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Thread on how Presidents’ words and actions shape the nation’s political culture.
I would add a corollary, which is that Presidents also shape the nation's collective memory as well. And what we remember about ourselves has significant political implications. For more on this, see the essays in this collection. upress.virginia.edu/title/5279
"Presidents shape not only the course of history but also how Americans remember and retell that history. Consequential decisions made in the Oval Office are typically accompanied by a justifying minihistory of who we are, who we have been, and who we can become as a people."
"Presidents draw attention to the parts of our history they want us to cherish and build upon, and repudiate or simply ignore facets of our collective memory that clash with their political objectives."
"They regularly invoke their presidential predecessors, encouraging us to admire some and revile or diminish others."
"The president of the United States, in short, is not just the nation’s chief legislator, the head of a political party, or the commander in chief of the armed forces. The president is also, crucially, the nation’s historian in chief." [From the intro to the book.]
"This book begins from the premise that presidents as the nation’s historians in chief should be evaluated not only on how effectively they persuade others to believe the historical narratives they tell—political scientists’ conventional measure of presidential performance..."
"...but also on the veracity of those narratives. Good history is true to the archival record, and presidents who give more credence to “alternative facts” than established ones are failing in their role as historian in chief."
This book was conceived (and the first drafts of essays were written) before the 2016 election, but it was completed in 2018. My co-editor and I went round and round on how much we should say about Trump as our current "historian in chief." We ultimately decided, not a lot.
Ultimately we came to the conclusion that Trump's utter lack of concern for empirical truth as well as his complete disinterest in (ignorance of?) any of the central storylines in American history make it almost impossible to consider him a "historian" of any sort.
Most of our past presidents, because they were by definition political junkies, had deep familiarity with people and stories from the American past. Their perspectives were often quite distorted and partial, but they were a product of extensive thought and engagement.
The reservoir of historical references from which President "Jackson could have prevented the Civil War and Frederick Douglass is doing great things" draws is...well...shallow seems like an understatement. Dessicated?
The current President speaks about American History with as much authority and knowledge as I speak about geology. IOW, with zero knowledge and authority. I know geology is important...I just don't know a single thing about it.
My ignorance about geology, however, doesn't really matter because my role in the public world is to be a historian. My mastery of geology has zero impact on my work life. But you'd think the President of a nation he claims to love would know at least *something* about its past.
Trump's utter disinterest in American history is reflective of his transactional relationship to everything and everyone. What has X done for me lately, and what can it do for me today? "What has my country done for me lately, and what can it do for me today?"
"Make America Great Again" is a profoundly historical motto, which makes it even more glaring the extent to which Trump and his people have utterly failed to flesh out this historical narrative in any significant way.
How was America once *made* great and what can we learn from that process? Of what did its greatness consist? Why was that greatness diminished? Will the future greatness be identical to the past greatness, or will it take an updated form to accommodate to new conditions?
These are all questions implicit in the statement "Make America Great Again," but I defy you to find speeches where Trump offered anything other than empty generalizations that could have applied to just about *any* country.
Here's a piece I wrote up on his 2018 SOTU address. To the extent that it offered any sort of historical narrative, it was a terrifying one. medium.com/@sethcotlar/to…
The closest Trump ever came to functioning as a "historian in chief" was a brief window when he visited Andrew Jackson's home and touched off a conversation about Trump, Jackson, and populism. medium.com/@sethcotlar/do…
But even then...Trump's participation in this was so perfunctory and uninformed. Basically, Steve Bannon whispered a few things in his ear, he repeated them in garbled form, and then shouted MAGA, and then the Greek Fox Chorus chanted back.
One member of the Fox chorus, Brian Kilmeade, has (coincidentally I'm sure) written a book about Andrew Jackson. Here's a thread on a hilariously bad conversation about Jackson and Kilmeade's book I forced myself to listen to.
In MAGA-land, reading about Andrew Jackson teaches us nothing about our present other than to make "us" feel good about both "our guy" and a past president who was great, just like "our guy."
