We’re Living Through the Twilight of the Resistance Historian (2024)

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 havinggiven Ron Chernow’s flawed Hamilton biography a total pass), but it really blew upin 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 atthe 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.

I’ve mounted some criticism of Richardson’s approach to bothhistoryandpolitics.Younger professional historians, too, have for the past couple of years put forth acid online critiques of the group of colleagues in which she so notably figures, which is made up of tenured stars with jobs at private universities. Some early-career professors take a dim view of an approach to facing the public that brings a few stars popular acclaim, even as the profession continues its decades-long jobs crisis. (On X this week, University of Massachusetts historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique, a longtime critic of this approach to public commentary, posted: “America desperately needs historians … as researchers and educators. It doesn’t need historians who’ve deluded themselves into thinking that giving academic dress to MSNBC talking points is saving democracy. Fight for public education instead.”) Divisions within the profession regarding Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza and this spring’s campus protests have exacerbated the internal backlash.

But a recent public statement from Richardson seems to be triggering even wider skepticism. The statement was made during an interview this past weekend with Christiane Amanpour, the CNN host. Amanpour set up the conversation by announcing that “historians like Heather Cox Richardson,” unlike those who want to replace Biden, “say the country’s focus should be firmly on the threat posed by a second Trump term.” In response to Amanpour’s first question, Richardson then said:

My interest is not in Biden or Kamala Harris or Trump or whomever he might choose as vice president. My interest is less in that than in the long-term sweep of American history. I want the whole picture. And in the whole picture of American history, if you change the presidential nominee at this point in the game, the candidate loses … for a number of reasons. First of all, because the apparatus of the party for the election is set up around somebody else. Second of all, because the news is only going to report all the growing pains of a brand-new campaign, including all the opposition research that the opponents are then going to throw at people.

The historian’s prediction, therefore, based on a claim about what she calls “the long-term sweep of American history,” is that replacing Biden is a sure loser for the party. In that scenario, she says, Trump must win.

Before considering whether any of that makes political sense and, more important to me, has anything to do with whatever lessons may be drawn from the history of presidential campaigns, it’s worth noting that much of the negative reaction to Richardson’s statement has to be coming from people who simply want Biden replaced. These are people who are not, as I am, criticizing an entire approach to centering U.S. history in politics, but instead are refusing to take advice from the historian in this particular case: a difference of tactical opinion regarding the best way forward.

And yet even that divergence from what’s been nearly wholesale adoption, in liberal culture circles, of Richardson’s historical narratives and analyses may tell us something about how things have changed, in those circles, since the middle of the Trump administration. While the historians invited to the White House during Biden’s honeymoon period (they included Richardson) seemed to speak as one in their excited, even fulsome support of him and his presidency, and while Biden has seemed to enjoy their support in return—in the debate, he stumblingly cited a poll of presidential historians that pronounced Trump the ”worst president ever,” and he continues to rely on Jon Meacham as a speechwriter and adviser—it’s naturally gotten harder and harder, as time goes on, to cleave to a unified narrative about what history can tell us about politics. Trump, the force that drew historians into this dynamic cultural position in the first place, in that they’ve framed him as a historically unique threat to the United States, has been out of office. The person in office has been taking actions that raise a multitude of questions, as all normal presidencies are bound to do.

Some will agree and some disagree with Richardson’s political advice. And it’s true, of course, that a new candidate can always lose. But what she’s presenting as history is simply bizarre, and the public disservice caused by her urgency in presenting it has gotten extreme.

If you were watching the CNN interview and didn’t know much about past presidential elections, you’d have no choice but to believe, given Richardson’s reputation and presentation, that throughout American history, there’s a repeating pattern known to scholarship and leading to an ironclad law of elections stating that if a new presidential nominee comes in at this point in the process, that nominee will lose. Richardson even gives reasons.

There’s no such pattern. Changing nominees at this point has literally never happened before—not even once. Richardson’s assertion that “in the whole picture of American history, if you change the presidential nominee at this point in the game, the candidate loses”—so clear, so forceful, so authoritative—is totally invented.

And this is a historian whose scholarship on the Reconstruction period is truly important.

That’s what I mean by bizarre.

There are only two past analogies to the current situation that some might try, in vain, to draw. One is President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection in 1968: The nominee, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, lost the election to Richard Nixon. The other is President Harry Truman’s decision not to seek reelection in 1952: Adlai Stevenson, governor of Illinois, lost to Dwight Eisenhower.

Neither of those Democratic nominees entered the race at anything like the point where we are now. The ’52 and ’68 stories are quite nuanced, and they differ in fascinating ways—the kind of thing some historians still like to explore—but in both cases, the incumbent dropped out in March, with important primaries still to come. Anyway, systems for assigning delegate votes to nominees were starkly different from the current system. No analysis of ’52 or ’68 suggests that Humphrey’s and Stevenson’s losses resulted from late entry, or from an infrastructure set up around the incumbent, or from the effects of opposition research. And the incumbents had withdrawn for their own political reasons—not in a state of crisis caused by a widespread belief that they’d become mentally unfit for office.

In thelong-range sweep ofour history, two examples, only four elections apart, wouldn’t make for a decisive historical pattern, if such patterns existed. But those two examples aren’t even close to analogous to our current situation.

While we’re coming up with patterns, consider the flipside. An incumbent’s declining to seek another term has not always led to failure for his party’s nominee. George Washington decided not to serve a third term; his vice president, John Adams, won the presidency. U.S. Grant was hoping for a third term; as Richardson knows better than most, when Grant decided against running, his party’s nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes, prevailed in one of the nastiest elections in our history.

Or, on the flip-flipside, you can say that, in stark distinction to the irrelevant examples of ’52 and ’68, replacing Biden after the primaries poses an evengreaterlikelihood of loss than Humphrey’s or Stevenson’s. You can say anything you want: Everyone who studies the past seriously, and that certainly includes Richardson, knows there’s no way to legitimately deploy history to arrive at anything like the flat, ironclad, if-then prediction she made on CNN, especially in the ever-changing crucible that is U.S. electoral politics, even if you had recourse to a series of real past events, and she didn’t.

So what’s going on here?

Many will be quick to ascribe motive. I’m not interested in that. What’s clear is that Richardson is invoking an elevated appeal to “the whole picture,” and adducing a faux-historical rule, in order to persuade people, many of whom trust her status as a scholar and are unlikely to question her facts, that Biden should stay on the ticket. A leading exponent of the liberal cultural ethos that perpetually bemoans our “post-truth” world has gotten herself into a position where an immediate partisan political tactic, possibly undertaken in a state of desperation, induces her to invent historical fact. The claim Richardson has made on CNN may be the most blatant example of a tendency that I think was always inherent in the new mode of engaging the public that historiansbegan pursuing in 2017—in part because that mode defined itself in relation to Trump’s presidency.

One becomes one’s enemy. It’s an ironclad rule of history.