The Real End of History

No, I'm talking about the coming (yeah, right) utopia. Where's utopia? Nowhere. I'm talking about Americans not having a sense of history or any historical sense. It isn't that no Americans remember important dates. Some of us do. Some of us are big readers of, say, the Civil War. Some people know a great deal about Revolutionary America or about the fight for civil rights. But knowing about separate periods or historical events is not the same as having a historical sense.

If we did have historical sense we would not have gotten into the idiocy of McCarthyism in the fifties because we could have asked where Stalinists came from and what was the likelihood that anything like that was going to happen here. After all, was it happening in England or France in the fifties? Was it happening anywhere by consent of the people and without a great deal of bloodshed? (In case you don't know, no, it wasn't.) Had it happened anywhere where there was not a great deal of political backwardness and total absence of workable infrastructure? No. Did Marxism fill the vacuum anywhere besides Russia and China? No. And there it did so after long campaigns of widespread murder.

Marxism needed corruption. We were deathly afraid that the pinkos would overthrow our entire way of life for a big part of the last century. And all of it was to no point. Nowadays Newt Gingrich and Lush Rimbaugh are trying to scare the hell out of some Americans that European style socialism is again on the march. Will Americans be fooled twice? I doubt it.

But the Republicans are going to miss a good opportunity for soul searching and for figuring out what sort of real politics they can develop. I don't say that Republicans are going to go away. They aren't. There are too many people in this country who believe in Big Business No Matter What The Poison and live on Anti-Abortion Fervor. That is not likely to disappear. Republicans will get voted back in because they are the only option people have when it comes to punishing Democrats. Our two party system shows no signs of erosion. Half of Republicans are even willing to put all their chips on the likes of Sarah Palin, as improbable as that may seem.

But it isn't just the GOP that has no use for history. Obama is too much the man of graphs and flow charts. It's too bad that none of them came in history books. Oh, sure, he may know a lot of facts about constitutional issues or even something of economics -- or at least of more recent players in the field. But what does he know about presidential history or biography? He has no sense of biography or story in general. He's a facts and figures sort of guy. Like most folks of our stupid era his is big on analysis of discrete problems. He has no power of synthesis. No one with any real notion of narrative would attack the financial crisis in so muddled a manner. No natural storyteller would jump into the health care issue will he's deep into the economic plot. Nor would he have picked the cackhanded Clinton for Secretary of State when we are lousy with people who can sound sensible and fake sincerity (H Clinton is weakest on the latter, if you hadn't noticed). Although you can't argue with idiots, you can shake hands with the devil. Of course the devil is likely to test his new air-to-ground missile the next day but that's no major difficulty when you are filled with the audacity of rosy-glasses. You can talk all you want to sharks and maggots, but at the end of the talk they are still sharks and maggots and haven't understood a damn thing.

But see, this is what you get when all of your smartest people are thinking about theory instead of history. Put down thy Foucault and pick up thy Shakespeare. If Obama can't be bothered with Robert Caro or Richard Pipes, Simon Schama, that kind of thing, read some Plutarch for gods' sake.