Matt Yglesias: Conservatives Can't Win the History Wars

Part of the extremely confusing and confused debate about “critical race theory” (scare quotes very intentional) in American education is actually about something entirely different — the content of history curricula.

On the history front, the conservative backlash really started well before the “critical race theory” kick got going. It dates back to The New York Times’ publication of the 1619 Project and the announcement that the Pulitzer Center was developing school curriculum units based on the project. Conservatives immediately lost their shit over this, and progressives countermobilized. History is now, I would say, one front in a multi-front battle composed of things that are only loosely related.

And on the history front, I think that at times liberals protest too much, acting as if nobody had ever taught about slavery in a social studies class pre-1619 or as if all of public education was still stuck in Dunning School propaganda as of five years ago. The whole point of the 1619 Project was to be provocative and not just to repeat the most common, basically known facts about slavery in American history. There is nothing wrong with adopting a provocative framing conceit for a special issue of a magazine. Good journalism should aim, at times, to provoke. But a provocateur can’t then turn around and act outraged that an act of deliberate provocation was not met with immediate acclaim across the political system.

I thought that was really all I had to say about this until I read Ross Douthat’s column on the history wars which made me think that conservatives don’t even really understand what they’re mad about here. He thinks conservatives are trying to rescue the good name of The United States of America from leftists who want to drag it through the gutter. But I think the core issue here is a new line of historiography that says not that America is bad but that the American conservative movement is bad. And what’s threatening about that line isn’t its worst excesses, but the fact that large swathes of it are perfectly plausible.