Rebecca Blackwell/AP Photo
A person cheers as New College of Florida students and supporters protest ahead of a meeting by the college’s board of trustees, February 28, 2023, in Sarasota, Florida.
My former neighbor Margot Stern Strom died last week. In the 1970s, starting in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she was teaching in my kids’ grade school, Margot created a high school curriculum called Facing History and Ourselves.
Facing History began with the Holocaust, and soon branched out into slavery, the extermination of native peoples, the Armenian genocide, and apartheid. It asked students to place themselves in the role of ordinary people who lived in those times and places—and faced ethical dilemmas of whether to resist or just go along. Or to place themselves in the shoes of the victims.
At Passover seders later this week, Jewish families will do that, paradoxically, when they are reminded to express compassion even for the Egyptians who suffered plagues as punishment for trying to destroy the Jews (Bibi, pay attention).
The Facing History curriculum won awards. It eventually trained over 100,000 educators worldwide and has been used in thousands of middle and high schools, even in what were not yet called red states.
But lately, Facing History and far tamer curricula have been banished in large chunks of the country that do not want to face history. On the contrary, they explicitly want to deny history.
Florida, at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis, passed a law that prohibits trainings that cause someone to feel guilty or ashamed about the past collective actions of their race or sex.
Wholly accurate books and movies of historical fiction such as a 1998 Disney movie on six-year-old Ruby Bridges, who integrated a New Orleans public school in 1960, have been banned on the ground that they make white people feel bad.
Facing History was created in a more innocent time, when the shame of the Holocaust was still fresh in living memory, when government and the courts and public opinion were all still on the side of advancing civil rights, and the country had not yet descended into tribalism. In the 1970s, the imperative of facing history was a widely shared goal.
Today, the approved curriculum in much of the white South might be called Denying History. The excesses of “wokeism,” some real, some invented, become the perfect pretext for pretending that slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings, and their more recent counterparts were something other than what they plainly were.
Today, you can hear serious people on both sides of the tribal divide talking about civil war or secession. It’s not just the far right that raises secession. I’ve heard liberals say, if only Lincoln had let the South go. Then the rest of us could have a normal social democratic country.
If you find that fantasy tempting, consider what happened after World War I. “Nationalities” at last got their own countries. But Europe was too much of an ethnic quilt. There were Romanians in Hungary, Greeks in Turkey, Germans in Czechoslovakia; and a stew of rival ethnic groups living cheek by jowl in Yugoslavia.
People with tribal identities found themselves behind enemy lines, as it were, just like Americans living in blue cities in red states, or vice versa.
There are only two cures for this kind of ever-deepening tribalism. Either it ends in ethnic cleansing—the literal sort, or the figurative cleansing of denying history—or we slowly and painfully find our way back to post-tribal democracy, and recover our collective memory.
For that to happen, DeSantis and his grand strategy has to fail; Trump, who now leads all Republicans in polls of likely primary voters, has to be renominated—as the Republican most likely to implode and easiest for Biden to beat. Biden has to win in 2024 and take both houses of Congress with him. And right-wing tribalism has to suffer defeat after defeat at the polls, and slowly lose its appeal.
In a fascinating extended interview that New Yorker editor David Remnick conducted with Jon Meacham, Biden’s favorite historian, Meacham said this:
“The fever only breaks if they lose. Let’s be very clear here. You’re never getting rid of Trumpism, right? … But it can be contained. My view is it is only contained if they keep losing.”
