The End of History, American-Style
History, the wag said, is just one damn thing after another. Understanding it is also crucial for citizens in a democracy and we're dumbing ourselves down big time.
Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” didn’t have much of a shelf life. But his essay’s premature proclamation of a triumphant liberal democratic world order did come with a catchy title that deserves recycling. It explains why Americans are so easily manipulated when it comes to their country’s past, not to mention how to think about history’s implications today.
As a field of study, history lately has taken its lumps. Cutbacks in liberal arts programs and plus-ups in STEM and computer coding classes at secondary and college levels have exacted their toll. So has the angst among parents about their offspring’s career and education choices in high school and beyond as technology transforms the job market and what employers say they need. The result: liberal arts college grads fell by a third between 2012-2020.
But the decline of liberal arts as a foundation for future learning and employment isn’t the only reason Americans know less and less about their country’s history. Republican controlled state legislatures are targeting high school history courses for dumbing down. Florida, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Dakota and Georgia are cases in point. All have passed laws to penalize teachers who fail to erase touchy subjects like critical race theory from their lesson plans.
Never mind the fact that CRT, the Republicans’ current bête noire, so to speak, isn’t even part of high school curricula. Sanitizing the history of slavery, the Jim Crow South, red-lining in real estate, and other systemic racist practices, they argue, protects their constituents’ 16-year-olds from “divisive concepts” that are just too traumatic for sensitive teenage minds. In other words, CRT is only one item on their historical hit list. Purifying the past won’t stop there.
The current front runner in the Republican presidential primary race dictated that GOP party line four years ago. “Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children,” Donald Trump said his 2020 pre-Independence Day rally at Mount Rushmore and later at the White House. Then running for re-election, he proclaimed creation of a 1776 Commission to promote a “patriotic education” after lambasting the 1619 Project, an effort to examine slavery’s historical role, as a left wing plot. Lenin wouldn’t have liked Trump’s ideological spin, but as for agit-prop, he would have called the jingoism first rate.
Needless to say, Trump’s acolytes—now primary competitors—are paying heed. Take Governor Ron DeSantis who bravely counts Mickey Mouse as well as school teachers among his mortal foes. Crusading in February against the Educational Testing Service, DeSantis threatened to ban its advanced placement Black history course in Florida’s high schools unless Black Lives Matter, reparations for slavery, and queer theory were stricken from its lesson plan.
Not surprisingly, with Trump holding pole position among Republican presidential candidates, the also-rans are mimicking his nonsense. DeSantis, for one, doubled down in July when critics pointed out the pablum on slavery in the state’s new history course guidelines; he credited the enslaved experience as a source of valuable job skills. Not to be outdone, Vivek Ramaswamy, a Trump fan boy, last month dove into the recent past, averring that 9/11 just might have been a US government op.
That said, it’s fair to ask, do the Republicans’ misrepresentations, misstatements and lies about history matter? After all, it’s just politics. Is the rhetorical flailing of presidential primary contenders pandering for votes, including from their party’s extremes, making a difference in what Americans know about their past? The answer: unfortunately, the fact-free historical fulminations aren’t without cost.
Consider the activists targeting schools in order to protect their Little Golden Book versions of American history. They’re purging library stacks and school curricula. But if discussing CRT, a theory about racism, in class, or reading about it in print makes students curl into a fetal position, what about the facts regarding the country’s past? Whether it’s segregation in Dixie, the destruction of indigenous Americans’ languages and cultures in state-run boarding schools, or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War Two, racism drove the injustices. Don’t potentially teary-eyed teens need protection from these divisive historical facts, too?
Whatever the passions of the anti-Woke true believers, the cynicism oozing from the Republican candidates’ “values-based” 2024 campaigns is obvious. So is the damage being done to Americans’ shared understanding of their past. A survey conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University and the American Historical Association made the point two years ago. The poll of 1,816 Americans, a harbinger of the divisiveness now playing out, highlighted the divisions now turning teaching history many states into an excursion through Fantasy Land.
Whether the issue was the historical attention paid to women, racial and ethnic minorities, or the LGBTQ communities, Democrats and Republicans split sharply, often by a two- to three-to-one margin. To be sure, the race, education, and age of respondents also accounted for divergent views. Most striking, however, the pollsters noted, “84 percent of Republicans believe that history should celebrate our nation’s past, while 70 percent of Democrats think history should question it.”
The most effective way to destroy people, George Orwell wrote, is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. The same arguably holds true for anyone seeking to do in a democracy. Events suggest the destruction can be a self-inflicted wound.