The Problem With Being on the Right Side of History.
History Does Not Absolve You From Persuasion.
There are few phrases more comforting than being on the right side of history.
It has the satisfying sound of an argument that has already won. It does not merely say that a person is right, or that their cause is just, or that their opponents are mistaken. It says something grander and more convenient: that the future has already agreed with them. History, that vast and impressive abstraction, has supposedly filed its judgement in advance. The present may still be noisy, complicated and resistant, but the verdict is coming. We need only wait for the dust to settle and the statues to be rearranged.
This is, as rhetoric, extremely tempting. It is tempting because it borrows the authority of hindsight while sparing us the inconvenience of not yet having any. It allows a person to speak as if the moral meaning of the present has already been clarified by the future. It gives political argument the flavour of prophecy. It is not just that I am right. It is that one day everyone will see that I was right, and those who failed to see it will look faintly embarrassing in the archive.
The trouble, of course, is that history has not yet turned up to give evidence.
This does not mean that the phrase is always empty. There are moments when it captures something real. Human beings have done things, tolerated things, defended things and built institutions around things that later generations have been right to judge harshly. Slavery, colonial violence, racial segregation, the exclusion of women from political life, the criminalisation of gay people, the maintenance of apartheid: nobody needs to pretend that all historical judgement is presumptuous just because some people use historical judgement badly. Moral progress is not an illusion. There really are victories worth defending, and there really are defeats that, in retrospect, deserve to look like defeats.
But that is not quite the same thing as saying they were inevitable.
This distinction matters. There is a difference between moral confidence and historical inevitability. Moral confidence says: this is right, and I am prepared to defend it. Historical inevitability says: this will win, and therefore opposition to it is not merely wrong but obsolete. The first still accepts the burden of argument. The second quietly tries to escape it.
That escape is the problem.
The phrase being on the right side of history offers people a borrowed certainty. It lets them occupy the posture of retrospective wisdom while the actual work remains unfinished. It turns politics into a queue for vindication, as though justice were not something made through struggle, organisation, persuasion, law, culture, institutional pressure, compromise, conflict, endurance and luck, but something that eventually arrives because the future is embarrassed on our behalf.
That is not only bad history. It is bad ethics. And, more immediately, it is often dreadful politics.
The temptation is understandable.
The phrase appeals most strongly to people who have reason to believe that the present is morally disordered. That should make us careful before mocking it. People do not usually reach for the language of history when they are calmly discussing the decimal places of a budget line. They reach for it when they believe something larger is at stake.
Abolitionists needed more than a careful reading of parliamentary arithmetic. Suffragists needed more than patience with the procedural objections of men who discovered, with remarkable consistency, that the time for women’s equality had not quite arrived. Civil rights campaigners needed to believe that segregation was not merely one legal arrangement among others, but a moral scandal. Anti-apartheid activists needed to insist that a racial caste state could not be made acceptable by calling it stability. Gay rights campaigners, in the face of criminalisation, stigma and state neglect, needed to believe that the moral universe was not exhausted by the prejudices of their own moment.
In these cases, the appeal to history can be sustaining. It says: this present arrangement is not permanent. The normality of injustice is not proof of its legitimacy. What looks settled can be unsettled. What looks natural can be exposed as political. What looks like common sense can, in time, come to look cruel.
There is a generous version of the phrase, then. It is not a sneer but a source of courage. It is the voice that tells people in losing causes that the present distribution of power is not the same thing as moral truth. It refuses the tyranny of the immediate. It says that majorities can be wrong, that laws can be unjust, that social consensus can be rotten, and that people who are despised in one generation may be honoured in another.
That is not a trivial insight. It is one of the reasons politics is possible at all.
But the problem with the phrase is that it so easily slides from courage into complacency. It begins as a refusal to let the present have the final word. It ends as a refusal to do the work of changing the present. The future becomes not a hope, but a guarantee. The person speaking is no longer making an argument; they are announcing the direction of travel.
And once someone believes they know the direction of travel, it becomes remarkably easy to treat anyone standing in the way as less a citizen than a historical inconvenience.
Moral confidence is not historical inevitability
The distinction between moral confidence and historical inevitability is the hinge of the whole problem.
