{"id":12287,"date":"2021-07-28T19:57:26","date_gmt":"2021-07-29T02:57:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=12287"},"modified":"2021-07-28T19:57:26","modified_gmt":"2021-07-29T02:57:26","slug":"history-as-end-harpers-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=12287","title":{"rendered":"“History As End”, Harpers Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Matthew Karp, July 2021 Issue<\/strong><\/p>\n

1619, 1776, and the politics of the past<\/em><\/p>\n

Last spring, 155 years after the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital surrendered again. In April 1865, the capitulation was swift and almost outlandishly theatrical: after learning that Robert E.\u00a0Lee\u2019s army had withdrawn from nearby Petersburg, the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, and his military guard escaped south under cover of darkness, setting half the city on fire as they fled. Early the next morning, the first Union troops arrived. As Richmond\u2019s black residents celebrated in the streets\u2014joined by more than a few poor whites\u2014the black soldiers at the head of the Union column worked to put out the flames. The embers of a regime dedicated to preserving African slavery were extinguished by hundreds of former slaves. The occupying forces then marched to Davis\u2019s executive mansion and commandeered it as their headquarters.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Illustrations by Pep Montserrat<\/p>\n

\n
\n

The second fall of Richmond was hardly kinder to the Confederate president. In June of last year, Davis\u2019s eight-foot bronze likeness, which had presided over the city\u2019s Monument Avenue for more than a century, was torn from its pedestal and dumped into the street\u2014his face nullified with black paint, his overcoat spiked with pink and yellow, and his outstretched hand now reaching upward as if making a forlorn appeal to the heavens. In the weeks that followed, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B.\u00a0Stuart, and Matthew Maury, Davis\u2019s bronze company on Monument Avenue\u2014the so-called Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es of the South\u2014were likewise eliminated from view, but they at least enjoyed the honor of an official state removal. Davis, their chief, received no such courtesy: protesters tied ropes around his legs and dragged him to the ground with what news reports described as \u201ca tiny\u00a0sedan.\u201d<\/p>\n

The conquest of Monument Avenue represented a key front in the renewed struggle for racial justice: the demand for a dramatic rethinking of U.S.\u00a0history and its place in public life. Strikingly, the most powerful energy behind this fight comes not only from scholars but from activists, journalists, and other thinkers who have made history a new kind of political priority. Although American historical amnesia is the laziest of tropes\u2014\u201cWe learn nothing,\u201d said Gore Vidal, \u201cbecause we remember nothing\u201d\u2014liberals today are more committed than ever to a passionate remembrance of things past. In recent years, a distinct pattern has emerged. Acts of horror\u2014the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown; the Charleston church massacre; the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; the murder of George Floyd; the storming of the U.S.\u00a0Capitol\u2014are met not only with calls for justice but with demands for a more searching examination of history. Reading lists and syllabi are distributed; institutional commissions are tasked with extensive historical inquiries; professional historians appear regularly in op-ed pages, on television, and in social-media\u00a0feeds.<\/p>\n

Every modern political movement makes some contact with history. Even in the United States, with our notoriously weak memory, progressive reformers have always invoked earlier struggles. Eugene Debs boasted that the Socialists of 1908 \u201care today where the abolitionists were in 1858\u201d; Martin Luther King Jr. never tired of talking about the Declaration of Independence, a beacon of democratic equality whose light exposed how little of it the United States had so far attained. Yet the role of history today, especially within liberal discourse, has changed. Rather than mine the past for usable politics\u2014whether as analogue, inspiration, or warning\u2014thinkers now travel in the opposite direction, from present injustice to historical crime. Current American inequalities, many liberals insist, must be addressed through encounters with the past. Programs of reform or redistribution, no matter how ambitious, can hope to succeed only after the country undergoes a profound \u201creckoning\u201d\u2014to use the key word of the day\u2014with centuries of racial oppression.<\/p>\n

