I may write more about this issue soon, but I’ve taken note of all the recent attention to “long-termism”, mostly focused on William MacAskill’s new book What We Owe the Future. (I will say this much: a lot of the people pushing back on it don’t seem to recognize that climate activism more or less requires some form of “long-termism”, and that it’s pretty hard to restrict the long-termism to just climate.)
But to take a different tack on long-termism, I found myself thinking this morning about how the political moment in the United States will look seventy-five years or so from now, as people look back.
This is a common exercise in a shallow way in public culture, usually made as a promise that history will judge a political leader harshly. Most historians know it doesn’t really work that way. If history—or historians—judge, it’s never a final sentence that holds true from the moment of judgment onward. Andrew Jackson has been reappraised several times, for example, and at least today, I don’t think there would be a lot of enthusiasm for putting him on the currency. Caligula and Nero have gotten some new looks over time. And so on.
Here I’m returning again to the question of presentism, I suppose, and once again accepting that it is and ought to be with us always in how we think about the past. But here’s a different angle: is it possible to think of the present with some of the distance that we are sometimes afforded in thinking about the past? (The distance that critics of presentism in historical thought believe we should strive for?)
What I mean is this: if I am writing, for example, about past sociopolitical conflicts, I’m often able to provide a fairly cold-blooded description of the anatomy of those conflicts, to describe various groups or classes almost as if I were offering an inventory: there are these people in this place with the following interests who were drawn into conflict with those people over there because their interests overlapped.
That distant descriptive vision is arguably factually or empirically incorrect: I’m likely describing those groups as far more defined than they were, describing their interests in far too clear a fashion, and misattributing some of what happened to some sort of rational or coherent pursuit of those interests. I am doing the slightly less formalized version of reductive model-making that historians tend to prefer, but it’s still a model that leaves out a great deal and provides a flawed, slightly false, explanation of what happened and why it happened. Why do I do it, then? Because it’s also more than slightly true and because there is a welcoming clarity to such a description, a clarity that helps me identify further research goals and helps me explain the history to any students or audiences who want to know more about it.
So, for example, since it’s on my mind this week due to teaching, if I work from scholarship by Walter Rodney, Toby Green, Boubacar Barry, Herman Bennett, Kate Lowe and other historians to talk about Senegambia and Upper Guinea in the early formation of Atlantic trade that primarily involved Portuguese sailors and merchants and in short order a Luso-African creole culture in coastal settlements and Atlantic islands, I can lay out one of those anatomies. There is the Portuguese sovereign and his court within the context of Iberian, Western European and Mediterranean politics, warfare and trade from the late 13th Century onward. There are the appointed representives of the sovereign heading some trading voyages along the Atlantic coast. There are officers and sailors on those official ships. There are unauthorized Portuguese merchants and sailors also sailing to the same destinations, such as the ship that was already anchored at the site that became Elmina when the local ruler Kwamena Ansa greeted Diego Azambuja after he arrived as the crown’s official representative. There are the rulers of centralized states of varying sizes up and down the coast from Senegambia to Benin who have immediate access to coastal sites who make various decisions about whether to welcome Atlantic trade, about how to develop the sites and practices of trade, and what commodities to offer and what to demand. There are people living already on the coast or immediately inland who make other decisions based on their own interests, sometimes at odds with the powerful—leading, for example, to an attack on the foundations of the fort the Portuguese began to build at Elmina. In Senegambia and Guinea, there are, if we follow Toby Green’s arguments, people in near-coastal polities who are already practiced at instrumental creolization designed to make trade and the expression of political authority from a distant metropole more frictionless who immediately set out to extend that strategy to encompass the Portuguese, thus producing a creolized Atlantic social world with its own interests to defend.
All of that effort makes it easier to narrate any given event and to connect early Atlantic Africa to what came before and after without losing sight of its historical distinctiveness. But it also makes the individuals and groups who actually inhabited that world seem a good deal more clear-sighted and consciously directed than they were. A historian can tell a story that cleanly rationalizes what happened to Buumi Jelen, a ruler of one of the Jolof states in Senegambia in the late 1400s. He went to Portugal to ask for aid in a succession struggle and was received as a fellow sovereign. The aid was refused, but Jelen claimed to convert to Catholicism—perhaps to try and change the Portuguese crown’s willingness to aid him. In some accounts, this worked and he was sent back with troops. But then he was murdered by the Portuguese commander of the expedition, an action I’ve seen historians explain in a variety of ways. To me, that just seems like a messy story that isn’t going to have a single explanation, which in turn seems to me the way that this whole history is when you’re trying to see it the way it was lived, which in turn seems to me the way human life is in general.
But that is not a helpful point when you’re trying to gain an entry-level understanding of the time and place. And it is not a helpful point when you yourself are trying to decide what to do in your own time and place. Which is maybe where that distanced anatomy can be helpful, if you can just simultaneously remind yourself that it really isn’t the way the world actually is.
So if we were to try for a moment to just look on thusly at the political conjuncture we find ourselves in today, in September 2022, in the 246th year of American independence, what could we see? It’s plain that the desire for that perception has fueled an enormous amount of conversation within liberal-left public culture since 2014 or so. That’s at the root of many arguments about whether Trump supporters are working-class, upper middle-class, rural or suburban, motivated by race, motivated by gender, motivated by religion, and so on. Part of the problem is that many of those arguments are far more motivated by intramural rivalries and deep ideological foundations within liberal-left coalitions. E.g., people have entered into public debate and social media arguments with some kind of idee fixe about who Trump’s supporters need to be or ought to be either to try and push back on allies by implying that they have the wrong idea about Trump’s base or by managing their own fears about whether Trump’s base might have a legitimate reason to call for left-wing sympathy.
