America Gave Up on Its Own History

Summary

Podcast Summary: "America Gave Up on Its Own History"

Podcast: To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
Episode: America Gave Up on Its Own History
Date: June 16, 2026
Host: Charlie Sykes
Guest: Yoni Applebaum, Deputy Executive Editor, The Atlantic

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Overview

In this episode, Charlie Sykes welcomes first-time guest Yoni Applebaum to discuss American historical memory amid the country’s 250th anniversary. They examine Applebaum's recent article, "How America Gave Up on Its Own History," exploring the country’s struggle to articulate a shared narrative and the consequences for national identity. The conversation also touches on geopolitical developments involving Iran, the shifting definitions of patriotism, the "history wars," and the broader challenges of national unity.

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Key Segments & Themes

1. Current Events: Iran, Trump, and Geopolitics

[02:28 – 14:09]

• The Iran “Peace Deal”

  • Sykes and Applebaum discuss the apparent ceasefire announcement between the U.S. and Iran, noting confusion about its terms and the lack of real progress.
  • Applebaum points out that while the Trump administration claimed victory, the Iranian regime remains in power, failed U.S. war aims, and unresolved issues regarding Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities.

    "It's now crystal clear to the Iranians that the US ... lacks, if not the military capacity, at the very least, the military will to displace the regime by force..." – Yoni Applebaum [05:32]

  • The episode underscores that Iran may have emerged strategically stronger, damaging U.S. credibility in the region.
  • Discussion extends to the implications for relationships with China, Russia, and Israel, citing the limits of American and great-power influence in modern asymmetric conflicts:

    "What we may be seeing here is a limit of great powers to impose their will on smaller adversaries." – Yoni Applebaum [10:48]

• U.S.–Israel Tensions

  • Sykes observes a rift between the U.S. and Netanyahu’s government, noting a lack of Israeli support for the peace deal and Trump’s dismissiveness.

    "Netanyahu has billed himself as a Trump whisperer ... Watching Trump cast Netanyahu and his concerns to the side ... is going to be a real political challenge." – Yoni Applebaum [11:58]

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2. America’s Fractured Historical Narrative

[14:09 – 32:44]

• The 250th Anniversary & “How America Gave Up on Its Own History”

  • With the country preparing for its semiquincentennial, Sykes questions what and how Americans are celebrating, prompting discussion about the breakdown in consensus around the American story.
  • Applebaum recounts a revealing experience on a blue-ribbon panel, where suggesting “patriotism” as a shared value triggered discomfort and rejection:

    "Like, I had blurted out a four letter word. There were people who physically recoiled." – Yoni Applebaum [17:25]

  • Both speakers reflect on the growing ambivalence and suspicion surrounding patriotism as a concept, noting increasing polarization around American identity.

• Historical Narrative Breakdown

  • Applebaum traces the disintegration of consensus to the aftermath of mid–20th-century civil rights and social justice movements, and eventually to polarized left and right narratives:

    "Between those two pictures of America, most Americans ... still understand themselves and their country somewhere in the broad middle..." – Yoni Applebaum [19:09]

  • On the left: emphasis on America’s founding sins and systemic oppression; on the right: insistence on American infallibility, suppressing uncomfortable truths — yielding a culture where many avoid history altogether.

• Eclipse of Civics Education

  • Sykes and Applebaum dissect the results of bipartisan reluctance to standardize history and civics education (e.g., during the No Child Left Behind era and previous failed curriculum efforts led by Lynne Cheney):

    "The result is ironic... If you're measuring performance on English and on math, that is where the attention will go. It's where the resources will go." – Yoni Applebaum [26:21]

  • History teaching time reduced, underqualified instructors proliferate, and America's collective historical literacy erodes.

    "More than a third of our high school history instructors are now coaches. And on the whole, they have less college training in history." – Yoni Applebaum [27:49]

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3. Popular vs. Scholarly Histories & Cultural Memory

[30:58 – 44:26]

• "Dad Histories" and Scholarly Withdrawals

  • Sykes laments popular history’s dominance by politically motivated figures like Bill O’Reilly, with nuanced academic histories often absent from mainstream conversation.

    "The best selling historian in the United States is probably Bill O'Reilly." – Yoni Applebaum [31:02] "It's hard for me to see that ... for them all to be outsold by Bill O'Reilly is actually a pretty damning indictment of where the profession has landed." – Yoni Applebaum [31:07]

  • Applebaum notes a proliferation of fragmented, group-focused scholarship has, while valuable in many respects, failed to create a cohesive narrative for broader public consumption.

• Fragmented Anniversary Celebrations

  • The Biden Administration’s approach to the 250th is characterized as pluralism run amok—emphasizing decentralized, individualized celebrations at the cost of national unity:

    "It was a notion that every group can do the celebration its own way... pluralism run amok." – Yoni Applebaum [33:55]

  • Applebaum argues for embracing a collective national identity while acknowledging complexities:

    "The only principle ... that works is by proximity, because we are all here in the United States. We need some way to be part of a common project." – Yoni Applebaum [35:15]

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4. Patriotism, Symbols, and the "History Wars"

[37:06 – 44:26]

• Hijacking of Patriotism and National Symbols

  • Both speakers express discomfort at seeing American symbols increasingly co-opted for partisan/MAGA branding, subjecting patriotism itself to the culture war.

