Two different versions of the US are on the table, but both of them are captive to the past.
Of all the schisms which cleave contemporary America, few are more stark than the divide between those who consider themselves to be victims of US history and those who fear they will be casualties of the its future.
Many people of colour, the large majority of whom vote Democrat, believe that the historical wrongs of enslavement and segregation have never been adequately righted. Many white Americans, the majority of whom voted Republican four years ago, fear the onset of a more “woke” and secular country in which whites find themselves in the minority by mid-century.
A prime reason why the 2024 presidential election feels so epochal is because it has become a fight between avatars of these contrasting and conflicting Americas. Kamala Harris is a Black woman, whose earliest political memories come from attending civil rights rallies in the late-1960s. “Fweedom” she shouted from her pushchair, she tells us in her memoir. Donald Trump is a white nationalist who made his political name as the untitled leader of the so-called birther movement, which denied the very legitimacy of the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama.
Make America Great Again, his catchphrase, is a slogan saturated in nostalgic nationalism. Part of its appeal always lay in Trump’s lack of historical specificity. So for some it conjured the America of the 1950s, before the civil rights movement hammered at the walls of prejudice and the feminist revolution shattered glass ceilings. For others, it brought to mind halcyon days when America’s manufacturing heartland was known as a workshop rather than a post-industrial wasteland. Now the former president wants voters to look back wistfully on his four years in office, when mortgages were cheaper and gas prices lower.
Kamala Harris, by contrast, is promising to look beyond the horizon. In her first campaign speech as the Democrat’s de facto presidential nominee, she framed the election as “a battle for the future”. Yet modern-day US politics has often become a battle over the past, revisiting histories that have never been properly resolved. The legendary Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill once famously said that “all politics is local”, a dictum that came to enjoy a long afterlife.
Increasingly, however, all politics is history.
Yesterday’s gone
“Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” were the lyrics from the Fleetwood Mac anthem that provided the soundtrack for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992: “Yesterday’s gone. Yesterday’s gone.” Politics back then was more future focused. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Cold War was in the past. The political theorist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy. As the new millennium approached, and the world hurtled down the information super-highway, Clinton later pledged to build a bridge to the 21st century.
Victory for this son of Hope, Arkansas, marked a generational shift. George Herbert Walker Bush, his opponent in the 1992 presidential election, hailed from the Greatest Generation, the Americans who fought so valiantly in World War II. Clinton was a Baby Boomer whose formative years had been spent in the culture wars of the 1960s. That tumultuous decade loomed large during the 1992 campaign. Indeed, there were times when the vote felt like a referendum on unfinished business from the ’60s. Would Americans vote for an alleged draft-dodger, who had not served in Vietnam? Would they countenance a forceful first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a high-flying lawyer who was a standard-bearer of the feminist revolution? Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone? Not a bit of it. The 1992 campaign underscored how neither the Clintons, or America, could truly break free from its history.
Fast forward to the present day and US politics has become even more captive to the past. Now that Kamala Harris is heading the Democratic ticket, racism has again come to the fore — what Bill Clinton had called in his second inaugural address America’s “constant curse”. Trump’s race-baiting, when he questioned whether she was truly Black, did not only have echoes of his birtherism. It is a more extreme version of the “southern strategy” pioneered by Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential election, in which he sought to exploit white fears about Black advance following the civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s.
Harris has described the racial attacks against her as “the same old show”. But the same old show of exploiting race for political advantage partly explains why the Republicans had a virtual lock on the White House from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Only once during that period, in the 1976, up against Jimmy Carter, did the party lose a presidential election. Successfully playing the race card — whether through Ronald Reagan’s demonisation of Black “welfare queens” or surrogates of George H W Bush running the notorious Willie Horton ad during the 1988 election — contributed to that success.
Nor is it just race. In the abortion debate, yesteryear has become the present day. Overturning Roe v Wade turned back the clock on female reproductive rights to the early 1970s. Small wonder that women in their 60s and 70s attending pro-choice rallies hold aloft banners reading: “I can’t believe I’m still protesting this shit.”
The gun debate is a clash over the meaning of the 27 words of tortured syntax and questionable grammar that make up the Second Amendment. Whereas the founding fathers intended it to be a collective right applicable to state militias, the National Rifle Association has succeeded in up-ending this interpretation and making the Second Amendment the basis for individual gun rights. Through much of US history, the Supreme Court repeatedly rejected this specious interpretation. After state militias diminished in importance, the Second Amendment even became known as the lost amendment because of its obsolescence. Not until 2008, in its landmark Heller ruling, did the conservative-dominated court finally grant victory to gun rights activists by altering its meaning.
Contemporary political ideology has become more historical. On the conservative side of politics, originalism is one of the few core ideas to have survived the Trump years intact. This legal credo posits that the Constitution should be interpreted to reflect the original thinking and intentions of the founding fathers. Thus, in the majority ruling overturning Roe v Wade, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to abortion was not “deeply rooted in the nation’s history”. To justify his reasoning, he used the word “history” no less than 67 times.
