How will we remember this era?

I've been reading a bit about how discredited causes are remembered. Specifically, I had my eyes opened by Susan Neiman's simultaneously scholarly and deeply personal 2019 book, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil.

Neiman compares how Germany has gone about confronting its Nazi past with how the United States has confronted the legacy of slavery. The comparison turns out to be a good deal more complicated than most of us would like, certainly the "most of us" who like to believe we're on the "right" side of history. To be an admirer of Hitler today is monstrous, no question. Yet to say that Germany has successfully grappled with Nazism and its legacy is ... well, contentious. Not all Germans believe that, and the skeptics have compelling reasons for their doubt.

Yet if Germany has had a difficult time looking itself in the mirror, the United States largely has kept its eyes closed, at least until recently.

Neiman observes that much of this country's problem grappling with the legacy of slavery arises from its refusal to examine a good century of its history, namely, the period between the end of the Civil War and the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. When skeptics of systemic racism complain that slavery ended over a century ago, they take advantage of popular ignorance of Reconstruction and its backlash, the so-called "Jim Crow" era. Some historians contend that the latter era's brutality, which included lynching and mass murder, merits a more brutally honest name, like "neoslavery". I can't argue with them. To paraphrase an observation made by Martin Luther King, Jr., chattel slavery ended in 1865 but African Americans weren't truly freed for another century. If more of us understood the truth of neoslavery, how thoroughly it ground AFrican Americans down under a web of legalized terror and economic exploitation, we'd give short shrift to the willfully obtuse argument that "slavery ended over a century ago and we should move on".

So both Germany and the United States still have work to do, coming to terms with the horrific legacies of their pasts. The United States has a lot farther to go in its own journey than Germany, though.

With all that in mind, I wonder: what will our descendants a century hence make of this era's legacy? (I'm limiting myself to considering the United States from here on.)

In our time we've seen a good forty percent of the country (the actual number varies depending on context but forty percent seems to be a good overall estimate) descend into political madness. There is no other way to characterize the reactionary (not conservative) embrace of the corrupt, cartoonishly dishonest, and venemous Donald Trump. Just this week, he reasserted his dominance over his would-be challengers for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — by being indicted in New York State.

The sheer number of verified and verifiable lies that Trump has told since he announced his candidacy in 2015 utterly disqualifies him as an authoritative or trustworthy source of information about anything. Yet millions of otherwise sane Americans repeat his assertions — echoed and embellished by far-right media and social media — with absolute confidence.

At one time I believed they were doing so purely out of spite, as a rhetorical middle finger to those of us who still have some trust in the mainstream media and, more broadly, in expertise and truth. Yet the vast majority of those millions have put their money and their health where their mouths are. They have repudiated the consensus of the medical and public-health communities that the vaccines against CoViD-19 are safe, and have refused to be vaccinated. They have done so because Trump, among others, has assailed the vaccines as toxic, or as sinister vectors for mind control.

It's worth remembering that (1) Trump himself got vaccinated, though he did his best to conceal that fact, and (2) Trump at least nominally presided over Operation Warp Speed, the government project that led to the vaccines' development. Yet millions of Trump's followers have repudiated the vaccines anyway.

To trust a compulsive liar — one who doesn't even follow his own (bad) advice — does not make sense. It makes no sense to me, and it won't make any sense to our descendants a century from now.

I remember the horror of the 1978 Jonestown Massacre in which hundreds of cultists committed suicide at the direction of the cult's leader. That was my first brush with what I've since discovered is a real vulnerability in the human psyche, one that explains adherence to horrific ideas not just by hundreds, but by millions. Sometimes the right — or rather, wrong — person comes along, able to convince a lot of people that they should put their complete trust in him. (It's almost always a man.)

Forty-five years on, we still don't have much of a handle on how cult leader Jim Jones gained his hold over his followers. I wonder if, a century from now, science will be able to explain that, or the power of our own time's literal cult hero, Trump.

Or will our descendants a century from now still struggle against the enduring, toxic legacy of the delusions Trump and likeminded allies have spread? Will his deluded message live on in a new "Lost Cause" narrative, perhaps fused with the old one that is one of the Confederacy's most evil legacies ("evil" because it tries to deny historical truth)?