In public debate, this order of operations has produced some unexpected ideological alignments. The Atlantic,<\/em> a sturdy citadel of centrist thinking on every contemporary subject from populism to Palestine, has been the editorial home of both Ta-Nehisi Coates, this century\u2019s most influential writer on race and U.S.\u00a0history, and Ibram X.\u00a0Kendi, the historian who has emerged as this moment\u2019s most prolific critic of American racism. The New York Times,<\/em> whose editorial board could not muster more than one vote out of thirty for Bernie Sanders, has in the past two years published the 1619 Project, which was billed as \u201cthe most ambitious examination of the legacy of slavery ever undertaken\u201d in an American newspaper; an essay making the case for reparations; and an excerpt adapted from Isabel Wilkerson\u2019s Caste,<\/em> which compared America\u2019s \u201cenduring racial hierarchy\u201d with those of ancient India and Nazi\u00a0Germany.<\/p>\n

In the age of Sanders and Trump, the Democratic establishment has assumed a defensive posture, concerned above all with holding off various barbarians at the gate. And yet in its consideration of the past, the same establishment has somehow grown large and courageous, suddenly eager for a galloping revision of all American history. For some left-wing skeptics, this apparent paradox requires little investigation: it redirects real anger toward vague and symbolic grievances. No, the Democrats who govern Virginia will not repeal the state\u2019s anti-union right-to-work law, but yes, by all means, they will make Juneteenth an official holiday. If this movement only signals a shift from material demands to metaphysical \u201creckonings\u201d\u2014from movement politics to elite culture war\u2014then it is not an advance but a\u00a0retreat.<\/p>\n

This critique, however persuasive as a reading of many liberal politicians, does not do justice to the intellectuals and journalists who have driven the national debate on these issues. It does not quite capture the significance of their interventions, or the ambition of their challenge to traditional liberal ideas. Nor does it capture the peculiarity of today\u2019s politics of history. American conservatives, traditionally attracted to history as an exercise in patrimonial devotion, have in the time of Trump abandoned many of their older pieties, instead oscillating between incoherence and outright nihilism. Liberals, meanwhile, seem to expect more from the past than ever before. Leaving behind the End of History, we have arrived at something like History as\u00a0End.<\/p>\n

The second fall of Richmond marked not only a victory for Black Lives Matter protesters, but a real and significant withdrawal from the lore of the Confederacy, even in ideological precincts where that lore has reigned for more than a century. Last year, Republicans in the Mississippi state legislature voted overwhelmingly to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state flag; NASCAR broke long-standing tradition and banned the rebel banner from its events; and the pages of right-wing journals such as National Review<\/em> and The Federalist,<\/em> often stout defenders of Confederate monuments, now overflowed with conservative authors either questioning or rejecting these symbols. Nearly half of the House Republican caucus, including the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and Southerners such as the minority whip, Steve Scalise, and the rising star Dan Crenshaw, voted in favor of a Democratic bill removing all Confederate statues from the U.S.\u00a0Capitol.<\/p>\n

It was not always thus. Barely two decades ago, at a Republican primary debate in South Carolina, George W.\u00a0Bush defended the state\u2019s right to fly the Confederate battle flag, winning hoots of approval from the audience. Bush\u2019s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, stirred controversy by celebrating \u201cSouthern patriots\u201d such as Jefferson Davis, Robert E.\u00a0Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, while his first secretary of the interior, Gale Norton, lamented that advocates of \u201cstate sovereignty\u201d had \u201clost too much\u201d when the Confederacy was defeated. In contrast, the leadership of today\u2019s American right\u2014from congressional Republicans to Tucker Carlson\u2014have used the monuments debate not to defend the traditional virtues of the Confederate Lost Cause, but to denounce related attacks on national figures such as George Washington, Ulysses S.\u00a0Grant, and Teddy Roosevelt. This is a trumpet blast of retreat, whether liberal commentators have acknowledged it or\u00a0not.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump occasionally staggered forth to celebrate the Confederacy and its icons. But the former president\u2019s fitful bouts of nostalgia had little effect on policy: when his own Department of Defense moved to bar Confederate flags from military property, Trump did not countermand the order. Last summer, Trump loudly opposed a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act mandating the removal of all Confederate names from military property, but his veto was overridden with commanding bipartisan support in both houses of Congress. The White House\u2019s more substantial attempts to develop a politics of history\u2014if they merit such a name\u2014followed the same pattern. As many critics have observed, the so-called 1776 Commission, convened in the dying days of the Trump Administration, was a slapdash affair. Organized as a last-ditch effort to refute \u201cprogressive\u201d narratives of history, the commission\u2019s hastily produced report consulted no professional historians, cited no historical scholarship, and recycled huge swaths of text from the authors\u2019 prior publications.<\/p>\n

