As a writer on the American past, I have no argument to make regarding whether Joe Biden should step down as president and/or as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. Since everybody else already has that question fully sorted out, with bulletproof if-then scenarios, strategies and tactics, and projections for results, I’m free to focus on other matters.
Related matters, though. I’ve been writing for years in opposition to professional historians pressing—on the public, on the media, on politicians and judges—a sense of the hyperurgent political relevance of certain facts and narratives drawn from the historians’ own scholarship. The phenomenon was already smoldering in certain historians’ adoration of Hamilton: An American Musical (with origins in their having given Ron Chernow’s flawed Hamilton biography a total pass), but it really blew up in 2017 #Resistance culture. Throughout the Trump presidency, this dynamic fed on itself, and on the riveted attention of an understandably anxious liberal public, until it became a cultural force. A group of history professors gained big follower numbers on Twitter, acted as political commentators on MSNBC and CNN, started NPR podcasts and popular newsletters, and were even awarded rare one-on-one interviews with President Biden himself.
After taking a victory lap at the advent of the Biden administration in 2021, the group is now addressing the 2024 election, applying their sense of the American past to assessments of likely outcomes of possible electoral tactics in response to the crisis emerging from Biden’s poor debate performance at the end of June. Yet in a political and intellectual climate so different from the one in which they birthed their project, they seem to find themselves flailing. That situation makes me hope we’re at the beginning of a shift in public-facing engagement by historians, an end to oversimplifying the country’s history in the service of proposing immediate answers to our most dire political challenges.
Last week, in the wake of the Biden-Trump debate, the historian-as-self-appointed-indispensable-public-adviser-on-current-politics collapsed into a pile of pretty evident absurdity. The collapse could have happened on the watch of any one of the historians who have made the bit their stock-in-trade—Princeton’s Kevin Kruse, Yale’s Timothy Snyder, Princeton’s Sean Wilentz (an innovator in the space, back in the Clinton years), and a number of others—but instead it happened to possibly the leading light of the whole effort, Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College and the author of the enormously popular Substack newsletter Letters From an American, launched during the Trump administration, which made Richardson a star of the historians’ warning-and-advising effort I’m talking about.