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- [00:01]
Expedia Voiceover
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- [00:31]
Matthew Karp
part of the motivation for this new narrative of history comes from a sense of the way in which that old narrative was so deeply complacent that it ignored the persistence of deep inequalities across all of these supposed progressive changes. And I think under the leadership of liberal presidents like Clinton and Obama, there was a sense on the left and maybe even among many so called liberals that this Whiggish account of America's change was really failing to address these deep inequalities that actually the last 50 years, say, since the Civil Rights movement had done very little to challenge. And now the good fight with Jascha Monk.
- [01:15]
Podcast Host
I'm recording today from a very special
- [01:17]
Podcast Host (possibly same as C, different segment)
place, the ancestral Hassel and estate of Alexide Tocqueville in Normandy. So yesterday I had the pleasure of holding in my hands the first edition of Democracy in America. That was a 500 print run and I held it just as I was standing above the desk on which Tocqueville actually wrote up his reflections about America after returning from the country. And so obviously it got me thinking about what is the same and what is different today, which parts of today's America Tocqueville would recognize and which parts he might be surprised or perhaps even shocked by, I think, much of America he would recognize. The passion for equality continues, even for America continues to be a deeply unequal country. Tocqueville recognized the importance of race in America, and he would be unsurprised by the way in which it divides the country today. Tocqueville recognized America's incredible civic spirit and entrepreneurial activity, and he would be unsurprised by all of the corporations and NGOs and other things that America has today. And to be clear, Tockel also recognized that there was high political spirits in the United States and that people had very deep political disagreements in the era in which he traveled the country. Nevertheless, it seems to me like one thing that he might be shocked by is just a sheer extent of ill will between American citizens. Not just political disagreements, not just passionate fights, but the way in which it feels today as though many Americans really hate their fellow citizens, want bad things to happen to them, want their fellow citizens to adopt terrible political positions so that they can look at them and
- [03:05]
Podcast Host
laugh at them and say, you see, I told you how terrible they are.
- [03:10]
Podcast Host (possibly same as C, different segment)
This is something that, to me, is not entirely new in American history. There have been moments in the past when that was the case, but it's not something that has been the case at most junctures in American history. It was not the case when I first came to the United States 15 years ago. And I don't think that there is anything in democracy in America that suggests that that was present or at least described by Tocqueville at the time. And so one lesson I'm taking from the weekend I'm spending here at a conference at this wonderful estate is that we've made much progress since the days in which Tocqueville was in America. But there's one aspect, at least, in which we should try to live up to the image that he had of the.
- [04:00]
Podcast Host
Today. My guest is Matthew Karp. Matt is an associate professor of history at Princeton. His first book was Vast Southern Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. He is an historian of particularly 19th century America. And then we had a really interesting conversation about the kind of history wars
- [04:19]
Podcast Host (possibly same as C, different segment)
in the United States at the moment,
- [04:20]
Podcast Host
the way in which conservative view of history has transformed over the last decades, the way in which what used to be a dominant liberal view of history in the academy is increasingly being replaced by a version of American history that casts its worst failings as its kind of DNA. Our conversation includes everything from the 1619 Project to how to think about American politics in a way that's actually conducive to real and sensible political change. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Matt Karp, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:54]
Matthew Karp
Hey, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [04:57]
Podcast Host
So you've been thinking a lot about the particular kind of war, the history that's happening at the moment in the United States, more broadly in the intellectual sphere, among historians. But perhaps before we get there, there are these sort of pat lions about Americans never caring about their history and sort of forgetting their own history. But that hasn't exactly been true, as you point out. So how have Americans sort of traditionally thought about the history and how does that inform this moment? And then perhaps we can get to what's different about this moment.
- [05:27]
Matthew Karp
Right. I think I quoted one of the Gore Vidal zingers about this. We learn nothing because we remember nothing. That's sort of a common theme in a certain kind of liberal discourse of sort of self flagellation about America's ignorance of the past. I Feel like probably in some sense, every country has its own version of that. Or historians are certainly interested in telling everybody else that they don't know their history. That's a move that our profession likes to engage in and sometimes seeps into the public sphere.
- [05:50]
Podcast Host
Of course, there are countries where the cliche is, remember that somebody going to Ireland and joking about seeing on some murals, remember 1037. And this is a historian of Ireland. What on Earth happened in 1037? I have no idea.
