History didn’t get a moment’s rest during the Trump years. The troller-in-chief twisted a renewed national conversation about slavery’s afterlives into yet another attempt at owning the libs. Anti-Trump liberals, meanwhile, conscripted history into the #resistance, deploying it alongside “truth” and “science” in an appeal to generic Enlightenment values. Whether by the 1776 Commission or The 1619 Project—which is to say, by a fatuous provocation or an earnest appeal—poor Clio, the muse of history, was asked to do a lot of work.
One of her main tasks seemed to be to pass judgment. “History will judge Donald Trump severely for his crimes against the United States,” declared David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor in chief, after the Capitol riot of January 2021. A Gallup poll on the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration found that six in ten Americans “believed that history will regard President Donald Trump negatively.” “With the outcome a foregone conclusion,” Nicholas Fandos wrote in the New York Times during the House’s second impeachment proceedings, readers could take solace in the thought that “the trial itself became an illuminating and cathartic act for history.” Such invocations conjured an image of History with a capital H, clad in black robes and powdered wig—perhaps even sporting a chic little RBG-style lace collar—gaveling Trump offstage to the jubilant cheers of the righteous. In this movie, Clio, our heroine, would triumph where the Access Hollywood tape, Robert Mueller, the emoluments clause, the Hatch Act, and two impeachments had stumbled.
The idea of history’s judgment was, and remains, seductive. It flatters our discernment, suggesting that we and History navigate with the same ethical compass. It reassures us that today’s wrongs will be righted in the future, regardless of our inability to remedy them now. It imagines that society will learn from past errors, as if human reason were an autonomous force. In the U.S. political context, it is best embodied by the refrain, borrowed by Barack Obama from Martin Luther King Jr. (who paraphrased it from the abolitionist Theodore Parker), that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Improvement, vindication, transcendence: these are its consolations, a redemptive promise for our secular age.
Yet this notion cannot withstand scrutiny, as Joan Wallach Scott’s On the Judgment of History shows. A work of political philosophy, the book argues that appeals to History as some kind of virtuous magistrate, however progressive the intent, in effect serve as a liberal alibi, deflecting demands for radical change and placing an outsized faith in the nation-state. At a time when political crises are resolutely global—eco-apartheid, ascendant right-wing nationalism, climate-driven mass migration—Scott argues we need to develop bolder, more capacious understandings of justice. Put simply, we cannot cede today’s political imperatives to the good favor of tomorrow’s retrospection.