    "The distorted patriotism is so bright and so glaring that it really requires an act of will to embrace the genuine patriotism you're describing." – Charlie Sykes [40:11]

  • Applebaum describes misappropriation of military honors for spectacle at the 250th celebrations as emblematic inversion of true patriotic values.

• Dueling Founding Narratives

  • Discussion of the 1619 Project vs. Trump’s “1776 Commission” as crystallizations of polarized interpretations of American origins.

    "1619 is not in any meaningful sense the founding of the United States ... then Trump appropriates 1776. You know, I would not cede 1776 to Donald Trump." – Yoni Applebaum [42:33]

  • Applebaum sees hope in the tradition of using founding ideals as a standard for the nation to aspire to, citing Frederick Douglass as example:

    "They ... say those flawed men got something big right. How well are we doing at living up to it?" – Yoni Applebaum [43:22]

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5. Path Forward: Hope for a Shared Narrative

[44:26 – End]

• Rediscovering a Shared Story

  • Sykes prompts Applebaum to identify who is working to rebuild consensus; Applebaum is cautiously optimistic:

    "I think the prospects are actually remarkably bright. Many professional historians have belatedly awakened to the peril..." – Yoni Applebaum [45:33]

  • Single-volume, nuanced histories are re-emerging (e.g., Jill Lepore), and Americans are showing renewed desire for genuine narratives that blend pride, critique, and complexity.

• The Immigrant’s Perspective

  • Applebaum shares the story of historian Johann Neem, an Indian immigrant who underscores the uniquely American possibility of fully belonging by embracing ideals rather than lineage.

    "Maybe, maybe if you live here, you don't understand how powerful that is, right? To have a country that if you embrace its values ... You can be fully co equal..." – Yoni Applebaum [47:02]

  • Sykes reflects that learning the "warts" of American history does not breed contempt, but admiration for progress and resilience, reinforcing the case for a comprehensive, honest narrative.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Historical Narrative's Fragility:

  "To a country built on an idea ... the inability to tell a common story might well prove fatal." – Charlie Sykes [25:08]

• On Teaching and Remembering Complexity:

  "People want the truth. They really do understand that the world is complicated and they want stories that are as complicated as the daily reality..." – Yoni Applebaum [32:26]

• On Embracing American Ideals, Despite Flaws:

  "A country that was willing to tolerate and exploit slavery and oppression and was full of people who struggled mightily to abolish slavery ... is a country that is flawed like we are flawed, but one that you can rise to its defense." – Yoni Applebaum [45:43]

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Conclusion

This episode critically examines the slow erasure of a shared American historical narrative and the dangers of leaving that vacuum to be filled by partisan or exclusionary interpretations. Both Sykes and Applebaum argue for a renewed commitment to honesty and complexity in public memory and education—recognizing America’s ideals, acknowledging its worst chapters, and celebrating its progress. They hold out hope that despite current polarization, a more inclusive and resilient national story can still emerge, but only if citizens, educators, and leaders are willing to do the hard work of facing history together.

Transcript

[Charlie Sykes]

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[Charlie Sykes]

I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome back to the to the Contrary podcast. Over the weekend, a couple of things that were surprising and completely unsurprising. I was actually surprised that they took Donald Trump's name off the Kennedy Center. I mean, it was was kind of delightful. Completely unsurprising is the fact that the President reacted in the pettiest possible way, putting a tarp up over it so that no one can see that his name is off. Meanwhile, the big UFC match went off at the White House and it was actually even worse than you thought it was. But for his birthday, the President also announced a peace deal with Iran. This may be the 39th or 40th announcement. This one may actually lead to a ceasefire. Or maybe not. There's a lot going on. So joining me on this podcast is the Deputy Executive editor of the Atlantic magazine, a first time appearance on this podcast, Yoni Applebaum. Yoni, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it very much.

[Yoni Applebaum]

Oh, it's great to be here.

[Charlie Sykes]

Well, I want to talk to you about your piece. Rather distressing piece, How America Gave up on Its Own History, a subject dear to my heart. But let's start by talking about this. The Art of Deal. No deal. The Fog of the Deal. We have some broad outlines of what the United States and Iran might have agreed to in this Memorandum of Understanding Although, as usual, the American version is different from the Iranian version. So give me your take on where we're at on this. The endless war turning into endless negotiations.

[Yoni Applebaum]

Yeah, I don't know if we've got a deal or a concept of a deal. We've got an Iranian version of this which sounds like they get everything they want. A senior administration official briefs reporters on Friday with a different version of the deal that gives the US a lot of what it wants. But it's very hard to look at the emergency without concluding that the Trump administration went to war against Iran in a war of choice and failed to achieve its key war aims. The regime is still in power. The protesters who had risen up against that regime remain brutalized and imprisoned. The regime has not yet agreed to surrender its nuclear materials. That particular can has been kicked down the road, they claim at least to have largely excluded the other key factors here. It's long range missile forces, which we've seen are a threat not only to Israel, but to other Gulf states, which reportedly were negotiating side deals with Iran to stay out of the line of fire during this war and also kick the can down the road on resolving the issue of Iran as a proliferator of terror in the region through its various proxy forces. And so what we're ending up with here is a deal that gets us not quite back to where we were before the war. The Strait of Hormuz will open, sort of, kind of, and everything else remains unresolved.

