Two things can be true at the same time. The state of our union is not good. But each of us can also control our response in ways that strengthen not only ourselves but also those around us. Perhaps, in the responding, we can each do our individual part to repair the breach.

As Lewis Lapham wrote in Age of Folly, “we have less reason to fear what might happen tomorrow than to beware what happened yesterday.” A nation denied knowledge of its past “cannot make sense of its present or imagine its future.”

And yet here we are, in the midst of a full-out war on history.

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Slavery was evil. Period.

Decades of misinformation campaigns and never-ending attacks on public education have eroded our sense of civic pride and our knowledge of history.

The most recent right-wing nonsense about “slavery not being that bad” is only the most recent example. If you believe any part of what the disinformation machine is telling you, one thing you might consider is reading historian Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told:  Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Slavery was not the pre-modern institution on the verge of extinction with paternalistic slave-owners as claimed by so many southern apologists past and present. Instead, in the eight decades prior to the Civil War, slavery expanded into a continental cotton empire that “drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.” Baptist writes that “the 3.2 million people enslaved in the United States had a market value of $1.3 billion in 1850—one-fifth of the nation’s wealth and almost equal to the entire gross national product.”  

Baptist describes both a system that is very efficient at sorting out slaves to get those who are most productive and the brutality that made that efficiency possible. Not one to mince words, Baptist names the violence that led to increased productivity “the whipping machine.” Baptist reminds us of the link between the term “fancy girl”—which began to appear in descriptions of young women who fetched high prices because of their physical attractiveness—and the fact that “Slavery’s frontier was a white man’s sexual playground.” His clear writing and extensive documentation takes the reader into the horrors of the slave system in the United States.

Pulitzer prize winning historian Eric Foner said that many Americans see slavery “as essentially a footnote, an exception to a dominant narrative of the expansion of liberty on this continent.” Foner asserts, however, that the underlying argument of Baptist’s book is persuasive. “Slavery was essential to American development and, indeed, to the violent construction of the capitalist world in which we live.”

Economist Jeffrey Sachs has written that, “We are a technology-rich, advertising-fed, knowledge-poor society.” America has lost knowledge of its past, fears for its future, and has a sizable minority that embraces the comfort of the authoritarian’s lie.

Why might that be?

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Billionaires will happily kill democracy

Those who study the past are not surprised that the ultra-rich—like those who run Fox News, the Washington Post, Facebook, and Twitter—are enemies of democracy. Historians have been telling us this for years, as in stories about the American billionaires’ support for Nazi Germany. They told us again as recently as last week in a summary of the efforts of the rich to undermine a government “of, by, and for the people” going back to antebellum times.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the most vocal of the presidents over the last century on this topic. In a 1938 message to Congress on curbing monopolies he wrote:

“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

And in a message a little over a century earlier, Abraham Lincoln had something similar to say about the most dangerous threat to democracy coming from within:

“All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

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There is money to be made in lying

Billionaires know they can make money under authoritarian governments so they support disinformation efforts across the media and political spectrums. The Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against Fox News Network has shown that the network consistently and willingly lied about the outcome of the 2020 election. But those paying attention have known this for a long time. Fox is “a disinformation machine designed to destroy trust in democratic institutions, including the idea that America’s electoral system is free and fair,” writes historian of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Fox admitted they lied, and then paid Dominion more than three-quarters of a billion dollars in order to keep on lying. Smartmatic’s ongoing suit against Fox News recently uncovered new text messages shedding light on the network’s decision to air and promote election conspiracies they knew were false. Newsmax, another right-wing “news” network, has paid out settlements to Dominion and Smartmatic over similar election lies in service of Donald Trump.

These were settlements, not judgments. Think about this for a moment. These two “news” organizations agreed to pay out over $900 million in order to keep on lying to the American people . . . the very practice that led to the original defamation suits. Lying is clearly very lucrative. And an unhealthy percentage of the American people are still willing to take what these “news” organizations say as gospel even when they have been told by the organizations themselves that what they are hearing are lies.

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History has long been a flash point for authoritarians

Historian and former GOP operative Mike Lofgren has written a thoughtful piece for Salon entitled Right-wing fake history is making a big comeback—but it never went away. The sub-heading hints at the lengths the billionaire-funded right will go to in order to shape the world more to their liking:

“We’re a Christian nation! The Civil War wasn’t about slavery! Fighting Hitler was a mistake! The lies run deep.”

And our political hacks have helped in this masquerade. Take David Brooks. Please. Brooks drives me crazy, in part because a number of people I admire think he’s moderate and wonderful. But I find him very cynical, and Lofgren does a great job of explaining why in a piece entitled David Brooks faces the truth of US history—and runs away.

