History and the Present
People reach for precedents to show the enormity of the insult by Donald Trump to the American political system evidenced by his latest two indictments. Aaron Burr had tried in the first decade of the nineteenth century to start a rebellion in the west that might have balkanized the North American continent but he was acquitted and he was only a vice president. Charles I was convicted by Parliament of treason and executed, he having trafficked with foreign powers to reestablish his power, but he had been a legitimate monarch otherwise and so a change from one political order to another rather than the enforcement of the constitutional order, which is what the indictments of Trump proclaim. The question is why is there need to find past analogies to give the present indictments as so serious, so historic, rather than plainly being so on their face? I am reminded when Eichman was tried in Jerusalem, the prosecutor, gideon hauser, went out of his way to portray Eichman as a miltonic satan, an epitome of evil intent, so as to grasp the magnitude of his crimes, rather than viewing Eichman, as Arendt thought, a man of minor attributes who could endeavor horrible levels of evil just by getting the trains run on time. A petty person whose evil was enormous. Why the exaggeration to make it supremely significant? While Hauser was taken with ultimate moral forces, the answer, I think, we exaggerate other great cataclysms is because historical events become shrouded with their enormity while the present seems inevitably plebeian, and I want to demonstrate that.
There are associated matters which make historical events seem weighty in that they are marked as part of the past. Charles I wore ruffs and lace and buckled shoes. The founding fathers wore knickers and white hose and wigs and so are memorably different, part of a different aura. Civil War generals wore long beards. The cadence of the talk was different. Lincoln was different because he was biblical rather than oratorical, which was the fashion of his day, while World War II dispatch writers and politicians were given to a plain homey style rather than given to eloquence. Anybody could understand the Four Freedoms FDR recounted: against hunger and fear, and for religion and speech. It was revolutionary to see Jerry Falwell wear ordinary business suits rather than Catholic cossacks so as to show that his beliefs were eternal and invisible rather than historically placed either in Tretin e dress or in the aura of biblical times. Moreover, history is placed into its historical representations. The musical “1776” has the players line up and pose as they do at the moment of the signing of the Declaration of Independence as they arranged as a tableau in the painting by John Trumbull fifty years after the event but now seen as the authoritative rendering about the event. Oppenheimer is remembered in the movie as having said “We have become Shiva” because that remark has been so often quoted. The present does not have such markers because they have not yet been remembered as such. Trump’s remark that he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it is still a fresh response that reverberates as a present threat and I have not heard anything to memorialize in those who oppose or arraign him. FDR used radio and autos while oldtime generals went by horse, like Robert E. Lee’s “Traveler” and Trump uses tweets which are not yet historical because they are present. We are waiting for some signature remarks to make Trump’s indictments historical, to bear the weight of history.
There are more profound ways to distinguish the difference between the past and the present than by associating the past with its distinct artifacts while the present is characterized as the ordinary even if that gets you pretty far in creating the flavors of those two things. Trump is so full of the present outlandish moment to place him with other past demagogues and haters however mild he is in that he wanted only fame and money but unlike the grand visions of twentieth century dictators did not want to eradicate groups of people, just disdain them. One way to separate past from present is to capture the temper of the times as being distinct, different from the present when the account was retold. Clarendon, who had observed what was contemporaneous and also consulted the records, thought that Charles I had been badly advised by those around him and that created the debacle. A better coterie would have helped avoid it and that fact did not have to be obtained. Characters and culture made it so. “From whence these waters of bitterness we now taste have more probably flowed than from these unseasonable, unskillful, and precipitate dissolution of parliaments”. That theory is the reverse of the greatest generation hypothesis which is that the people who won World War II were particularly gifted and patriotic while other generations or elites were particularly artless and couldn't manage things well. The worst generation includes the diplomats which tried to avert the First World War as well as those who tried to deal with Hitler though recent historians are less critical of the generals that led the First World War than earlier historians were and the generals on both sides of the Second World War are given high grades. Similarly, the Founding Fathers were a particularly gifted lot while the American politicians between Grant and TR were not. You have to get what those people can offer.
The same can be said of the Trump era. Unlike Barry Goldwater and other Republican stalwarts who went to the White House to tell Nixon to resign, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have not severed their umbilical cord to Trump even if they both had criticized Trump's responsibility for Jan. 6th just the day after. Whether they were afraid of the Republican base or the Republican donors, they have since withheld their disdain, saying only that renominating Trump is imprudent rather than that he is a criminal even if breaking ties with him would leave Republicans free to put up a candidate very likely to win in 2024. They missed the opportunity to set things right and so after still shackled with him. More’s the pithy. The past is full of missed opportunities and misjudgments understood in hindsight.
