The Use and Abuse of History
Are supposed parallels between past and present too easily twisted for unsavory ends?
On January 6, I had two radio interviews to discuss the history of secession and the enduring theme of disunion in American history. With Congress about to certify the Electoral College results from the 2020 presidential election, both programs wanted to discuss possible precedents for a contested election: 1800 and 1876. Neither, I told the hosts, offered much guidance for the present, since the 2020 election hadn’t been particularly close, and it wasn’t like warring armies were about to descend on Washington—as had been threatened in both those years—to determine the outcome of the contest. A few minutes after I hung up with the second show, WNYC’s All of It With Allison Stewart, I flicked open Twitter. Something was happening at the Capitol. What I had only moments earlier been saying had already been rendered obsolete.
In a larger sense, however, I felt somewhat vindicated. In the last issue of this newsletter, dated January 5, I predicted the following day would be “a dramatic and perhaps a momentous day in the constitutional history of the United States.” And last summer, in a post titled “‘Officially Very Concerned’: Waking Up to the 2020 Nightmare Scenario,” I encouraged Americans to seriously consider the possibility of Trump refusing to concede the election, competing slates of electors being sent to Congress, the military being called in. I suggested that what James Madison called the “parchment barriers” of the Constitution were “about to be tested in a way they have not been for a very long time. I suspect they will be found wanting.”
I know the “I-told-you-so” mode is rather unattractive, so I’ll cease. But, you know, I kind of did.
Something I’ve been thinking about in the weeks since January 6 is the use and abuse of historical parallels in the way we talk about present-day politics. The genre has become a veritable cottage industry during the Trump years, as historians, journalists, and others have contorted themselves (and, occasionally, the historical record) to compare these times of crisis to others in the past. Often this has been to the good. Contrary to the oft-repeated complaint, echoed most recently by The Economist, that historians spend too much time “fiddling with footnotes rather than bringing the past to light for a broader audience,” historians have probably never been more engaged in seeking to enter public debate with insights about history. Countless scholars have offered accessible, relevant contextualization of recent events by referring to other periods of serious strife in the past and analyzing how political leaders and ordinary citizens alike reacted to and shaped them.
Yet I’m also increasingly mindful of how historical parallels can be misused by those trying to conceal how radical contemporary assaults on democracy really are. I was appalled, for instance, that Senator Ted Cruz and others invoked the Electoral Commission of 1876 in their effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. There was really no comparison: While actual force and fraud were used in Southern states in 1876 to suppress the Black vote and swing the election toward the Democrats, the 2020 election appears—ongoing efforts at racist voter suppression notwithstanding—to have gone relatively smoothly. There was no evidence of widespread fraud, no outstanding issues that actually needed to be sorted out. Cruz was seizing on a supposed historical parallel—one I have to admit I helped promote, though before the election—in order to delay certification of the results, and ultimately to override them. Whatever good highlighting past episodes of contested elections had accomplished (i.e. emphasizing the possibility of a post-election crisis), that benefit later seemed to have been overshadowed by the evil that Cruz and his crew of Trumpist sycophants hoped to perpetrate by taking advantage of the analogy.
The whole sorry episode raised questions in my mind about the usefulness of historical analogies. Do they obscure more than they reveal? Are they too easily abused for mercenary, even reactionary ends? This topic was recently taken up with exceptional thoroughness and clarity in an episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy, in which the hosts discuss the question of whether Trump is a fascist. More broadly, they consider why it is necessary to be careful about connecting people and phenomena in the present with those in the past. It’s well worth a listen.
There are some historical echoes, however, that are just too insistent to ignore, such as the New York Times photographer Erin Schaff’s stunning shot of National Guard troops sleeping at the base of an Abraham Lincoln statue in the Capitol, steps from a plaque that commemorates the troops that camped out in the same building in 1861 to stave off a feared Confederate invasion of Washington.
Days earlier, Schaff had related in harrowing detail how, on January 6, members of the mob, seeing her press affiliation, had thrown her to the ground and smashed her cameras. “I thought I could be killed and no one would stop them,” she recalled. Scrambling to safety, she found her way to a balcony near the office of the Speaker of the House. Rioters were everywhere. “This will be the start of a civil war revolution,” one said—idiotically.
The more useful way to discuss the echoes of the past in the politics of the present is not simplistically via analogy and parallel, but causationally (I think that’s a word), highlighting how what happened in history still shapes the way our country looks and how our government (mal)functions today. The forces, dynamics, and processes at play then, though changed by the Civil War and the century and a half since, altered by the civil-rights movement and the backlash to it, radicalized by economic changes and technological developments and the rise of social media, exacerbated by demographic changes in the country, are still at work today. The work of history is telling the story of both change and continuity over time. Too often, our popular discourse in recent years has focused on the latter at the expense of the former; I’ve been guilty too.