- [06:03]
Matthew Karp
I feel like there have been two broad transformations on the right and on the left in the way that the politics of history show up today. And I'd say on the right, there's been a kind of shift from a kind of traditionalist, patriarchal, or kind of even filial pietistic worship of America's traditional leaders, gods and generals, which very much for a long time included the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, to, I think the dominant mood now is still nationalistic, but I think it's much more in the Trump era has turned in some ways away from the substance of history and towards a kind of a trolling, even a kind of nihilistic escape from history, which is, I think, a transformation worth noting, both the retreat from the Lost Cause and this kind of embrace of the MAGA theory of history or the sort of maga non theory of
- [06:47]
Podcast Host
history, just to seize it out a little bit. So as I understand it, sort of, if you go back 20 or 40 years, and on the right, the view of American history was as relatively free of blemishes, as relatively free of serious problems, and then perhaps even some ways of trying to rehabilitate Southern generals and so on and so forth. And when you say it's sort of gone into a more trolling mode today, I take it you mean things like Dinesh d' Souza pointing out that, you know, actually it was the democrats in the 19th century who defended slavery and the Republicans who attacked. And so it sort of is actually distancing itself, even though not very loudly or not sort of in a very obvious way, it's actually distancing itself from the negative parts of American history. But 20 or 40 years ago, some conservatives might have tried to downplay or defend. Am I getting this right?
- [07:34]
Matthew Karp
Absolutely right. I mean, I think there's a much deeper, longer history. We could go through the decades since, say, the American Civil War, talk about the history of how that has been remembered. I don't know if that would be super productive, but I think what I'm most interested in. Yeah. Is that More recent shift from even as recently as the Bush administration, we had several cabinet members who came in and had many controversies, you know, John Ashcroft and I think Gail Norton in the Interior Department, who basically openly praised the Confederacy and lamented the defeat of the south in the Civil War, lamenting what we'd lost in terms of state rights and so on. And, you know, obviously there are other ways to measure this. When Martin Luther King Day came up for a vote for the first time in Congress, a majority of Republicans opposed it in the late 70s, and only gradually across the 80s did they sort of relent. Whereas now there is a significant retreat from some of those specific symbols associated with the Lost Cause and sort of Southern resistance and states rights. You know, the Juneteenth vote that just came up, another national holiday explicitly affirming and celebrating emancipation, was passed almost unanimously with co sponsor John Cornyn of Texas. So I think there's a bigger shift, despite the obvious, like, ongoing pro Confederate sentiment in parts of the country. I don't mean to completely eliminate that, but I think in the way that the politics of history has showed up kind of institutionally, there has been a big shift. And the dominant energy, I would say, on the harder right is not to celebrate Confederate gods and generals. You know, Donald Trump isn't Robert E. Lee fanboy, there's no question about that. We know that. So we understand that clearly an element of pro Confederate sympathy remains in the south and elsewhere. And you do see the Confederate flag. You saw it on January 6 and elsewhere. But in terms of what the Trump administration itself was really up to in its more kind of formal and institutional sense, the way that it wanted to engage the politics of history, it was not invested in a kind of Lost Cause memorabilia. If you read the 1776 project, they call John C. Calhoun the father of identity politics and follow the d' Souza formula in identifying him as a Democrat alongside side. The Democratic leaders of the Confederacy, et cetera, they're if anything, inclined to embrace the macho nationalism of Lincoln and of the Union, arguably, if you want to find a narrative in there. But to me, what I find the strongest kind of current in that is not on the right. They've actually developed a new and persuasive formula for thinking about American history that in some ways they kind of accepted in d' Souza, for sure, the basic chronology developed by liberal and left leaning historians centered on slavery and emancipation at the heart of what 19th century US history is about. And just switching the colors on the Jerseys and saying, you know, the Good guys were Republicans and were conservatives. The older narrative, for all of its flaws and worse than flaws, had arguably a coherent philosophy behind it that, you know, really was taking a position in interpreting these events that was different from the dominant left or liberal positions. And I think that the new formulation is not really invested in developing its own sort of theory of history. It's kind of accepting the one that's out there and taking opportunistic moments to dunk on. The opposition mixed in with some chaos in Trump's Twitter feed because he clearly likes the History Channel and the movie Gettysburg and loves Robert E. Lee. But I think that liberals are kind of predisposed to sort of see every invocation of Robert E. Lee in a Trump speech as something like he's embracing the lost cause again. But if you really look at what the administration was up to, I don't see a lot of evidence for that. I think it's much more like a kind of trolling grandpa with a hobby moment rather than a real investment in Southern politics and Southern states rights, certainly, which was a part of the right as recently as the 80s and 90s, for sure.