Notably, while the 1776 Report included a range of pseudo-patriotic distortions about slavery and the founding era, it did not attempt to rehabilitate the Lost Cause narrative. It did not even complain that U.S.\u00a0historians had unfairly neglected Robert E.\u00a0Lee, as the former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney did in her 1994 attack on the Clinton Administration\u2019s National Standards for United States History\u2014a major salvo in an earlier cycle of the history wars. Instead, the report\u2019s authors celebrated Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, praised Reconstruction, and condemned the postbellum South\u2019s descent into Jim Crow, \u201ca system that was hardly better than slavery.\u201d Its genesis notwithstanding, the report\u2019s candid recognition that slavery was the cause of the Civil War and emancipation its result\u2014eschewing hoary tropes about a \u201cbrothers\u2019 war\u201d\u2014may well represent an advance from the sentimental politics of Ken Burns\u2019s famous 1990 documentary series. This should not go unnoticed.<\/p>\n

Likewise, when the Trump White House announced plans to construct a National Garden of American Heroes as a rebuttal to monument removals, the initial list of statues included Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and the Union Army officer Joshua Chamberlain, but not a single rebel in gray. The final lineup, released as one of Trump\u2019s last presidential acts, ran to 244 \u201cAmerican heroes\u201d\u2014practically anyone ever mentioned in a U.S.\u00a0history textbook, from Crispus Attucks to Muhammad Ali. The list included zero Confederates.<\/p>\n

No doubt a deposit of pro-Confederate feeling remains, in some form, sedimented into the hard edges of the American right. At the U.S.\u00a0Capitol riot on January 6, a handful of rebel banners were visible in the crowd; one Delaware man, since arrested by the FBI, carried the Confederate colors into the halls of Congress. Yet the occasional appearance of such paraphernalia, however disturbing, is neither new nor surprising: for over a century, after all, the flag has served as America\u2019s most prominent symbol of white supremacy. Its presence at Trump rallies underlines the endurance of racism on the far right, but it does not necessarily portend a resurgence of the Lost Cause, as some have suggested. By any sober accounting, Confederate nostalgia is weaker in the United States today than it was two decades\u00a0ago.<\/p>\n

The right\u2019s most potent energy in the age of Trump has mobilized not around traditional paeans to God, generals, and founders, but an erratic brand of troll humor. So goes Ann Coulter\u2019s viral demand to #CancelYale (because the university is named for the merchant and slave trader Elihu Yale), or the Texas representative Louie Gohmert\u2019s resolution to ban from Congress \u201cany political organization\u201d that has ever \u201csupported slavery\u201d (i.e., the Democratic Party). Even the 1776 Report summoned this spirit, denouncing John C.\u00a0Calhoun\u2019s racism and then impishly describing him as \u201cthe leading forerunner of identity politics.\u201d The goal here is not to develop an alternative right-wing vision of U.S.\u00a0history, but simply to mock the libs using their own language: conservatism, to update Lionel Trilling, as irritable mental gestures that seek to resemble\u00a0jokes.<\/p>\n

