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How Historians Took Over Liberal Punditry

Every nation sustains itself with mythmaking. This is why Augustus commissioned Virgil to write The Aeneid at the moment the emperor was transforming the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, why the British monarch is crowned atop the Stone of Destiny, why Marianne looks over Paris from both the Place de la Nation and the Place de la République, and why the Mexican president emerges every September 15 around 11 p.m. onto the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City to issue el Grito—the cry that sparked the Mexican war of independence—anew.But perhaps no nation has been more dependent upon its stories than the United States, a country formed in the relatively recent past without the benefits of shared ethnicity, language, or custom. In the absence of the usual ties that typically hold a nation together, it is values, we are told, that make an American an American and that make this country the special place that it is. Ironically, while Americans have always bitterly disagreed about the practical implications of those values, they have largely been consistent in the story they tell about those values and thus themselves. That story goes a little something like this: The United States was founded by good men, rebelling against tyranny and dedicated to the cause of liberty. Throughout its history, the United States has sought to pursue the path of freedom and justice, although some people—often, but not always progressives—are willing to concede that it has sometimes fallen short of this ideal. What these people will not concede, however—what they almost never concede—is the fundamental assumption that the United States of America is collectively a nation striving for the good.In any other time, this persistent bit of American Exceptionalism might be excusable, even charming. But in a moment in which it seems not only increasingly impossible, but irresponsible, to ignore the deep flaws at the heart of the American project, this is exactly the choice that has been made by a certain brand of liberal public intellectual cum influencer in the Trump era. This cohort includes figures such as Jill Lepore, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Joanne B. Freeman, and Kevin M. Kruse. Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder are arguably the two most prominent examples of a new iteration of an old trend, the historian as explainer, and perhaps more jarringly as political strategist. Credentialed historians and critics of the current regime, they promise key insight into the present via their knowledge of the past, and they have become a prominent feature of the opposition to Donald Trump.The narrative of history and, more importantly, of the present that they offer has gone viral, offering comfort to its audience and a substantial economic benefit to its creators in the form of newsletter subscriptions and book deals. While it seems cruel to challenge anyone’s source of comfort in this very disquieting age and is certainly unkind to question academics pursuing alternate income streams, it is time we start to question the narrative of history that has been so widely adopted by many Americans and ask whether this particular fantasy of the past is providing any benefit in our increasingly dystopian present. In particular, there is an insistence among these figures that the past is something to be mined for lessons about how to survive the rising tide of authoritarianism and fascism. It’s a compelling premise. But a decade into what future historians may very well term the “Trump Era,” it’s still not precisely clear what use the past is to understanding—let alone escaping—the current predicament.The Resist! Historians, as you might call them, would not be possible if not for the American center-left’s increasingly romantic view of expertise. It (and the Democratic Party) have over the past 30 years come to be dominated by the most well-educated: Roughly 60 percent of people with graduate degrees lean blue. The nation’s best students are now collected in one political corner utterly unwilling to question the teacher’s competence. She is, after all, the teacher.This shift has also been catalyzed by the American right’s increasingly dangerous anti-intellectualism, which in part drove their political opponents to a sometimes exaggerated deference to credentialed authority—a deference that often ignores the fact that experts frequently disagree with each other. Take, for example, the progressive rallying cry to “Believe science.” This certainly seems to be a good idea, especially on clearly settled topics such as the efficiency of vaccines and the reality of climate change. But what about those issues where the science—and more importantly the scientists—deeply disagree? Who exactly are we trusting then? After all, there are good faith, legitimate debates occurring around issues ranging from the effects and efficiency of long-term psychiatric drug use in children to support options for autistic people to the ethics of AI. None of this is settled, and experts—credentialed experts—disagree.This deification of expertise in and of itself has also made it somewhat portable, a fact that is on clear display among the historian influencers. Take, for example, Heather Cox Richardson—arguably the most prominent of the cohort. Richardson’s Substack Letters From an American boasts over three million subscribers and is one of the most widely read newsletters in the world. The Harvard-educated Boston College professor has nearly six million followers on social media and was a Time 100 Creator in 2025. Letters From an American began as a synopsis of the events around Trump’s first impeachment and continues as a daily commentary on current events, much of which includes Richardson’s advice on topics ranging from how to identify fascism to how resistance to the MAGA movement ought to be organized. Her blog has also built a New York Times bestselling book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America.When her work is shared, and it often is, the credibility of her positions is upheld by the assurance that Richardson is an expert—which is most certainly true: She wrote her dissertation on the Republican Party’s economic policies during the Civil War. Before Richardson entered the realm of public intellectualism as the co-host of the NPR-affiliate podcast Freak Out and Carry On in 2017, all of her books were focused on nineteenth-century America, including works on Reconstruction, the Battle of Wounded Knee, and the history of the Republican Party. Although fascism does have nineteenth-century roots, albeit in Europe, much of her newsletter is devoted to what is best described as punditry: analysis of the president’s mental state, upcoming Senate elections, and the weaponization of government agencies.Timothy Snyder, the other bright star of this constellation, has a better claim to being an expert on fascism. Snyder, who decamped from Yale to the University of