Moral confidence can be necessary. There are issues on which endless neutrality becomes its own form of cowardice. To say that a person should defend their beliefs without any conviction would be absurd. Political and moral life requires commitments. It requires people to say, sometimes against the mood of their age, that something is unjust, degrading, dishonest or cruel.
But moral confidence still has to argue. It still has to explain itself. It still has to persuade, organise and contend with reality. It does not get to assume that the righteousness of its destination has solved the difficulty of the route.
Historical inevitability does something different. It turns a claim about justice into a claim about momentum. It implies that the issue is not simply whether something is right, but whether it is where history is heading. That gives the speaker a useful double advantage. They get to sound morally serious and strategically sophisticated at the same time. Their opponent is not merely wrong; they are behind. Their position is not merely unjust; it is ageing badly. Their arguments do not need to be answered so much as outlived.
This is a powerful form of rhetoric because nobody wants to imagine themselves as the last defender of some doomed stupidity. Most people prefer to think of themselves as decent, modern and reasonably alert to the moral weather. To tell them they are on the wrong side of history is to threaten them not only with defeat but with embarrassment. It asks them to picture their grandchildren wincing at them.
There are times when that threat may be deserved. But as an argumentative habit, it is dangerous. It rewards people for speaking as if history were simpler than it is. It treats the future as a kind of moral audit office. It encourages the thought that the direction of justice is obvious to those with sufficient virtue, and obscure only to the wicked, stupid or self-interested.
This is where the phrase becomes ethically corrosive. It does not merely express confidence. It licenses contempt.
The Whig comfort blanket
There is an old historical temptation here. Herbert Butterfield’s critique of Whig history was, among other things, a critique of stories that turn the past into a procession towards the enlightened present. In the Whig version of history, events are arranged so that they appear to be moving, however bumpily, towards us: our freedoms, our institutions, our moral assumptions, our self-congratulation. The American Historical Association’s discussion of Butterfield describes his concern with abridged historical narratives that achieve drama and apparent moral clarity by interpreting the past through present politics, producing teleological stories that can do violence to the complexity of the past.
The appeal of such stories is obvious. They tidy history up. They sort people into winners and losers, prophets and reactionaries, darkness and light. They allow us to see the past as a series of auditions for the present, with everyone judged by whether they anticipated us.
That does not mean we should suspend moral judgement. There is a lazy misuse of anti-presentism which treats any judgement of the past as an anachronism, as though the people harmed by historical injustice were not themselves present at the time. Enslaved people did not need twenty-first-century theory to understand that enslavement was a horror. Women excluded from public life did not need a modern seminar to notice that the arrangement was convenient for men. Colonised peoples were not waiting for later historians to tell them that coercion had occurred.
So the lesson is not that moral judgement is impossible. It is that moral judgement is not the same as historical neatness.
The past was not a morality play whose central purpose was to produce the opinions we currently hold. It was inhabited by people acting under conditions of uncertainty, constraint, imagination, prejudice, courage, fear, ignorance and interest. Sometimes the people we now admire were wrong about other things. Sometimes the people who defended good causes did so for mixed reasons. Sometimes movements that deserved to win lost for generations. Sometimes victories were partial, compromised or reversed. Sometimes what looked like inevitable progress depended on accidents, alliances, institutional openings and tactical decisions that could easily have gone differently.
This is why the right side of history is such a suspiciously comfortable phrase. It allows us to enjoy the moral clarity of hindsight in advance. It lets us imagine the future as if it were already a school textbook, with our side printed in the chapter heading.
But history is not written in advance. It is not a conveyor belt. It does not carry good causes to victory while their supporters stand around being correct.
The moral arc is not a travelator
The most famous version of this comfort is the line about the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice. Martin Luther King Jr. used a version of it, but the thought is usually traced back to the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker. Parker’s original formulation is more interesting, and more humble, than the slogan it has become. He did not present himself as a man who could see the whole design of history. He said, in effect, that his view was limited; he could not calculate the full curve, but by conscience he believed it bent towards justice.
That humility matters. Parker’s line was not a forecasting model. It was not a graph. It was not a complacent assurance that the future had a departmental commitment to fairness. It was an act of moral faith under conditions of partial sight.
