Here’s what I wrote down to say at the OAH. I’m posting it to go up at around the time of the panel, so I don’t know right now whether it’s what I’ll actually say (oh the verb-tense issues). But if you’re interested and you somehow didn’t manage to make the panel, read on.
Thank you for coming.
“Does liberalism have a usable past?”
A conservative would never ask this question. To a conservative, the answer is obviously “yes, of course liberalism has a usable past.”
It looks something like this:
Liberalism brought you tax-and-spend government.
Liberalism brought you activist judges and forced busing.
Liberalism countenanced the rise of black nationalism and anti-family feminism.
Liberalism was soft on communism.
Liberalism brought you interventionist government that prolonged the Great Depression, undertook sinister social engineering, created a culture of dependency, lost China and Vietnam, and very nearly brought the entire country to its knees by emboldening activist Islamists in 1979 Tehran—before the rise of Ronald Reagan restored everything to rights.
Unless you want to go back to those bad old days—unless you want the soft-on-communism crowd to come back and be soft-on-terrorism, unless you want someone who’ll hike your taxes and deepen the recession, unless you want godless government and political correctness and commerce-crippling policies to coddle welfare queens—you had better not let the liberals back in.
Which is all by way of saying to a conservative, liberalism has a highly usable past indeed—usable for electing Republicans.
And that is the past of liberalism we see used every day in all corners of our culture.
It is a past whose use, whose purpose, is to deny to liberalism a meaningful present and future.
We could offer an equal and opposite usable past, the kind that might help elect liberals. We could say,
Who beat back the Great Depression? Liberals.
Who defeated the Nazis and designed the strategy that won the Cold War? Liberals.
Who brought electricity to the South and water to the West? Who saved our forests and our air and our water? Liberals!
Who fought for our right to register and vote? Liberals. For our day in court? Liberals. For freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and from fear? Liberals, liberals liberals!
But this is not the history of liberalism that we get if we read professional historians—even liberal ones—writing about American liberalism. Open up a book by Alan Brinkley, David Kennedy, William Leuchtenburg, James Patterson; read your Jim Kloppenberg, Julian Zelizer, Bruce Schulman, or Meg Jacobs: liberalism is complicated. Compromised. Conflicted.
When faced with the opportunity to fight for justice, liberals spend an awful lot of time dragging their feet and wringing their hands. Fretting about proper procedures. Calculating how much justice seems politically feasible, in light of prevailing trends, to grant. Doing deals with the titans of corporate power.
Theodore Roosevelt was bought in 1904, even if he didn’t quite stay bought.
Woodrow Wilson named eastern bankers and monopolist manufacturers to serve on the Federal Reserve Board.
Franklin Roosevelt dodged the opportunity to provide federal relief two or three times before giving in and aiding the unemployed, he took healthcare out of the original Social Security bill, he opposed the FDIC, he temporized on civil rights—indeed, they all temporized on civil rights, not to mention feminism; none of them were ever quite comfortable with labor unions….
And when not making pragmatic arrangements, liberals were caving to the worse angels of their nature.
Liberals carried out the Palmer Raids.
Liberals sent Japanese-Americans to concentration camps.
Liberals lied about Yalta and other incidents in the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis; liberals ensured that African Americans would be overrepresented in the U.S. Army that fought in Vietnam.
Liberals were the ones who tried to turn the Mekong River Valley into the Tennessee River Valley.
For every liberal plus, there is at least one minus.
If you should happen to be a liberal, then, or in the strange circumstance of wanting to become a liberal, you find yourself in much the same position Van Wyck Brooks described when, in 1918, he first called for an American “usable past”.
You find, if you read academic historians, that you have the “most meager of birthrights.” In addition, if you listen to today’s journalists and politicians, you are usually “cheated out of that.” Further, as Brooks wrote:
“We want bold ideas, and we have nuances. We want courage, and we have universal fear…. We want vitality, and we have intellectualism…. We want expansion of soul, and we have an elephantiasis of the vocal organs. Why? Because…. the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value.”
What is to be done? Brooks offered a recommendation: “not to seek for masterpieces—the few masterpieces are all too obvious—but for tendencies.” We should not, Brooks would chide us, string together Liberalism’s Greatest Hits as I did at the outset, and leave it at that.
Nor should we condemn the great liberals of the past for their shortcomings, cutting ourselves off from them; as Brooks says, that would be “severing the warm artery that ought to lead from the present back into the past.” We should ask instead, what tendencies gave rise to them, and what tendencies limited them? But we don’t do that.