[Charlie Sykes]

And of course, the Strait of Hormuz was open before we began the war. It's unclear whether or not Iran will still have some kind of control over it. It's suggesting there might be some joint operation deal with Oman. We just, we just simply don't know. What seems pretty obvious, though, and the markets have, are obviously reacting to all of this, is Donald Trump just wants to be done with this war. He just wants to scrape this off his shoe and that he is not going to go back to war. So in many ways, we're worse off in the sense that we used to have a credible threat of force. Right. That the United States had this massive military, that if Iran did X, Y and Z, we might bring down the hammer, but the hammer seems to have been taken off the table. And so that is not without consequences. Correct? Yeah.

[Yoni Applebaum]

And really, I think since 2003 and the American invasion of Iraq, the Iranian regime has lived in fear that the United States might one day come to Tehran as it came to Baghdad. And that gun over the mantle, which was never taken down, nevertheless gave the United States significant leverage and also led the Iranians to push in a variety of directions, including its nuclear program, including those rocket forces, to try to establish some sort of deterrent. The other thing that Iran did not know prior to this war was that it could actually shut down the Strait of Hormuz. There was, at the very least, a large question mark over that. And so these two things have now been resolved. It is now crystal clear to the Iranians that the US Lacks, if not the military capacity, at the very least, the military will to displace the regime by force, that it can survive the worst that the United States is prepared to throw at it and come out the other side. And it is also clear that the United States can't open the Strait of Hormuz by force, or at least is not willing to make the investment necessary to do so. And so, even if that strait reopens now, it does so with a sort of Damocles dangling over it. At any moment that the Iranians wish they can shut down the strait again. And that has made Iran, perversely, for all of the billions in military equipment it has lost, for all the lives the US And Israel have taken, Iran emerges from this conflict in many ways in a stronger strategic position than it went into, which is remarkable.

[Charlie Sykes]

And I agree with that. And it's just a sign of the geopolitical failure of this war. Now Donald Trump is going to claim that it is a huge victory. My guess is that he's just more interested in dropping it into the memory hole, you know, that it just didn't happen and we're just gonna move on. We have other worlds to conquer, other places to take over and to initiate whatever. But that is the case. And, of course, the rest of the world is looking at this. So what do you think that they make of this in China and in Russia when they're now looking at the world's greatest superpower rattling its saber and then coming out with pretty much less than it had before it went in?

[Yoni Applebaum]

You know, I'll give you a dark cloud and a silver lining here. The dark cloud is that I think we have exposed many of the limits of American power and American will. We have shown effectlessness in our use of military force, a willingness to go into a conflict without clearly defined goals or means of achieving them, and then an impatience. You know, the US Economic stranglehold on Iran was really starting to inflict some serious pain, which is part of what led the Iranians, in the end, to force, through a deal over the objections of their own hardliners. But just at the moment when the US Was again achieving some leverage against Iran, we have eased up on Iran. And that record is not what we typically try to project to our adversaries on the global stage. Right. Like, we want to be an ally which can be counted on in a tough patch. And I think that many of the Gulf states no longer regard us that way, and we want to be an adversary to be feared. And maybe we're not regarded that way either. So here's my silver lining. We have now seen in Ukraine that Russia badly underestimated the difficulty of invading a hostile territory with a large and sophisticated military, but one that was vulnerable to asymmetric threats. And Russia rapidly discovered the limits of its ability to project power beyond its borders. The United States has learned some of the same lessons in this conflict with Iran. The drone warfare that Iran engaged in seems to have taken an actually not inconsiderable toll, not only on the United States, but on other forces in the region, not in terms of lives, but in terms of damage to assets, and certainly imposed significant constraints on our freedom of action in a way that we didn't experience in 2003 when we went into Iraq. The world has changed. So you asked about what does Xi think as he watches this from Beijing? Or one answer may be that although the US Looks weaker and more effectless for China, it has to raise serious questions about its own ability to project power. The fact that it is larger and better armed than, say, Taiwan does not necessarily mean that it can do what it might have been able to do 20 or 30 years ago with the same kind of advantages asymmetric warfare has advanced. And it's going to be very hard for any large, heavy military force to impose its will on a smaller adversary if that adversary is sufficiently nimble, is willing to accept some number of casualties and absorb them and push back in an asymmetric way. And so that's the silver lining I've got for you, is that what we may be seeing here is a limit of great powers to impose their will on smaller adversaries.

[Charlie Sykes]

Well, and it's interesting to note that China's military, as impressive as it looks, has never been tested abroad. So we don't actually know. And also, any sort of war would be economically and globally, globally destabilizing. And right now, things are going pretty well for China. Does China want to destabilize the trajectory of events that are happening right now? So that would be another silver lining. So the other Thing that's been happening is that we have this agreement to have more talks, kicking things down the road. What do you make of the very obvious tensions now between the United States and Israel? Israel was not part of this negotiation, not part of this deal. Clearly, the personal relationship between Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu seems to be a little bit rocky, with Trump now twice in the last several weeks calling up Axios and saying, you know, I called him up. You know, I called up Netanyahu and said, you're fucking. You're out of your fucking mind. You know, you're an idiot. So what do you make of all of that? Israel pushing back against us, saying, we're not part of this deal and we're not necessarily gonna go along with this ceasefire.

