The History Wars

 Yglesias makes some interesting points about the newest front in the social wars: the teaching of history. Conservatives are up in arms about the 1619 Project, which I think Yglesias does an excellent job of summarizing. Basically, there was one line in Nikole Hannah-Jones essay that makes an unsupportable claim about slavery being a root cause of the American Revolution. Conservatives have seized on that to try and discredit the entire set of essays, many of which represent fairly established understandings of how institutions in the United States evolved under white supremacy.

(I think it's important to label it as "white supremacy" rather than "racism." Mainly because "racism" has become a cudgel rather than an academic description. Also, white supremacy better captures the ideology that led to slavery and the ethnic cleansing of Native populations. But it's probably still inadequate, because it doesn't capture the virulent anti-Catholic beliefs of the Founders.)

One thing Yglesias tries to tackle, and I think somewhat less well, is historiography. He notes that history is often about the present as much as the past, and gives the generic examination of the Progressive historians vs the Consensus School vs the New Left. Some of that it true, though I struggle to put Hofstadter in the neat box Yglesias puts him in. He notes that the Beards - Progressive historians - tend to almost willfully ignore race in favor of class. So therefore Progressive historians ignored race. Except DuBois was writing at the same time the Beards were. Hofstadter actually centered class in a different way in his Age of Reform, seeking to remove some of the Marxist cant and replace it with the sort of urban/rural class divide we see today. Not to mention the Paranoid Style, which perfectly predicts Trumpism.

What I think Yglesias gets fundamentally right is that current historical work casts conservatives as the villains. My textbook already incorporated the first two years of Trump's presidency and it's no-hold-barred. William Buckley said that conservatism was standing athwart the stream of history and saying, "stop!" That's...not great, Cotton. 

If America's foundation was based on two competing ideas - universal freedom and equality before the law and also white supremacy. Lincoln and Douglass saw that contradiction as holding the ability to challenge white supremacy and slavery. As I've argued here repeatedly, social movements that argue on the grounds of universal values succeed more than "special pleadings." Garrison's extreme rhetoric limited his following to a few true believers. Douglass and Lincoln tied their arguments to the broad ideals of America. Dougless did it caustically, sarcastically, while Lincoln was more reverent, but the basic idea was the same.

What is undeniable - and I challenge "conservatives" to deny this - was the "conservativism" in the 19th century was wedded to slavery, white supremacy and eventually Jim Crow. That remained true throughout the 20th century. Read Eisenhower - a relative moderate - on Brown v Board of Education. His argument that you shouldn't overturn "established folkways" couldn't be more "conservative." 

If we center white supremacy among America's founding ideal - which we must if we want to understand our history properly, then we have to place conservatism as the defenders of that white supremacist status quo. If we do that, it drags Eisenhower, Goldwater, Reagan and especially Trump, into the historical spotlight in ways that are simply undeniable and unavoidable. People like Ross Douthat must realize that and it scares them. Tough shit.