Toward a Reconciled View of American History
The reconciled conception of history is not, on its own, meant to tell us how to live. It is meant to provide an acceptable moral account of the past, on the assumption that having one would let us devote more attention to the one thing we can actually change—the future.
Photo by Raul Petri on Unsplash
In contemporary America, two interpretations of history battle for dominance. One view—call it the progressive view—sees the American past as a long tale of violence and oppression, focusing on the unjust treatment minorities have suffered at the hands of American society. It asserts that racist violence was central to the creation of this nation, that the liberty-loving rhetoric of the Founding Fathers was merely that, and that the sins of the past continue to exert a pernicious influence on the present. The other view—call it the conservative view—sees the national past in a positive light. It says that while America is not perfect, it still has much to be proud of. America was founded on high ideals whose implementation has, over time, made the world a better place: freer, richer, more equal, and more fair. Accordingly, the conservative view stresses instances of America’s contribution to moral and political progress, pointing to moments like the Declaration of Independence, the abolition of slavery, and the defeat of fascism and communism in the 20th century.
The two positions seem to be completely at odds with each other. In these debates about the national past, conservatives often feel that progressives are unpatriotic and unfair to the past, and progressives think that conservatives want to whitewash history and ignore its crimes. Yet a closer look at these historical narratives reveals that what the two sides say about the past is not entirely incompatible. There may be a way of reconciling the strengths of each side into what we may call the reconciled view of American history. Adopting the reconciled position would allow us all to turn our focus and attention to the places where deeper disagreement remains, namely, in our judgments about the present state of society and the direction it should take.
The Progressive View
To synthesize the conservative and progressive readings of American history, we first need to examine what each side gets right and then establish that the rational insights of each camp are not incompatible with each other.
The concern here is not with what each side gets right empirically; the dispute between conservatives and progressives is not in the last instance about who has a more accurate grip on the historical facts. Insofar as either side makes empirical mistakes, or tells straightforward lies, those need to be criticized and corrected. The project of finding a shared interpretation of the past has to bring together what’s true about the moral or normative beliefs and attitudes motivating the competing accounts of history (with “normative” construed broadly to refer to all our commitments about how human beings should treat each other). No interpretation of history—whether the progressive, the conservative, or the reconciled one that I am trying to develop here—can tolerate empirical falsehoods, that is, basic errors of fact.
“Progressives often roll their eyes when they hear the excuse that people like the Founders were ‘men of their times’ and thus not culpable for their participation in injustices such as slavery and native land theft. Yet there is a point here that needs to be taken seriously.”
So let’s start with the left. The progressive view of history takes itself to be issuing a corrective. If it centers the black experience, that is because many of the dominant traditions of historical interpretation in the United States neglected it for a long time. If it insists on the suffering and injustice suffered by minorities, that again is because many of the dominant interpretations of American history downplayed that injustice, when they acknowledged it at all.
Conservatives tend to be skeptical of progressive claims that a certain minority group has been airbrushed from historical narratives or from the mainstream culture. Yet progressives, in this case at least, are on firm ground when they say that the black experience was often neglected or ignored by the American historical consciousness. Black Americans received little attention from white historians after the Civil War, and most white historians in the early to mid-twentieth century focused on the role of class conflict in American history and little to say about race. It wasn’t until the New Left entered the historical profession in the 1960s that mainstream historians started taking such topics more seriously.
The progressive view of history wants to impress upon Americans not just that injustice has occurred, but also the depth of that injustice: how terrible, bloodthirsty, and cruel white supremacy has often been. Progressive authors therefore tend to provide detailed and graphic accounts of specific instances of violence or subjugation; the purpose of such accounts is to shock people into realizing just how brutally America has treated its victims. Much of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ famous essay, “The Case for Reparations,” involves accounts of this kind, that is, accounts of black people suffering awful injustices. Here is how the historian Edward Baptist describes the whipping of an enslaved woman named Lydia in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism:
In Virginia and Maryland, white people used cat-o’-nine-tails, short leather whips with multiple thongs. These were dangerous weapons, and Chesapeake enslavers were creative in developing a repertoire of torment to force people to do what they wanted. But this southwestern whip was far worse. In expert hands it ripped open the air with a sonic boom, tearing gashes through skin and flesh. As the overseer beat Lydia, she screamed and writhed. Her flesh shook. Blood rolled off her back and percolated into the packed, dark soil of the yard.
Conservatives sometimes dismiss this point about the savagery of slavery, or try to blunt the force of it, by saying that Americans today are already aware of the evils of the institution. It is true that Americans for the most part accept the abstract judgment that slavery was very unjust. But it is one thing to think that a particular institution was wrong, and another thing to have concrete knowledge of the violence and suffering that the institution inflicted. The latter produces a particular kind of effect on the soul, a unique sort of ripple on it. You only begin to grasp and internalize the evil of slavery when you read about the beatings, the whippings, the rapes—in a word the torture—that it entailed; and it is to the credit of progressive historical writers that they insist on keeping this feature of slavery firmly in the public consciousness.