And when I say we don’t do that, I’m not merely reflecting on my impressions of today’s discourse; I’m thinking of scholarly findings like those of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, who found that Americans “placed national events within their familial stories, or made national personages into familiar figures in personal narratives. Or they talked about national events as disconnected incidents not linked to a larger narrative, and about national figures and events in distant and attenuated terms, rather than the rich terms they used for describing moments in their personal and family histories.”
Americans, Rosenzweig and Thelen discovered, loved looking at the history of their family or their heritage, but not of their community, town, or nation. “[M]ost Americans simply do not recognize themselves and their families in a distant narrative that stretches from election to election, war to war….”
Why? Many, if not most of them, learned from the experience of the 1960s to reject the national story. The government lies. People who try to make a difference get murdered. It was “a decade that had robbed them of hope.”
Or rather, Americans evinced this disappointed disconnection from the nation’s story unless they were black. Rosenzweig and Thelen discovered that African Americans make constant use of the past to explain where they are, relying on a narrative “from slavery to segregation to civil rights.” Black people in this country “have a stronger sense of a public … past than white Americans did.”
And that public past is a liberal past, a past of progress—progress against real obstacles, to be sure, but progress nevertheless.
And it is a liberal past within living memory, of overcoming real obstacles within living memory—it is a living memory of a national American history in which individuals matter, in which struggle matters, in which right made might, as a majority of Americans of all colors at long last bent their collective will, or at least lent their affirmative assent, to the use of all their power to right great historic wrongs—to give life to the dead letters of the Fourteenth Amendment, to restore to the Constitution what the blood of the Civil War dead had written there: the equal protection of the laws.
More, it is a story not over, but propelled by this sense of a shared past.
“The history of a civilization, if intelligently conceived, may be an instrument of civilization.” So Charles and Mary Beard wrote in the 1930 edition of The Rise of American Civilization. It begs the question of what we mean by civilization, which is where we started, fifteen minutes ago: a usable past, but for whose use?
If we want a usable past for liberalism, of use to liberals, where can we find it? Where can we look to see a story of citizens’ engagement in politics, of legislators and judges rising to the challenge, of the federal government deploying its powers—late, to be sure, in the day, but better late than never—for good? We can look to the history Rosenzweig and Thelen found alive and well in the black community—a history that translates well outside it.
In 1918, Van Wyck Brooks challenged his readers to see American history as non-Americans see it. “Go to England and you will discover that in English eyes ‘American [history]’ has become, while quite as complete an entity as it is with us, an altogether different one.” I can say from personal experience it is true today. In England the history of the United States is the Revolution, the Crisis of Slavery, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement—the fulfillment, over time, of the liberal promises written in 1776, made good at last even to a people once considered chattels. And a nation of pasty young white people like it. Because it is a story of collective action in the name of justice, of triumph over obstacles, of right making might. A history of liberalism.
And it is a history that inspires young white people in America today, people young and unprepared to hedge and qualify. This generation unmarred as yet by such disappointments as accrued to the youth of the 1960s, is a generation prepared to believe and make use of that story, a generation who think it offers them hope.
35 comments
March 29, 2008 at 10:54 am
Rob_in_Hawaii
Usable indeed! In fact, I think I’ll start “using” this in my political science class next week. I think it gets to the heart of what liberalism has meant throughout US history. It also makes a heartfelt case for the philosophy in the future. Great job, Eric.
March 29, 2008 at 3:49 pm
albiondia
The desire for a usable past — a justificatory, coherent historical narrative — seems to me to be a very Burkean/conservative impulse. The problem with liberals, so the argument goes, is that they don’t get history, seeing society in ahistorical terms, incorrectly interpreting it as a suitable subject for abstract legislative tinkering.
Is the inclination to hunt for a usable liberal past therefore a defensive (conservative, even) posture that a more bullish liberalism would have little need for? Are we stealing a suit of clothes that doesn’t even fit?
March 29, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Jeremy Young
All in all, a really fabulous post. When you get back, I’d be interested to hear more about liberals rolling back the New Deal — what liberals are you thinking of there? Certainly not Johnsonian ones.
March 29, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Jeremy Young
Er, and by “post” I mean “paper.” Geesh.
March 30, 2008 at 1:28 am
Buster
In addition to this post, readers might be interested in the HNN coverage of OAH at: http://hnn.us/articles/48877.html. Complete with highlight clips!
Between blog posts that reproduce talks and YouTube coverage of panels, I may never have to experience another awkward or boring conference moment.
March 30, 2008 at 3:24 am
eric
jeremy, I certainly didn’t mean to say liberals rolled back the New Deal.
March 30, 2008 at 3:26 am
eric
and Buster, inasmuch as HNN managed not to mention historians from a certain department on the edge of the American West, well, I’m not sure what to tell you about their coverage.
