"Historians, loath to make narrative sense of an age without waiting for the vapors of passion to pass, agree on one thing," writes the Times' Timothy Egan in the somewhat accurate opening to his optimistic "The Day That Decided the 2020 election."
While it's true that historians of the old school are loath to reflect on historical occurrences within roughly the last 50 years, historians of an even older school refuse ro rule on all things historical within, say, the last 500 years. Whatever's fresher than that is but the grist of yesterday's newspapers, more properly left for the deadlines of journalism and the impassioned rabble so fond of "instant" analyst.
What's needed for epochal clarity is the longue durée, as coined by the French Annale School of historical reflection. (Just read any of the school's brilliant works by, for instance, Fernand Braudel or Jacob Burckhardt, and you'll see what I mean.)
So precisely what, I hear you cry, is the point of this appallingly abridged introduction to professional historiography?
The pertinent thrust — or controversial target, I should say — is, in large part, Egan's following contention: "It was, [historians will say], Nov. 20, 2019, that ensured the outcome — a day and a night that crystallized the choice for the majority of Americans ready to toss Donald Trump from office" — the 20th being the day of Ambassador Gordon Sondland's rare outburst of Trump-indicting truth.
Egan's powerful implication is that from there on out — from most modern, judgment-eager historians' point of view — things got better. "Because there was no denying the facts of Trump’s deep corruption and dereliction of duty, because every midnight of the American soul has been followed by a dawn, the outcome on this election night was never in doubt."
That "the past is prologue" (this being, essentially, Egan's argument) can be an instructive aphorism is not in dispute. It can also be a catastrophic assumption, however — one born, perhaps, of reading too much of journalist-turned-historian Jon Meacham's ever-extravagant hagiographies.
Has America always had faults? asks Meachum in each and every of his uplifting 300 pages of biographical half-truths. But golly gee whiz America's historical sins have always evolved into veritably inevitable enlightenment, answers Jon, just as inevitably.
Such is history of ideological sentimentalism; not detached, disinterested analysis. It's also Exhibit A of the perils of hustling contemporary opinion as clinical assessment. Some precipitous historians unquestionably will deem 2019 and 2020 as momentously happy turning points in American history.
Others, most of them long after our earthly departure, will deem 2019 and 2020 as merely the end of the beginning of unprecedented American squalor.
And by that, I mean this — in which I commit the just-derided, historical transgression of instant analysis. (Contradiction can be so convenient as an argumentation tactic, can it not?):
Trump will not only walk with impunity; the outrageous double atrocities of 2019 and 2020 will simply open the barbarians' gate to the maws of Dante's political inferno (and his masterpiece was political, not religious). Anticonstitutional precedents will have been set: U.S. presidents will be free to disregard Congress, usurp its power of the purse, violate any presidentially annoying laws on the books, and, in general, act as an unofficial dictator — a kind of Vladimir Putin for America.
I love Timothy Egan, I love his writing, and I love most of his thoughts. But his thoughts of today? My money is on the dark side — not the premature giddiness of justice being done.