Now, we are told, History is back, and so is action, power, and ferocious ideological combat. Donald Trump threatens to abolish American democracy and install a dictatorship, perhaps a fascist one. In Western Europe, the old liberal order trembles before a rising tide of right-wing populism, while Russian armies lay siege to Ukraine. And everywhere, from Moscow and Beijing to Tehran and Caracas, powerful authoritarians menace the peace and liberty of the world.
But if History is on the march again, its movements appear strangely constricted. In our time, the political dramas of the past two centuries—vibrant tales of revolution and reaction, narrated in accents variously romantic, tragic, and ironic—have collapsed into a single story: in short, History moves only when the political right acts and the center reacts. (The left, offstage, yelps sorrowfully.) This master plot of contemporary history bestows two presents at once. The rancorous, reptilian, essentially unknowable right—rising from the wastes like Trump, Putin, or Sauron—receives the Promethean gift of historical agency. It always throws the first punch. Meanwhile, the muddled, indecisive center, whose own fecklessness allowed the right to take form in the first place, is awarded the gift of heroic opposition. Only by joining battle with its antagonist can the existing order redeem itself and vindicate its true humanity.
In literary terms, this plot produces a narrative of somewhat less subtlety than Avengers: Infinity War. Yet it has proved not only compelling but addictive and exportable across time and space. From Timothy Snyder’s chilling parables of fascism abroad to Heather Cox Richardson’s portraits of extremism at home, our leading professional historians have played no small part in entrenching this sequence as the fundamental narrative of our time.
It is no coincidence that our staple analogies of historical agency all bear its imprint. If liberal victory can come at all, it is only as a reluctant response to vicious and unprovoked outrage: the slaveholders who dissolved the Union, the Nazis who invaded Poland, the Jim Crow fanatics who trained their fire hoses on peaceful protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. It was actually in the Nineties, a much-lauded new book argues—while politicians dithered and theorists pronounced the disappearance of History—that the dark forces of today’s right began to cohere.
History itself, of course, is different from what any of these narratives suppose, and wilder. Does it matter, for instance, that America’s most desperate crisis and most radical revolution began with a mass movement on the political left? Perhaps it should.