone else to tear that curtain down.