[Yoni Applebaum]

Yeah, the deal's a big problem for Netanyahu and it's a big problem for Israel. And in somewhat separate ways, Netanyahu has billed himself as a Trump whisperer, as the indispensable man who, despite all of his flaws and unpopularity, can deliver for his voters a kind of security that they can't get from other Israeli political leaders based on his closeness to Donald Trump. Watching Trump cast Netanyahu and his concerns to the side and his rush for the exit is going to be a real political challenge for Netanyahu. Netanyahu, who is desperately trying to cling to office and put together a coalition that can preserve his grip on power for the Israelis across the board, you cannot find, and I've already tried this morning, you cannot find a senior Israeli official who is willing to praise this deal. The most you can find is officials who are willing to say, well, gosh, let's give it some time, and maybe it's not as bad as it seems. And that's true across the political spectrum. It's true from the far right fringes of Netanyahu's coalition, where ministers like Basalis Modric are out there condemning the deal. It's true from leaders of the opposition like Yair Lapid across the Israeli political spectrum. They are looking at this and thinking, you know, Israel went to war risking quite a bit in a bid to permanently end the Iranian nuclear program and the prospect of nuclear annihilation, which is what the Israelis feel that they face. They also hoped to sufficiently degrade Iran's rocket forces and its ability to produce those rockets so that they could remove sort of the guns Israel's had. They have not achieved either of those objectives. They made progress, in their view, on both fronts. But ending the war now leaves both of those existential challenges to Israel unresolved and may have bargained away some of their ability to deter or respond to Hezbollah on its northern border in the process. So the Israelis are, I think, pretty unhappy in discovering what most other people, domestically and abroad, who have invested their faith in Donald Trump have discovered, which is that there is not reciprocal loyalty there to be had, and they get

[Charlie Sykes]

to repent at leisure. Okay, let's switch gears, because your piece, I thought, was incredibly timely given the fact that we now find ourselves deciding how and what we're going to celebrate for the 250th anniversary of birthday party for the United States of America. What, you know, do we celebrate? Are we celebrating the same values? Are we celebrating the same country when we see the American flag, Are we saluting and reacting the same way? So you wrote the piece How America gave up on its own history, unable to agree on how to interpret the American story. The country's schools, universities, and political institutions have stopped trying to tell it at all. And I was really kind of stunned. I've been writing about, you know, American education for a long time, but when I read your piece, it really did hit me that we are now downstream from decades of people not being able to figure out which story we're going to tell. And so now we have these moments, which, as a former conservative, I find really shocking to, you know, to hear J.D. vance and others rejecting the idea that America is a creedal nation, that America is an idea, and so blood and soil. So let's just start with the story that you tell. July 2019. You are in one of those first circles of hell, one of those blue Ribbon Commission meetings where people sit around with whiteboards and they think deep thoughts and everybody has to go around the room and come up with. With a name of a shared value. Am I getting this right? You know, a shared value. And.

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[Charlie Sykes]

And you basically dropped. You kind of dropped the turd in the punch bowl. So you just tell me the story.

[Yoni Applebaum]

Yeah, I did. It was a beautiful setting. They put me up the night before in a bedroom that was literally larger than the footprint of my house. And I thought, wow, this is great. I'm participating in this blue ribbon panel, and we're going to figure out America's problems. And they brought me in there because they'd been working on this for months, and they deadlocked. The conservatives and progressives in the room had come to believe that they had fundamentally different understandings of the country and they wanted some outside thoughts. I threw out there, you Know, I sort of thought about it for a minute and I thought, like, you know, there are things that unite us all as Americans. There are things that we can all subscribe to. My own story, I think is only possible in this country. You know, I've got ancestors who fled oppression in all kinds of places to come here in Russia and in Poland, and who fled from East Anglia to come over on the Mayflower, and who fled from Cuba to live freely without the oppression of the Spanish crown. That's a very American story. Most Americans have a story like that to offer if you start scratching. And I thought, well, there's a word for that. There's a word for how I feel about this country, how everybody in this room feels about this country, must feel about this country if they're giving up a beautiful July day to sit around and brainstorm. And so I suggested patriotism.

[Charlie Sykes]

Patriotism. How did that land?

[Yoni Applebaum]

Like, I had blurted out a four letter word. There were people who physically recoiled. Participants said that that word made them feel excluded, attacked. It conjured up a legacy of racism, of oppression, of dispossession. It was remarkable to me in that I thought it was a word that we could each imbue with our own meaning, that if Americans each love their country, we don't have to do it in the same way that there are many kinds of patriotism out there. But that, that is fundamentally like, if we're a people and are united by living here in this country, by being citizens of the same country, the word for that unity is patriotism. And I was a little bit shocked by the reaction in the.

[Charlie Sykes]

And yet it did reveal this fundamental divide, you know, and I remember when I was, you know, kind of unashamed, unabashed as a patriot, and yet I will confess to you that it makes me feel a little uncomfortable right now. What does it mean right now in a country that is this particular divide, this particular, you know, in this particular moment in history? And I think a lot of Americans are feeling that way. They are feeling ambivalent. So just give me your sense of. You said that this group of high powered people had deadlocked about how to tell America's story. And I certainly grew up in an era in which there was a coherent story of America being the last best hope, going through various challenges, not always living up to its ideals, but really being this great democratic experiment. When did that consensus break down and why?