The sloganised version often loses that uncertainty. In public rhetoric, the moral arc becomes less like a discipline and more like infrastructure. It bends towards justice, apparently, because that is what arcs do. The speaker is then relieved of the question of who bends it, how, at what cost, against which resistance, and with what possibility of failure.
But the moral arc is not a travelator. It does not move us while we stand still.
If it bends towards justice at all, it does so because people bend it. They bend it through argument, protest, litigation, writing, organising, voting, bargaining, striking, teaching, risking reputation, losing elections, building institutions, changing norms, and sometimes spending entire lives on causes whose victories they will not personally see. Even then, it does not bend smoothly. It buckles, stalls, snaps back. It can be forced in the other direction. Rights won in one generation can be weakened in another. Taboos can return. Cruelties can be renamed. Bad ideas can acquire new fonts and re-enter polite society as if they had merely been away at finishing school.
The belief that justice is possible is necessary. The belief that justice is inevitable is a narcotic.
What the phrase does to argument
The deeper problem with being on the right side of history is not that it is historically naive, though it often is. The deeper problem is what it does to argument.
First, it makes people lazy. If history is already moving in your direction, persuasion starts to look optional. Why explain yourself carefully to people who will eventually be ashamed of themselves anyway? Why address their fears, objections, confusions or material interests? Why build a majority when history has already seconded the motion?
This is a particular danger for progressive politics, though not only for progressive politics. A movement can be morally right and still politically incompetent. It can diagnose an injustice accurately and still fail to build the coalition needed to remedy it. It can have the better argument and still lose because it mistook moral force for organisational power. The fact that a cause deserves to win does not mean that it will. The universe does not give extra seats for being correct in principle.
Second, the phrase makes people self-righteous. It encourages a flattering distinction between those who understand the age and those who belong to its debris. The opponent becomes not someone to be persuaded, defeated, constrained or answered, but someone already sentenced by the future. This is emotionally satisfying, but satisfaction is not the same thing as seriousness.
There are, plainly, people whose views do not deserve endless gentle handling. Some beliefs are cruel. Some arguments are bad faith. Some political projects are organised around domination, exclusion or contempt. There is no duty to launder prejudice as mere difference of opinion.
But even then, the question remains: what is the task? If the task is moral denunciation, then denunciation may be justified. If the task is political change, then denunciation may not be enough. People do not stop having votes, money, institutional power, social influence or capacity for obstruction merely because history has been informed that they are in the wrong queue.
Third, the phrase makes people strategically stupid. It confuses losing an argument in the future with losing power in the present. This is a dangerous confusion because many unjust arrangements are perfectly capable of lasting a very long time. History contains quite a lot of things that should have ended earlier. Some of them did not end because people were too frightened to challenge them. Some did not end because too many people benefited from them. Some did not end because their opponents were divided, exhausted, excluded, imprisoned, murdered or ignored. Some did not end because nobody had yet built the machinery needed to end them.
To say that an injustice is doomed is not to make it so. Sometimes it is not doomed. Sometimes it is extremely well funded.
Finally, the phrase can make people morally careless. If you believe you are speaking for the future, you may become less attentive to the present. You may stop asking whether your own side has hidden premises, bad incentives, internal cruelties or convenient evasions. You may start treating tactical disagreement as moral betrayal. You may decide that anyone asking about means, trade-offs, implementation or unintended consequences is merely slowing the march of justice.
That is how moral certainty degenerates into moral vanity.
The serious version
There is, however, a serious version of the appeal to history, and it is worth preserving.
Adam Green, in an article for Episteme, argues that appeals to being on the right side of history can be understood not merely as rhetorical flourish but as a kind of higher-order evidence: a claim about how one’s view may stand in relation to broader patterns of moral learning and social judgement. He does not deny that the phrase can be used rhetorically, but he asks whether there is something more substantive going on when people invoke it.
That is a useful complication. We should not pretend that all references to future judgement are automatically stupid. Sometimes people are asking a real question: what will this look like when the panic has passed? What will this policy look like when the people harmed by it are finally heard? What will this compromise look like when its evasions are no longer convenient? How will later generations understand the excuses we currently find so persuasive?
Those are good questions. In fact, they are morally necessary questions. They ask us to step outside the suffocating immediacy of our own moment. They remind us that the present has no monopoly on judgement. They help us see that what feels moderate now may later look cowardly, and what feels extreme now may later look like basic decency arriving late.