Thus the leading \u201chistorian\u201d of the Trump era is the pundit Dinesh D\u2019Souza, who, unlike earlier generations of conservatives, makes no effort to defend or even contextualize slavery, the Confederacy, or Jim Crow. States\u2019 rights play little part in his historical narrative. On the contrary, the central argument of D\u2019Souza\u2019s best-selling books and movies is simply that all these racist evils were perpetuated by \u201cradical\u201d Democrats\u2014men such as Calhoun, Davis, and the Mississippi segregationist James Eastland. Only \u201cconservative\u201d Republicans, from Lincoln to Trump, have faithfully defended American freedom and civil\u00a0rights.<\/p>\n

Left-leaning historians, myself included, have sometimes been tempted to debate this argument, whose particular claims are easily reduced to rubble. But this is a fool\u2019s errand, since D\u2019Souza\u2019s shtick is immune to facts and logic, and frankly indifferent to ideological consistency. You could even say that the D\u2019Souza thesis, widely reproduced in the right-wing media, takes progressive history literally but not seriously. (\u201cDid you know that the Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War, founded the KKK, and fought against every major civil-rights act in U.S.\u00a0history?\u201d asks one YouTube video produced by the conservative media company PragerU.) This sort of trolling offers no ideological counterblast to the progressive narrative that puts slavery and racial oppression at the center of the American experience. In fact, it essentially ratifies a version of that narrative, claiming the mantle of its heroes, such as Frederick Douglass, and declaring that its villains were the forerunners of Nancy Pelosi and Joe\u00a0Biden.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, this smirking vision of history cannot inspire meaningful conviction. Its emergence reflects a rising breed of right-wing politics that, for all its bluster, does not trouble itself very much about America\u2019s past in the first place. Trump, after all, can barely remember when his supposed heroes were alive, remarking that Andrew Jackson\u2014who died in 1845\u2014\u201cwas really angry\u201d about \u201cwhat was happening with regard to the Civil War.\u201d The macho nationalism of MAGA world, scornful of elite pieties and suspicious of fussy appeals to tradition, does not actually need anything from Jackson, the Civil War, or American history writ\u00a0large.<\/p>\n

Sure, that history contains a healthy store of symbols that may be raided, at will, to serve the ends of present-day political struggles. Thus the same House Republicans who voted to contest the result of the presidential election hours after the Capitol riot could repeatedly appeal to Lincoln and \u201cthe better angels of our nature\u201d in defending Trump against impeachment. But such superficialities only dramatize the eclipse of an older style of conservatism, with its filial devotion to the Founding Fathers and its blinkered but sincere odes to universal freedom. If the stuffier school of historical orthodoxy retains any standing in American politics today, it is not within the strongest current of right-wing politics, but with Liz Cheney, Ben Sasse, and the beleaguered cohort of anti-Trump Republicans in Congress.<\/p>\n

In this light, the most eloquent Civil War monument of all may be the former president\u2019s own. At the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia, a plaque inscribed with Trump\u2019s name commemorates a gruesome battle: \u201cMany great American soldiers, both of the North and South, died at this spot,\u201d it reads. \u201cThe casualties were so great that the water would turn red and thus became known as \u2018The River of Blood.\u2019\u2009\u201d This battle never happened. In 2015, a reporter for the New York Times<\/em> informed Trump that historians regarded his plaque as a fabrication. \u201cHow would they know that?\u201d he responded. \u201cWere they\u00a0there?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Today it is not conservatives but liberals who are most sincerely committed to American history. Yet they too have evolved, perhaps even more dramatically, from their ideological forbearers. Great liberal historians from Thomas Babington Macaulay to James M.\u00a0McPherson are famous for a kind of baseline optimism, expressed in complex accounts of contested and contingent events that ultimately lead to progress. In lesser hands, the liberal narrative can slide toward complacency\u2014or worse, the construction of an American story in which each act of brutality (colonization, slavery, Jim Crow) somehow only sets the stage for the triumphant advance to come (nationhood, emancipation, civil rights). This has been the rhetorical terrain of Democratic presidents since John F.\u00a0Kennedy, a happy realm where confessed historical crimes painlessly resolve into patriotic triumphs. \u201cThere is nothing wrong with America,\u201d Bill Clinton intoned during his first inaugural address, \u201cthat cannot be cured by what is right with America.\u201d During the Obama Administration, the reigning bromides echoed Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s line about \u201cthe arc of the moral universe,\u201d in which, as in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, justice is a bit time-consuming but always prevails in the\u00a0end.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s historicist critics operate within a different kind of cosmology. In her essay introducing the 1619 Project, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones notes that black Americans have fought for and achieved \u201castounding progress,\u201d not only for themselves, but for all Americans. Yet the project does not really explore this compelling story: in fact, it largely skips over the antislavery movement, the Civil War, and the civil-rights era. Strikingly, Frederick Douglass appears more often in the 1776 Report than in the 1619 Project, where he originally received just two brief mentions, both in an essay by Wesley Morris on black music. Martin Luther King Jr., for his part, makes only one appearance in the 1619 Project, the same number as Martin Shkreli. In more than one hundred pages of print, we read about very few major advocates of abolition or labor and civil rights: Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Henry Highland Garnet, A.\u00a0Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, and Bayard Rustin are just a few of those who go unmentioned.<\/p>\n

