Heather Cox Richardson with President Biden. Source: Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons.
The New Republic has a rather silly piece today by an obscure academic: How Historians Took Over Liberal Punditry: The hottest resistance talking heads during Trump 2.0 are academics. What happened?
The essay never attempts to answer the question of what happened. After sloshing around quite a bit in her academic specialty — the political mythologies of eastern European countries and how they were shaped by orthodox religion — the author’s point seems to come around to something entirely irrelevant. That is, she accuses historians such as Heather Cox Richardson of paying too little attention to the political mythologies of American evangelicals.
Oh, give us a break. We liberals know all we need to know about the political mythologies of American evangelicals. After all, we’ve seen the consequences of it. And we held our noses against the stench of it long before it led to Trump 2.0. Not to mention that Heather Cox Richardson pretty much wrote the book on how those mythologies were perpetuated after the Civil War.
Since Katherine Kelaidis never offers an answer to the question of what happened, I’ll have a go at it. What happened is that the mainstream media, terrified by fear of attacks from the radical right and held in check by corporate owners, simply cannot tell the plain truth about what has been happening in America. Liberals are not the sort of people to pay attention to know-nothing pundits. So we turned to academics, who just happened to be academics whom we already knew and trusted, like Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman.
There’s a bit of an ancient trap in this — if your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. Katherine Kelaidis, whose only tool is the intersection of religion with national mythologies, just has to believe that there is something in that idea that we all need to have our noses rubbed in.
No we don’t, Katherine Kelaidis. We’re way ahead of you, because we don’t share your blinkers. Now please go back to being obscure.