Timothy Snyder and the Good History
We don’t do good history at BAD HISTORY. What we do at BAD HISTORY is bad history, a term that, as used here, can have all kinds of meanings, from telling stories of bad stuff that happened in the past to criticizing bad takes on stuff that happened in the past. And more!
The historian Timothy Snyder, though, on his blog THINKING ABOUT, has posted a piece entitled “Bad Arguments and Good Historians,” which begins “Anyone who can read the Constitution knows that Donald Trump cannot hold office.” That’s exactly the kind of assertion that I think participates in every variety of bad history. It’s widely known that beginning even before the Constitution was ratified, nothing but disagreement has prevailed, among people who can read, as to what its “plain wording” (to quote a lot of people, now including Snyder) means. Yet Snyder thinks that in the case of Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which some have alleged automatically bars Trump from even running for office, not just holding it, history can tell us what lawyers can’t.
And that, to me, is silly history.
“. . . the majority of the members of the Supreme Court, “ Snyder says, “take the view that the legislative, political, and social context . . . decide what is meant.” This, unfortunately, has a kernel of truth. Snyder is elevating and rationalizing the actual view of the rightist justices, who under the malign influence of the goblin fantasists at the Federalist Society, have decided that federal judicial rulings must be guided by principles “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition,” by which they mean an Anglo heritage of ideas about rights. Because it’s just a stark fact, for example, that the political equality of women is not, putting it mildly, deeply rooted in that heritage, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
We might expect liberals like Snyder and others to reject that way of thinking. And normally they do, but now they’ve seen … opportunity! “This,” Snyder announces, “is where historians come in.”
His idea may seem to be that if the rightists on the Court are saying they care about history, then let’s hold their feet to the fire by giving them some of the real stuff. Maybe this heritage approach can get us somewhere.
But nobody thinks the judges care about history. So what’s the real purpose of historians’ “coming in” and, as Snyder says, meeting “bad arguments” with “good history, provided in two amicus briefs signed by two groups of prominent historians with expertise on the issues in question”?
Maybe the expectation is that when the judges ignore these briefs, as oral argument strongly suggests they will, in certain ways for perfectly good reason, the amicus historians will have proven for all time that the judges don’t really care about history, for all their talk about the past, and will thus have exposed themselves for all time as the rank hypocrites they are (that’ll show ’em). Then Snyder can post about what an outrage it is when good history is rejected as a counter to bad argument, and on and on it’ll go, to trivial effect.
I’ve given a critical reading to one of the briefs Snyder is calling good history, so I won’t get back into it now. Suffice it to say that the weakness of the evidence from which Snyder draws the statement “the purpose and consequence of Section 3 was, precisely, to prevent Jefferson Davis from running for president,” for example, suggests that critical reading isn’t what he brought to reading the brief. Why would he? His lavishly credentialed colleagues in Ivy League history departments—the “good historians”—are with him and against Trump, and you wouldn't expect to get bad history from the good people, now, would you?
Some may ask what’s so wrong with all this.
The very triviality. When some of the most intellectually refined people of our time, like Snyder and the amicus historians, treat what they’re forever framing as a last battle between ultimate good and ultimate evil as a pretext for doing nothing more effective than blabbing on about the importance of what they already do professionally anyway, as if such blabbing represents a bold assault on the enemies of democracy, then the liberal culture they position themselves as defending has clearly been degraded to a pathetic degree, and the liberal academic intelligentsia—on which some hopes actually have historically been pinned—stands before us gruesomely embarrassed at best.
Is it possible that an entire intellectual ethos, on which liberal democracy has, in part, relied, is now collapsing in tatters thanks in part to the narcissism of the good-history purveyors, as triggered by the crisis represented by Donald Trump? That's the kind of end-of-days thing I fret about (because these people are more or less my people). But don’t worry: personally they’ll all be fine. They're innocents.
Their imperviousness to embarrassment can even lend them a kind of charm. One of the amici, Drew Gilpin Faust, formerly the president of Harvard, told Lawrence O’Donnell, the anchor of MSNBC’s “The Last Word,” that she’d never even heard the disparaging chestnut “law office history” before Trump’s lawyer used it in oral argument.
Maybe these people need to get out more? Prep a bit? Arm up? They’re bringing cap pistols to a knife fight and then harumphing about how bewilderingly bad for the country it is that they've been so easily repelled. Returning covered in glory to their campus offices, there's no downside, no wound to lick. They're capable of maintaining a condescending attitude even toward people who have clearly beaten them.
The historian Sean Wilentz, interviewed for The Nation’s podcast, takes condescending innocence all the way. He doesn’t even seem to know or care what went on in oral argument on Section Three: he’s looking forward eagerly to history-making dissents from Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson, so for him “it’s all to the good.” Until I read that interview, I believed the Section Three effort was a genuine if absurdly misguided attempt to beat the literal Devil, in a game for the highest stakes, but no, it turns out abject failure will be OK too, in the grand scheme of things. How dustily abstracted a world do you have to live in to be certain a) that all three of those justices, because they’re liberals like you, will dissent (I’d be quite surprised, but what do I know); and b) far worse, that bringing a futile case like this and ginning up sound and fury about it has been good because, while it won’t do a thing to stop Trump, great dissents can now be imagined taking their place in the long, noble record of liberal history.
One begins to suspect that stopping Trump isn’t really job one for these people. They seem to believe that a thing called “history” keeps a long-range score; that they’re no longer just scholars of that thing but are taking an important part in it, which the score will one day reflexively vindicate, even valorize; and that that's what matters. And I don’t think that’s good. Or history.
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Further Reading
Wilentz on The Nation podcast.
One more from me on the Section Three argument.