Nation’s past strife has lessons for today

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.

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. 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-the-road 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.”

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.

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.

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?

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.