Presentism has become a driving idea on the left, the notion that historical figures can legitimately be judged by modern-day mores and values. This thinking led a San Francisco education board in 2021 to vote in favour of renaming 44 schools, including those honouring George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — a decision it later reversed — and New York councillors to vote unanimously to banish a statue of Thomas Jefferson from City Hall, because he enslaved more than 600 African-Americans.
Duelling visions
In recent years, the history wars have become ever more angry. On becoming president in 2021, one of Joe Biden’s first acts was to banish from the White House website the 1776 Report. That was Donald Trump’s pet presidential project to push back against what he called a “radicalised view of American history” and to produce a “pro-American” history curriculum. Following that edict to the letter, the panel he appointed gave America a clean bill of historical health, especially on the question of race. America, the 1776 Report concluded, was “the most just and glorious country in all of human history”. It was a complete whitewashing of the past using heavy duty bleach.
The 1776 Report became a rebuttal to the 1619 Project at the New York Times, which was first published in 2019 on the 400th anniversary of the first ship carrying enslaved Africans reaching shore in what was then the British colony of Virginia. Its aim was “to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of our national narrative”. Do Americans align with the 1776 Report or the 1619 Project? Increasingly, the debate over the meaning of America’s complicated and contradictory history is conducted in a crassly binary form.
The battle over how history should be taught in schools has been fought with almost the same angry vituperativeness as battles over abortion and guns. Critical race theory, the inarguable nostrum that America’s institutions were riddled from the start with systematic racism, has become the focus of fierce, sometimes even violent, contestation. How to make sense of the past is where white identity politics and minority identity politics often now face off.
Statues and monuments have become lightning rods, especially those honouring Confederate figures such as General Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davies, the first and only president of the Confederate states. In the George Floyd summer of 2020, demonstrators seemed more determined to tear down symbols of white supremacy than to press for substantive police-reform legislation.
History has not only become a driver of popular protest but of populist politics. The Tea Party movement, which first emerged during the Great Recession in 2008, was inspired by the protesters who poured chests of tea into Boston harbour in anger at their British colonial overlords. Some Tea Partiers turned up at protests wearing 18th century costumes, including tricolour hats, as if they were staging some historical re-enactment.
During the January 6 insurrection, many of the rioters chanted “1776” as they stormed the US Capitol. Rather than seditionists, they cast themselves as patriots acting in the spirit of the revolution. For them, the violence was historically legitimate. Some carried the Betsy Ross flag, with its 13 stars and stripes signifying the original colonies, a popular banner amongst militia groups because it celebrates the era when Blacks and women were barred from voting. The VDARE flag was also brandished, an homage to Virginia Dare, who is thought to be the first white child born on “New World” soil. In a similarly racist vein, other seditionists carried the Confederate colours. Given all the ensigns and flags, the storming of the Capitol felt like a historical passion play.
In the stage management of politics, historical settings now frequently form the backdrop. During the 2020 election, Biden travelled to Gettysburg to issue a plea for national unity. Ahead of the 2022 congressional midterms, he delivered a speech defending democracy in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the framers drafted the constitution. For his first campaign speech of 2024, Biden travelled to Valley Forge, where George Washington’s army had regrouped during the Revolutionary War. There, he accused Trump of “trying to rewrite the facts” of January 6, and of “trying to steal history the same way he tried to steal the election”.
For commentators attempting to contextualise this election, history has become a touchstone. Understandably, parallels are being drawn with 1968. That was the year President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, his place taken at the head of the Democratic ticket by vice-president Hubert Humphrey, who did not have to contest a single primary. The year was also marred by political violence, with the assassinations both of the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, who was then running for president. The convention was even held in Chicago, the venue for this year’s Democratic conclave — a far more joyous affair.
Often, then, it feels as if America is facing a problem of historical overload. It is being overwhelmed, and paralysed to an extent, by a welter of unresolved history. It is tempting to bastardise that famous sign posted on the war room of Bill Clinton’s Little Rock campaign headquarters in 1992. It’s not the economy, stupid, but rather the history.
Passing the torch
When Joe Biden explained in a speech, delivered from the Oval Office, why he was standing aside as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, he used the superlative line from the inaugural address of John F Kennedy, the fellow Irish-American who had inspired him to enter politics. It was time, said Biden, “to pass the torch to a new generation”. Aged 81, with a political career in Washington that stretched back to the early 1970s, Biden had witnessed, and participated in, an epic tranche of history. He was old enough to have been a member of a Democratic Party that still included racist southern segregationists, some of whom would later defect to the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln. Like his friend and Catholic co-religionist, Ted Kennedy, he had switched sides on Roe v Wade, from opposing the 1973 Supreme Court ruling to fighting for its survival. He had first sought the presidency as far back as 1988, when Ronald Reagan resided in the White House.
