In Opposition to Nazi References, in Favor of Gilded Age References

For a very long time, I have expressed frustration that Americans obsessively focus on World War II and the Nazis and don’t pay enough attention to their own horrible histories. Often, this is reflected in the universities. You could easily fill a 100 seat course on the Holocaust, much easier than you can for a 30 seat course on Native history or the history of slavery. And yet, which is more relevant to what is happening today in the U.S? It’s obviously the latter two. Everything going on right now has roots in American history. If people spent more time thinking about the Colfax Massacre, they’d understand the goals of the modern Republican Party quite clearly. I mean, Wong Kim Ark is right there! So is Lochner and Plessy and Buck and so many other cases that clearly demonstrate the goal. Yes, there are relevant Nazi and fascism references here, no question, especially around Karl Schmitt. But we liberals really undermine our own effectiveness by not placing the current conditions directly in the context of Jim Crow and the larger repeal of Reconstruction and the liberal state, which is what the superb historian Manisha Sinha does in her new overview of Reconstruction, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920.

Just among other things, I am amazed at how few references there are, even among big time liberal Bluesky users, on how the Trump war on DEI has a very clear goal of returning us to the Wilson administration on race and talking directly about the goal of Jim Crow, with maybe a few exceptions for the good ones. It has a goal of effectively overturning the entire last century of women’s rights. It most definitely has a goal of overturning the National Labor Relations Act and returning us to the 1920s there. All of this is right there for us to understand, yet we are obsessed about the less relevant stories of World War II.

It’s a real problem of historical memory. For a long time, I believed and still do that the appeal of World War II for a lot of Americans is that we were the Good Ones and the really bad stuff, like the Holocaust and rape of Nanking and stuff was done by the Bad Ones and we saved the world. So you can think about good and evil without any implication that might impact you today. So now when are nation is collapsing into a past-esque horror, that’s our references.

In short, stop reading and watching documentaries about World War II and start reading about the 1890s. It’ll help you understand what is going on here. And if you have to look up the Colfax Massacre, well, that’s a sign that you probably really need to follow this path.