Saving Democracy: Does It Depend on Knowing History?

I hope not.

If you know your history, / Then you would know where you’re coming from. / Then you wouldn’t have to ask me / Who the heck do I think I am. ( Bob Marley and Noel Williams, “Buffalo Soldier.”)

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For readers like me, there are plenty of good reasons to read history.

Tangent: It’s also probably beneficial to a nation state with a representative government to have politically engaged citizens who possess at least a rudimentary knowledge of that nation’s history. Interest in such things as how elections and other events have gone in the past can be a sign of the curiosity and thoughtfulness we’d want our voting citizens to have and all that.

Couldn’t hurt, anyway. . . .

But today, I’m interested in two other matters regarding what we call “knowing history.”

One: a lot of Americans, and I’m including the otherwise reasonably well-educated, with various political convictions, seem to me to lack much realistic idea of this country’s history. It’s prevalent among informed people across political divides, for example, to believe that the nation’s founders expressed ideals regarding equality, and to excoriate the founders for hypocrisy about, excuse them for falling short of, or hymn them for upholding those ideals, when it seems glaringly obvious to me that they didn’t express any such ideals at all. I’ve written about that here and here, among other places. And that’s only one example, in which my idea of knowing history may be somewhat . . . idiosyncratic?

Two: An idea now prevails among liberal thinkers, especially professional historians—and especially professors of American history—that to begin to save, as they often put it, American democracy from the current rise of anti-democratic forces in U.S. politics, we as a people must confront and understand and learn from the American past. Bad things happening now can be explained, the thinking goes, and if explained, they can be overcome. If explanations for the present are naturally to be found in the past, then historians are the natural explainers.

That all sounds so reasonable, even hopeful—and at a time when reason and hope are in such desperately short supply. You’ll see where I’m coming from, though, when I note that professors who assert that saving democracy requires understanding the American past are asking us to accept their particular interpretations of the American past, as presented in their work; concomitantly, our reading their work gains urgency from their casting current political situations as historically unique. Historians’ interpretations thus become, by the historians’ definitions, facts we all need to know in order to cope with a national emergency.

Which means to me that the all-important “explainer” element, on which this new public role of the authoritative #resistance historian relies, is fundamentally flawed.

History isn’t an explanation of what supposedly happened and how it supposedly led to what’s going on now, with lessons on how to fight back. It’s an argument about what events in the past might mean, an argument dependent not on authority but on visible struggles with the record, ultimately bound to be in some ways wrong. Inherently political, history can indeed be, as the old New Left had it, “usable”—but usability has nothing to do with throwing down red meat in reaction to unfolding events, via supposed parallels (“Trump’s being just like Andrew Jackson today”) or overarching reassurances (“American democracy is nevertheless inherently strong because the Civil Rights Movement proceeded from founding principles”).

The old New Left, viewing history as a dialectical process in which the left was taking an active part—and toward a radical end, not restoration of norms or favorable settlements of old conflicts—was tougher-minded about this stuff than today’s MAGA-crisis liberalism, which blends the usable-past concept with the confront-national-sins concept to sentimentalize even those events in U.S. history we should find the most egregious, linking all of the national past, good and bad, to a drama about the present. What’s going on now—the eternal political present, a priori continuously climactic—gets cast as the final throwdown over all of the good and ill that has defined us as a people.

In other words: This is it. This is the Big One. Applied to the present time in the form, more or less, of a religious drama, American history is made to serve as a weapon in the last battle, occurring now, between good America and evil America.

I’ve already written (glancingly) about my dissent from the thinking of probably the most influential exponent of that approach, Heather Cox Richardson, of Boston College, a highly credentialed and well-published historian of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and other subjects, whose blog “Letters from an American” became an intellectual lifeline for liberals, indeed a source of hope and comfort, during the horrorshow of anti-democratic chaos that was the Trump presidency. Richardson’s book How the South Won the Civil War has become a touchpoint Trump-explainer even for those who haven’t read it, a kind of Lost Cause narrative for liberals.

That book does of course involve argument. But Richardson’s public explainer role, which rests in part on that work, doesn’t. The main audience for her explanations isn’t digging critically into her argument; to many, it just sounds right, a satisfying origin story of the deplorables. That’s not reading history or understanding it. It's following—joining what's often called a community.

My issue goes beyond Richardson and her large fanbase. The Yale professor David Blight’s New York Review of Books articles, too, frame current political nightmares in the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. To the scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries who set themselves up as political pundits of this new kind, their own areas seem to them to hold the hidden keys, not surprisingly. Going totally another way, into his own area, Timothy Snyder, another Yale professor, is one among many who look to Europe between the wars to identify, in the rise of fascism in the ‘30’s, lessons said to be applicable, virtually one-to-one, news cycle by news cycle, to the specific day-to-day actions of Trump and his ilk.

Looking at Reconstruction, looking at Europe almost a century ago . . . What explains U.S. politics today? Everything, it would seem, but U.S. (and global) politics of the past two or three generations, and I suspect that’s partly because pointing to certain critical failings in liberal American politics during that period would discomfit the target audience. But whatever: to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Everybody who writes about the past sees resonant parallels. Every writer who publishes believes the public is in crying need of enlightenment along the lines of whatever the writer is bringing to market. That’s nothing new.

The particular problem here is how good Trump has been for commercial publishing, for the profiles of certain historians, and for the status of history in liberal discourse. If they can’t quit him—and man, they just can’t—how seriously is anyone supposed to take all these perpetually recycled warnings and lessons and threats? A certain readership for this stuff can clearly always be relied on now. There are people who will outlive Trump by decades and die in the process of hectoring the grieving family around the deathbed about that time he did egregious thing x, y, or z. But I think that any useful sense of the real presence of real threats to democracy—and the threats are, of course, real and always have been—is eroded by all this flogging of threat-porn IP as just another ongoing, even thriving publishing genre.

An even bigger issue, to me, has to do with the underlying presumption that for “us” to save American democracy, “we” need to engage more fully with the national past. That presumption can’t possibly be true. If we look at times when democracy was under less threat, or was actually expanding, those periods weren’t marked by any especially high levels of historical understanding among the voting public. Sure, at certain points maybe more kids could spit back more dates. But that’s not what historians mean by engaging with the national past—not at all what they mean.

“We taught civics then!” people say. But if anybody today urging the public to read history as an antidote to Trumpism were to crack nearly any civics or history text published in the good old days (and I mean also in the North), they’d quickly find material that would make them slam it shut in disgust.

“But our founding fathers read history!” Of course they did, and they read it wrong, as we all do, and from their creative misreadings flowed a host of problems. And some good things too. It’s dispiriting to me to see these U.S.-historians-turned-democracy-leaders denying what historians actually know about the nature of their practice and promoting a false idea of what history is for, even while failing to offer the public anything it can really use in sustaining and expanding democracy. Utility can come from history, if it can come at all, not in the form of lessons and warnings but only in the way such utility can come, when it can, from fiction or music. I read history for the same reasons I read fiction and listen to music and for that matter watch TV; if those forms have utility, I don’t notice it at the time and am not seeking it. I do think they can have it, though.

Everything more truly and immediately useful takes politics. The most immediately useful political means for combating Hitler in the 1930’s, whatever it might have been, surely wouldn’t have required the intelligentsia to buy into some scholars’ theories about lessons to be derived from some century-old precursor to Hitler. Trying to get people to think that way, by selling them books about it, might only have served as yet another very unfortunate impediment to stopping the rise of fascism.

. . . When I analyze the stench, / To me it makes a lot of sense / How the dreadlock rasta / Was a buffalo soldier. . . .