Unlearning the Lessons of the Past

When the Continuities Disappear

I

In these times, two of the most important public intellectuals on the Left are Corey Robin and Jamelle Bouie. By “important” and “on the Left” I mean that their audience reaches well beyond academia, and that their politics place them in the social-democratic orbit of Bernie, AOC, and the Progressive Caucus in the House. Robin is a political theorist who writes for NYRB, The New Yorker, and Jacobin, Bouie is the New York Times columnist whose every sentence draws on historical sources. (This roster of publications should tell us something specific about the politics of mainstream print media: it may not be the home of radical “Marxist lunatics,” but it’s where the Left has won.)

I address their work today because their use of the past has begun to frustrate their political purposes. Or are they my purposes? Let us see. My complaint is that their assumption of continuity between past and present threatens to disarm their audience by treating Trump’s bid for unbridled power as nothing new— as a feature, not a bug—in the annals of the American experience. Their most recent forays are my cases in point. (Another likely case is that of Gerald Horne: see David Waldstreicher’s review of the corpus at Boston Review: https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-long-american-counter-revolution/?)

Robin suggests that Trump’s unprecedented claims of exclusive executive privilege in foreign policy, by which he justifies kidnapping and deporting legal residents of the US, merely reprise the “law and order” crusades that Republicans have been pressing since the 1960s. Nothing new here, he says, and that’s why it’s depressing. Bouie takes us back even further, to the 19th century, suggesting that Trump’s claims—which erase the line between domestic and foreign policy and to that precise extent magnify executive power—should recall the experience of free Blacks in the antebellum period, when they were subject to arbitrary detainment, imprisonment, and even deportation to the South under fully constitutional fugitive slave laws. This experience, of the fragility of freedom, is new only in the sense that the majority of Americans is now catching up to what people of color have long had to know in their bones.

[https://coreyrobin.com/2025/04/17/its-not-what-is-new-but-what-is-old-thats-so-depressing-in-the-current-moment/. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/opinion/trump-court-order-constitution.html?]

These are compelling analogues because they remind us that US history is a slaughter bench. D. H. Lawrence was right: beneath the sunny disposition of the optimistic American is a hard, stoic, isolate killer. But in these times, we hardly need the reminder—and to be reminded in this way, as if The Who are introducing us to the new boss, is to obscure the novelty of Trump’s innovations.

The diminishing returns on historical analogues have reached the vanishing point because this president is, in fact, a radical departure from the past. All bets are off, including those we’ve made on the moral arc of the universe: it has no shape until we give it one.

II

Now, I’ve been reading, teaching, and writing history for over fifty years—how can I say this? Well, one of the things I’ve learned is that the wisdom of the ages is sometimes worthless. The vicarious experience supplied by the study of the past can be pointless, functioning as the itinerary of the tourist who returns home with all his assumptions about foreign customs validated because his expectations were confirmed.

In other words, the past as such is like mere experience: it tells us nothing. A past event, any event, has to be commemorated if it is to remain an event with lasting effects—which is to say that the past as such is meaningless, that either we keep responding to what has happened, keep remembering and recording this or that moment as a significant event, or its effects will be lost on us in the present. Not only that. The difference in the way a past event is remembered will make all the difference in deciding the future, and vice versa—our judgements in and of the present, which determine our assessments of what the future holds, will depend in large part on how we see it in relation to past events or epochs.

But a smoothly sequential narrative—one with a beginning, middle, and end—can’t always be constructed from the raw materials of memory, or of archival research, or of the “secondary” sources (what historians record in their monographs). When such continuities disappear, and you know that history isn’t repeating itself, you realize that there’s nothing more you can learn from the past. At that point, you can leave it behind. In fact, you have to—you have to become a radical. Otherwise you can’t respond adequately or inventively to the thick, coming future that is always overtaking the abiding present.

But the radicalism that comes of this realization has to be earned. It is not the attitude toward history that assumes revolutions are events that escape or obliterate the present because it is the product of a hopelessly corrupted, irredeemable past—as the Bolsheviks of 1917 assumed, or the Yarvinist Republicans of Project 2025 assume. Nor is it the attitude toward history that finds radicalism only at the outer edges of the past, where marginal figures speak truth to power but abstain from holding it because to do so is to risk their souls.

No, the radicalism you need at times like these is what comes of ransacking the past. You can’t ignore it as if it’s useless for present purposes; you can’t stick with the kindred spirits you find in the past as if the mainstream is equally useless; and you can’t treat the present as if the past is not even past—as if nothing has changed in the last 50 years, or since 1619. You have to designate a usable past, which is to say an ethical principle that resides in and flows from the historically determined circumstances in which you now find yourself. You’re in search of an ought that plainly derives from what is.