Toronto last year, is a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, with a specialization in the Holocaust and the Soviet Union. But his academic work is not directly linked to his advice on what to do in twenty-first-century America. That work, for example, includes a biography of Wilhelm von Habsburg, the poet and soldier who was placed in charge of Ukrainians against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of World War I. Moreover, perhaps even more than Richardson, Snyder has leaned into the dubious idea that the historian is really a political strategist in disguise. His 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century, topped The New York Times bestseller list and became something like scripture among some left-leaning Americans during the first Trump administration.The entire subdiscipline of historiography exists because historians themselves are conscious that the way history is written and interpreted does itself have a history, one that is infused by ideological and sociological (and not infrequently psychological) influence. When we try to learn lessons from history, we must first choose a version to teach us—which narratives to highlight or omit, which assumptions to accept, which voices to elevate or ignore. That is why the past is often a comforter as much as if not more than it is a teacher. This is certainly true in the case of the Resist! Historians.The popular success of figures like Richardson and Snyder rests on the fact they are presenting a narrative that rarely challenges their audience—which is largely white, middle-class, well-educated, and progressive. It is an audience made up of people for whom, up until now, the American project has worked out very well. What many of these people want to hear is that the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement is an aberration, a fixable malfunction. The audience for Richardson and Snyder, whether on podcasts, Substack, or Threads, want to believe that the current president and his supporters are not heirs to their American legacy but have instead twisted the truth about this nation’s history for their own malign ends. In this context, not only are their detractors the real inheritors of the nation’s Founders, but there is a clear path to escaping this fraught moment: accepting the truth about the nation and following where it leads us.When Richardson, for instance, wrote about Rededicate 250, a bizarre event held on the National Mall on May 17 that was part political rally and part evangelical revival, she wrote with confidence, “...the United States of America was not founded as a Christian nation. The Founders were quite clear about that…,” and she went on to quote the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli, which famously declared that “the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion” and “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [of Muslims].” It’s a bold, appealing proclamation, one that seeks to co-opt, if not to obliterate, a key trope on the right, where the Founders’ status as (almost exclusively) white Protestants and their invocations of the Almighty trump the constitutionally protected rights they enshrined, most notably in the First Amendment.And it’s true, the Treaty of Tripoli does say exactly that. But this is not the whole story. Many states maintained a religious test for office, and an established church, well into the nineteenth century. In fact, Massachusetts, where Richardson was educated and continues to work, did not fully disestablish its state church until 1833. Moreover, institutional histories are not the only histories that count. Rededicate 250 can only be seen as an anomaly if you ignore the long history connecting evangelical revivals and American politics dating back to Colonial times—traditions that have continually reasserted themselves in figures like Billy Graham and the continued prominence of megachurches. In the lived history of the Republic, not only the Christian character, but the evangelical nature of the country, are hard to deny. It can certainly be complicated and contextualized via documents like the Treaty of Tripoli. But that is different than asserting that their existence trumps other relevant details and events in U.S. history.Of course, the truth of some of its assertions does not mean that the contemporary brand of MAGA evangelical has the right to govern the United States unchallenged, but it is also incorrect that there is no precedent for the rise of MAGA. As in a version of the twentieth century that exists to provide “lessons” to anti-fascists in the present, the idea that there is a pure, uncontested American history available for use by those disgusted by the current regime is comforting, even inspiring. It simplifies history, creating binaries between the authentic and the opportunistic and, in many cases, between good and evil. Rather than unspooling the complexities and ambiguities of American history, it instead treats the past as raw material for punditry. The Treaty of Tripoli is not an early example of diplomacy and statecraft from a new nation struggling for legitimacy, but a tool to be used against Christian conservatives who wield history and Scripture selectively.History is neither a teacher who rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play. It is inconsistent, morally ambiguous, and often not especially helpful.But history is neither a teacher who rewards the best students nor a sweeping morality play. It is inconsistent, morally ambiguous, and often not especially helpful. It is one of many forms of expertise that can provide resonant analogies and occasional lessons—but its lessons are not inherently of more use than those offered by social science or even political activism.It is, of course, hardly unique for subject experts, particularly academics, to stray outside their areas, particularly while providing mainstream political commentary. Economics, in particular, has turned out a steady stream of pundits, from the respectable (former New York Times columnist and, yes, current Substacker Paul Krugman, for example) to the baldly ideological (such as the nationally syndicated, baldly libertarian John Stossel). But there is nothing about academic training, no matter the discipline, that translates automatically to expertise in political strategy, just as there is nothing in history that provides a clear playbook for escaping the overlapping crises brought about by the second Trump administration.That is not to say that Richardson, Snyder, and the other historian influencers need to quit the public square, but more that their visions and approaches to historical punditry need to be challenged. There is room for more diverse and sometimes dissenting voices, who are more willing to voice facts about the United States that disquiet and disturb. There is room to question expertise, particularly when it is deployed as cover for political analysis or punditry. And there is room for more stories to be told about America, even when they are stories we may not like.