“Brooks distorts not only his own past, and that of the conservative movement, but the American past as well, since much of his piece is a Parson Weems-style potted history of our country, apparently written to vindicate his optimism that everything will come out right in the end. I have already written about right-wingers’ longstanding taste for distorting the record of the past to conform to their ideology. That kind of historical mythology is now the law in many Republican states.”

Just remember, the war on history has nothing to do with history in the same way that the “occupation” of Washington, DC has nothing to do with crime. Both are really about power and dominance.

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We have no one to blame but ourselves

Why are we in this mess? Lofgren laid this out succinctly following the 2024 election.

“Even as the media intermittently deign to perceive that the GOP as an institution might be authoritarian, or that money might rig the system, or that billionaires just might not be our friends, there is one actor that is invariably held harmless. In fact, it is regarded as virtuous, possessing a homespun wisdom that infinitely surpasses the sophistry of academia and so-called experts.

It is the American people, the fawned-over pet of every gassy idealist from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg to Thornton Wilder to the hack editorial writers of the present age. The ‘good sense of the people’ is responsible for each bit of favorable fortune, and absolved of every disaster.” (emphasis added)

As Lapham wrote in 1990, “the promise of democracy no longer inspires or exalts the citizenry lucky enough to have been born under its star.”  It isn’t so much that liberty stands at bay but, rather, that it has fallen into disuse. 

“Sometime in the last 40 years,” writes Lofgren,” between Ronald Reagan’s proclamation that greed is good, the rise of hate radio and garbage social media, the vicarious victimhood of 9/11 and the kill-fest of Iraq, the dominoes falling from Wall Street all the way to some empty and forlorn McMansion slum in 2008 and finally Trump shrieking in our ears nonstop, at least half the American people lost whatever shred of rationality they possessed. These people now think Joe Rogan or Alex Jones are philosophers on par with Henry David Thoreau or William James, except that they’ve never heard of the latter two.”

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What can we do

I’m not sure what the right way forward is for you. I’m still figuring it out for myself. Throwing a sandwich, which can turn you into a face of the resistance, may or may not be the way you want to respond to the moment.

This is the second post in what has become an August trilogy focused on recognition of the challenges we face and how we might respond. The first is Work on things you can do something about. This current post is a reminder of what we are up against. The third and final one is Choosing gratitude in difficult times.

Here are a few thoughts as we consider our response to the attacks on history and our democracy.

• Save us from weak resignation. My friend and mentor Frank Wade recently reminded me of this line from the hymn God of Grace and God of Glory, written by Harry Emerson Fosdick during the Great Depression. At a time when many people felt overwhelmed and hopeless, Fosdick was seeking to combat the passive, defeatist attitude of giving up and withdrawing from the struggle against injustice. If you think these times are harder than others have faced, learn some history.

• We need to stop celebrating a past that never existed and, instead, understand and honor the one that did. We can each, in our own way, work to understand the past that existed and then tell our family, friends, and neighbors about what we’ve learned.

• We should use every means possible to express appreciation for those working at museums, historic sites, schools, and archives trying to ensure that our history—and the story of what really happens—remains.

• Stick with the facts.

• Focus on your area of expertise or interest. I tend to think about today’s world in terms of history. Perhaps you think about it in terms of the law. Or theology. Or human rights. Or the environment. Whichever is the way you think, focus on telling your friends and neighbors about today’s challenges from that perspective, and find groups to work with that advocate in that area of interest.

• Curate a news feed that points a way forward . . . and skip what Facebook sends your way (it is designed to be addictive and to make you angry). I don’t claim to have the right mixture, but I do read individual historians (e.g., here, here, and here); history aggregators like Bunk; former Republicans; news and activist sites; wise elders; and lucid commentators who take the long view. Focus on well-respected independent journalists like Talking Points Memo, The Guardian, Popular Information, and Pro-Publica. Find one or two sources of news that focus on what’s going right in the world.

• Read people—like poets and songwriters—who don’t necessarily write about the events of the day, yet have important things to say: Individuals (and many on my list are friends) who write about small towns, Greek tragedy, urbanism, and the Zen-like experience of scoring a baseball game.

• Understand (and follow as you can) what citizens of other countries have done to fight authoritarians. Protect Democracy staffers interviewed dozens of leaders, experts, practitioners, and scholars from around the world. Their eight rules of antiauthoritarianism that democracy defenders can apply to keep the United States from declining into a more authoritarian form of government give them hope.

• Different people will respond differently . . . and that’s okay. Accept it.

• Take a sabbatical when you need it. As Thomas Merton wrote, “The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his [or her] work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his [or her]…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.” 

• Love your neighbor. No exceptions.

And remember, as the great Molly Ivins put it, freedom fighters don’t always win, but they are always right.

More to come . . .

DJB

Fort Sumter under attack to begin the Civil War from Courier and Ives.