Taking Historical Fundamentalism Seriously

In her recent book The Whites of Their Eyes Jill Lepore argues that today’s conservatives’ embrace of the founding is not just another example of citizens using the Revolution for political purposes—which generations of Americans have done—but instead an attack on the very idea of history. Tea Partiers, she concludes, practice a form of “antihistory.”

“In antihistory,” Lepore writes, “time is an illusion. Either we’re there, two hundred years ago, or they’re here, among us.”¹ To Tea Partiers, there is no distance between the past and present; the past is not a foreign country. To believe that the founders can speak to us directly, not mediated by the mists of time, “is to subscribe to a set of assumptions about the relationship between the past and the present stricter, even, than the strictest form of constitutional originalism.” It is to be, Lepore argues, a historical “fundamentalist.”²

Lepore rightly finds the Tea Party approach to history quite troubling. As her book makes clear, the founders lived in a time and place very different from ours. It was a time of slavery; when women lacked political equality; and when one needed property to vote. Moreover, American democracy has always been a work in progress; struggles from below as well as from above matter. We do not want to treat a few founding fathers as gatekeepers to the true America.³

Lepore dismisses the Tea Partiers’ effort to find wisdom in the founders: “‘What would the founders do?’ is, from the point of view of historical analysis, an ill-considered and unanswerable question, and pointless, too.” To seek guidance from men who lived over 200 years ago is “not history. It’s not civil religion, the faith in democracy that binds Americans together. It’s not originalism or even constitutionalism. That’s fundamentalism.”⁴

While it is certainly open to debate whether we Americans today should seek guidance from men and women who lived over two centuries ago, Lepore’s tone is dismissive and, at times, derisive of the effort of many Americans to learn from the past. It’s the same tone candidate Barack Obama expressed when he referred to ordinary Americans who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations” and that Thomas Frank uses when he wonders “what’s wrong with Kansas?”⁵

As scholars, however, we need to take historical fundamentalism seriously. In fact, we cannot afford to dismiss it condescendingly. Lepore is right about the American Right’s rejection of professional history, but her approach makes it impossible to understand the nature of their distrust.

A Tea Party protester. From CNN, October 6, 2011.

In reality, “antihistory” is a form of history. What Lepore calls “history” is quite new. As professional historians have made clear, it was only about a century ago that we professional historians wrested control of history from amateurs. To justify our craft, we formed new professional associations, created graduate degree programs, focused on understanding national over local questions, and established scholarly journals. In order to bolster our authority, we took control of the school curriculum, ensuring that our way of understanding the past would be taught in America’s classrooms. We interposed ourselves between the people and their history, and in doing so claimed to be the true mediators of historical truth.⁶

The Tea Partiers give expression to an older tradition of history, one in which the past was didactic rather than distant. People could learn lessons from the past, and the past could speak in the present, because human nature was constant. The rise of historicism changed all that by making the past different from the present. The roots of historicism lie in an 18th-century transformation of temporal consciousness, a shift away from circular or biblical time and toward time as a linear progression, an endless series of causes and effects that lead to the present. But historicism—which sometimes even treats human nature as...