III

The great revolutionaries of the modern epoch understood this radical imperative more acutely than most of us will ever have to. James Madison is my favorite example. He undertook a close study of ancient and modern republics in 1786 as a way of finding a way beyond the “elective despotism” that threatened the new United States of America (those are Jefferson’s words). That study of the past convinced Madison that all previous republics had failed because they had allowed the rights of property to trample the rights of persons: “In all the Governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots & lawgivers the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich.”

Madison was able, as a result, to design a republic that kept these rights in balance—by getting radical, by departing in every respect from the specifications of earlier political theorists, from Aristotle and Polybius to Machiavelli, Harrington, and Montesquieu. For example, where they had seen historical time (the metaphor they typically used was “commerce”) as the solvent of republics because it brought social differentiation and conflict—the division into “the Class with and the Class without property,” as Madison put it the constitutional convention of 1787—the young American saw it as the bulwark of political stability, because it would produce more factions; that is, it would produce more diverse interests, and thus less likelihood of a despotic majority. He left the past behind by enlisting historical time, by harnessing the inevitable—economic growth and development, social change— to the project of preserving popular, republican government.

Lincoln is another good example. He is invariably depicted by both Left and Right as a moderate figure who, being partial to the Constitution, was forced by radical Republicans to make the Civil War an anti-slavery crusade. He is better characterized as a revolutionary because he was more radical than conservative in his approach to every question. He always insisted that there could be no compromise on the promise of the Declaration—either “all men are created equal,” and there was no conceivable moral justification for slavery, or the rule of the few at the expense of the many was the moral law imposed by the nature of things.

More to the point, Lincoln understood that the secession of southern states—which he anticipated, then encouraged by refusing to compromise on the Republican platform of “no extension” of slavery into federal territories—had created something like a state of nature, in which the constitutional guarantees of property in human beings could no longer be observed, let alone enforced, by the states left in the Union. All bets were off, including the infamous Fugitive Slave Act (1850) that had amplified the original provision in Article IV, Section 2. The Constitution itself, which Lincoln had acknowledged as the historical bulwark of the Declaration’s ethical principle, was now in question.

During the secession crisis, between the election of November of 1860 and his inauguration in March 1861, Lincoln wrote dozens of letters exhorting Republicans in Congress to refuse compromise on the extension of slavery, knowing full well that absent such compromise, a civl war was inevitable. He had no qualms about the bloody consequences of his nearly unique rigidity. “Hold firm, as with a chain of steel,” he kept writing to wavering comrades, “the tug [of war] has to come, and better now than at any time hereafter.” Or in a variation on the theme: “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere long, must be done again. The dangerous ground—that into which some of our friends have a hankering to run—is Pop Sov. Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, and better now than at any time hereafter.”

Lincoln offered a longer explanation of his militant stance to Congressman J. T. Hale in a confidential letter of January 11, 1861:

“What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance the government shall be broken up unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are attempting to ply upon us or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us and of the government. They will repeat the experiment on us ad libitum. A year will not pass till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union. They now have the Constitution under which we have lived over seventy years, and acts of Congress of their own framing, with no prospect of their being changed; and they can never have a more shallow pretext for breaking up the government, or extorting a compromise, than now.” [my italics]

Notice how Lincoln understood the Constitution on which he had staked so much—it was a malleable instrument of government that would have to be changed if slavery was “to be placed,” as he put it, “in the course of ultimate extinction.”

The republic that Madison designed was coming apart in the 1850s because the Slave Power insisted on enforcing the rights of property as against the rights of persons—as against the human beings they held in bondage. The oligarchy in control of the South was willing to betray the original intent of the founders, that is, a constitutional, increasingly popular, democratic political order. Lincoln and the Republican Party salvaged the intended republic not by preserving its past, but by fundamentally transforming its architecture, by amending the Constitution in accordance with a new birth of freedom.

The Republican Party as led by Trump and validated by the Supreme Court insists, as the Slave Power did, on enforcing the rights of property as against the rights of persons, no matter what. The oligarchy personified by Elon Musk and now in control of the federal government is fully committed to sacrificing the poor to the rich, and to that precise extent is willing to betray the original intent of the founders, that is, a constitutional, increasingly popular, democratic political order. The opposition, whatever its derivation, can salvage the intended republic not by preserving its past—and not by repudiating it— but by fundamentally transforming its architecture, by amending the Constitution in accordance with a new birth of freedom.