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Column: Donald Trump fails again on American history 101

 


According to President Trump, American history has been hijacked.

As he puts it, a cabal of radical educators wielding Marxist ideologies like Critical Race Theory and wielding dog-eared copies of Howard Zinns Peoples History of the United States have captured our schools and universities and indoctrinate our kids to believe that America is mean, that Americans are racist, and that our country was founded on oppression rather than freedom.

The riots and chaos on the streets, he says, are the direct result of decades of brainwashing by leftist teachers determined to make Americans lose confidence in who we are, where we come from and what we are. believe.

But fear not! Trump will take our story back from radicals and socialists, and fight the twisted web of lies that questions the virtue of the heroes of the Americas and the nobility of the American figure. He has already issued a decree to protect the statues from violent crowds incited by radical fringes. Now, he said in a speech Thursday, his administration is supporting the development of a pro-America program designed to teach students the wonderful truth about our country.

It’s vintage Trump. He loves to throw up empty patriotic rhetoric. He enjoys fomenting division and resentment through culture wars. And he likes to portray the world in the simplest, simplest terms.

But here’s the thing about the story: It’s complicated. It is nuanced. It is a tangled web of competing interpretations, contradictory facts, alternative perspectives. It’s constantly being reconsidered, challenged and revised, and it is as it should.

Especially the idea that America is not bad but rather beautiful and that these are the only two choices worth mentioning is ridiculously simple-minded. The idea that we must propagate our children with a patriotic jingo education is not only absurd, it is dangerous.

Yes, there are radical historians in the world, and there are also conservative historians. There are political historians and social historians and cultural historians and intellectual historians. There are those who believe in the study of bottom-up history and others who prefer top-down history. Some historians see the world through the prism of gender, race, class or sexuality. Certain study leaders, certain study movements, certain study nations, certain study ideas.

Unsurprisingly, there are those who write about the United States as a constant force for good and others who are deeply critical of it. This is because some focus on the long and slow expansion of rights, the expansion of liberal democracy, the growth of a giant middle class, the commitment to political freedom while others point to the evils of slavery, the genocide of the indigenous population and the centuries. long denial of rights to marginalized people.

The story is richer and more complete because of these competing factions.

I came of age by reading historians of all political currents. There were those on the left like Herbert Aptheker, those closer to the center like Arthur Schlesinger, and those more to the right like Robert Conquest. Later I read Eric Foner and Robert Caro and Jill Lepore and Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ron Chernow and Victor Davis Hanson. Together, they helped me put this country in context by offering new and different ways of looking at the past.

The pro-American education advocated by Donald Trump is designed to eliminate complexity, ambiguity or contradiction. It is a very bad idea if we hope to understand our big but messy experiment in democracy.

The president is setting up his Commission of 1776 to replace toxic propaganda and ideological poison with patriotic education. Here are some principles that could guide him along the way, but he will surely ignore.

Historians must be intellectually honest, regardless of their political leanings.

Colleges and universities should offer students a wide range of historical opinions, approaches and perspectives. Indoctrination from a single political point of view will not help students become thoughtful critical thinkers who can fulfill their responsibilities in a democratic country.

Historians should study and teach our country’s flaws and strengths. To teach that the United States is simply beautiful and that the most exceptional nation in the history of the world would be foolish, dishonest and dangerous.

School curricula should be decided by teachers and academics, not by politicians with axes to crush and elections to win.

Over time, our ongoing national debate about which Americans should be honored and who should be removed from their pedestals should be informed by the thoughtful ideas of historians across the country.

And, finally, some historian somewhere should tell Donald Trump to stop saying he has done more for African Americans than any president since and maybe even including Abraham Lincoln. I can’t bear to hear it again.

@Nick_Goldberg

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