Niebuhr, I think, considered irony to be something more profound than merely not being fully and unselfconsciously embedded in mainstream thought and action. The most specifically important thing the ironist notices that others don’t is that the various elements of a situation don’t fit together as comfortably, logically and morally, as most people assume they do. Once you notice this kind of essential contradiction — in the example that was mainly on Niebuhr’s mind, the contradiction between America’s overwhelming military and economic power and its sense of itself as innocent and benign — you are obligated to use your perception to imagine, and then to try to achieve, a situation that is less ironic. That’s quite a different project, far more difficult and painful, than noticing the contradiction, congratulating yourself for being so perceptive, and blithely going on with your life.
Niebuhr’s great worry, which of course turned out to be prescient, was that the United States, blind to its central contradiction, would overreach, using its power in ways that would be harmful if they succeeded and humiliating if they failed. (By his lights, the Soviet Union was even more unironic than the United States, believing itself to be enacting a historical inevitability, the dictatorship of the proletariat.) It was urgently necessary for us to embrace a more ironic conception of our country’s past and its future. He wrote: “The ironic element in American history can be overcome, in short, only if American idealism comes to terms with the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historic configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue.”
C. Vann Woodward saw the South as standing apart from the nation as a whole in having already lost its unironic innocence many years earlier. The United States was rich, but the South was poor. The United States had never been defeated in a war, but the South had. The United States was founded on freedom, the South on slavery. Woodward had few illusions that the triumphant national culture of 1952 could change in the short run, but he believed that historians, at least, could infuse the American narrative with a Niebuhrian irony. These historians “must have a rare combination of detachment and sympathy, and they must have established some measure of immunity from the fevers and prejudices of their own times, particularly those bred of nationalism with all its myths and pretensions, and those born of hysteria that closes the mind to new ideas of all kinds.” And why couldn’t Southern historians, who had particular experience with being on the receiving end of history, be leading participants in this project?