- [11:02]
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- [11:29]
Podcast Host
this is somehow reminding me of a friend of mine in college who would have blaring arguments and he would, you know, very strongly be on one side of this. And if you realize that he's losing the argument, then at some point, after a brief pause, he would shout, exactly. And claim that he had been on the side of the argument with one all along. It sort of seems to have a little echo on that. I think this is slightly beyond the scope of our conversation today, but there are interesting ways in which the Trump error, at the same time as obviously being, in my view at least, very dangerous and actually quite sui generous, has accepted a lot of social developments in an interesting way. One of the dogs that really has embarked for the last five or perhaps ten years is gay marriage, right? Which is something that conservatives had opposed very passionately for a very long time. Famously, state referenda to ban same sex marriage help to win George w. Bush the 2004 elections. And there's no attempt whatsoever, while Republicans had unified control of government from 2016 to 2018 to roll that back or to even make it part of a political debate. And sometimes I think it's important when you're trying to understand a political moment, to look at these things that are not very visible precisely because they're not in contention, precisely because both sides have actually accepted them as one of the moments of real change. And I think the fact that same sex marriage is just something that's now pretty much uncontroversial, at least in terms of day to day politics, is really quite remarkable, actually. That might be a similar sort of thing.
- [12:53]
Matthew Karp
Yeah, I agree. It's often these dogs that don't bark that are just as significant in trying to assess what historical change really is happening and what transformations have kind of been established and which ones haven't been. And I do think that even in this sort of post George Floyd moment, when you did have a lot of, you know, people on the right getting hot and bothered about tearing down of statues and stuff, I thought it was notable that Tucker Carlson never once defended the Confederacy or any of the Confederate statues. But line of battle that he drew was on national figures, you know, know Ulysses Grant, George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, et cetera. And it was not as simple as the d' Souza good guys are Republicans, bad guys are Democrats. But it was clearly a conscious decision that he or, you know, his team or whoever in that world had made to cut the Confederacy loose, if you will. And that showed up in all of the various statue gardens and sort of absurd nationalistic pageant ideas that Trump was shooting out at the end of his term in his late running arrival in the history wars. None of it really was involved in, you know, celebrating the Confederacy. So again, that doesn't make Tucker Carlson a civil rights hero by any means, or mean that he doesn't engage in all sorts of other racially tinged dog whistles and so on. But I think it's important to note from a historian's perspective that this is very different from how a right wing cable or radio news host would have been talking in the 90s for sure.
- [14:10]
Podcast Host
And so one thing you chronicle is the way in which the right's view of history has actually changed a lot in the last 10, 15 years. And we've teased it out very nicely. Now, ironically, one way of describing the situation perhaps is that today's right, at least in certain ways, has accepted this liberal narrative of American history that was prevalent in our institutions in history departments until 10, 20 years ago. Then at the same time, it seems as though there's been a similar transformation on the liberal. And I would say, particularly the left part of the political space in which that old liberal narrative has actually itself been jettisoned for a rather new narrative. So tell us what's going on in terms of thinking about history and historiography on that side of the political spectrum.
- [14:52]
Matthew Karp
Yeah, I agree. There's been a kind of realignment that in some ways is interlocking. And I think both of these shifts kind of in some ways feed each other because the new antagonisms drive each side further into its sort of new position. But, yeah, I would say on the liberal left, and I mean, we can talk about this, but I guess it sort of depends on what your definition of liberalism, what your definition of the left is. But I would say, arguably, it's almost more significant in the way that this narrative has come to shape institutional liberalism rather than just the kind of activist left. But I would say that there's been a shift from the. The buoyant, often optimistic, occasionally complacent liberal belief in American progress and in progressive change as the kind of root of American history. You know, this is famously encapsulated in Obama's line about the moral arc of the universe is long, that bends toward justice. And every kind of Democratic president from, you know, certainly from John F. Kennedy through to Obama, depicted US History as this kind of long march of progress, with the American Revolution, the struggle against slavery, the struggle for women's suffrage, sometimes the struggle for the labor movement, depending on the moment that we're talking about, the struggle for civil rights, the struggle for gay rights, again in an Obama speech, all of these would kind of often converge as this sort of general narrative of progress. And sometimes this did lean towards a kind of deep complacency. And Bill Clinton's line about there's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed about what's right with America, that I think, you know, critics have often accused liberal history, even back into the 19th century, you know, they called it Whig history, as kind of of celebrating this inevitable march to progress, almost as if we didn't need to do anything because progress was sort of mechanically working itself out. Anyway, I think that's all gone now, or at least I wouldn't say all gone, because you can still hear notes of it in Biden himself, who is an amalgam, I think, of a lot of these different forces, but I think it's been challenged in a really powerful way, not just on the activist left, but in the citadels of liberalism itself, like the New York Times, by a new narrative embodied in the 1619 project, but not only present in it that,
- [16:50]
Podcast Host
just as a side note, will sell fire debates about what's liberal and what's left. I mean, I consider myself a liberal. You consider yourself, as I take it, a leftist who's very much not a liberal. I think sometimes you can see on which figures we agree on treating skeptically by the fact that I will think of them as leftist and you will think of them as liberal. It's not clear to me how liberal the New York Times is today, but to you, the New York Times is still sort of the citadel of liberalism. Wish that it were in my mind, but we'll shelf that debate. But I think hopefully this is a description of. In terms of debate.
