As a writer on America’s past, I have no argument about whether Joe Biden should resign as president and/or the Democratic presidential nominee. Everyone else has already worked that out perfectly, with all the “if-then” scenarios, strategies and tactics, and outcome predictions ready, so I can focus on other things.
But there is a related issue. I have written for years against professional historians imposing on the public, the media, politicians, and judges the political significance of certain facts and stories drawn from their own scholarship. This phenomenon is already evident in some historians. Hamilton: An American Musical (It all started with their total disregard for Ron Chernow’s flawed Hamilton biography.) But it really exploded in 2017 with the #Resistance culture. During the Trump presidency, this dynamic propagated itself, drawing the rapt attention of a rightfully anxious liberal public and eventually becoming a cultural force: a group of history professors gained huge Twitter followings, worked as political commentators on MSNBC and CNN, started podcasts on NPR and popular newsletters, and even landed a rare one-on-one interview with President Biden himself.
After celebrating the inauguration of the Biden administration in 2021, the group is now working on the 2024 elections and, in response to the crisis that arose from Biden’s poor performance in the debates at the end of June, applying their sense of America’s past to assessing the likely outcomes of possible electoral tactics. But they find themselves struggling in a political and intellectual environment that is very different from the one in which they birthed the project. We hope that this situation marks the beginning of a shift in historians’ public engagement, and an end to the oversimplification of the country’s history to propose immediate answers to our most pressing political challenges.
Last week, in the aftermath of the Biden-Trump debate, historians as self-appointed and indispensable public advisers on current politics collapsed into a heap of pretty obvious absurdity. This collapse could have happened under the watch of any of the historians who make their living from history, such as Kevin Kruse at Princeton, Timothy Snyder at Yale, Sean Wilentz at Princeton (an innovator in the field during the Clinton administration), or any number of others, but it happened instead under the watch of perhaps the person who led this whole effort, Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston University and author of the wildly popular Substack newsletter Letters From an American, which launched during the Trump administration, and who has become the star of this historian-advisory effort of which I am speaking.
I have been vocal in my criticism of Richardson’s approach to both history and politics. Younger professional historians have also launched scathing online critiques of her most visible group of colleagues in recent years, comprised of tenured stars at private universities. Some early-career professors are uncomfortable with the public-facing approach that has made her a popular choice for a few stars, even as the profession continues its decades-long hiring crisis. (This week on X, University of Massachusetts historian Asheesh Kapur Siddiq, a long-time critic of this approach to public commentary, posted, “America desperately needs historians… as researchers and educators. We don’t need historians who delude themselves into thinking that giving MSNBC talking points an academic veneer will save our democracy. Fight for public education instead.”) Divisions within the history academy over the Gaza war and Biden’s response to campus protests this spring have exacerbated the internal backlash.
But Richardson’s most recent public statements seem to be inciting even broader skepticism. The statements were made during an interview with CNN host Christiane Amanpour over the weekend. Amanpour began the conversation by saying, “Historians like Heather Cox Richardson, unlike those seeking an alternative to Biden, say the country’s focus should be firmly on the threat posed by a second Trump term.” In response to Amanpour’s first question, Richardson responded:
My interest isn’t in Biden or Kamala Harris or Trump or whoever he picks for vice president. My interest is more in the long-term course of American history. I want to know the big picture. And in the big picture of American history, if you change your presidential candidate at this point, that candidate will lose… for a couple of reasons. First, because the party machinery for the election is built around someone else. Second, because the news is all about the growing pains of a brand new campaign, including all the cross-pollination that the opponent will be throwing at people.
So the historian says replacing Biden would be a sure defeat for the party, a prediction based on what she calls the “long-term course of American history.” In that scenario, she says, Trump would surely win.
Before considering whether these make political sense and, more importantly for me, what lessons can be drawn from the history of presidential campaigns, it is worth pointing out that many of the negative reactions to Richardson’s comments are no doubt coming from people who simply want Biden to replace them. These people are not criticizing the entire approach of putting American history at the center of politics, as I am, but rather refusing to accept advice from historians in this particular case: a tactical disagreement about how best to move forward.