March 30, 2008 at 3:44 am
Buster
I know, I know. I didn’t want to mention the short-shrift earlier. No need to rub salt in the wound, and all that.
On HNN’s coverage, I personally think that the way the site tries to bolster “star historians”–from highlighting the big names over big arguments to the weekly feature on “young and hot” academics–is HILARIOUS. This coverage was no exception. I wouldn’t take it personally.
March 30, 2008 at 9:54 am
Jeremy Young
Eric, thanks for your comment. If you watched the fifth video down on Day #2, they did in fact cover you — they just identified you as Michael Kazin (heh). I e-mailed Rick last night and he said it should be fixed momentarily.
March 30, 2008 at 11:39 am
Michael
I certainly claim that in most ways I’m a liberal, especially on issues of societal importance. I would say that liberalism means doing what is best for mankind, not for the leaders of big business, government run by big business, or building up the military without regard to the needs of the rest of the nation. I am not trying to give a full definition here. What I am saying is that reactionaries (or wingnuts) will point to this post and say that it just proves that liberalism is run by “special interests,” without noting that their special interests have actually bought the government that we have. Some of the ideas are like the conservatives saying that when the US bombs kill civilians, it is an accident and the dead are less dead because of the intent to make the society better. When the liberals do things it is an intent to change society and that is bad.
March 30, 2008 at 8:42 pm
eric
Huh. Well, that’s better than not mentioning me at all, I guess; but I did actually give a paper—this one here—and that comment is truncated so it’s not at all clear what data I was talking about. (I was talking about the Pew Center polls on core attitudes.)
March 30, 2008 at 8:50 pm
eric
Michael, I kind of hoped that the paper would make clear my ambivalence about the whole idea of a usable past, and also very clear that a responsible history of liberalism as written by professional historians isn’t—and shouldn’t be—all rah rah liberals (or boo hiss liberals either).
March 31, 2008 at 6:36 am
Michael
Well, Eric, your ambivalence is so, shall I use the word, liberal. I didn’t mean to say that you should have been all rah-rah liberalism. I’m sorry if that seemed to be my intent. It just seems to me that liberals need to rethink and restate liberalism in a more positive way. I understand that liberals do nuance and conservatives don’t. I just think that liberals need to be more positive in their own outlook. Citing England, to me, is exactly the wrong thing because conservatives will seize on that as more proof that liberals can’t see anything good in America.
I don’t think that I have enough command of the history of liberalism or conservatism to write something, so I admire you for attempting. I also admire Eric Alterman for trying with his new book. I think that I would probably approach the topic from more of a Bob Somerby view: show the lousy approach of the conservative and why the liberal side is better. I think that too often we allow conservatives to stake out the “way” and we try to play catch-up and give that nuanced answer to something about which we should be beating them with their own stick.
March 31, 2008 at 6:42 am
eric
But Michael, the point of citing England was not to say, the English are better than we, but to say, this is how others see us: as having something good in ourselves. I.e., the English perspective shows us something good about America.
March 31, 2008 at 6:54 am
student
That’s an interesting post, but I wonder if African-Americans were the only significant group that left the 1960s with “hope” in the possibility of public action. For example, the U.S. labor movement had lobbied hard and successfully during the 1960s not only for civil rights, but also for significant social gains, such as Medicare. Why would labor people have left that decade “robbed of hope” that federal government action could produce good results for the society as a whole? After all, labor kept pushing for social reforms like OSHA, and it would continue to push for others (e.g., Vance-Hartke controls over overseas direct investment).
March 31, 2008 at 6:58 am
eric
student, Rosenzweig and Thelen didn’t find class to be as important a variable in how Americans construe their history:
March 31, 2008 at 6:59 am
albiondia
Certainly here in the U.K. there is still a lingering feeling that the U.S. represents something of a last, best hope. I’d go so far as to say that this feeling is intimately bound up with a history of small-p progressive liberalism in America that is admirable despite its manifest faults.
I think Michael is correct in arguing for a ‘more positive way’ of emphasising the virtues of a modern liberal politics that avoids the need for a ‘usable past’. But Eric, you seem dead-on in highlighting this ambivalent tension between the desirablity of a usable past and an appreciation of the complexities that perhaps make it unattainable.