- [17:18]
Matthew Karp
I have these debates with Sean Lens, too, where he's like, that's not liberalism. I'm a liberal. You know, and it's like, well, okay, but it depends on whether you have in some ways an idealistic or functional definition of what liberalism is. But anyway, clearly there's been a new narrative that has challenged this sense of America as a vehicle for progress in which American history is defined by these progressive changes. I think 1619, you know, most dramatically develops a narrative of US history that's centered in the role of oppression, specifically racial oppression, in America's origins. That's like, explicitly, the project is focused on refounding america not in 1776, but in 1619, and also on. On the continuity of that oppression through the long sweep of American history. So instead of, you know, highlighting moments of progressive change, from the Civil War to the Civil rights movement, the narrative that unfurls under the ages of 16 19, I get my geometric metaphors mixed here. It's both linear in the sense that it is a flat line from the antebellum plantation complex to the prison industrial complex today, et cetera, et cetera. And it's also kind of circular reading the moral weight of 1618. Yes, there are some references to, you know, the role of African Americans in constructing democracy, Hannah Jones's opening essay. But I think, taking the project as a whole, it's clearly making an argument that is much more invested in these continuities and in fact, these kind of cyclical struggles, rather than marking progressive victories or noting the importance of change. And I think that has different political implications, and I think it's a different kind of historical cosmology than the world of progressive change.
- [18:51]
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- [19:20]
Podcast Host
in one of your articles, you point out very nicely that in the 1619 project, Martin Luther King gets one mention, the same number as Martin Shkreli. What do you think makes that emphasis on the continuity of what is bad about America so appealing at the moment? I mean, it's obvious that looking at Trump and everything he represented, despite, as you're saying, the sort of strange acceptance of the old liberal narrative in certain parts of American history, it prompts a reexamination of everything that's worse about America. And I can sort of see that. But there seems to be in my mind a kind of moral or political appeal that those who write American history in this way seem to see in saying the DNA of American history is slavery, the DNA of American history is 1619. The DNA of American history is its original sin, as they call it. And that's really the thing that defines the country. Why do you think that seems like an appealing way to talk about American history to people who are very much invested in political possibility today and what to do? And why is it that in your mind, actually a mistake? Why is it that that actually doesn't open the possibility of effective political action nearly as much as those who insist in this reading seem to assume?
- [20:35]
Matthew Karp
I guess I think part of the motivation for this new narrative of history comes from a sense of the way in which that old narrative was so deeply complacent that it ignored the persistence of deep inequalities across all of supposed progressive changes. And I think under the leadership of liberal presidents like Clinton and Obama, I think there was a sense on the left and maybe even among many so called liberals that this Whiggish account of America's change was really failing to address these deep inequalities that actually the last 50 years, say, since the civil rights movement had done very little to challenge. If you look at, say, the racial wealth gap, or frankly the the class wealth gap, which encompasses most of the racial wealth gap, since the racial wealth gap itself owes itself largely to the differences in the top 10 and really the top 5 and 1%, and that these kind of really persistent inequalities under capitalism, we're not even getting airtime under this liberal narrative. And that is a sort of place in which I'm sympathetic to a much more critical and a much more Darker, kind of like, how did we get here? This liberal triumphalism doesn't really address this stuff. Now, where I think, you know, the mistake is, or where I'm much more critical of this movement, is its effort to replace that sense of inevitable progress, this sort of moral elevator of history, with this sense of paralyzed, doomed, endless continuity owing to original sin or owing to a genetic code, or owing to some kind of tragic arc that is inescapable. And I think, again, this is maybe to come back to a sympathetic point. I think some of that comes from a sense of a kind of hopelessness about the possibility of political change under our current environment. And that I don't think that the proper political or intellectual response to hopelessness is to instantiate it at the core of our historiography. But I do sort of understand that impulse from some quarters. Does that make sense?
- [22:26]
Podcast Host
Yeah, I think that makes sense. I guess I'm trying to think through the second piece of it. You know, there seems to be a weird tension there. Let me go on a little bit of a tangent myself. I always find it very strange when the same people, as empirically, I think is often the case, seem to believe two different things. One, they tend to believe that America today is deeply characterized by white supremacy and the most powerful institutions in the country are deeply racist and so on and so forth. And then two, they say we need real restrictions on freedom of speech, and we need to make sure that we are able to censor people saying horrible things. And one of the problems I have with that is that it just seems like a very naive understanding and vision of power. But if you mean seriously that the country is deeply racist and white supremacist, how can you also want a bunch of people on a committee or in Silicon Valley to be able to decide what gets said and what won't get set? Because why on earth are you confident that they will censor the right kinds of things and allow the right kind of things? And I guess there's sort of something. It's not exactly the same paradox, but something, a weird tension in this, where people who say America has always been the same, its DNA is to be racist. It's not just that 1619 is a founding moment of America, but it is the founding moment of America that truly defines the country. And yet, at some level, if it owned its nihilism right, if it said, and therefore America will always be, to use online language, trash, and we should give up on ever trying to improve it, and either it's a real black nationalism that says, you know, African Americans need their own country. Or it is just a pessimistic philosophy of history that says, let's stop struggling and just give up. Because as you know, we've learned from history, but nothing's ever gonna get better. I would sort of get how these two things fit together, but it's this odd thing where slavery and white supremacy is the DNA of America seems to go together with. And this is supposed to be the preamble for radical political action. And there seems to be an odd mismatch there, but I haven't quite put my finger on.