Don't hide the Confederate statues

In the rush to disavow the lingering ugliness represented by heroic statues of prominent Confederate figures, we risk hiding our history.

No question, glorifying Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and other military and civilian leaders of the Confederacy can only be defended if you believe in their gospel of white supremacy. They attempted to secede from the United States in order to preserve slavery, period, full stop. The idea that they were political philosophers selflessly committed to "states' rights" is utter nonsense. They and their allies wanted to preserve the privileged position of large slaveholders. Following the Civil War, Southern whites who still believed in the innate superiority of whites over blacks devoted themselves to ensuring that blacks could not participate fully and equally in civic life, giving rise to Jim Crow. It was the children and grandchildren of the Confederacy who exalted the losing side's military and civilian leadership, spinning for themselves and their descendants the comforting myths that the Civil War was about states' rights, an overbearing federal government, conspiracy by northern states to undermine the economies of southern states — that the war was about anything other than slavery and the postwar desire for white dominance and black subjugation, in practice if not in law. If not for this whitewashing (ahem) of history, the Confederacy would be seen for what it was: a rebellion by slaveholders to protect their economic and cultural interests.

Now, it's crucial that we stop thinking of the Confederacy as anything but what it was. To that end, we have to do something about all those monuments that uncritically exalt the Confederacy. But is simply tearing down the statues the right step?

Not if that's the end of the story.

Tearing the statues down and throwing them away would be almost as irresponsible as erecting them in the first place. It would be following a grotesque distortion of history with a denial of history. The history in question isn't so much the Civil War as the more than century-old effort to exalt white supremacy and to deny the reality of slavery's hold on the United States.

As bad as it has been to misrepresent the legacy of the Confederacy in the way the contested statues have done, it would be nearly as bad to deny that this misrepresentation ever took place.

One reason the Confederacy lingers as a romantic Lost Cause is that the U.S. has never confronted the meaning of the Civil War. The U.S. has never undertaken the kind of soul-searching that Germany did after World War II. (Granted, that soul-searching was mandated by the conquering powers.) Tellingly, Japan faces much the same challenge vis-à-vis World War II as the U.S. does with respect to the Civil War. That's why every so often U.S. leaders have to do an awkward dance regarding which Japanese war memorials they can visit: some of those memorials exalt the kind of culture of Japanese supremacy that prevailed before the war, a toxic culture Japan has not disavowed in the complete way Germany has disavowed Nazi ideology.

So the U.S. must grapple with the Civil War and what it meant in a real, painful way. But the U.S. must also grapple with what it has meant not to have come to terms with that war and its causes.

It has meant that those who fought to perpetuate slavery and to tear asunder the United States have not been portrayed as actually doing these things.

It has meant that millions of their descendants have embraced a toxic ideology that tells them they are superior to blacks and other non-whites.

It has meant that these same descendants have told themselves comforting myths that deny that this ideology motivated, and was at the heart of, the Confederacy's very existence.

To pretend that the Civil War's unconfronted and toxic legacy in the South (and elsewhere) never happened would compound the terrible error we've made by not confronting that legacy in the first place.

By all means, take the damned statues down (and while we're at it, rename all those schools named after the same Confederate leaders). But don't just send those statues to the nearest landfill. Send them to a museum where they can be contextualized properly — where we and our descendants can finally learn the truth about the Civil War and the toxic aftermath that resulted from not acknowledging that truth for so long.

Ambiguity in the Declaration of Independence?

Per the New York Times:

A scholar is now saying that the official transcript of the document produced by the National Archives and Records Administration contains a significant error — smack in the middle of the sentence beginning “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” no less.

The error, according to Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., concerns a period that appears right after the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the transcript, but almost certainly not, she maintains, on the badly faded parchment original.

A punctuation error that affects the interpretation of one of our founding documents is potentially a very big deal. The Declaration is one of the two documents at the heart of the story we tell ourselves, the story of what our nation was intended to be.

On the other hand ... we've been poring over these documents for more than two centuries. I doubt a punctuation mistake will lead to some radical, totally unexpected interpretation of the Declaration. It would be unfortunate if any new interpretation led to the kind of seemingly endless and destructive imbroglio that surrounds the Second Amendment, but maybe it will lead instead to the kind of ongoing vital debate we have about the First.

Should be interesting to see what comes of this.