[Yoni Applebaum]

Yeah, it's a great question. Right. So we've told our story many different ways over time, and by the early Cold War, there was this notion of sort of a broad American consensus that what made this country remarkable in some sense was that middle, not the extreme right or the extreme left, and that Americans could agree on, you know, its basic values. It comes under challenge, an appropriate challenge, during the civil rights era. You know, black Americans say, well, gosh, you know, that story that you're telling of sort of uninterrupted march of progress, that's not our story. We've been marching backwards for 100 years. It comes under pressure in the 1960s and 70s, as the women's movement says, well, you know, there are advances here, but there was also a lot of fighting for equality, and it is not yet achieved. Right. Like lots of groups come in and challenge that story. And we get a new kind of consensus out of that. We get a sort of mainstream narrative of American history which says our ideals are constant, our progress toward those ideals is halting and often too slow and sometimes reversed. You know, Reconstruction was a step forward for this country. Redemption that follows it, and direction of Jim Crow was a step backward. But that we can keep our eyes firmly fixed on the horizon in moving toward those ideals, that the story of this country is of the groups that have been excluded or oppressed, pointing us back to this ideal, saying, don't you remember what it means to be American? How can you live in a country in which all men are created equal and not treat all of the citizens of this country equally? And that constant pointing back to the ideals, that becomes the new consensus narrative, not that we've always agreed with each other, but rather that this is a country where people can believe in equality and justice. Fundamentally, the most profound American idea, the really revolutionary one that we set loose on the world, is the notion that I'm as good as you are, and you're as good as I am. I work for a magazine started by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that was his summary of the American idea. He said he heard it in the schoolyard where one kid turned to the other and said, I'm as good as you. Be right. And there's something very profound about that, that there's not an aristocracy, that people are fundamentally equal. And that idea, that was the great animating force. And it breaks down then under pressure from the right and the left, the left comes to say, hey, things aren't just bad. It's not that we sometimes move backwards. It's that this country was fundamentally founded in sin. It was an oppressive colon enterprise grounded in racism and in some sense, irredeemable. Because of those founding sins. And the right says, no, no, you've got this all wrong. America was a godly republic. Our founding documents are a kind of scripture. And we shouldn't challenge the record of the American past. We shouldn't pay attention. Donald Trump wants to take down signs detailing the founders who were slaveholders. Don't pay attention to any of that. Focus only on the positive elements of our story. Don't wrestle with the complexity of the past. There's a single unaltered narrative of American greatness, and we're going to tell the story that way. And between those two pictures of America, most Americans, I think, still understand themselves and their country somewhere in the broad middle, that this is a country with good ideals, that doesn't always live up to them, but keeps trying. But on the right and on the left, that picture, there's sort of a horseshoe bend. And where you end up with is a mutual acknowledgment that this is a country founded in white supremacy. Right? And whether you think that's great or that's terrible is what defines whether you're on the far right or the far left. The center, meanwhile, says, like, what are you talking about? This is a country founded in the proposition that all men are created equal. And if we haven't always lived up to that, we've done better over time. So that's, I think, where it really broke down.

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[Charlie Sykes]

So you have a very interesting paragraph here. You said, lately we have discovered the sort of. The vulnerability of this story. A nation, a nation defined by blood and soil, built around a shared religion or ethnicity can survive divergent narratives. To a country built on an idea, though, and bound together by a shared understanding of our history, the inability to tell a common story might well prove fatal. So that's really kind of the heart of this, that for those of us who actually kind of did believe that we were built on an idea and assumed that that was kind of the consensus, this breakdown of the narrative might well prove fatal, because what are we left with? Right, so. And as you point out, we have the right and the left. What I thought was interesting is, you know, when you're historically chasing all of this, you go back to the Bush era when they were putting together no Child Left behind. And even by that point, the debate about American history had become so consensus that they essentially decided to, like, leave it alone, to back off from it. And so what was the result? Like a vacuum. Like, we're just not going to talk about it. What happened?

[Yoni Applebaum]

Yeah, it's because everybody thought it was important. That's the irony that really kills me. They could agree on math, they could agree on English, but when it came to the stuff that really mattered, the question of history and civics, they had a devil of a time coming up with standards and largely punt. They punt because in the administration of George W. Bush's father, this had come up. Lynne Cheney, Dick Cheney's wife, who was leading the National Endowment for the Humanities at the time, tries to come up with curricular standards. It blows up in her face. She attacks the standards, both of them. Bush and Cheney knew perfectly well, one from his father, the other from his wife, just how dangerous it was to get entangled with the history of wars. And they decided to punt on it rather than try to come up with some sort of a standard that could. That could make it through. The result is ironic. If you're measuring performance on English and on math, that is where the attention will go. It's where the resources will go. So in schools that start to struggle to meet these standards, they cut the amount of time devoted to history by a third. And it's not just the classroom hours are shrinking because people are not being tested on the history, because there is no common set of standards. The core of teachers shifts. If you've got a football coach and he needs the other half of his fte, or for a lot of coaches it's just a stipend and they need a full time teaching job, you've got to find a classroom for that coach. Very few school districts are willing to give up on their football program. And so for a while those coaches had been in lots of different disciplines. They start getting concentrated in the history classroom. Once you start making the funds for the district contingent on performance on English and math, you stuff the coach. And there's a lot of good teachers out there who coach, don't get me wrong. But on the whole, the Americas football coaches and other sports coaches and PE teachers, more than a third of our high school history instructors are now coaches. And on the whole, they have less college training in history. They know less, they tend to teach much more out of the textbook instead of using primary sources. And history is now the discipline in high schools where teachers have the least actual preparation before they go on and teach.