- [24:27]
Matthew Karp
Yeah, I guess for me that's legible through the sort of big political economic changes in the last 50 years. And this is where my own, if you want to say, leftism comes in. But I mean, I think the domina and with Tomas Piketty and others, I think the dominant fact of world history since the 1970s or world history, the history of the North Atlantic industrial and post industrial world, is the devolution of the labor movement and the weakening of the institutional power of the working class and the collapse of class politics itself. And I think in that moment where labor and workers are weaker and less cognizant of any kind of political power or efficacy of any kind, you have, on the one hand, the increase appeal of, you know, and you've written a lot about this, I guess, the right populist temptation. And then on the other hand, I think you have a sort of new, you know. Piketty calls this the sort of Brahmin left that has emerged largely in academia and media and other kind of professional class cadres that retains some sense of this sort of commitment to egalitarianism, but is totally divorced from labor and from class politics itself. So what kind of. Of ideas about the past or about political change, period, does it have? It has a kind of worldview centered on a kind of moral catharsis and reckoning that whether it's through sort of diversity seminar trainings or through a new account of American history, can kind of right various wrongs without actually being connected to, I think, political mass movements grounded in material conditions. And I think that flight from materialism, if you will, I think does explain on two levels, both the impulse to locate these historical wrongs not in our present conditions, but in the past itself. And I think the way in which that impulse has been received, because I think the truth is, and this is where you have something like various Trotskyists online have made this critique very eloquently, but the way in which this new historical cosmology of 1619, et cetera, does not threaten the powers that be, does not threaten Silicon Valley or J.P. morgan or any of the kind of new paladins of our economy, because it is so idealistic and so grounded in this place of almost most abstract reckoning that it does not present a material threat to the power of capital today. And I think it's therefore been much easier for it to be embraced by various establishment figures. Some of these ideas, to the extent that they're left ideas, they came up from, you know, leftists in the mid 20th century who were on the far fringes and margins of the cultural establishment. Now they're at the very center of it. You know, they're winning Pulitzer Prizes and so on. And I think the pure materialist, which I'm actually not, but I think the pure materialist would say day this demonstrates how unthreatening these ideas are. So, you know, it may be logically inconsistent in the way that you're talking about it, but historically, functionally, these things are quite compatible.
- [27:17]
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- [27:35]
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- [28:11]
Matthew Karp
Why wait?
- [28:12]
Podcast Host
Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. Let's make two distinctions because I think that you explained something that I agree with, but I'm not sure that it's the whole of the picture. So let me try and outline how I see it this so let's distinguish on one side between and I'm making these labels up as we're talking, you know, liberal history and 1619 history.
- [28:34]
Podcast Host (possibly same as C, different segment)
Right.
- [28:34]
Podcast Host
Liberal history being the sort of older Shone Willans reading of history and history, obviously after the 1619 project and a view of American history that makes 1619 and slavery and white supremacy more something like the DNA of America. And then on the other end, let's distinguish between broadly speaking, ameliorist power politics, let's say of Obama, Clinton, whatever kind, and something more like, let's say revolutionary politics for the sake of it. And then you get a typical political science two by two, you get four possible logical positions. And I think actually you can more or less find people in those four quadrants. I don't think any of those quadrants is completely imaginary. So I think what you've described very well is the ameliorist 1619 quadrant, which is to say Robin Diangelo. Right. Like you have this thing where racism is the DNA of every American and the way to beat that is with corporate diversity seminars for which you invite Ms. D' Angelo as a speaker and pay her a lot of money. Right. And I think as a critique of that which is a powerful force in American society and politics today, which has become inscribed at the heart, I don't know, of liberalism, but certainly of capitalism in the Fortune companies and so on and so forth. I think, think you described that very well and I actually don't have any particular disagreements with how we talk about that space. I guess I do also think that there is a part of more revolutionary politics that is also drawn to the 1619 project. Right. That there is a sort of view where. Well, because of all of these things, when you look, Even for the 1619 project itself, it says capitalism actually at its very basis comes out of slavery and all of those things. And so it does want to. To at least offer a critique of capitalism. It sees itself as being not just an advocate for universal healthcare or something, but really of capitalism itself comes out of slavery in a way that taints it forever and ever and therefore we need to get rid of capitalism. So that to me seems to be in a different part of it, two by two and one, where it's trying to combine revolutionary politics with a 1619 history. And I wonder what you think explains the appeal to some people of that kind of political system space.