Yet even this divergence from the near-total adoption of Richardson’s historical narrative and analysis in liberal cultural circles may tell us something about how things have changed in those circles since the middle of the Trump administration. While the historians invited to the White House during Biden’s honeymoon period (Richardson included) seemed to speak as one in their enthusiastic and passionate support for him and his presidency, and Biden seemed pleased with their support (at the debate he stumbled through a poll of presidential historians that declared Trump “the worst president ever” and continues to rely on Jon Meacham as a speechwriter and adviser), it is understandably harder as time goes on to stick to a unified narrative about what history can teach us about politics. Trump, who drew historians into this dynamic cultural position in the first place and positioned him as a unique threat to the United States in history, is now out of office. While he is in office, he has taken actions that raise many questions, as any normal presidency necessarily does.
Some will agree with Richardson’s political advice and others will disagree — and, of course, it’s always possible that a new candidate could lose — but what she presents as history is simply bizarre, and the public disservice caused by her haste to present it has become extreme.
If you were watching the CNN interview and didn’t know much about past presidential elections, Richardson’s reputation and presentation would lead you to believe that there are repeated, academically known patterns throughout American history that lead to an absolute electoral law that if there is a new presidential candidate at this point in the electoral process, that candidate will lose. Richardson even gives reasons why.
No such pattern exists. Changing a candidate at this point has literally never happened before. Richardson’s assertion that “in the entirety of American history, if you change your presidential candidate at this point, your candidate will lose” is very clear, very powerful, and very authoritative, but it is a total fabrication.
And this historian is a really important figure in research on the Reconstruction period.
That’s what I mean when I say weird.
There are only two historical parallels to the current situation that some cite, to no avail: President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection in 1968, when his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, lost to Richard Nixon, and President Harry Truman’s decision not to seek reelection in 1952, when Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson lost to Dwight Eisenhower.
Neither Democratic candidate entered the race under similar circumstances to today. The circumstances of 1952 and 1968 are quite nuanced and different in interesting ways that some historians still want to explore. But in both cases the incumbents withdrew in March, and important primaries were still to come. In either case, the system of allocating delegate votes to candidates was quite different from the system we have today. There is nothing in the analysis of 1952 or 1968 to suggest that the defeats of Humphrey and Stevenson were the result of late entries, infrastructure built around incumbents, or the effects of research on the opposition. And the incumbents withdrew for their own political reasons, not in a crisis caused by a widespread belief that they were mentally unfit for office.
In the long course of history, two examples separated by just four elections would not be conclusive historical patterns, if such a pattern existed, but these two examples bear no resemblance to the current situation.
While we’re coming up with patterns, let’s also consider the opposite: when an incumbent declines reelection, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the party’s candidate loses. George Washington decided not to serve a third term. Vice President John Adams was elected President. U.S. Grant wanted a third term. As Richardson knows better than anyone, when Grant declined to run, the party’s candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, won one of the toughest elections in U.S. history.
Or, conversely, in stark contrast to the unrelated examples of ’52 and ’68, on Biden’s behalf. rear The primary elections are Greater than Defeat is less likely than Humphrey or Stevenson predicted. Say what you like. Anyone who studies the past seriously, and certainly Richardson included, knows that there is no way to legitimately use history to arrive at the kind of straightforward, ironclad “what if” predictions she did on CNN, especially in the ever-shifting testing ground of American electoral politics, even if she could rely on actual past events (which she did not).
So, what’s going on here?
Many will immediately speculate on the motives. I am not interested in that. What is clear is that Richardson is trying to bring forward lofty appeals to the “big picture” and fake historical rules to convince many people that Biden should remain on the shortlist, even though they trust her status as a scholar and are unlikely to question her facts. A leading promoter of the liberal cultural ethos that constantly bemoans our “post-truth” world, she has found herself in a position where she is induced to falsify historical facts by an extemporaneous partisan political tactic, perhaps undertaken in a desperate situation. The claims Richardson made on CNN may be the most blatant example of a tendency that I believe was always inherent in the new way of engaging with the public that historians began to pursue in 2017, in part because that way was defined in relation to President Trump.
People become enemies. This is an ironclad rule. history.
