Ineffective Point of Argument I: The Wrong Side of History

"The wrong side of history".

Recently, a really popular statement in arguments is that something or somebody is "on the wrong side of history".

You don't know that.

There are any number of movements or trends that people thought were inevitable that turned out not to be.  All of these things were thought to be on the "right side of history" at one time.  In the 1930s plenty of people in the Western world, including the United States, believed that fascism was on the right side of history. The same is true of Communism in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s.  Shoot, I even saw an argument quite recently that Communism actually was "on the right side of history", made by somebody who was centered on the Third World and just wouldn't give up the argument.

Something being on "the wrong side of history" is meant to be an argument stopper by somebody who is supporting a popular trend and who doesn't want the other side argued.  The suggestion is that "this is inevitable and you should just accept it".  It's an intellectually anemic argument for a variety of reasons.

For one thing, nobody knows how history comes out on anything until quite some time has passed on the topic.  Fascism went down as being on the "wrong side of history", in this context, when teh major fascists powers were defeated in 1945.  Up until then, nobody was really sure.  Communism didn't go down as being on the wrong side of history, in this context, until some time in the 1990s.

The other thing people hint at meaning when they say this is that somebody is on the morally wrong side of something.  A trend line however, doesn't determine that.  The Nazis and the Stalinist were always on the morally wrong side of history even when they were on the rise.  A trend line doesn't determine right or wrong. Right and wrong determines that.  Guys like Thomas Becket and Thomas More died being on the right side of history, but they were bucking a trend when that happened.