That’s not that different than what historians imagine to be a distant perspective, mind you. (Once again, presentism!) Since the end of the 18th Century, no historian has taken a cool look at the French Revolution without some imagined, often quite conscious, need to identify or disidentify with some group of involved actors, or without some need to give out a commendation or a condemnation for some role in causing the events of the Revolution. But whatever moves in you when you think of the sans-culottes, it’s likely not the same thing when you think of a crowd of people wearing MAGA hats.
I’m no different. I dislike and fear those crowds and I am quite sure those feelings are reciprocated. I do not hate them for who they are but what they have done, are doing, might yet do. There I think that feeling is not reciprocated: I’m pretty sure they hate me for who I am, categorically. And part of that feeling is not nobility on my part but simply that I still don’t know, after all the hurly-burly of the last decade, who they are, categorically. I only know what they visibly have done, are doing, declare that they will do.
I know where there are more of them and where there are fewer. But that knowledge gets tripped up by also knowing that I know where there are voting rules that favor where they are that may confuse my capacity to build models of who they are. I know that there’s a fairly strong connection to having a college degree, with the Trump base far less likely to have one. That’s not enough either, though, considering that many of their tribunes in political office or in leadership positions have degrees, often from elite universities. They seem to be very strong in regions that are suffering enormously from the effects of deindustrialization—West Virginia, the Rust Belt, etc.; but Seth Stephens-Davidowitz I thought suggested accurately that we have the wrong idea about “ordinary millionaires” in American society and that a lot of those ordinary millionaires may be precisely the people who have the characteristic cultural and social resentments of Trump’s political base.
Try as I might, I find it nearly impossible to think my way into the kind of anatomy that historians seventy-five years from now may be able to lay out. (Assuming there are historians and assuming they will be allowed to express some form of critical distance from whatever emerges from this moment, both assumptions that may be unwarranted.)
The closest I can come is that first, I need to work continuously towards a distinction between the outcomes of an electoral system and the wider social and cultural substrate that system lies on top of. This electoral system, no matter how it is run, falsifies and distorts the sociocultural referent that it claims to speak for. Some people don’t vote, some people’s votes count for more, some voting rules disconnect the outcomes of voting from the interpretation of votes by those who are elected (or appointed). If I want to understand who a set of people who are politically and socially mobilized are, then I need to not use electoral outcomes as the first or most important indicator of their identities, interests, or even location. (Including the point that casting a vote may not actually be an indicator of political mobilization.) If I care primarily about the consequences of electoral outcomes, then I need to focus my attempts to be distanced on those and those alone.
The second thing I think I can manage is some sort of inventory of economic, political and cultural interests that are conflicting or rivalrous and then maybe begin to try and match those up to tangible groups or constituencies of people. I can say some concrete things about the value of the credentials that higher education provides in the current labor marketplace and from there figure out who can pay the costs of those credentials and who can’t, or what other barriers to access there might be that aren’t straightforwardly about cost. I can say some concrete things about the cost of health care and about how different groups in different locations pay those costs—or forgo those services.
I think to do this right—in a distant way—involves a really huge inventory of interests, costs, groups and locations. I think it involves the opposite of trying to single out a major causal variable. I understand why everyone wants to shortcut to that—it’s how some social sciences train people to think, but the reason they do is that they’re trying to find something simple to focus effort and resources on in order to move the needle in a particular direction. That is another thing that the historians’ version of distance does differently: we end up arguing that change over time is a huge dance of simultaneities choreographed by the music of unintended outcomes. I think it’s possible to begin to get a clear picture of Trump’s support from that kind of distance but it is not an especially strategic or comforting exercise.
It’s not strategic because his support is a complex system that has hardened into a firm structure from a thousand different starting conditions that can’t be disentangled by pushing on any single thing. All the different contentions about who they are: millionaire car-dealers! underemployed ex-steelworkers who have been kicked in the teeth by globalization! pensioned lower middle-class civil servants who are defending the primacy of white political power! evangelical Christians who want a theocracy! angry men who want to push women out of public life and the workplace! are all true I think if you do your distanced inventory with enough meticulousness, and there is no simple way to align them all so that all those differences collapse and it all makes perfect analytic sense.
It’s not comforting because some of that inventory justifies—even intensifies—our fears about what might happen next. And it also makes clear that there are dimensions to Trump’s support that in fact anyone on the left has to feel some sympathy for: the economic and cultural exclusions resulting from the rise of educational credentialism, the consequences of globalization, the intensifying isolation of rural communities (something not unique to the United States). When you are trying to understand someone that you know has to be your enemy because of what they are doing and might yet do, it’s a lot easier when you can legitimately despise every single thing about them.
So I understand very much the impulse to just stay in the fight as it is, and deal with it as it comes to us. I’m not clear we gain much by trying to imagine a long view from above. I suppose what I am sure of is that the worst of all worlds, all too common on social media, is the attempt to use one quantitative or evidentiary proxy to reduce Trump’s base to a single social reality or causality and act as if analytic distance has been fully achieved. Nobody gets anything out of looking out the second-story window and acting like they have the same view as a spy satellite looking down from orbit.
Image credit: "The eastern coast of the United States from Virginia to Florida" by NASA Johnson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.