The progressive view of history aims to reshape Americans’ understanding of their own national identity. Mainstream understandings of what it means to be American typically make reference to the American Dream, to the promise of social mobility and advancement, to freedom, justice, and equality, to a sense of basic fairness. It is not clear whether progressive historical writers think this is all bunk, though they do think it is incomplete. If many Americans historically cared about freedom, equality, and the rest, many were also committed to preserving a system of racial supremacy. They thought that being a full American required you to have white skin.
Nikkole Hannah-Jones, one of the most prominent recent proponents of the progressive theory of history, argues that “origin stories function, to a degree, as myths designed to create a shared sense of history and purpose. Nations simplify these narratives in order to unify and glorify, and these origin stories serve to illuminate how a society wants to see itself—and how it doesn’t.” In other words, origin stories generate certain understandings of nationhood. Progressive authors provide an origin story that centers the history of racism so as to get Americans to grasp that racism has been a significant part of the American DNA.
Sometimes progressive authors write as if they thought American identity should be entirely reduced to racism. They go too far. But there is an important observation to salvage here, namely that racism, too, is a part of who we Americans have been. American national identity thus needs to take on board a significant element of self-criticism.
The Conservative View
What about the conservatives? What aspect of the truth are they tracking?
While conservatives usually concede that American history has involved plenty of injustice, they are inclined not to blame the individual actors behind those injustices. They grant that slavery and the theft of native American land were unjust, but they are unwilling to paint the agents behind those institutions and policies as monsters. They hate the sin without hating the sinner. The 1776 Report, a document published by the Trump administration in 2021 that put forth a patriotic understanding of American history, states that “the most common charge levelled against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.”
Progressives often roll their eyes when they hear the excuse that people like the Founders were “men of their times” and thus not culpable for their participation in injustices such as slavery and native land theft. Yet there is a point here that needs to be taken seriously. As progressives themselves often stress in different contexts, human beings are to some significant degree products of the environments we are raised in. We do not completely choose, in a free and unrestricted way, the beliefs we hold or the manner in which we behave. The fact that not all of our behavior is voluntary, that some of it is determined by causes outside our control, should at least mitigate the judgments we make of people raised in circumstances that weren’t conducive to moral virtue.
Conservatives hold that the progressive position is too judgmental of America as a whole, in part because it judges America’s historical crimes in a vacuum—as though America were the only nation with a checkered history. Progressive authors often point out that America was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and atop the stolen land of native Americans, and use these facts to render an overall negative judgment of American history; against this, conservatives point out that slavery and empire were historically ubiquitous practices, and that America is relatively unique not for having slavery but for abolishing it. “The unfortunate fact,” wrote the 1776 Report, “is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history.” Once this is taken into account, our moral judgments of American history as a whole should be considerably softened.
Conservatives adduce another reason in defense of their positive judgments of American history. America, in their view, has often been at the cutting edge of world-historical movements for freedom and equality—and deserves credit for it. Commenting on the achievements of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood wrote,
To focus, as we are today apt to do, on what the Revolution did not accomplish—highlighting and lamenting its failure to abolish slavery and change fundamentally the lot of women—is to miss the great significance of what it did accomplish; indeed, the Revolution made possible the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking. The Revolution not only radically changed the personal and social relationships of people, including the position of women, but also destroyed aristocracy as it had been understood in the Western world for at least two millennia. […] Most important, it made the interests and prosperity of ordinary people—their pursuits of happiness—the goal of society and government.
Conservatives want, then, to counteract some of the overly harsh moral judgments of progressives. They think the individuals of the past should not be blamed so harshly even when they were complicit with injustice; and they think American history, placed in proper context, is more praiseworthy than the progressive view allows.
There is a tendency among some conservatives to push this exculpating impulse too far. Some conservatives are radically unwilling to grant the validity of any criticism of the American past (or present, for that matter). That is a mistake. Just because many of the people of the past weren’t always moral monsters doesn’t mean that they were never blameworthy for the evils they committed. Just because America has much to recommend it when placed into the proper context of world history doesn’t mean that it never committed genuinely unjustifiable crimes for which it too should be held morally responsible.
Even though the conservative view sometimes shades into an unthinking, unreflexive apologia for anything and everything American—into a sort of hagiography for the nation—we should still embrace the reasonable insights motivating the view. Sometimes we really can be unfair in our judgments of our ancestors or of the national past as a whole.
Conservatives often resent how the progressive view seems to slip into the promotion of a sort of national self-hatred or self-abasement. And progressive authors sometimes do write with quite unrestrained rage, even hatred, against some feature of the national past. (Writing of the American Revolution, Nikkole Hannah-Jones asked sardonically, “How do you romanticize a revolution made possible by the forced labor of your ancestors, one that built white freedom on a black slavery?”) They also say that this national past forms part of who we are and were. Couple the two propositions, and you get the result that we Americans should hate a core part of who we are.
