Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch (via Informed Comment): What will Happen when Trump’s Dupes Find Out?
Andrew Bacevich is an excellent national security analyst, good enough to be wrestle with when he has contrary opinions. Worth reading the entire TomDispatch post.
Sample:
Unlike President Trump, I do not pretend to speak for Everyman or for his female counterpart. Yet my sense is that many Americans have an inkling that history of late has played them for suckers. This is notably true with respect to the post-Cold War era, in which the glories of openness, diversity, and neoliberal economics, of advanced technology and unparalleled U.S. military power all promised in combination to produce something like a new utopia in which Americans would indisputably enjoy a privileged status globally.
In almost every respect, those expectations remain painfully unfulfilled. The history that “served for the time being” and was endlessly reiterated during the presidencies of Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama no longer serves. It has yielded a mess of pottage: grotesque inequality, worrisome insecurity, moral confusion, an epidemic of self-destructive behavior, endless wars, and basic institutions that work poorly if at all. Nor is it just WHAMs who have suffered the consequences. The history with which Americans are familiar cannot explain this outcome.
Alas, little reason exists to expect Becker’s successors in the guild of professional historians to join with ordinary Americans in formulating an explanation. Few academic historians today see Everyman as a worthy interlocutor. Rather than berating him for not reading their books, they ignore him. Their preference is to address one another.
And here is where it gets very interesting.
In effect, professional historians have ceded the field to a new group of bards and minstrels. So the bestselling “historian” in the United States today is Bill O’Reilly, whose books routinely sell more than a million copies each. Were Donald Trump given to reading books, he would likely find O’Reilly’s both accessible and agreeable. But O’Reilly is in the entertainment business. He has neither any interest nor the genuine ability to create what Becker called “history that does work in the world.”
Most historians will now start asking, “How do I get public libraries to start buying my books in multiple copies and putting them in the history section?”
Bacevich goes on:
Yet as events make it apparent that Trump is no more able to run a government than Bill O’Reilly is able to write history, they may well decide that he is not their friend after all. With that, their patience is likely to run short. It is hardly implausible that Trump’s assigned role in history will be once and for all to ring down the curtain on our specious present, demonstrating definitively just how bankrupt all the triumphalist hokum of the past quarter-century — the history that served “for the time being” — has become.
And then he makes the point many on the left have also been making that is being resisted by the “there is no alternative” center:
When that happens, when promises of American greatness restored prove empty, there will be hell to pay. Joe Doakes, John Q. Public, and the man in the street will be even more pissed. Should that moment arrive, historians would do well to listen seriously to what Everyman has to say.
What is tragic (there still is tragedy in the current farce) is that there is an amazing assortment of “Everyman” historians writing about the historical experience of Everyman, even in the post-Cold War era. Many are non-technical (in the historian’s sense), well-written, and solidly based on documentary and documented oral history information. There are cultural histories, social histories, as well as traditional political, military, and 1% histories (great men).
But what do you see in the history sections of public libraries? Gigantic Civil War sections and sections about World War II. Much smaller sections on everything else. Almost nothing about the period between the Constitution and the controversy over slavery. Nothing between the Civil War and World War I (when a lot of labor history occurred, as well as the development of Jim Crow laws,) and nothing about the New Deal. For post-World War II, there are retained current events books and no systematic histories. Sprinkled in are the books of the conservative protected class – Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Amity Schlaes – all grinding their particular axes against liberalism.
And yet, there are good, potentially popular, well-documented histories out there.
It is not the historians who are keeping them off the shelves. However, Bacevich is correct. It must be the historians who stand ready when the break in the narrative comes. Is anybody preparing for that break in the narrative in any other way than a restorationist one?
