History and Amnesia: Why the Widening National Divide is a Battle over American History

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”- James Baldwin

In a year when we are reminded again that events on the far side of the world can impact our lives with terrifying speed and calamitous effect, perhaps it is appropriate that the pithiest explanation of the American divide came not from an American, but from Marion Marechel, a French politician espousing the same archnationalist plague that has infected democracies across the globe. Speaking at a conference in Rome in February, Marechal contrasted her caricatured version of the postwar Western liberal consensus with the perceived strength of the New nationalist right: We believe in memory, they are amnesia.

History lives within us, whether we will it or not. And now, in 21st century America, the battle lines increasingly drawn in our streets, all too reminiscent of those in tottering democracies of ages gone by, are increasingly defined by a vast difference in historical vision. In this, the year of the pandemic, the year of racial fracture, of brutality and isolation, scientific denial and national trauma, a battle over the past has been dragged into the sunlight of the present. The battle over history isn’t just what children will learn in class, although it very much is that. More ominously, historiographical visions are increasingly clashing in the cities, where street level protestors…