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Opinion | I Looked Behind the Curtain of American History, and This Is What I Found


Editors note the existence of some bipartisan myths that transcend party or ideology, but for the most part, the myths mentioned in “Myth America” ​​originate or exist on the right. In an analysis spanning 20 chapters, over 300 pages, and centuries of history and public discourse of the United States, this emphasis is remarkable. Did left-wing activists and politicians in the United States ever formulate and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story? If such liberal innocence is real, let’s hear more about it. Otherwise, it may require its own debugging.

One of those bipartisan myths, often supported by politicians of both major parties, is the myth of the nation: American exceptionalism. In his essay on the subject, David A. Bell, another Princeton historian, is able to refute the term. “Most countries can be considered exceptional in one sense or another,” he writes. Today, the phrase is often used as a “baton” in the country’s culture wars, Bell says, a practice popularized by politicians like Newt Gingrich, who has long since hailed the United States as “the most unique civilization in history” and attacked anyone who did not bow to remembrance. Bell writes: “For Gingrich, it has always been less important to prove America’s difference than to accuse the Left of not believing it.

In exploring earlier arguments for the unique nature of America, Bell referred to John Winthrop’s 17th-century lecture “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which the future governor of The Massachusetts Bay Colony declared that the Puritan community would be “like a city on a hill”. ” (a line that President Ronald Reagan expanded centuries later to “shining city on the hill”). References are mandatory in any discussion of American exceptionalism, although Bell minimizes the relevance of civil discourse to exceptionalism debates, because the text “breathes out with painful doubt” about whether the colonists can meet the challenge and because the sermon “virtually persists”. we didn’t know until the 19th century.”

It is a tempting assumption, at least to this non-historian, that the initial ambiguity of a speech (or a book or an argument or a work of any kind) any) will make it irrelevant, no matter what it means to future generations. It’s the same attitude that Akhil Reed Amar, a law professor at Yale and author of a chapter on myths surrounding the Constitution, has for Federalist No. 10. James Madison essay ” foreshadowed much of post-Civil War American history,” wrote Amar, in part because he argued that the federal government would protect minority rights more effectively than the states, “but in 1787-1788, hardly anyone notices Madison’s masterpiece.” Unlike other Federalist essays that have resonated widely in the debates over constitutional ratification, Amar writes, Number 10 “did not make a deep impression in coffee shops.” and American pubs, where patrons read aloud and discussed in both the local and suburban newspapers.” Alas, Mr. Madison, your work is not in vogue, so we will remove it from the homepage of history.

To his credit, Amar is consistent in prioritizing immediate popular reactions in his historical reviews. He criticized the argument in Charles Beard’s 1913 book, “The Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” that the Constitution was an anti-democratic text. “If the document is really anti-democratic, why would anyone vote for it?” Amar asked. “Why did tens of thousands of ordinary working people enthusiastically join the massive pro-constitutional rallies in Philadelphia and Manhattan?” However, even after the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol, it seems clear that people in a free society can rally for democratic and reactionary causes. democrats, with great enthusiasm, if they believe those causes are right. respectable.

Other contributors to “Myth America” readily squint at first impressions of the past. In a chapter that minimizes the transformative impact of the Reagan presidency, Zelizer lamented the “ridiculous joke that the ‘Reagan Revolution’ remake of American politics remains central to the national discourse,” although although it is “more of a point of political discussion than a description of reality.” (Reminder: Calling them jokes or arguments is an effective shorthand for eliminating opposing views.) When Zelizer looks back at the 1989 collection of essays by historians, only months after Reagan left office, and argued that Reagan’s 1980 victory was “The End of the New Deal Era,” he did not hesitate to cast judgment on his professional colleagues. me. “Even a group of historians were caught up in the moment,” he wrote.

Here, proximity to a previous historical epoch makes observers more susceptible to the sway of fleeting passions, not those of profound insights. If so, perhaps the anthology of essays on American myths published shortly after Trump’s presidency also runs the risk of being caught up in its own timing. (By the way, that 1989 book, edited by historians Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle and titled “The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980,” shares a collaborator. member with “Legendary America.” Michael Kazin, bow your head. )

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