March 31, 2008 at 8:08 am
student
With all due respect to the late Roy Rozensweig, those findings did not really address my question, for example, whether African-Americans were the only group that came out of the 1960s hopeful that public action could be a source of progress in American society. I suspect that labor people coming out of the 1960s had not lost hope. And anti-war activists were hopeful that their efforts would have an impact on the way that the Vietnam War was prosecuted (and they did). Sure people knew that presidents lie and that some people who had tried to make things better had been murdered. I just think that the picture at that time was more mixed than the quotation you offer about people being “robbed of hope
March 31, 2008 at 8:36 am
eric
student, I suppose the result may be an artifact of Rosenzweig & Thelen’s method. But they definitely did not find what you suggest. Here’s another way they put their conclusion (btw I see I left off the citation from the paper; all Rosenzweig and Thelen citations come from The Presence of the Past, this one on p. 117):
There’s an endnote at the end of that sentence; if you look it up on p. 266n4 you find,
So as I say, maybe it’s an artifact of their method, but they didn’t find what you suggest. I don’t know of other, similar studies looking at how Americans position themselves in history, but if there are, and they show a labor or class consciousness with respect to construction of the past, I would be glad to know about it.
March 31, 2008 at 10:13 am
Michael
Eric, I think that you are correct that American people in general do not think and talk in terms of class. I think, however, that there is a real reason for not doing so. Since I was a child (many years ago) even until now, I have been propagandized with the idea that America is society not divided by class. The propaganda was not always spoken or direct. Many times it was by way of disparaging other societies for being divided along class lines. It, therefore, becomes hard to think in terms of class in America. For conservatives it would be straight forward that America is not divided along class lines. For a liberal it would be hard to start making divisions that didn’t blur so much that it would be hard to define a real class in our society.
March 31, 2008 at 11:00 am
Are Americans liberal? « The Edge of the American West
[…] “silent majority,” or Reagan Democrats. So say Pew. This post born from a comment on this panel, which in q & a turned out to be a lot less historical and more […]
March 31, 2008 at 11:11 am
silbey
I think, however, that there is a real reason for not doing so.
Sure, but that’s orthogonal to Eric’s point which is not about WHY people don’t talk about class, but THAT people don’t talk about class. The WHY is essentially irrelevant to his point.
March 31, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Michael
silbey, I think that simply saying that people don’t talk about something does not mean something profound. It seems to me that there must be a reason why people don’t talk about a particular topic. I think that liberals have to deal with something not happening as well as the reason why it doesn’t happen. It becomes hard to talk about something if you have been trained to look past the something so that it is second nature to do so.
March 31, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Vance Maverick
I fear that most white people in this country, even liberal-ish ones, tend to minimize the civil-rights struggle in one way or another. On the one hand, we don’t like to count the ills of slavery (or male suffrage) too heavily, because that makes the balance of justice for the first century or so of our Republic look pretty bad. On the other, we do like to pretend that the struggle is now definitively over — that we’ve achieved colorblindness, or gender blindness (or at least blindness).
So I worry about making that story the theme, the executive summary, for liberalism’s usable past. The perhaps somewhat mythical average white dude I’m thinking of would respond, “Surely we’re past that now — all Americans, liberal and conservative, have moved beyond our forebears, liberal or conservative, in that respect.”
March 31, 2008 at 2:28 pm
eric
Surely we’re past that now
It’s just that those “cotton—er….” people keep bringing it up.
March 31, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Vance Maverick
Your Lou Dobbs link goes back to this post. Perhaps emblematically.
March 31, 2008 at 2:32 pm
eric
But you knew what I meant!
March 31, 2008 at 2:32 pm
eric
Fixed.
March 31, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Vance Maverick
Are you surprised to find we read the same blogs? That’s the same link I would have chosen — the official secondhand news source for liberals.
The other point where I agree with you but worry about how to convince those who need to be convinced is the one for which you use the shorthand “New Deal.” Taxing and spending are actually what we liberals want to do — the tactical problem is how to persuade people that there are valuable goals to be reached that way.
March 31, 2008 at 2:40 pm
Vance Maverick
Well, part of what we want to do. The costs of civil rights are pretty negligible compared to universal health care.
March 31, 2008 at 2:44 pm
eric
Taxing and spending are actually what we liberals want to do
You need to show that you’re going to tax the right people and spend on the right programs.
March 31, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Are we all progressives now? « The Edge of the American West
[…] and current events, memory, our thing by eric So long as I’m debriefing myself about the OAH panel on this blog, let me put up my answer to the “nomenclature question”—i.e., […]
March 31, 2008 at 5:01 pm
silbey
I think that simply saying that people don’t talk about something does not mean something profound
michael, fine. But then don’t write your comments as if your point was somehow invalidating eric’s. It wasn’t. It was adding to it.
August 27, 2008 at 11:52 am
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August 31, 2008 at 3:16 am
ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry » Blog Archive » Listory Hesson
[…] August 31st, 2008 In England the history of the United States is the Revolution, the Crisis of Slavery, the New Deal, … […]