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/262/ The Useless Past ft. Matt Karp (Patreon)

Published:
2022-05-10 06:01:01
Imported:
2026-06
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On liberals' embrace of the past and history wars.

We talk to Matthew Karp about his essay, "History As End: 1619, 1776, and the politics of the past". It seems as if there's an ideological inversion going on, where liberals see history in terms of original sin and cycles of injustice, or at best, want to relitigate the past in order to fight battles of the present. Meanwhile conservatives have abandoned the past. 

What does this say about current attitudes to capital-h History and making the future?

Readings:

History As End: 1619, 1776, and the politics of the past, Matt Karp, Harpers

Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson, Gregory Elliott

The End of the End of History, Bungacast

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Comments

Davka Smolah Collective

The thing I always find strange about the myopically identitarian "rewritings" of American history is that they all ignore such an obvious structural-economic component. The Southern planter class really has structured their whole regional economy around extracting labor-power for less than its reproduction cost (slavery, sharecropping, illegal immigrant labor, prisoner labor, etc.). In certain ways, via the Republican Party as their class-sectoral party, they're trying to expand that business model throughout the country. This does, quite reasonably, demand a materialist critique that, say, $0.05/hour manual labor in 2022 (wages in prison labor) are both a subsidy to bad business models and, importantly, that subsidy is coming out of the pockets of the free working class.

Henry

Glad you mentioned the Russian Monument in Treptower Park. I live in Berlin and I was also thoroughly impressed when I first visited the site. Not only by the massive statue itself, but also by how the whole complex is arranged and how space and perspective are being used within it. I drove by it the other night leaving a birthday gathering of a friend that took place in the park. The whole area is fenced up now and there is a strangely large police presence within, the entire thing spotlighted while the park surrounding it is completely dark, and (at least during the few minutes I observed) there was a cop constantly circling around the statue with a flashlight. Quite the surreal scene...

Red Shmoo

This obsession with America’s racist past reached its deranged zenith when those DHS border patrol agents rode down those Haitian immigrants on horseback last September. Remember that? American liberals focused so hard on how the image of white men on horseback riding against black people evoked America’s racist past, slave patrols or whatnot, that the actual event happening in *present* reality - poor Haitian refugees being terrorized by authorities NOW TODAY IN BIDEN’S AMERICA- ceased to have any reality for them. The actual immediate meaning of the event being totally eclipsed by how its *optics* evoked America’s racist past.

Daniel L

I think so much if this comes back to the subsuming of class into race, gender and anything else in the US

Casey Cho

I don't think its necessarily conscious as noted in the interview, but 1619ism is often used as a cudgel by woke liberals to denounce any kind of popular, materialist left. I recall Bernie's appeals to the New Deal and FDR being met with criticisms that it ignored the racists aspects of the New Deal or the Japanese internment camps. Jeet Heer caught a lot of flak for praising the late 19th Century Populists, with "progressives" seeming to adopt an almost cartoonish Hofstaderism to regard all forms of populism as inherently racist and reactionary. By dismissing the white working class as a hereditary reactionary caste, a post facto justification can be created for the current "Coalition of the Ascendant" (ie PMCs and the nonwhite working class, esp the urban precariat) as the only possible progressive coalition possible. The ultimate symbol of this tendency was when activists made attempts to cover up a 1930s mural by a communist artist who studied under Diego Rivera in George Washington High School in San Francisco that correctly depicted Washington as a slave owner and settler atrocities against Native Americans because it might seem offensive. Spearheading this effort was Meena Harris, the niece of the Vice President.