Two fundamental themes anchor the 1619 Project\u2019s approach to American history: origins and continuity. The table of contents is a fusillade of facts that have emerged, in unbroken lines, from centuries of persecution. Whether the subject is Atlanta traffic, sugar consumption, mass incarceration, the wealth gap, weak labor protections, or the power of Wall Street, the burden of argument remains the same: to trace the deep continuities among slavery, Jim Crow, and racial injustice today. \u201cWhy doesn\u2019t the United States have universal health care? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War,\u201d one essay posits. \u201cAmerican democracy has never shed an undemocratic assumption present at its founding: that some people are inherently entitled to more power than others,\u201d notes another. The wheel of history spins and spins, but it doesn\u2019t exactly\u00a0move.<\/p>\n

Above all, the historical imagination of the 1619 Project centers on a single moment: the purported date that marks the arrival of African slaves in British North America. \u201cThis is sometimes referred to as the country\u2019s original sin,\u201d writes Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, <\/em>\u201cbut it is more than that: It is the country\u2019s very origin.\u201d Out of this moment, he continues, \u201cgrew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional\u201d\u2014the kernel of four hundred years of economic, political, and cultural life. History, in this conception, is not a jagged chronicle of events, struggles, and transformations; it is the blossoming of planted seeds, the flourishing of a foundational\u00a0premise.<\/p>\n

The dominant images here are biblical and biological: slavery as America\u2019s \u201coriginal sin\u201d; racism as part of \u201cAmerica\u2019s DNA.\u201d (The 1619 Project contains no fewer than seven such references.) These marks are indelible, and they stem from birth. The existence of slavery and racism means that America has been Stamped from the Beginning,<\/em> as Kendi titled his first book, ironically borrowing a phrase from Jefferson Davis. \u201cJust as DNA is the code of instructions for cell development,\u201d writes Wilkerson, \u201ccaste is the operating system for economic, political, and social interaction in the United States from the time of its gestation.\u201d From happy cures and bending arcs to tainted natures and embedded genetic codes, the metaphorical distance between the old liberal history and the new dispensation is\u00a0immense.<\/p>\n

