There are not one but two Americas, or so we are told: Biden voters and Trump voters, city-dwellers and rural Americans, vaccine enthusiasts and anti-vaxxers, MSNBC habitués and Fox News loyalists, BLM cheerers-on and MAGA advocates—and, of course, blue states and red states. Everything passes through the filter of partisan allegiance, not just how you vote and what you watch and read but who you know, where you live, where you shop, what you say. Hatred of the Other and fear of being misidentified as a member of the opposite clique form the basis of our warring political cultures.
If they have quibbles with their own side, partisans are sure about one thing: Evil is on the other side. From the perspective of the historian, this is not a necessarily persuasive way of thinking about things. If, in a history of the Italian city-states, one encountered the claim that wrongdoing during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was overwhelmingly attributable to the conduct of the Guelphs and not the Ghibellines—or vice versa—it would be hard not to react with skepticism. Of course, it is possible that one faction was more vicious than the other, but probably not for the reasons the opposing faction believed it was. More likely, both factions, their differences now seemingly arcane, formed part of a single political system, which is best assessed as such. The writing of history has high moral stakes, and historical figures have morals, too, but history is not a facile or simplistic morality tale—or at least it shouldn’t be. The most effective historical scholarship has always been that which is most carefully attuned to interlocking sources of change, as well as to mutual misunderstandings and unintended, sometimes tragic, outcomes.
Those who bring such an approach to the analysis of contemporary politics typically draw accusations of cultivating a nihilistic bias in favor of an indefensible status quo, or of being a “useful idiot” for the other side. But evaluating the American scene from a certain remove does not require suspending one’s moral or political judgment of partisan figures and their actions. Nor does it require adopting the hyperproceduralism and worship of the opinion poll particular to the political centrist. Quite the opposite.