Against this, the conservative position reasonably suggests that a wholly critical view of ourselves and our history is incompatible with national pride, unity, and self-respect. “That doesn’t mean ignoring the faults in our past,” as the 1776 Report put it, “but rather viewing our history clearly and wholly, with reverence and love.” The conservative view leaves room for self-criticism about past mistakes but rules out self-hatred, which seems like a healthier attitude both for persons and nations to take.
The Reconciled View
I said earlier that while the two positions seem incompatible, breaking down the specific judgments of the two positions reveals that they aren’t—at least not entirely. The progressive position seeks to weave minorities into the mainstream understanding of American history, to impress upon people just how horrifically the institutions and practices of the past treated their victims, and to introduce a significant element of self-criticism into the American national identity. The conservative position seeks to protect the individuals of the past from unfair aspersions of blame, to insist on America’s contributions to the progress of freedom and equality in history, to place America’s crimes into a broader historical context that makes America seem less unique in its evils, and to reject the idea of national self-hatred.
All these pieces of the puzzle can be fit together into a new conception of American history: the reconciled position. This position works on a higher plane, takes a greater field of view, than either the conservative or the progressive ones on their own.
The reconciled view effects a double reconciliation. First, it reconciles two competing accounts of history, conservative and progressive, by doing justice to the rational insights of both. Second, it reconciles the present generation to its past by coming to judgments that are fair to the moral reality of the past in all its complexity. For there is a sense in which both the conservative and progressive views can alienate us from our history. The former can prevent us from finding anything valuable in it, while the latter may lead us to minimize or ignore its troubling features. By putting everything in its proper (moral) place, the reconciled view helps us be at peace with our past.
Some of the pieces of the reconciled position may fit somewhat awkwardly at first. The reconciled view says that many of the institutions of the past were awful, but that the agents who upheld them were not necessarily monsters; that America deserves criticism for its unjustifiable crimes and praise for its contributions to historical progress; that Americans should be cognizant of their deep national faults without succumbing to self-hatred. Despite the awkwardness, the pieces fit together—and it’s a good thing they do, because all of them are independently true.
If the reconciled view of American history does justice to conservative and progressive insights, it also asks both sides to make certain sacrifices. Conservatives could no longer go on with a purely celebratory account of the American past or with a conception of national identity that was entirely uncritical. Progressives would have to check their impulse to harshly judge the individuals of the past and would have to make some greater concessions to the positive features of the national story.
That’s all easier said than done. The conservative can protest—I am already aware that American history is not all roses and rainbows! The progressive can protest—I do not have a solely negative conception of America! But these are abstract and theoretical concessions, extracted with great difficulty. It is rare in practice to see a progressive author speak of America’s merits or a conservative one speak of its faults. The impulse of the former is virtually always to judge severely, of the latter, to praise without much qualification. A sincere assimilation of the reconciled position would require substantial movements in the natural inclinations of both sides. The conservative would have to confront America in its depravity and the progressive would have to recognize what’s redeeming and enduring in the American story. The reconciled position provides a solution that everybody involved should be able to live with, even if they are not completely satisfied.
History as Political Philosophy?
There is a loose end that needs to be tied up. I have argued, on the one hand, that there is a way of synthesizing what’s best in the specific judgments of the contemporary conservative and progressive views of history; and, on the other hand, that there remains deep disagreement between the two camps about (1) the state of society today and (2) the direction it should go in moving forward. That leaves open the question of whether the reconciled position of history can also reconcile these competing visions of present and future.
The answer is no. The reconciled view of history is an attempt to synthesize two ways of looking at the past; it has nothing to say directly about the present or future.
The reconciled view does rule out some uncomplicated judgments of the national past as a whole. Nobody with the reconciled position could say that the national past is wholly good or wholly bad, or even mostly good or mostly bad. It is a mix of the two. Beyond this, it has nothing to say about what attitude we should take toward the existing order of society today.
In fact, the conservative and progressive political programs are both compatible with the reconciled account of history—and this is a virtue, not a fault, of the account. The reconciled view “merely” seeks to establish harmony in Americans’ judgments of their national past. (Merely—as if this task were easy!)
We spend too much time waging proxy battles in the past as a roundabout way of arguing about the present. Arguments about the past and future need to have more daylight, more separation, between them. When we argue about the past, we should remember that we are arguing about the past, and the reconciled position offers us one way—the most plausible way, in my view—of judging the national past. It is common to see both conservatives and progressives labor under the assumption that if their view of history prevailed, their view of how the future ought to be would prevail as well. That is not the case. Even if we reached similar judgments about the past, the future would remain open to dispute.
Indeed, debates about the future involve all sorts of considerations that have little to do with our judgments of the past. Our judgments about the direction society should take depend among other things on prior judgments about the nature of justice, about how society today works (and not merely about how it worked in the past), and about what political action could plausibly accomplish in the present. These sorts of judgments can be separated to a significant enough degree from our historical judgments.
The reconciled conception of history is not, on its own, meant to tell us how to live. It is meant to provide an acceptable moral account of the past, on the assumption that having one would let us devote more attention to the one thing we can actually change—the future.