- [30:42]
Matthew Karp
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, obviously, clearly I come from a third quadrant which is, you know, no one will like to hear this. Literally no one but the Willenst, Du Bois Marx quadrant that does see history as you know, defined in some ways by progressive, even revolutionary change, and yet is not content with meliorist politics today.
- [30:59]
Podcast Host
And I'm probably in something like the fourth quadrant, which is to say that we probably broadly see eye to eye on the history. But I'm more sympathetic to ameliorism revolutionary politics at this point in my life. When I was 16, it may have
- [31:09]
Podcast Host (possibly same as C, different segment)
been a different thing.
- [31:11]
Matthew Karp
Revolutionary politics is confusing because I think, anyway, that's the topic for another podcast. But I think in terms of the appeal of that say activist wing of the 1619 group or the kind of slavery is capitalism stuff on one hand, again, I'm sympathetic to, you know, some of these arguments, especially in historical scholarship works like, you know, Sven Becker's book and others that really want to make the point. And my own first book did not take on the capitalism question very seriously. But I wrote about, you know, the southern planter class before the Civil War and the way in which they were sort of nationalistic, forward looking, engaged in a kind of project of globalism, imperialism, and saw themselves not as pre modern throwbacks, but on the vanguard of modernity and their ideas about race and economic production, et cetera. I mean, I'm still persuaded by that. And so I think the links between slavery's capitalism and American capitalism are real and there was space for that. I think the political error is to believe that, you know, the way that you described it by tarring capitalism as in effect a kind of latter day slavery or it bears the mark of the beast, that that will be a kind of trump card in a political argument. And again, I guess I come back to the mor weight put on that argument again reflects the increasing sort of academicization and professionalization of the left, including the activist left in this country, the NGO iFoodation, if you will, of the left, that this is not a politics rooted in the material conditions of how capitalism works today at the shop floor. This is an argument that comes out of the academy and migrates through activists and sometimes then does show up with politicians too, because this new Brahmin left has a strong electoral component, but I don't think that it can actually deliver on its promise politically. I think it's a mistake tactically and intellectually for one to kind of fall into the sort of theory of history that is cyclical and linear. I don't want to say that you don't have to embrace the inevitability of progress, but you have to embrace the reality of struggle and revolutionary change. I mean, it was Du Bois who called the Civil War era, the greatest and most important step towards democracy of all races ever undertaken in world history. And he was writing in Black Reconstruction in his Marxist phase. This was not a meliorist point of view. The Civil War itself was not meliorist. You know, radical Reconstruction is not a kind of earned income tax credit kind of policy, you know, nor, I would argue, was Abraham Lincoln himself. And this is another historical argument. But I mean, for me, it's important for the left to kind of reclaim not just the possibility, but the reality of radical change in American history, the reality of, yes, political revolution and the connection between democratic politics and mass politics that's focused on a radical realignment of society that I think has happened periodically, with almost regularity in US History, from the Revolution to the Civil War to the New Deal era to the Civil Rights movement. And not all of those changes were complete, obviously, and not all of them were good. They often were connected to intense backlashes and reactionary waves in politics, too, that in some ways sometimes made things worse by some perspectives than they were before. So there's not a moral elevator here, but there is a consistent opening and possibility to change from the left or from the right that I think looping into either this sort of bland progressive narrative or the sort of paralyzed, genetic, DNA focused narrative. It really obscures. And I think it's a fatal error for left politics, first of all, and for understanding how history works.
- [34:29]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it strikes me that both at least the slightly cliched version of the old liberal historiography and a lot of the new 16, 19 historiography share a lot of their form and share an emphasis on inevitability. If Bill Clinton's line was that there's nothing that's wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right in America. A lot of the slogan for the new sort of wave of leftist or liberal or whatever you want to call it, 1619 historiography, seems to be something like there's something that's good about America that isn't marred by or caused by what's terrible about America. This, to me, speaks a little bit to a wider thing that I find striking in the way that history is done today. And, you know, I would never call myself a historian. I was a history major and undergrad and came Cambridge and did a master's in history. So I have a little bit of historiographical training. And the thing that was always beaten into me as an undergrad is you don't look at history in order to give Brownie points of what's good and what's bad and sort of from our perspective today. But in particular, you don't look at history as a simple form of genealogy where if something has origins in X and X was bad, that means that that's something thing must itself be bad. And what I find striking about the last 10 or 20 years on our intellectual scene is that history seems to have a much bigger prominence, perhaps in the academy, but certainly in the general public than it did 20 years ago. When you look at how many Pulitzer prizes historians are winning, when you look at some of the big intellectual stars like Ta Nehisi Coates, who are not perhaps trained academic historians, but certainly draw very, very heavily on history and very work, there is this incredible appetite for history. But a lot of it does seem to take either explicitly or in an implicit form, this genealogical form, right, to say, hey, actually the origins of current policing methods, of capitalism, of our discourse about human rights, of X, Y and Z are problematic in these kinds of ways. And so therefore, actually this is itself problematic. How do you think about this genealogical mode of argument and the role it's playing in our discourse today?
