The Past Is A Different Country

 I had a brief interaction in Twitter (I did not engage) about the relative luxury of being - I'm not joking - a medieval peasant. There's this weird subset of mostly bros who think that being a peasant was awesome, because there were so many feast days and you didn't "have to work" during the winter.

This is, of course, bullshit of the highest order. A peasant could not own his own land, could not pass down wealth to his children, could not control his own destiny. A peasant had no civil or legal rights, was at the mercy of the local warlord, had strikingly high child mortality rates. In return for being able to farm a patch of land, a peasant gave up much of his crop and could be conscripted into the militia. Food was bland and scarce, entertainment was non existent and life spans could be quite short.

Still, there are those who don't see the past accurately. You could watch a show like The Witcher but you can't smell the open sewers. You can't feel the utter hopelessness as your child dies of a common infection.

This occurs to me as a parallel to Trump's current monomaniacal obsession with William McKinley. Like the walking Dunning-Kruger effect that he is, Trump has heard about the McKinley Tariff and extrapolated from that this bullshit idea that America was never richer than in the 1890s. Now, Americans were relatively richer than other people in the world in the 1890s, but that's pretty much true today, too. Leaving aside the treatment of women, Blacks and Natives, even for White people this was an era of child labor, agrarian unrest and monopoly.

What's more then McKinley Tariff helped touch off one of the worst depressions in American history. These were depressions without unemployment insurance, food assistance or any welfare beyond private charity and family help. Urban poverty and crime were endemic. 

What that Bro on Twitter and Trump are doing is proceeding from a perspective - the modern world sucks because I personally am unhappy right now - and then cherry pick a few misleading events or ideas. It is the exact opposite of the actual study of history (when done right). Sure, there is a reliance on the sort of "Great Man" school of history that ignores the actual lives of the overwhelming majority of people, but it's also just raging confirmation bias. 

With Trump, of course, it extends beyond the 1890s. He makes ragingly false statements about anything and everything. When was president everything was perfect and now everything is American Carnage. My worry is that the historical illiteracy of the average American can actual extend to the recent past. Trump gets high approval ratings on the economy, when really he did jack shit besides inheriting the Obama Recovery and cutting taxes. The Biden economic record is actually much stronger, but people rarely remember the past well.