In his televised address to the nation, he invoked George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose portraits hang in the Oval Office. He spoke of “the sacred task of perfecting our union”, echoing the preamble to the US constitution. Also he reminded his compatriots of words from the Declaration of Independence: “We are all created equal, endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.” And he ended by evoking the spirit of the American revolution, and the creation of the American republic: “The great thing about America is, here kings and dictators do not rule — the people do. History is in your hands.”
Kamala Harris has grabbed that torch and run with it like a baton. In her first speech as the Democrat’s de facto presidential nominee, she immediately sought to reframe the contest: “This campaign is also about two different visions for our nation,” she said, “one where we are focused on the future, the other focused on the past.” Rather than embroidering her speech with historical references, she spoke of “the beauty of this moment”. Tellingly, the only two presidents she name-checked were Joe Biden and Donald Trump. She did not even mention the January 6 insurrection, the leitmotif of Joe Biden’s stump speeches. The road to the White House, she sought to affirm, would not involve glancing in the rear-view mirror. It was full speed ahead. “We’re not going back,” she told the crowd in Milwaukee, which immediately took up that chant. “And I’ll tell you why we’re not going back: because ours is a fight for the future.”
In her keynote speech at the Democratic convention last month, the phrase “we’re not going back” became a mantra intoned over and over by her mosh pit of supporters. “Let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told,” she concluded by saying. But at no stage did she refer to the possibility of achieving a historic first by becoming the first woman to take the presidential oath of office. Just as Obama de-emphasised his race ahead of his victory in 2008, she is downplaying both her skin colour and her gender.
That, in itself, reminds us of how in modern-day America it has become harder to turn the page. History is not so easy to escape. And nor is the Harris campaign completely ahistorical, despite all the efforts to focus on the path ahead. Consider her emphasis on “freedoms” — “the freedom to live safe from the terror of gun violence”, as she put it in Milwaukee, “reproductive freedom” and “the sacred freedom to vote.” It is a modern-day reworking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous four freedoms, outlined during his 1941 State of the Union address, which included the freedom from fear and the freedom from want.
Much of the appeal of her running mate, Tim Walz, comes from his traditionalism: the fact that he seems to have stepped into the present from a folksy, romanticised past. The son of rural Nebraska. The veteran who served in the National Guard. The high school teacher. The gun-owner. The coach. The soothing ambience of Friday Night Lights. “Tim Walz is a Norman Rockwell painting sprung to life,” reckons the Democratic strategist, David Axelrod, who served in the Obama White House. In a campaign that has tapped into the “Brat summer” online zeitgeist, inspired by the release of Charli XCX’s album Brat, Walz seems more like a character from the hit sitcom Happy Days, the personification of a set of reassuring stereotypes. Indeed, a strength of the Democratic ticket is that it combines the old with the promise of the new.
But if Kamala Harris were to win in November, would it truly mark a break from the past? That was how Obama’s historic victory in 2008 was often portrayed: almost as an “end of American history” moment. A Black man occupied a White House built by the enslaved. Finally and belatedly, the original sin of slavery had been absolved. Grace had finally led America home. Amazing grace.
Yet the Obama years showed that hope and history rarely rhyme. Perhaps the central lesson we learnt from his eight years in office was that there cannot be a post-racial America partly because there cannot be a post-historical America while so much racial discrimination still persists. During the Obama years, US politics became even more racialised. Equality gaps somewhat narrowed but did not close. Rather than being unifying, a transcendent figure who could draw the red and blue states together, a Black president became polarising largely because of his pigmentation. He was followed into office by a man routinely considered to be a racist, a refutation of the Obama years in human form.
President Kamala Harris would surely face the same white backlash, with misogyny thrown into the mix as well. Misogynoir is the phrase that combines these two prejudices. If she is sworn in next January as the country’s first female president, she would not end history. Rather, her inauguration would likely see history pressing repeat. During Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention, he noted of a second Trump presidency: “We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse.” But he could also have been describing the reaction among many Trump supporters to a Harris presidency.
A problem for contemporary America is that news cycles have become the historical cycle in microcosm. On guns, abortion, race, the division of power between the states and the federal government, the apportionment of power between the presidency, Congress and the judiciary, we keep on revisiting the same arguments. We keep on going over the same ground. We keep on confronting the same unresolved problems. “We cannot escape our history.” The words of Abraham Lincoln, contained in his message to Congress in December 1862, are just as resonant now as they were at the time of the Civil War.
History, then, is not an anchor, but rather stormy seas that never calm. They could get even rougher as the country nears its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. The United States is buckling under the weight and contradictions of its past for the simple reason that so much of that history is still being contested. All politics is history. All history is politics.
Credits
Words: Nick Bryant
Illustrations: Emma Machan
Editor: Leigh Tonkin