- [36:45]
Matthew Karp
I mean, I'm not totally unsympathetic to the importance of understanding lineages and history and continuities and the relationship between past crimes and present day realities. Absolutely. This is part of the historical enterprise. I take Walter Benjamin's point, you know, when he says every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. I mean, and there is a kind of foundational truth to that. I guess I depart from the current instrumentalization of that in something like the meta arc of 1619. And therefore, in its kind of reductive insistence on therefore conceiving of all history as this kind of closed chamber in which these marks of the beast almost preclude the reality of enormous changes. I think on the one hand, if you just look at the narrative of the past that it unspools, leaving even aside the future for a minute, it's amazing how the Civil War itself is almost absent in that chronology of history. And I do understand that they, for specific, understandable reasons, they didn't want to do a kind of a greatest hits album of, oh, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. And then you have the heroes of the Civil War rights movement. And that's what African American history is for. So many Americans who are educated under the auspices of this kind of progressive narrative and they wanted to kind of tell a different story that challenged that story. So I do understand that as A kind of corrective. At the same token, to kind of wipe out the anti slavery movement, the Civil War, radical Reconstruction, as mass political struggles, as part of the center of both African American and US history is to kind of craft a narrative in which, you know, there isn't really a difference between 1850, say, and 1900. And I think even on those terms, it really is a huge misapprehension of what materially did change between a regime of, say, chattel slavery, you know, and human property and a society and economy based on that, and the very different social and racial order under Jim Crow, which you don't have to do a kind of spot on line item comparisons about which is better, which is worse, although there were obviously huge gains made by that struggle that were not rolled back even in the reaction. If you look at, say, black literacy rates, or if you look at, you know, the autonomy provided over marriage and family life, if you look at even, even economists have calculated the share of earnings that black workers in the south basically got to own themselves under Jim Crow as opposed to under slavery. It goes up remarkably, the amount of hours that they spent working, not to mention the entire order of society is different under that kind of sharecropping regime. I hope it's not pedantic to say these things are different. And I don't think that if you're drilling down to sort of teaching history at grade school, that we have to get into the dynamics of sharecropping in that kind of way. But I think as a broad take on what has changed. And then of course, from 1900 to 1950, there's change. I think, I just think the idea then that the American future is going to be a land continuation of the last 50 years, whether that's wonderful and progressive, or whether that's tyrannical and completely closed is mistaken. There are obviously going to be unpredictable things that happen that transform our current regime into something else. And I think you don't even have to have a particular political disposition or ideology to kind of feel the importance of that, both to any kind of egalitarian politics or to a kind of real grapple with the nature of history itself. And so I think on both of those levels, this cosmology really is self limiting.
- [39:59]
Podcast Host
So how should we make use of history today? You're a historian in the academy. You're also somebody who writes for a broader audience. How should we think about the role of history Now? Of course, it may be that we have to wear two different hats. I take a bit neuro Gaming work, you will write whatever you think is intellectually true. And obviously, even in public facing work, you don't want to say things that are untrue or that somehow are overly sensitive, simplistic. But what is actually the public purpose of studying history, and particularly in the American context? How is it that we should think about the relationship between a true and accurate and unflinching understanding of the nature of American history, a narrative about our own country that actually, however pat the Bill Clinton line may be, does help us to draw on what's best about America in order to fix the things that are evidently wrong?