Since its publication, the 1619 Project has attracted criticism from nearly every ideological quarter. On the right, it has become a soft target for politicians in search of a culture war: a handful of Republican legislators have even proposed bills barring the project from classrooms\u2014a clear violation of free speech. On the left, the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site has denounced it as \u201ca reactionary race-based falsification of American and world history.\u201d (The Communist Party USA, for its part, has defended the project.) But in some ways it is the long-tenured champions of liberal history who have fought it most fiercely. McPherson, Sean Wilentz, and three other scholars of American history have challenged several of the project\u2019s claims\u2014in particular, the way that Hannah-Jones portrayed the link between slavery and the American Revolution. According to her account, \u201cBritain had grown deeply conflicted\u201d about slavery and the slave trade by 1776; by cutting ties with the empire, America\u2019s founders aimed \u201cto ensure that slavery would continue.\u201d \u201cOne of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain,\u201d she wrote, \u201cwas because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilentz and other critics argued that this fundamentally misrepresented the politics of the Revolution. As historians from Eric Williams to Christopher Brown have explained in detail, antislavery sentiment in Britain remained marginal in the 1770s. Certainly, it was much weaker in London than in the rebellious colonies, where at least seven colonial assemblies had already attempted to end the importation of enslaved Africans, and where the Continental Congress would ban the slave trade in 1774. As the scholar Leslie Harris put it bluntly in Politico,<\/em> \u201cThe protection of slavery was not one of the main reasons the 13 Colonies went to war.\u201d Harris, who had been contacted by a Times<\/em> fact-checker to help confirm material in the 1619 Project, wrote that she had \u201cvigorously disputed\u201d Hannah-Jones\u2019s \u201cincorrect statement\u201d and was distressed to see that it had made it into\u00a0print.<\/p>\n

Eventually, the Times<\/em> issued a thin \u201cclarification,\u201d agreeing to change the phrase \u201cthe colonists decided\u201d to \u201csome of the colonists decided,\u201d but leaving the rest of the questionable text in place. Later, the editors deflated some of the most forceful language introducing the project, eliminating one phrase about 1619 as \u201cour true founding\u201d and another sentence that described 1619 as \u201cthe moment\u201d when America began. For some critics, these edits represented a major admission of error, and an embarrassment for the Times,<\/em> yet Silverstein insisted that no real concessions had been made. Revealingly, he noted that the idea of 1619 as America\u2019s \u201ctrue founding\u201d was always a \u201cmetaphor\u201d\u2014a metaphor of national birth\u2014and that its impact was undiminished by the\u00a0changes.<\/p>\n

In one sense, Silverstein is right to suggest that the real stakes of the controversy run deeper than any specialist debate about the 1770s. Though Wilentz titled his critique of the project \u201cA Matter of Facts,\u201d framing his analysis as a correction, the debate cannot be resolved by an appeal to scholarly rigor alone. The question, as The Atlantic<\/em>\u2019s Adam Serwer has written, is not only about the facts, but the politics of the metaphor: \u201ca fundamental disagreement over the trajectory of American society.\u201d In a country that is now wealthier than any society in human history but which still groans under the most grotesque inequalities in the developed world\u2014in health care, housing, criminal justice, and every other dimension of social life\u2014the optimistic liberal narrative put forward by Kennedy and Clinton has ceased to inspire. Some commentators have rushed to declare Joe Biden a transformational president on the basis of his large stimulus bill, but Biden\u2019s chastened brand of liberalism remains less notable for what it proposes than what it removes from the horizon: universal guarantees for health care, jobs, college education, and a living wage. Although Biden may still invoke Obama\u2019s \u201carc of the moral universe\u201d on occasion, the metaphors that brought him to power, and that still define his political project, are not about the glories of progress but the need for repair: \u201cWe must restore the soul of America.\u201d In a country so deeply riven by injustice\u2014with violence and oppression coded into its very DNA\u2014what more could be hoped\u00a0for?<\/p>\n

In this sense, for all their narrative daring, the new cohort of historicists are not only institutionally but ideologically at home with the politics of today\u2019s liberal establishment. The vulgar materialist dimension of this point is relatively clear-cut: unlike an older generation of new-left radicals, figures such as Coates, Hannah-Jones, and Wilkerson sit not at the margins but near the core of the American cultural elite, writing for the nation\u2019s most influential journals, winning its most prestigious prizes, and receiving acclaim from its most powerful politicians, from the Senate majority leader to the vice president. In the past five years, Hannah-Jones has emerged as an outspoken Twitter critic of Sanders and his left-wing class politics.<\/p>\n

