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Opinion: The historical revisionism of the leftist mind

Progressive ideology has distorted many Americans’ understanding of history.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones, a proponent of critical race theory, arrives at the premiere of “The 1619 Project.” File Image.

Knowledge of history is an endangered specimen.

 

In a recent survey by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, a sample of Americans were asked ten questions about our nation’s founding taken from the U.S. Citizenship Test. Only one in three respondents passed this quiz, and the age gap in passing rate revealed a disturbing trend: 74% of respondents aged 65 years or older passed, followed by 51% of respondents aged between 45 and 64 years, and only 19% of those under 45. Large majorities were unable to explain why the colonists fought the British or why Benjamin Franklin is famous. Over half did not know how many Justices serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.

 

Students currently receiving a history education are faring no better. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a nationwide test of grade school students, revealed that 86% of eighth-graders were below proficient in history knowledge in 2022, up from 84% in 2018 and 82% in 2014.

 

Revisionist history

 

In addition to ignorance, many Americans have unnuanced, skewed, or downright fallacious impressions of American history.

 

Talk to a sample of college-educated Americans, and you will find that many operate under the assumption that the Founding Fathers were a bunch of deists and atheists, that the Civil War was a conflict solely about slavery during which an angelic, antiracist Union beat an evil, racist Confederacy, that slavery was the source of American prosperity, that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was the first female Supreme Court Justice, and that American women were miserable, unfulfilled housewives until birth control, legalized abortion, and full-time employment opportunities came to free them from a “Handmaid’s Tale” existence.

 

These misperceptions did not materialize by accident. The masses have been miseducated, and it is not difficult to see how. As more and more Americans have attended college over the last few decades, more have received history instruction from an odd group: history professors.

 

Activist academics

 

The history professoriate is a progressive crowd. While college professors are already well-known to lean left, history professors lean farther.

 

One analysis of voter registration data revealed a ratio of seventeen Democrat history professors to every four Republican history professors. Another analysis found a ratio of thirty-three Democrats to one Republican. According to campaign contribution data, ninety-five history professors donate to Democrat campaigns for every five who donate to Republicans. History professors are also some of the least likely professors to claim an enduring belief in God.

 

It does not take a psychology degree to see how political motives, groupthink, and confirmation bias might checker the history lectures meted out by such a group.

 

Even more problematic is the opportunity that history professors have to indoctrinate students with the activist playbook so common amongst progressive people: Oversimplify history by creating villains and heroes based on their identity markers. Impute racist or sexist motives to every historical figure who does not pass progressive muster. Wax eloquent about class struggle in every historical era. Discuss traditional social norms as though they are unenlightened and backwards. Omit all counterevidence. The students will nod along in ignorance and laugh with you at our supposedly benighted progenitors.

 


It does not take a psychology degree to see how political motives, groupthink, and confirmation bias might checker the history lectures meted out by such a group.


 

It is an open secret that many professors find it more important to promote progressive ideology than tell the truth about history. In their minds, it is preferable that students leave their classes thinking that the War on Drugs was a racist vendetta to imprison black people or that Lincoln was homosexual, rather than understanding that law-abiding black Americans were desperate to get violent crack dealers out of their neighborhoods or that it was once normal for unmarried or traveling men to platonically share a bed.

 

Hollywood history

 

The machinations of Hollywood have also misled the American mind about history. Most historical films of the last twenty years shoehorn history into flashy propaganda for Hollywood’s preferred political preoccupations. Historical figures known to be shy or ambivalent are presented as bold revolutionaries, and meek, traditional women are turned into crude, curse-flinging feminist heroines. The Christian convictions prominently held by the featured figure or era receive little attention, but gratuitous and anachronistic amounts of extramarital sex receive ample screen time. Unsophisticated viewers, poorly armed with spotty history educations, absorb these faux-histories as gospel truth.

 

Progressive understanding of history

 

Progressive ideology is shot through with presentism, viewing history through the lens of modern beliefs and attitudes. While some liberals may not realize they have this lens, others do and relish it. C.S. Lewis called this “chronological snobbery”—the belief that the philosophy, art, or science of the past was inherently inferior simply because it was in the past.

 

A person’s sense of history significantly influences his sense of reality. It will affect the way he lives, works, and votes. Progressive activists understand this and act accordingly to sway the perceptions of young people. This was precisely the strategy of the Soviet regime when it retouched its executed dissenters out of existence.

 

A thorough and honest reading of history would falsify a number of progressive presuppositions. The efficacy of socialist policies, whether three waves of feminism have increased the happiness of women, and many other superstitions would fall at truth’s footstool. This is why progressive activists must ignore counterevidence, willfully misunderstand the past, or revise history itself.

 


A person’s sense of history significantly influences his sense of reality. It will affect the way he lives, works, and votes.


 

There are many possible antidotes to America’s poisoned history education, but Thomas Jefferson succinctly described one of the best in his 1779 Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom: “Truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless, by human interposition, disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

 

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