/262/ The Useless Past ft. Matt Karp
Added 2022-05-10 06:01:01 +0000 UTCOn liberals' embrace of the past and history wars.
We talk to Matthew Karp about his essay, "History As End: 1619, 1776, and the politics of the past". It seems as if there's an ideological inversion going on, where liberals see history in terms of original sin and cycles of injustice, or at best, want to relitigate the past in order to fight battles of the present. Meanwhile conservatives have abandoned the past.
What does this say about current attitudes to capital-h History and making the future?
Readings:
- History As End: 1619, 1776, and the politics of the past, Matt Karp, Harpers
- Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson, Gregory Elliott
- The End of the End of History, Bungacast
Comments
I don't think its necessarily conscious as noted in the interview, but 1619ism is often used as a cudgel by woke liberals to denounce any kind of popular, materialist left. I recall Bernie's appeals to the New Deal and FDR being met with criticisms that it ignored the racists aspects of the New Deal or the Japanese internment camps. Jeet Heer caught a lot of flak for praising the late 19th Century Populists, with "progressives" seeming to adopt an almost cartoonish Hofstaderism to regard all forms of populism as inherently racist and reactionary. By dismissing the white working class as a hereditary reactionary caste, a post facto justification can be created for the current "Coalition of the Ascendant" (ie PMCs and the nonwhite working class, esp the urban precariat) as the only possible progressive coalition possible. The ultimate symbol of this tendency was when activists made attempts to cover up a 1930s mural by a communist artist who studied under Diego Rivera in George Washington High School in San Francisco that correctly depicted Washington as a slave owner and settler atrocities against Native Americans because it might seem offensive. Spearheading this effort was Meena Harris, the niece of the Vice President.
Casey Cho
2022-05-19 11:38:41 +0000 UTCI think so much if this comes back to the subsuming of class into race, gender and anything else in the US
Daniel L
2022-05-17 11:28:27 +0000 UTC