[Charlie Sykes]

I think I snarked on social media maybe a couple of months, maybe a couple of years ago when something horrible was happening in Washington. I said, this is what happens when we make history an elective. And it was as you know, this happens to a country in which history is an elective. And I guess I had not fully realized until I read your piece how far it had gone, because I remember these. And they felt like mild culture war fights at the time compared to what we have right now, when Liz Cheney and others were trying to come up with a core curriculum involving American values. And I remember what the debate was. There was a concern that, you know, young people were learning about America and history, but what they were learning about was all of its crimes, all of its failures, you know, that we were racist and we were sexist and there was slavery. And they were not learning about these values. They were not learning about the Declaration of Independence. And so the argument seemed at the time to me was a way to revivify, revitalize American an understanding of the American idea and the American past. But obviously that debate turned out to be a massive failure. That rather than any sort of revitalization, we saw exactly what you were describing. You talk about how as professors and teachers pursued separate histories of various groups, uncovering neglected stories, challenging facile assumptions, they made comparatively little effort to assemble the pieces into a comprehensible narrative. Scholars largely stopped writing single volume histories of the United States states. And yet there was this resurgence of, and I hate this phrase, by the way. So the dad histories, the very popular histories of the Civil War and others, there's been kind of a renaissance of understanding of certain histories, but that's sort of outside of what you're describing of the academic world and the way we're passing on that legacy to the next generation.

[Yoni Applebaum]

Look, the best selling historian in the United States is probably Bill O'Reilly.

[Charlie Sykes]

Oh, God, that is the most depressing thing you've said so far, by the way.

[Yoni Applebaum]

It's hard for me to see that as, you know, like, we employ thousands and thousands of historians in our colleges and universities. For them all to be outsold by Bill O'Reilly is actually a pretty damning indictment of where the profession has landed. There's a lot of good historical work being done out there, and it was the turn that history takes in the 60s and 70s toward telling the forgotten stories and giving voice to the voiceless. There's a lot of value that comes out of that. We have a richer narrative, a deeper understanding of the American past. It's not something that I'm advocating against. The question is, if you're going to do that, can you keep the sense of scale and proportion? Can you relate the parts to the whole? Can you find a way to tell the darker chapters in our history while still having an accurate picture of the history that you're portraying? And that's a real challenge. You can write the sorts of boosterish books that no Reilly writes that ignore or downplay those aspects of the past. You can write the sorts of leftist indictments that focus exclusively on those aspects of the past. The challenge is, can you write a book or give a lecture or make a documentary that gives the full, rich complexity? And the funny thing is, it's what people say they want. And when scholars actually give it a shot, they eat it up. Because people want the truth. They really do understand that the world is complicated and they want stories that are as complicated as the daily reality that they encounter.

[Charlie Sykes]

Yeah, but we don't live in an age that really likes nuance, do we? In terms of our debate? I mean, nuance is like the armadillo in the middle of the road, right? I mean, it's just you also point out, and I thought this was very damning, you know, you point out this failure to tell the American story. And we are certainly living through that right now with the consequences that it's not limited to just the high schools and the universities. I was actually quite surprised. You know, the Biden Administration was, you know, in office preparing for this 250th anniversary. And you write that when Biden took over the nascent project of America's 250th birthday, it simply punted on the question of how to create something unifying. The federal commission instead invited people to record their personal history on the theory that your story is America's story. It's like, so you just tell me your truth, and we're just going to kind of punt on the shared story. So what happened there? Was this the same dynamic that you experienced with the Blue Ribbon Commission, that it was like, we can't go to the depths of trying to come up with a story we're all going to agree on, so let's just do this

[Yoni Applebaum]

