How Historians Took Over Liberal Punditry

The hottest resistance talking aheads during Trump 2.0 are academics. What happened?

Every nation sustains itself with mythmaking. This is why Augustus commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid at the moment the emperor was transforming the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, why the British monarch is crowned atop the Stone of Destiny, why Marianne looks over Paris from both the Place de la Nation and the Place de la République, and why the Mexican president emerges every September 15 around 11 p.m. onto the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City to issue el Grito—the cry that sparked the Mexican war of independence—anew.

But perhaps no nation has been more dependent upon its stories than the United States, a country formed in the relatively recent past without the benefits of shared ethnicity, language, or custom. In the absence of the usual ties that typically hold a nation together, it is values, we are told, that make an American an American and that make this country the special place that it is. Ironically, while Americans have always bitterly disagreed about the practical implications of those values, they have largely been consistent in the story they tell about those values and thus themselves. That story goes a little something like this: The United States was founded by good men, rebelling against tyranny and dedicated to the cause of liberty. Throughout its history, the United States has sought to pursue the path of freedom and justice, although some people—often, but not always progressives—are willing to concede that it has sometimes fallen short of this ideal. What these people will not concede, however—what they almost never concede—is the fundamental assumption that the United States of America is collectively a nation striving for the good.

In any other time, this persistent bit of American Exceptionalism might be excusable, even charming. But in a moment in which it seems not only increasingly impossible, but irresponsible, to ignore the deep flaws at the heart of the American project, this is exactly the choice that has been made by a certain brand of liberal public intellectual cum influencer in the Trump era. This cohort includes figures such as Jill Lepore, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joanne B. Freeman, and Kevin M. Kruse. Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder are arguably the two most prominent examples of a new iteration of an old trend, the historian as explainer, and perhaps more jarringly as political strategist. Credentialed historians and critics of the current regime, they promise key insight into the present via their knowledge of the past, and they have become a prominent feature of the opposition to Donald Trump.

The narrative of history and, more importantly, of the present that they offer has gone viral, offering comfort to its audience and a substantial economic benefit to its creators in the form of newsletter subscriptions and book deals. While it seems cruel to challenge anyone’s source of comfort in this very disquieting age and is certainly unkind to question academics pursuing alternate income streams, it is time we start to question the narrative of history that has been so widely adopted by many Americans and ask whether this particular fantasy of the past is providing any benefit in our increasingly dystopian present. In particular, there is an insistence among these figures that the past is something to be mined for lessons about how to survive the rising tide of authoritarianism and fascism. It’s a compelling premise. But a decade into what future historians may very well term the........

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