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by pjc50
3385 days ago
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> what the history books will say about our time in 100 years or so The history books will be written by the victors. What the history says will depend hugely on whether we have free informational continuity between now and then or a massive legal/totalitarian/military/nuclear/catastrophic "wipe" destroying that. (Less dramatically, this is obviously the era when intelligence agencies are fighting and the internet is their battleground. ""Cyberwarfare"" is not about turning off power stations, it's about destroying your opponent's ability to do normal open democratic politics. There's even tension between US domestic security services - the FBI director Comey is clearly pro-Trump while the CIA are not, and Trump has gutted the US State Department which has traditionally been the department for interfering with other countries.) |
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For instance, free speech, as we know it, really came around WW1-era and was due to people like Learned Hand convincing Oliver Wendell Holmes. But since then, history has been seemingly rewritten to make it look like it was part of the revolutionary war.
There's plenty of other things ... non-citizens could vote up to 1926. The "American Dream" was coined in 1931 and was essentially backdated to colonial times, etc.
Accurate realities will bunch the pants of essentially everyone regardless of politics. One could argue being openly gay, for instance, in the 1800s was not seen as insufferable. James Buchanan, the 15th president, lived with a man and was referred to by terms that were contemporary to homosexual. I've done fairly extensive private research and can't find it being a controversial thing during his campaign, even though this was a well known fact (I've meant to do some more microfish reading at the library about it). See, there I go messing up the narrative of progressivism and civil rights. Sorry.
The guy after him, Lincoln, was seen so unfavorably at the time that he won the popular vote in 1864 by only 10% - this was after everyone who disliked him had ostensibly already left. You think he'd be a landslide in the remaining states.
There's a narrative of a cordial press during FDR being too polite to take photographs of the man in a wheelchair. Nope, the secret service would confiscate your camera, possibly strip you of press privileges and destroy your film. Kinda like a repressive state.
This isn't the tropish "victors write the history" - this is a more nuanced instance of people framing benign things to support a narrative arc and defend a lensing through the politics of storytelling. The deviations, far-reaching connections, and omissions, can often reveal preferences on what the underlying culture of the author would prefer them to see and can be as revealing as the text itself.