right, and we won't have a grand national celebration. We won't. You know, there was no real event planned during the Biden years. As gross as the spectacle here in the Capitol was last night, where we had a UFC fight on the South Lawn. Trump has tried to create spectacle. He's tried to create sort of a physicality and a celebration around the 250th. When Biden was in office, there was very little effort in that direction. And it wasn't just sort of like, record your own narrative. The other major initiative launched in those years was almost like a branding kit, so that, like, if you were doing your own local celebration and you could download the materials and slap the 250th label on it and add yourself to a database, but that was sort of pluralism run amok. It was a notion that every group can do the celebration its own way. Every municipality, everybody can sort of celebrate the 250th in whatever way they find significant, whatever it means to them. Tell your own story. And there's a deep irony in that, right, because what you're celebrating actually is the coming together of 13 separate colonies into a United States and many different peoples within those colonies who came to conceive of themselves in common as Americans. You know, we move from these United States to the United States, we start to think of ourselves as common inhabitants of a single nation. And the left isn't Paris by this. It does not like to embrace nationalism. I will admit I am an unabashed nationalist, because when I look at the world and see people affiliating themselves by different principles, they sometimes do it by tribe or by faith, by bloodline, even by political ideology. The only principle that I can see in the United States that works is by proximity, because we are all here in the United States. We need some way to be part of a common project. And when we ask Americans to subscribe to a common history and a common set of ideals to the culture that comes with it, what we are asking them to do is to blend themselves into that whole, remaining true to who they are, true to their individual narratives, but also simultaneously embracing the notion that there is a common American project that they have now joined and that they will advance to the next generation. And that sense of standing in that line of people who have advanced the common American project, knowing that past, seeing it in all its complexity, understanding the ideals that's intended to advance, that is a much better way to organize a society than in the more exclusionary means that we otherwise fall prey to. And so abandoning it just strikes me as literally insane.

[Charlie Sykes]

Yes. Although it does feel as if we're backsliding and that this 250th anniversary is an occasion of backsliding. Every time that Trump. You mentioned the ufc, things that. To the extent that Donald Trump brands the, you know, nation's birthday as a partisan event, as a MAGA thing, or you quote, a scholar calling this the hyper American approach, that's more likely to alienate people from that project, isn't it? I mean, it feels as if this is a real challenge because, you know, I would like to go out to Cedarburg, Wisconsin, you know, and for the parade and the flags and everything. And yet the more Donald Trump and Maga are so. And J.D. vance aggressively trying to say that this is about the blood and soil, our version of America. And so it is. It feels very alienating at this moment. It feels harder to buy into the idea of the communal project.

[Yoni Applebaum]

Maybe this is the key danger that Donald Trump poses to the anti Trump opposition. There is a constant temptation for them to define themselves as the opposite of Trump. If he wraps himself in the flag, the temptation is to reject the flag. If he surrounds himself with the military, the temptation is to dismiss the military. And it is a temptation that I think the left would be wise to resist. You know, these things are not Trump's. My next door neighbor puts an American flag out on her porch every July 4th, every Memorial Day, every Veterans Day. I asked her once why she did it, that her father served in a segregated military, but he was damn proud of his service, and he gave his daughter a life that she would not otherwise have had. And she is proud of her country. She sees the flag in that sense as her way to honor her father's wartime service. And that is the other tradition of American patriotism, not partisan in its affiliation. I'll tell you, the moment last night when my stomach turned was when they had Medal of Honor winners escort the fighters out to the ring. There's a tradition in the US Military that everyone from a general officer down to a private salutes a Medal of Honor winner. And there is not a tradition that you salute mixed martial artists. And so they leveraged the escorts to get the military honor guard to throw salutes as the fighters walked past. You know, there is an inversion of patriotism there. The folks out there last night who I wanted to honor were the ones who put their lives on the line for their country, not who put their lives on their line for a prize purse. And to use the one as a means of honoring the other struck me as exactly backwards. And what we can do is have a patriotism where, you know, the folks we're honoring at America's 250th are the medal of Honor winners, and celebrities, like prize fighters are escorting them, because that's the kind of patriotism we want to pay tribute to.

[Charlie Sykes]

Well, you've turned my stomach. But as you're illustrating here, this is a fraught time for patriotism to go back to your original dropping the line. The distorted patriotism is so bright and so glaring that it really requires an act of will to embrace the genuine patriotism you're describing. I'm really glad you mentioned the flag, because this is something. My wife and I talk about this all the time, and we come from a long tradition of real respect and love for the American flag. And yet these days, when we're sitting there and a guy comes by in a truck with a big American flag, it feels like this big middle finger. And it's like, I constantly am thinking, that is not your flag. I am not going to let you take away that flag. I'm not going to let you hijack that symbol. So the temptation you're describing is to find, you know, to react negatively to it. Like, okay, that has now become a, you know, in house symbol of maga. Well, you know, the hell with that. No, this is. This would be a huge problem. Okay, I want to go back to the history, because in terms of the history wars, there was one sort of back and forth that captures exactly what you're describing in this, in a very dramatic way, in a very, I think, very, very unfortunate way. When the New York Times, for reasons that they best understand, decided to launch the 1619 project, and everyone decided they were going to Put this into schools. This dates the founding of the country back to the first slave and suggested, at least in the original versions, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, which I think is an ahistorical view. Trump and the right seized upon that to create their own. You know, Trump's 1776 Commission. And so you had these dueling visions of what is the founding of America? Is it, you know, irredeemably about slavery, was the revolution about slavery, which then created the opening for this. This other, more sanitized version. And really, we're still kind of living in that push pull, aren't we, where there is that the two versions of American history that have been weaponized, to use that overused term.

[Yoni Applebaum]

Yeah, it's a great way to frame it. Right. And what you're pointing to there is sort of this cycle of reaction and counter reaction where we spiral down. The 1619 project included a lot of really valuable scholarship. But like you, I look at it and think it got a fundamental claim here wrong. 16:19 is not in any meaningful sense the founding of the United States. Folks rallied to the defense of that claim, I think, in part because of the identity of the critics and the nature of the criticism. They were lobbying and, you know, then Trump appropriates 1776. You know, I would not cease 1776 to Donald Trump.

