Forgetting the History We All Know

Many recent public debates have shown that certain lessons from high school American History have either been forgotten or are being willfully ignored by our elected representatives, bestselling authors, experts and large swathes of the American people. We should, of course, be wary of simplistic applications of history to the present, but surely some lessons are beyond controversy and we should suspect that anyone who suggests otherwise is trying to lead us in the wrong direction.

In high school, I remember learning how the economic excesses of the Roaring Twenties resulted in Black Tuesday and the Great Depression. My instructor described FDR’s New Deal policies as a series of efforts to right the economy, some of which were more successful than others. The depression did not fully end, we were told, until the war economy of World War II, which was followed by the affluent society epitomized by the Leave It to Beaver world of the 1950s. One would think then that we would be wary of economic conditions such as those prevalent in the 1920s and view prudent government programs as a possible solution.

Yet, while economic disparities are as bad now as they were before Black Tuesday and unregulated markets continue to periodically crash the economy, big business and conservative politicians remain untouched and therefore unfazed. They continue to call for decreased regulation, lower taxes for the rich, dismantlement of welfare programs, and smaller government, this last to the point where the current Republican presidential candidates bicker over how many government departments they would abolish. These policies would roll back history, put us further behind the rest of the developed world, and quite possibly turn the Great Recession into something much worse, something that might even reach the 1% in their gated communities.

Another history lesson every American knows is that, while some balk at saying we lost the Vietnam War, we most certainly did not win it, nor was our waging of it always honorable. Think of the My Lai Massacre. One would think then that we would be wary of protracted military engagements and, when they’re necessary, carry them out with some humility.

Yet the armed forces remain a national fetish. Rarely does one hear a voice unconvinced of our military omnipotence or of the good-ol’-boyness of our troops. Indeed, to suggest otherwise is viewed as unpatriotic. The campaigns of the Republican presidential candidates in 2008 were based almost solely on an unseemly blend of military worship and jingoism. And dissent among their constituents and the media is uncommon. I think this is because many Americans prefer to ignore the experience of Vietnam in favor of the Good War, when the world really did need saving and we played a decisive, although hardly lone, role in saving it. Nonetheless, all wars and other military interventions since have been much messier affairs, with attainment of victory and our moral high ground more open to question.

I should add that I do have a great deal of respect for some members of the military and do support some of our overseas engagements, but I am less excited about the unquestioning adulation we are asked to lavish upon all members of the military and every operation they are called upon to perform.

Also disturbing are challenges to racial equality. American history is fraught with racial issues from slavery to Jim Crow, but I always believed that while some individuals may still practice discrimination and prejudice, our institutions and leaders had overcome the shameful practices of our past through struggles such as the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. I thought that we had all learned the lesson that racism is bad and any view to the contrary is unspeakable.

Yet many in the public light, again mostly conservatives, are attempting to stage a comeback for institutional discrimination against select non-white groups. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, among others, has suggested that private businesses should have the right to reject service on the basis of race, and recent tough immigration laws like Arizona Senate Bill 1070 have been drafted to target Hispanics, albeit in a sort of code language that thinly covers, but not very successfully, their vile core. Surely we are not still fighting this battle are we?

Unfortunately, the question to that answer is “Yes, we are.” Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” I do not know if the trends in forgetfulness I have mentioned above will lead to a second or third occurrence of past calamities, but there is surely much tragedy in the suffering that could result if we fail to learn even the most basic lessons from our past.