The problem is not asking how the future might judge us. The problem is pretending to know.
There is a difference between using imagined future judgement as a discipline and using it as a weapon. As a discipline, it asks us to be less complacent. As a weapon, it allows us to become more so. It can make us more reflective, or it can make us insufferable. The difference lies in whether the thought of history increases our sense of responsibility or decreases it.
A good appeal to history says: I may be trapped inside the assumptions of my age, and I should test them. A bad appeal to history says: my opponents are trapped inside the assumptions of their age, whereas I have somehow escaped into permanent enlightenment.
The first is humility. The second is cosplay as posterity.
History will not do your canvassing
The political danger is clearest when the rhetoric of inevitability meets the ordinary mechanics of power.
History does not knock doors. It does not draft legislation. It does not build unions, parties, campaigns, charities, legal strategies, newspapers, schools, churches, tenants’ groups, mutual aid networks or professional associations. It does not persuade nervous voters, reassure conflicted allies, split opponents, count numbers, secure amendments, survive defeats or return the next morning to try again.
People do that. Institutions do that. Movements do that. And they do it imperfectly.
This is one reason the right side of history is such a seductive phrase for people who enjoy politics at the level of identity but not always at the level of work. It allows the performance of seriousness without the discipline of strategy. It says: we are the future. But the future, as campaign literature, is often overprinted and under-delivered.
The hard truth is that good causes lose. They lose all the time. They lose because they are crushed. They lose because they are divided. They lose because they are early. They lose because they are badly led. They lose because their opponents understand power better. They lose because the public is frightened, tired, misled or unconvinced. They lose because the institutional terrain is hostile. They lose because events intervene. They lose because history is not a referee.
This does not mean politics should become cynical. Quite the opposite. It means politics should become less mystical. If something matters, it deserves better than inevitability. It deserves the seriousness of means.
That means persuasion remains morally important. Not because every opponent is reasonable. Not because all disagreement is innocent. Not because the public must be flattered at all times. Persuasion matters because politics is the art of changing conditions among people who have not yet agreed with you. To abandon persuasion is not a sign of moral courage. It is often a confession that one has mistaken agreement for justice.
There will always be people who cannot be persuaded. There will always be people whose objections are dishonest or whose interests are too deeply tied to the injustice being challenged. But most political change depends on what happens around them: who is mobilised, who is reassured, who is split away, who is made less afraid, who is given language for something they already half-believe, who is shown that a different arrangement is possible without the world ending.
That is slow work. It is much less glamorous than being congratulated by the future. Unfortunately, it has the advantage of being real.
Against prophecy
The answer, then, is not to abandon moral confidence. That would leave politics to the people most comfortable with power as it already exists. The answer is to detach moral confidence from prophecy.
Say that something is right. Say that something is cruel. Say that something must change. Say that the excuses are inadequate, the settlement is unjust, the compromise has curdled, the respectable consensus is hiding something ugly. But do not pretend that history has already done the arguing for you.
The future may judge some of our present arrangements harshly. It may vindicate causes that now look marginal, excessive, naive or inconvenient. It may also expose some of our certainties as shallow, some of our fashions as evasions, some of our moral performances as vanity. That is the trouble with invoking posterity. It does not only judge the people we dislike.
To think historically is not to imagine a future that applauds us. It is to remember that people in the past also thought they were obvious, decent, modern and justified. Some of them were. Many were not. Most were tangled in ways that become clearer only when time has stripped away their excuses.
That should make us morally serious, not paralysed. It should make us willing to judge, but wary of enjoying judgement too much. It should make us suspicious of the rhetorical shortcut that turns our preferred future into destiny.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be vindicated by history. Most of us would prefer not to be remembered, even hypothetically, as the person standing athwart justice asking whether the minutes of the last meeting had been properly approved. But the desire to be vindicated is not evidence that one is right. Nor is confidence in the future a substitute for responsibility in the present.
If a cause is just, it deserves argument. It deserves organisation. It deserves patience, courage, discipline, humility and strategy. It deserves people willing to persuade those who are not yet persuaded, and to defeat those who cannot be persuaded, without pretending that either task has already been completed by time.
History may one day take a side. But it will not spare us the work of taking one now.