JOEL KOTKIN ON THE TEACHING OF HISTORY TODAY: America The Not-So-Beautiful.
In contrast to the physical sciences, and even other social sciences, the study of history is, by nature, subjective. There is no real mathematical formula to assess the past. It is more an art, or artifice, than a science.
Yet how we present and think of the past can shape our future as much as the statistics-laden studies of economists and other social scientists. Throughout recorded time, historians have reflected on the past to show the way to the future and suggest those values that we should embrace or, at other times, reject.
Today we are going through, at both the college and high school levels, a major, largely negative, reassessment of the American past. In some ways, this suggests parallels to the strategy of the Bolsheviks about whom Serge wrote. Under the communists, particularly in the Stalinist epoch, the past was twisted into a tale suited to the needs of the state and socialist ideology. This extended even to Bolshevik history, as Josef Stalin literally airbrushed his most hated rivals – notably Leon Trotsky, founder and people’s commissar of the Red Army – into historical oblivion.
In the modern reformulation, America – long celebrated as a beacon of enlightenment and justice – now is often presented as just another tyrannical racist and sexist state. The founding fathers, far from being constitutional geniuses, are dismissed as racist thugs and suitable targets of general opprobrium.
Initially, the progressive assault made some sense. Traditional “civics” education often presented American history in an overly airbrushed manner. Many of the nation’s worst abuses – the near-genocide of American Indians, slavery, discrimination against women, depredations against the working class and the environment – were often whitewashed. These shortcomings now have been substantially corrected in recent decades, from what I can see in my children’s textbooks.
Of course, the old attitudes still remain embedded, particularly among those mostly older, white middle- and working-class Americans who are attracted to Donald Trump’s call for America “to be great again.” This kind of unfocused nostalgia does seem likely to be consigned to – as Trotsky dubbed it – “the dustbin of history.”
But as progressive ideology has grown in influence, it has become ever more radicalized, often to the extent of downplaying, or even denying, the remarkable accomplishments of our civilization. It is now considered a “microaggression” on college campuses, notably, those of the University of California, to call America “the land of opportunity,” or celebrate the notion of the “melting pot.” This attitude ignores that America has provided succor and hope to many millions of people who left desperate conditions in places like southern Italy, Ireland, the slums of Lancashire, the shtetls of Russia, rural Japan, China, Central America, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa. . . .
Winston Churchill remarked that “history is written by the victors.” Today, in terms of history and the American past, the presumptive winners are Hollywood, academia and the mainstream media, where people often have little appreciation for America’s unifying creed. In such a situation, there are also losers – namely, the rest of us and our children – who will inherit little of the pride in their country’s history that older generations took for granted.
If American and the West are uniquely awful, how come everyone else in the world wants to live here?
But this is best understood as a war by the New Class against the bourgeoisie. Sapping the bourgeoisie of pride and confidence is a vital step toward bringing them to heel. But when a nation’s rulers have no particular affection for the nation they rule, can it end well?