Thread by @torstenkathke

The fact that Chernow gets billed as a historian when history is not his training but his subject is part of a larger problem.

People don’t understand that what academic historians do is different from others who write about history.

https://twitter.com/davidastinwalsh/status/1122493646740307968

This is a problem also because on the one hand we shouldn’t stringently gatekeep who "gets to be" a historian, while on the other many people known to the public as historians may employ historical methods, but often aren’t trained in historical *thinking.*

Chernow‘s books are valuable contributions to conversations historians are having, and they, along with other popular historical works by non-historians (e.g. Robert Caro, Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough) shape debates about history.

I‘ve read quite a few of them and I‘ve profited. Many reviews by academic historians highlight the good and the bad in these books.

But there is often a difference between how non-historians and historians (in the inclusive sense of people trained in history) approach history.

Historical training supplies students with both a general idea of larger connections between events and developments that occurred, and a set of tools and professional standards of how to do history and how to think historically.

Other professional and academic fields use some of the same tools, but often have a different perspective and are interested in different things.

This produces valuable insight, but it isn’t necessarily *historical* insight.

So: Why are historians dumbfounded by Chernow‘s claim that Donald Trump is an aberration?

Mostly because, while having a self-aggrandizing reality TV star with a penchant for authoritarianism as US president may be new, the component parts of his rise are not.

There’s the potent narrative of the self-made man, from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography via Horatio Alger‘s stories right up to Bill Gates and Kylie Jenner.

There is the constant appeal of the outsider to politics who wants to mix things up, be it Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan, or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There is the deep history of white supremacy, antisemitism, and nativism. These show up in different guises at different times, but sadly they are hardly atypical, more the rule than the exception.

There is the voter suppression of both the antebellum and post-Civil War South. There is the corruption of the Gilded Age and the Nixon years.

There is the role of a changing media landscape which has always tended to lead to political realignments and to politicians who could wield the new tools best having an edge: FDR‘s mastery of radio, Nixon‘s and JFK‘s use of TV, or Barack Obama‘s comparative social media savvy.

And there’s also the entrenchedness of a political establishment going along with things they may not actually approve of in hopes of racking up partisan wins.

To be honest, there’s more, much much more here still, but I think I‘ve made my point.

No matter how you slice and dice it: the rise of Donald Trump wasn’t preordained by American history, but every aspect of it is deeply, thoroughly rooted in it.

So when Chernow (as he did: ) looks back and finds that it has been bad before, I wholeheartedly agree.

Where I, and many other historians, would differ, though, would be his optimism that we‘ll get through this because we always have.

To say that is to go back to a conception of history that has been widely discredited by professional historians: that there will be progress, albeit with setbacks.

Sometimes there is just the setback.

And even if the pendulum swings back: it does so because people, individually but caught up within an era – and its political and social possibilities and impossibilities – force it to.

This presidency is an aberration in style. But not in substance.

End.