HE WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE: Dan Henninger: Bye, Bye American History. The College Board’s revised AP US History exam (APUSH), which I’ve written about before, is being finalized this summer, but not without some pushback. Henninger observes:

Last week, 56 professors and historians published a petition on the website of the National Association of Scholars, urging opposition to the College Board’s framework. Pushback against the new AP U.S. history curriculum has also emerged in Texas, Colorado, Tennessee, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia. . . .

Let’s cut to the chase. The notion that this revision, in the works for seven years, is just disinterested pedagogy is, well, claptrap. In the 1980s, Lynne Cheney, as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, threw down the gauntlet over the leftward, even Marxist, class-obsessed drift of American historiography. She lost.

At one point the curriculum’s authors say: “Debate and disagreement are central to the discipline of history, and thus to AP U.S. History as well.” This statement is phenomenally disingenuous. From Key Concept 1.3: “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” Pity the high-school or college student who puts up a hand to contest that anymore. They don’t. They know the Orwellian option now is to stay down.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld got attention this week for saying he understood why other comics such as Chris Rock have stopped performing on campuses beset by political correctness, trigger warnings and “microaggressions.” He said young people cry “racism,” “sexism” or “prejudice” without any idea of what they’re talking about.

How did that happen? It happened because weak school administrators and academics empowered tireless activists who forced all of American history and life through the four prisms of class, gender, ethnicity and identity. What emerged at the other end was one idea—guilt. I exist, therefore I must be guilty. Of something.

Yep. We are “guilty” of being American and must emphasize these four prisms–class, gender, ethnicity and identity–at every opportunity, as it allows us to constantly reopen useful wounds. We should probably also pay reparations. Oh wait, I guess that’s what a progressive income tax and a growing welfare state essentially are, albeit crudely. But paying reparations might be nice, so long as it didn’t allow us to actually, you know, put these “sins” behind us, since they’re so very politically useful.