Not Here by Goodman Rob

Author:Goodman, Rob
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

(5) The 1619 Project is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.

(6) The Federal Government has a strong interest in promoting an accurate account of the Nation’s history through public schools and forming young people into knowledgeable and patriotic citizens.

What those statements tell me is that the enemies of the sort of public history the 1619 Project represents—illiberal as they are, full of bad faith as they are—really do understand something about its political stakes. It really does “threaten the integrity of the Union.” It really does make social cohesion and solidarity harder to imagine. Myths are coordination points. They do not have to be good or just or fair to coordinate us; even in the absence of those conditions, they can keep a kind of cold social peace for quite some time if they are taught and retaught without competition or contradiction, taught and retaught as “the true principles” of history. The bill’s authors aren’t wrong to see a challenge to those principles (the principles of the unambiguously virtuous American founding) as a threat, a thaw, to that cold social peace—a threat that was glimpsed, however briefly, in the 2020 riots. We might imagine the bill’s authors as engaging in a kind of bloodless realpolitik, not in any direct reckoning with history. Their history may or may not be true, but that is not their most pressing concern. “The Federal Government has a strong interest” in legislating its truthfulness.

That, at least, is what we might imagine if we gave them the benefit of the doubt. And yet, if we do so—if we assume there is some genuine public spirit in these Republicans’ feelings for social cohesion—then we are led to ask: Why is received history so important to America’s social cohesion in the first place? Why is “divisive and revisionist” history such a threat?

We could answer that question with another question: Besides received history, what else is there to keep the peace? When public schools are effectively segregated, when public spaces are shadowed by random gun violence, when union membership (despite some recent high-profile success stories) remains in a generations-long decline, when wealth and income inequality surpass that of the Gilded Age, when the undemocratic Constitution puts meaningful political power out of reach—when the concrete and tactile bases of solidarity have been so methodically eroded—the only basis of solidarity left is story. Received history bears all that tremendous weight. Under these conditions, it is the only thing that conceivably can. The United States is hardly the only country in which those conditions prevail—but the great weight placed on received history in American politics is an index of the failure of other, material kinds of social cohesion in American life. That cohesion was not destroyed by raving demagogues or insurrectionists. It was destroyed by generations of “normal” politics.

Of course, many of the same politicians who have done so much to erode material

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