Historical Ignorance Warps American Politics: Jonathan Alter
By Jonathan Alter
Bloomberg
Jun 17, 2011
In Woody Allen’s charming new movie, “Midnight in Paris,” Owen Wilson’s character, a modern-day novelist, travels through time to the 1920s. He wishes he could stay, so he could keep hanging out with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His love interest from the ‘20s wishes she were living in La Belle Epoque. Both discover when they travel back to the 1880s that Degas and Gauguin wish they were living in the Renaissance.
Most of us occasionally experience Era Envy, a wistful feeling, captured in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy,” that we were born too late. Cheevy “wept that he was ever born.”
Politicians, being more practical, wield such themes to win favor with nostalgic voters. Nowadays we’re past the point where Democrats invoke the 1960s and Republicans the 1980s. On the right, in particular, the time horizons are getting longer. Conservatives openly yearn for a pre-New Deal social contract under which Americans would largely fend for themselves as they did in the 19th century. (Glenn Beck went so far as to call Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Era a “cancer.”) And the Tea Party folks, of course, want to go even further back in time and restore the spirit of the founders.
The problem is that spreading a romantic gauze over history distorts our sense of the present. It makes our politics treacly, trivial and unaccountable to historical truth. It doesn’t help that test results released this week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that students in fourth, eighth and 12th grades do worse in American history than in any other subject. This will leave them unarmed against distortion.
(More here.)
Bloomberg
Jun 17, 2011
In Woody Allen’s charming new movie, “Midnight in Paris,” Owen Wilson’s character, a modern-day novelist, travels through time to the 1920s. He wishes he could stay, so he could keep hanging out with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His love interest from the ‘20s wishes she were living in La Belle Epoque. Both discover when they travel back to the 1880s that Degas and Gauguin wish they were living in the Renaissance.
Most of us occasionally experience Era Envy, a wistful feeling, captured in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Miniver Cheevy,” that we were born too late. Cheevy “wept that he was ever born.”
Politicians, being more practical, wield such themes to win favor with nostalgic voters. Nowadays we’re past the point where Democrats invoke the 1960s and Republicans the 1980s. On the right, in particular, the time horizons are getting longer. Conservatives openly yearn for a pre-New Deal social contract under which Americans would largely fend for themselves as they did in the 19th century. (Glenn Beck went so far as to call Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Era a “cancer.”) And the Tea Party folks, of course, want to go even further back in time and restore the spirit of the founders.
The problem is that spreading a romantic gauze over history distorts our sense of the present. It makes our politics treacly, trivial and unaccountable to historical truth. It doesn’t help that test results released this week from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that students in fourth, eighth and 12th grades do worse in American history than in any other subject. This will leave them unarmed against distortion.
(More here.)
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