I keep asking myself, 'why study history?' And keep coming back to this line from Nineteen Eighty Four. Along with Santayana's also relevant line that those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it and Twain's remark that history does not repeat but it rhymes. Unfortunately, quotations are a kind of blunt tool and professional historians try not to use them. Aspiring academics will often deride quotations as an amateur's crutch once they reach a certain level of proficiency in a given discipline. But quotations from famous thinkers often contain strong ideas that can be conveyed without elaborating with great detail. It may be a fallacy, appealing to authority, but it also serves as a kind of shorthand to cut to the chase in this format. So I hope you can pardon me this indulgence as I get to the point.
It has been a real issue, to decide where to begin any narrative about history that has bearing on the present. Most books about WWI for example, treat Woodrow Wilson's administration as though it were completely normal and not in fact the unique product of a three way race for president in the US. To tell that story though, a writer would have to trudge back to 1860 and discuss the rise of the Republican Party to convey why having a northern Democrat holding the office was an anomaly. Taken from one point of view, the Wilson administration was schizophrenic, at first promising to uphold the nonpartisan Progressive worldview of modernizing the economy and government, then promising to keep the country out of the war. Events forced the president to reluctantly declare war, then going full throttle not only to physically prepare the armed forces for that war but aggressively proselytizing the largely pacifist population into anti-German anger and hysteria. Then finally falling apart after the equally aggressive campaign to force the US to join the League of Nations.
Arguably, the Democrats running the country from 1912-1920 could have done better. Would WWI have turned out differently if William H. Taft had won reelection? It is likely he would have if Teddy Roosevelt had not run a third party campaign and split the GOP. But Wilson is what happened, maybe he should never have been president, but an uncommon set of circumstances arose to make it seem like Progressive Democratic governance was the norm in most portrayals of WWI in media of all sorts. While WWI is not as popular as the sequel among "historians" in the tavern, this may be where the myth about not trusting Democrats in foreign policy began. The outcome of WWI on world history is monumental but other actions of the "Progressive" Wilson administration are arguably more consequential for domestic policy. Things like the Red Scare, mass deportations of recent immigrants, the prosecution of socialists and pacifists for disagreeing with the war, the first government propaganda machine to manipulate public opinion, the crushing of unions and unrest after prematurely abandoning economic controls and leaving everyone to fend for themselves in the chaotic market.
Events like these are still with us, most recently with George W. Bush's administration, which also talked up idealism in the abstract about military intervention bringing about a democratic transformation in the Middle East. The bushies also demonized opponents, unleashed a massive propaganda campaign against domestic enemies, crushed unions and working people, enriched all the wrong people through cronyism, and left office after collapsing the economy. Woodrow Wilson let loose a torrent of anti-democratic (note small "d") government action that has been repeated since, but all people want to talk about him today is his virulent racism. We do a disservice to history if we delegate the past to Hollywood or the History Channel and not stand up to the pea-brained historians at the tavern, and say "no, you do not get to preach to me or others when you have no clue what you're talking about." The same is true of being too conscious of identity politics and write off a complex episode of our history by saying that the president was a racist and that is all you need to know.
People are not binary creatures but complex mixtures of good and bad. And yes, this is all relative. It is a sign of maturity to see beyond the simple good or evil and look for the shades of moral ambiguity or complexity. To take our example further, Woodrow Wilson was certainly a racist, but he also held genuinely idealistic principles of expanding democracy, reducing armed conflict, diplomacy over war, modernizing the state, and so on. The "vision thing" was good but the methods used in pursuing it were terrible. However, bush had no idealistic principles, everything he did was for the selfish pursuit of power and plunder. It has rarely been so easy to spot evil as it has been since 2000.
But again, where did that evil begin? If you work backwards it is very hard to spot where the republicans went crazy. There was no indication of how far Woodrow Wilson would approximate the authoritarian empires he ultimately defeated. But is there any doubt that any republican seeking the office of the president today would gleefully pursue authoritarianism? This year, looking at Presidents Day and thinking about how insane the presidential campaign is already, we should be prepared to examine everything we can from history and speak up when something smells bad.
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