But there is another way to look at events of the past. Writing a hundred years or so after the Rebellion against James I, David Hume, in his “History of England'', treats the motives and values of the protagonists in history as making them no more or less adroit than other people in other times and places. They are just subject to a set of circumstances difficult to manage through. They do what they can and so history has a kind of inevitability because it is constrained by those other factors. History seems inevitable even if it is not. That sense of inevitability is what gives history its patina as part of the past, just as you know that Elizabeth and Darcy are bound to wed because that is the form of the tuning, whatever the obstacles. History in hindsight has its form of things, a story completed and so its elements adjusted to arrange that outcome.
Apply Hume’s view to the Trump era. Rather than think of Congressional Republicans as not having met their statesmanlike duties, or even thinking that Republicans as a party have gone astray from its base values of small government, lower taxes and a preference of rural areas to cities for a flagrant disregard of the two party system, Newt Gingrich a sign and substance of the decline of Republicanism into demagoguery, think of them as having repositioned themselves within the two party system by adding new issues they think relevant and telling and continuous with their prior beliefs. They still claim that they are for small government even though they want a national ban on abortion; they want smaller government though Trump increased the federal deficit. But they remain distrustful of cities, as when they claim high crime rates in big cities when those are lower in big cities than in small ones. The key difference is that Republicans have added to their grievances a variety of social issues which were regarded as distractions from economic issues but are in fact for them the heart of the matter, these referring to status issues they think have been given preference, such as race or gender or sexual orientation, over the white and straight population, excoriating activists while insisting that respectable minority people are alright. That is just the conservative proclivity to appeal to a better time in the past, perhaps in the Fifties of “Father Knows Best”, acknowledging however that racism was a bad thing but current day looting is not. Trump adopted that program rather than upended it and so Republicans find him in favor, whatever else he has done, trying to excuse his deeds as not really traitorous. That is a dilemma for them, given that the video and phone tapes show what he did and so people are pressed just to disregard the facts that are before them by claiming without evidence that it was all a lie or not of much moment, not thinking themselves to be against the Constitution. The mind can alter how to appreciate events.Many leading conservatives say what Gov, Sununu of New Hampshire, say is that Trump is a loser, bound to be defeated in the 2024 election, and that is the main reason to oppose him, when in fact the main reason is that Trump was a traitor.
So we circle back to what it means to be in the past. It isn’t its accouterments nor how people were better people or worse people than they are now, a judgment rather than a fact, or an idealized time to use as a benchmark. Rather, the past is the collection of facts that happened rather than the possible however much you want to cast it otherwise. Sociologists are like scientists in adhering to what happened, not what you might prefer to have happened. Facts are external while possibilities are in the minds of people, part of their imaginations. The difference between the past and the future is metaphysical in that the past consists of and is appealed to for what is unappealable even if arbitrary: that there are laws concerning inclined planes, that atoms are real and not just a theory, that Lincoln was assassinated, that Caesar crossed the Rubicon, that Trump egged on his followers to attack the Congress. So the indictments rather than just the claims behind them are already a fact, part of their history and the future holds how people will sociologists are like scientists in that they give facts as primacy over fantasies however arbitrary are the facts that obtain but remain definitive as when a sociologist notes that crime rates are high in inner cities even if you would prefer otherwise. The social world is just what it is. It is still unaltered till it is changed.
Apply this to the appreciation of the Trump indictments. They are amazing because they are facts even if all but somewhat unprecedented. And yet as crazy as it seems, it actually happened and so people are awed at its presentation. The future concerns how people will cast or deny the facts. The past is now a different country and I was transferred from seeing unexpected possibilities into actuality.The legal proceedings loom as having a long timeline until trial, which is just as well because a better judgment should be placed by the American people through the Republican primary voters on who should be nominated as President. Trials can decide whether people should be put in jail but voters can play any hunch they like to decide who will be President, whether he smirks, like George W. Bush, or she seems aloof, like Hillary Clinton, and there is more than enough evidence for voters to decide if Trump has done something egregious. But the indictments are already a fact and remain so, a set of circumstances against which interpretations can be made for so long as, and this is forever, facts remain as events that actually have taken place. America is not a fact free environment; it is always the case that there are liars and demagogues that have to be revealed over time and sometimes only by history rather than current events.