Democrats must keep emphasis on division, bitterness

History is much on our minds, and not only because we’re arguing about how our past should be presented to public school students. We also sense – – correctly – – that we are at a hinge point for democracy itself. The two are linked: From the beginning of the republic, arguments over history have mirrored the conflicts in our politics.

I was reminded of this during a recent conversation with a person dear to me, my high school history teacher, Jim Garman. Jim deepened my love for the American saga by showing how great historians argued among themselves about what the past meant. As he put it, “there are many ways to tell the story.” It’s useful to learn early on that our history will always be contested.

In the 1960s, when I was in Jim’s class, the curriculum reflected the “conflict or consensus” debate about how best to understand the long American arc. The consensus school was nearing the end of its dominance, as was the power of a middle-of-theroad political perspective that shaped politics in the years after the New Deal and World War II.

Dwight D. Eisenhower had moved the Republican Party toward acceptance of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s project and preached the need for “balance.” John F. Kennedy, the Democrat who followed him, spoke out against a “grand warfare of rival ideologies” that would “sweep the country with passion.” Kennedy called for a “more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead.”

Many of the era’s great historians and social scientists, reflecting the view that we had reached “the end of ideology,” were pushing against a Progressive era framework that stressed class conflict. No, said the influential political scientist Louis Hartz, encapsulating the prevailing view that we were united by a single ideology. Our nation was built on a “moral unanimity” behind the “fixed, dogmatic liberalism” reflected in the individualistic thinking of John Locke.

The consensus outlook soon came crashing down as the academy rediscovered how deeply conflict ran through our DNA. This dissenting narrative rose alongside the civil rights and feminist movements. The turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s reignited passions that Kennedy hoped were part of our past.

The emerging generation of historians highlighted problems around race, class and gender. “Dissertations in social history quadrupled from 1958 to 1978,” the writer Scott Spillman noted, “as young scholars sought to recover the experiences of women, slaves, free blacks, Native Americans, immigrants and children.”

Later, as New York University professor Kim Phillips-Fein observed, the rise of a conservative movement directed against the accommodations that Eisenhower had championed turned the study of conservatism into “one of the most dynamic subfields in American history.”

What can we learn from the past half-century’s history wars? First, that it’s deeply misleading to downplay deep conflicts around ideology, race, class, gender and immigration. All are central to who we were and who we would become.

To do this is not to deny the importance of liberty, equality and community to our narrative. They were always touchstones for those who battled to improve our republic. But battle they did.

Second, school boards and politicians should beware of insisting upon sanitized, state-sanctioned versions of our nation’s messy past. Students will not appreciate our country any less when great teachers like Jim engage them in the arguments that are foundational to what it means to be an American.

Finally, let’s recognize that democracy advanced not when our nation papered over conflict in the name of false consensus but, rather, when our forebears took up the struggle for justice – – even when it made some people uncomfortable.

It’s an American habit to long for a politics without conflict, for a happy, peaceable republic where interests and ideologies give way to constructive collaboration. Who doesn’t understand this aspiration at a time when we can’t even agree on the most basic steps (vaccination, mask-wearing) to keep as many of us as possible alive and healthy?

So, yes, I want us to be kinder and more understanding toward one another in the coming year. We would do well to embrace the Rev. David Hollenbach’s call for “intellectual solidarity.” He’s right that the world would be a better place if we sought the truth together through disciplined conversation and authentic dialogue.

But we won’t get to the searching interactions Hollenbach calls for if we indulge the illusion of a democratic public life without friction. The same realism should lead us to reject the romantic fallacy that the American story is largely a consensual project.

As long as democracy itself is under threat, as it certainly will be in 2022, we would be untrue to our history if we gave up the fight just because we longed for some peace and quiet.

– – E.J. Dionne is on Twitter: @EJDionne.