In the summer of 2007, after my junior year of high school, I served as a page in the House of Representatives. One of my tasks was to raise the flag on the roof of the Capitol over the House chamber to signal the representatives were in session. Early in the morning, I and another page would ascend through ancient, musty crawl spaces, amply graffitied by earlier generations of pages, and emerge on the roof, with the National Mall sprawling at our feet and the glistening white dome looming beside us. It was even more special late at night, when we would climb back up to take the flag down. I’ve cherished those moments ever since. I’m relentlessly critical of this country’s ugly, misbegotten past and skeptical, to say the least, that its “brightest days are ahead” (as President Biden ritualistically intones), yet on January 6 and in the ensuing days I felt as personally aggrieved and angered by the assault on the Capitol as anybody. I still do. I hope the authorities track down every single person who participated in the attack and every person (including those in public office) who instigated it. The prominent presence of the Confederate flag among the rioters that day should serve as a reminder of the consequences of allowing those who seek to use violence to overturn the results of a democratic election to go unpunished.
WHAT I’VE BEEN WRITING
On January 15, I published a piece at The Nation titled “Now Is Not the Time For Unity,” taking issue with Biden’s feel-good rhetoric in the months since the election. “Pledging yourself to ‘unity’ as some kind of a priori ideal hands a weapon to your opponents who can accuse you of violating your word for partisan interest,” I warned:
Clinging to decency, competence, and sanity, Biden seems ill-equipped for the task at hand—indeed, he may even be an obstacle to national healing, to the grueling and delicate work of reckoning with and recovering from the trauma of the Trump presidency. He appears incapable of realizing that his increasingly desperate pleas for reconciliation have been met with a deafening negative from the other side. With his paeans to American unity and his track record as an eager appeaser of segregationists, he may feel the need to do whatever it takes to strike a deal that will keep Republicans from embracing outright sedition again.
Today that reads to me as a little bit too harsh. I’ve been fairly impressed with how aggressively Biden has acted to roll back some of Trump’s worst policies and to institute badly-needed correctives. I have few substantial complaints thus far. But the real question will be whether Biden puts pressure on Senate Democrats—especially hold-outs like Joe Manchin of West Virginia—to abolish the filibuster and return the upper chamber to some semblance of majority rule. Without doing that (necessary to pass what I consider the top priority this year, democracy reform), his presidency won’t get very far.
On January 19, I published a longer essay, “Why It’s Time to Take Secessionist Talk Seriously,” at the blog of The New York Review of Books. It argued that in the wake of the Capitol attack it would be foolish to assume, as so many pundits have , that a serious secessionist movement could not emerge in the wake of Trump’s ouster. Already there were signs that the MAGA crowd was turning toward secession to salve their wounds: the chairmen of the Texas and Wyoming state GOPs endorsed the idea, a Texas representative was getting ready to file a bill to hold a secession referendum in the Lone Star State later this year, and prominent right-wing commentators like Glenn Beck were embracing the notion of red-state independence.
Despite all this, most mainstream political commentators who covered the secession talk dismissed the possibility of a state’s actually trying to leave the Union as remote, even inconceivable. “The Confederacy lost,” the New York Times contributing opinion writer Wajahat Ali simply tweeted—as if that, a century and a half later, settled it.
Glib rejoinders may not suffice much longer. Secession talk should not be written off as hopeless fantasy, a fetish of the far-right fringe. Given last week’s astonishing attempt at overthrowing the government, the country’s long history of separatist movements, and the tenuous, ever-shifting balance between state and federal power, secession remains the most likely form that a full breakdown in constitutional government would take. As America’s political dysfunction gets worse, talk of secession is likely to get more and more serious, until it isn’t talk at all.
After the Texas state representative filed his secession bill, I was quoted in this Daily Beast story by Casey Michel—the best journalist on the contemporary secessionism beat. “Nobody who has been following the rise of Texas separatism over the last decade—or rather the return, after a century and a half’s suspension—can be much surprised by Biedermann’s bill,” I told him. “The referendum idea will certainly go nowhere, at least in this legislative session, but the first serious presentation of a secession bill before a state legislature since the Civil War must be seen as another flashing warning of a new crisis of the Union.”
WHAT I’M READING
“Dr. Do-Little: The Case Against Anthony Fauci,” in The Drift, by Sam Adler-Bell: “By fudging the facts to assuage the president and moving the goalposts to manipulate the public, Fauci, however inadvertently, helped to undermine public trust in the medical response, creating openings for conspiracy and demagoguery to fill the gap.”
“Rewinding Jimi Hendrix’s National Anthem,” in The New Yorker, by Paul Grimstad: “Jimi’s Woodstock anthem was both an expression of protest at the obscene violence of a wholly unnecessary war and an affirmation of aspects of the American experiment entirely worth fighting for.”
FINALLY…
I’m a little obsessed with this video of a Burmese fitness instructor filming her workout, merrily oblivious to the military coup taking place a few hundred yards behind her. Make of that what you will.