The ideological alignments go deeper still. As the critics Pankaj Mishra and Hazel Carby have noted, the new style of historicism focuses narrowly, if not exclusively, on the United States, sidelining the much larger history of slavery and racism in the Atlantic world, while ignoring the global impact of the U.S.\u00a0empire. The result is a kind of funhouse mirror of American exceptionalism, in which many of the familiar heroes\u2014from Jefferson to Lincoln\u2014become villains, but the setting is essentially the same. Likewise, as the political scientist Adolph Reed\u00a0Jr. has argued, the new historicism either neglects the question of economic class or subordinates it to the politics of racism\u2014producing a reductive and strangely motionless version of the past that the historian James Oakes calls \u201cracial consensus history.\u201d And as the professor Harvey Neptune has pointed out, nearly all of these authors offer an account of race that tends to naturalize rather than historicize its emergence as an ideological category, ignoring more critical work on the production of racism by foundational scholars such as Barbara Fields and Nell\u00a0Painter.<\/p>\n

Beyond these omissions and confusions, there is the basic question of the narrative itself. If one key function of the old liberal history was to fortify belief in the course of incremental progress, what is the political work of the new dispensation, with its metaphors of birth, genetics, and essential nature? How can a history grounded in continuity relate to a politics that demands transformational change? In so many ways, it seems to lead in the opposite direction. There is a reason why Biden, who notoriously promised Democratic donors that \u201cnothing would fundamentally change\u201d if he were elected, has had little trouble adopting the new framing of slavery as America\u2019s \u201coriginal\u00a0sin.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problems with this metaphor are manifold, as the historian James Goodman has noted: its historical anachronism, its confusion of the sacred and the profane, and its tendency to obscure, rather than clarify, the burden of responsibility for the crime of slavery. Yet perhaps the most serious problem is not the theological question of \u201csin\u201d\u2014a fair word for racial oppression in America since 1619, and one that has done heroic service in the cause of justice since the era of abolition\u2014but the deceptiveness of \u201coriginal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In 1971, Michel Foucault published a lengthy critique of any enterprise that aimed to attain historical truth by uncovering its elemental beginnings. \u201cHistory,\u201d he wrote, quoting Nietzsche,<\/p>\n

teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin. The lofty origin is no more than \u201ca metaphysical extension which arises from the belief that things are most precious and essential at the moment of\u00a0birth.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a perverse fantasy, Foucault believed. Actual historical origins were neither beautiful nor ultimately very significant. A true student of the past, he argued, must grapple primarily with \u201cthe events of history, its jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats\u2014the basis of all beginnings, atavisms, and heredities.\u201d Against the idea of either a glorious or a deterministic starting point, Foucault urged an approach to the past that emphasized turbulence over continuity:<\/p>\n

History is the concrete body of a development, with its moments of intensity, its lapses, its extended periods of feverish agitation, its fainting spells; and only a metaphysician would seek its soul in the distant ideality of the\u00a0origin.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whatever birthday it chooses to commemorate, origins-obsessed history faces a debilitating intellectual problem: it cannot explain historical change. A triumphant celebration of 1776 as the basis of American freedom stumbles right out of the gate\u2014it cannot describe how this splendid new republic quickly became the largest slave society in the Western Hemisphere. A history that draws a straight line forward from 1619, meanwhile, cannot explain how that same American slave society was shattered at the peak of its wealth and power\u2014a process of emancipation whose rapidity, violence, and radicalism have been rivaled only by the Haitian Revolution. This approach to the past, as the scholar Steven Hahn has written, risks becoming a \u201chistory without history,\u201d deaf to shifts in power both loud and quiet. Thus it offers no way to understand either the fall of Richmond in 1865 or its symbolic echo in 2020, when an antiracist coalition emerged whose cultural and institutional strength reflects undeniable changes in American society. The 1619 Project may help explain the \u201cforces that led to the election of Donald Trump,\u201d as the Times<\/em> executive editor Dean Baquet described its mission, but it cannot fathom the forces that led to Trump\u2019s defeat\u2014let alone its own Pulitzer\u00a0Prize.<\/p>\n