[Charlie Sykes]

No, definitely not. Please don't.

[Yoni Applebaum]

The founding principles of the Declaration. Right. That, that is, you know, our harshest critics have usually been those who hold up the standards of our founding documents to the American people and say, are we living up to that? They don't cede it. They don't say these things were wrong or these things were misbegotten because of the flawed nature of the men who wrote them. They say those flawed men got something big. Right. How well are we doing at living up to it? You know, when Frederick Douglass gave his much quoted speech, you know what to the slave is the fourth of July, people still quote the zingers in there, the critique of American hypocrisy. They less often quote his citation of. Of the Constitution of the United States as a liberty document. What he was saying in that speech was not just that Americans were hypocritical, but also that they had a way out. Right. That they could live up to their own principles. That's the flip side of the charge of hypocrisy.

[Charlie Sykes]

Yeah. And that was like sort of a fundamental fusional document of these various traits where you had a former slave who was challenging America as reality versus ideals. But he came down in the end on, okay, this is the American idea. So there is a template there that's very, very old. So let's leave with a more hopeful thing because I do think it's going to be difficult for a lot of people to go through this. And then again, the 250th birthday of the United States is a great time to talk about, okay, who and what are we celebrating? What is America? What does America stand for? I think it's important to resist the Trumpian takeover. But give me some who is working on the project of telling this story, this shared story, because if there's any way that America gets through what we're going through right now, it's when we basically have something approaching a shared history, a shared understanding of America.

[Yoni Applebaum]

Yeah.

[Charlie Sykes]

Who is doing that? What are the prospects?

[Yoni Applebaum]

I think the prospects are actually remarkably bright. Many professional historians have belatedly awakened to the peril. They have looked around and said, you know, it is actually important for us to engage in this project to write histories that are rich and nuanced and complicated and as diverse in their sources and in their perspectives as the people that they seek to document. And we're getting single volume histories of America again. Jill Lepore wrote a really interesting one. Other historians are engaged with that project. But more than that, I think many Americans want this again, right? There is again a sense that if this republic is worth defending against those who would degrade its values or challenge its principles, then you have to honor those values and the principles. Right? A country that is founded in slavery and oppression and can never rise above it is not one that is of worth defending. A country that was willing to tolerate and exploit slavery and oppression and was full of people who struggled mightily to abolish slavery and to end oppression is a country that is flawed like we are flawed, but one that you can rise to its defense. And I see people doing this. There was a historian I talked to while reporting this named Johan Neame, who had a really interesting perspective on it because he, like many of the most patriotic Americans I meet, is an immigrant to this country. He actually arrived in the bicentennial year. I couldn't have scripted it better. In 1976, he's a three year old immigrant from India. And he told me, like, look, you know, the country that I arrived in was a country where somebody like me could become American. And maybe, maybe if you live here, you don't understand how powerful that is, right? To have a country that if you embrace its values, uphold its ideals, Dedicate your life to its service. You can be fully co equal with those who are born there and can trace their lineage back generations. That's a remarkable thing in the world, and we shouldn't give that up. And when I talk to scholars like that, I'm inspired because I look at it and I say, okay, he's not somebody who wants to whitewash the past. He's not somebody who wants to look away from the complexity. He wants to stare hard at and not lose sight of the broader message that can be distilled from the American past.

[Charlie Sykes]

So two thoughts about that. Number one, the story of the immigrants who understand how special America is coming amidst the assault on immigration, the people questioning, is immigration a good thing or a bad thing? So in many ways, the fundamental American idea is under challenge there. And I think that's the kind of. The frightening thing. But the other point is taking a hard look at American past. I think there's this naive view that if in fact, you look at the warts, that's all you see. And I remember during the. I think it was during the 1920. 19 or 2020. And I admitted this on my podcast at the time. And I'm not totally proud because I thought I understood American history. I was learning for the first time about the Oklahoma City Massacre and the number of incidents like that. And I was shocked that I didn't know more about it. I was shocked at the horror of it and that this was the kind of thing that had been whitewashed from American history. But to your point, when you look at and realize how bad things were, you also then have to look at how much we have overcome and how much incredible courage it has taken us to go from that point to this point. And how many countries would be able to figure out a way to how do we deal with these crimes? As opposed to the. So the MAGA approach is that if you tell people about these terrible things, they will hate America. And this is running down America. I agree. If there is a redemption story, if there's an ark story, it needs to include stories like that. So it doesn't make me hate America more. It makes me in many ways admire the resilience. Like, oh, my God, this happened. We need to remember this happened. But also that how far we have come from that. So I think those are important points. So I'm hoping that you're right, that this is a moment to rethink all of those things. So thank you for the article and thank you for all your time today. I appreciate it. Very much.

[Quo Advertiser]

Thank you.

[Yoni Applebaum]

It was a pleasure.

[Charlie Sykes]

Well again, the article is How America Gave up on its History, History and the Fight about the inability to agree on America's story. Incredibly timely for the 250th birthday. We'll post a link to it on on my website. And thank you all for listening to this episode of to the Contrary. You know why we do this, why we continue to do this this week again, in case you had forgotten that, we need to remind ourselves that we are not the crazy ones.

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