- [40:51]
Matthew Karp
I wish I had a sort of a better answer for this. And actually I'm going to start working on a book about how to understand the politics of history today. But I think I would begin where I ended the last answer, on the kind of omnipresence of change in US History and how in some ways, that more than any of these kind of continuities or meta narratives is something that I think it would be both useful for students politically and pedagogically to absorb. At the heart of any narrative, I would have two keywords, change and struggle. The way in which these histories are always contested. And I think the advocates of 1619, and this comes down to kind of a close reading contest, because I think its supporters will say, no, you know, 1619 is a story of struggle. It's all about black struggle against, you know, the oppressive forces of white supremacy. And that struggle is ongoing. And they would claim that that's the narrative. But I do think that it's a very different kind of conception of historical struggle and contestation than, say, Frederick Douglass's, who, yes, contained in his worldview an element of 19th century Whiggism in his belief, belief that struggle would lead to progress. And even Obama's line about the moral arc of the universe owes itself to a 19th century abolitionist, Theodore Parker, who was contemporary of Douglass's. But I don't think you have to buy into that inevitability of progress to say that American history is contested. And I don't know how this clearly works as a sort of a tool in building good citizens, because that's always where historians end up. Coming down is like, how does this help build democratic citizens? Because that is one purpose of a historical education and the politics of history. But I'm tempted and I want to explore the possibility of, of a narrative of American history that centers struggle and change at its heart, contestation and transformation. I think that opens up more possibilities than either of the kind of standard liberal narratives, much less either of the traditional conservative or the new maga nihilistic one. I think that breathes some air into these disputes that American history, and I don't need to make exceptional claims as opposed to other countries or other parts of the world, but American history, I think from the beginning has invoked really titanic ideological struggle about the possibility of living under a democratic society and what that entails. You know, the break from monarchy was absolutely foundational in world history, I do believe. And the questions about slavery and labor and race that have run like a red line through American history, also foundational for world history. And they've been contested and challenged and transformed by those struggles. And so I think to think about the United States as this kind of field of contest, rather than as a kind of a great clanking machine in one direction of or another, is the starting place.
- [43:23]
Podcast Host
That's very interesting. I've just completed a book that'll be out next spring about the question of democracy and diversity, broadly speaking. And I'm struck, and I haven't put that together in context of our conversation until just this moment, but I'm struck by the way in which both sides of the debate about that seem to assume not just past continuity, but future continuity. So there's a view on biafronationalist right, which basically says America is defined by being a white nation or Anglo Saxon Protestant nation, or whatever it may be. And so once that group ceases to be a majority of the population, we're going to have these huge problems because all the good things about America are going to be destroyed by the people who aren't truly American. And that's obviously a very pessimistic reading of what our future will bring us. And then you have, oddly, a deep pessimism on parts of the left which essentially says that America has always been terribly unjust, and it still is terribly unjust. And if we fast forward what our diverse democracy or other diverse democracy around the world would look like 50 or 100 years from now, it'll just be a continuation of those same terrible injustices. And I think in a weird way, both sides of this, and I'm not particularly sympathetic to either, but I'm more sympathetic to one than the other. But both sides of this, in a weird way, seem to underestimate the possibility that there has been real change over the last 50 years and that there may be much more change over the next 50 years. There's a sort of assumption of continuity in the background there. And So I think, as a kind of political exhortation, the hope for political change, whether it be of more media risk or more revolutionary nature, is something we can hopefully agree on.
- [44:59]
Matthew Karp
Yeah, I'll end unhappily by punching left a little bit and say that there is a strain in, I think, American leftism that I think is independent from, if you will, the kind of Afro pessimistic lineage that I think informs some of the writing of somebody like Ta Nehisi Coates or Nikola Hannah Jones, which I think is independent. But I think one place they join is in this sort of deep strain of sort of moralism that I think is this sort of moralistic critique of American exceptionalism that I think ends up adopting just in the same way that d' Souza adopts a lot of the premises and the kind of basic structures of his critics and then just switches the polarities. I do think elements of the left have fallen into that same trap where it's like. Like every event in the last 200 years of history is kind of defined by. And this is almost independent from the kind of racial narrative argument, because I think you can do a narrative of US History as this kind of vessel for unsheathed, unrepentant capital and empire that in the 20th century, kind of let loose on the world all of the evils of modernity. And I don't think that that kind of deep moralism is helpful in actually understanding these struggles. I understand and sympathize with people who want to talk the enormous crimes that this country has participated in at home and abroad, and even put them at the center of the historical narrative as they belong to be. But I think then turning from those crimes to sort of make America this essentially a wrestling heel in world history and in terms of its role in its relationship to its own people, from native genocide to, you know, massacres in Southeast Asia, that kind of narrative of US History, I've never been drawn to
- [46:36]
Podcast Host
it, even just the terms of identity in with which Americans tend to think about their own politics and that they then impose on other countries that have different historical dividing lines, both between different economic classes, but also between different racial and religious identity groups.
- [46:50]
Matthew Karp
Yeah. I don't think that adopting that kind of negative image of American exceptionalism as America the exceptional evil is politically powerful or intellectually persuasive. And I much prefer a narrative that centers that struggle and transformation on all sides, from the left, from the right, and in different directions, and that then, as you said, leaves room for future struggles and future possibilities. Because I think they are out there and if we deny them then we're not going to be in position to influence them when they do happen.
- [47:21]
Podcast Host
America could be much better 50 years from now than many people assume and it could also be much worse and that's perhaps more agonistic view of our history and our future. Metcalf, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
- [47:32]
Matthew Karp
Yeah, absolutely.
- [47:38]
Podcast Host
Thank you so much for listening to the good news. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [48:06]
Matthew Karp
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.
- [48:21]
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