The political limits of origins-centered history are just as striking. The theorist Wendy Brown once observed that at the end of the twentieth century liberals and Marxists alike had begun to lose faith in the future. Collectively, she wrote, left-leaning intellectuals had come to reject \u201ca historiography bound to a notion of progress,\u201d but had \u201ccoined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going.\u201d This predicament, Brown argued, could only be understood as a kind of trauma, an \u201cungrievable loss.\u201d On the liberal left, it expressed itself in a new \u201cmoralizing discourse\u201d that surrendered the promise of universal emancipation, while replacing a fight for the future with an intense focus on the past. The defining feature of this line of thought, she wrote, was an effort to hold \u201chistory responsible, even morally culpable, at the same time as it evinces a disbelief in history as a teleological\u00a0force.\u201d<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s historicism is a fulfillment of that discourse, having migrated from the margins of academia to the heart of the liberal establishment. Progress is dead; the future cannot be believed; all we have left is the past, which must therefore be held responsible for the atrocities of the present. \u201cIn order to understand the brutality of American capitalism,\u201d one essay in the 1619 Project avers, \u201cyou have to start on the plantation.\u201d Not with Goldman Sachs or Shell Oil, the behemoths of the contemporary order, but with the slaveholders of the seventeenth century. Such a critique of capitalism quickly becomes a prisoner of its own heredity. A more creative historical politics would move in the opposite direction, recognizing that the power of American capitalism does not reside in a genetic code written four hundred years ago. What would it mean, when we look at U.S.\u00a0history, to follow William James in seeking the fruits, not the\u00a0roots?<\/p>\n

An older tradition of left-wing American politics had much less trouble with this kind of historical thinking. Frederick Douglass plays little part in the 1619 Project, but he knew better than most that historical narratives matter in political struggles: they shape our sense of the terrain under our feet and the horizon in front of us; they frame our vision of what is possible. Douglass\u2019s famous speech about the Fourth of July came at a low ebb of the abolitionist movement, just after the Compromise of 1850, which included the Fugitive Slave Act, appeared to remove the question of slavery from national politics for good. That made it all the more important for him to build an argument from history, drawing on the experience of the Revolution to insist that the United States belonged not to \u201cthe timid and the prudent,\u201d but to insurgents who \u201cpreferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage.\u201d Douglass\u2019s fight against antebellum timidity took courage and purpose from an understanding of history in which radical change was possible.<\/p>\n

Moreover, Douglass questioned the wisdom of any historical politics that undermined the prospects for present-day change. This did not imply a purely instrumental contempt for the past, in the manner of the Trumpian right, but rather reflected a clear-eyed determination to treat history not as scripture or DNA, but as a site of struggle. \u201cWe have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future,\u201d Douglass declared. \u201cTo all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time.\u201d For some scholars, this must read like rank presentism\u2014yet unlike the neo-originalist framing of the 1619 Project, it gets the order of operations\u00a0right.<\/p>\n

The past may live inside the present, but it does not govern our growth. However sordid or sublime, our origins are not our destinies; our daily journey into the future is not fixed by moral arcs or genetic instructions. We must come to see history, as Brown put it, not as \u201cwhat we dwell in, are propelled by, or are determined by,\u201d but rather as \u201cwhat we fight over, fight for, and aspire to honor in our practices of justice.\u201d History is not the end; it is only one more battleground where we must meet the vast demands of the ever-living\u00a0now.<\/p>\n

Matthew Karp\u00a0<\/strong>is an associate professor of history at Princeton University.<\/em><\/p>\n

Harpers<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Matthew Karp, July 2021 Issue 1619, 1776, and the politics of the past Last spring, 155 years after the fall of Richmond, the Confederate capital surrendered again. In April 1865, the capitulation was swift and almost outlandishly theatrical: after learning that Robert E.\u00a0Lee\u2019s army had withdrawn from nearby Petersburg, the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12287"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12287"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12287\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12288,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12287\/revisions\/12288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}