Beschloss has once again weaponized history in service of partisan ideology and Democratic Party ends.
Earlier this year, I wrote about the group of alleged ‘historians’ in President Biden’s orbit who are weaponizing their knowledge in service of partisan ends while dressing it all up as historical objectivity. Their ranks include, among others, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jon Meacham, and Michael Beschloss. “By flattering Joe Biden, by misleading him, by striving openly to become part of a history tailored to their own biases, the president’s historians haven’t just dishonored their profession,” I wrote. “They have damaged the country.”
They are responsible, directly or indirectly, for some of Biden’s most pernicious rhetoric, such as his argument against Georgia’s voting law that cast opponents of it as being on the side of Dr. King, John Lewis, and Abraham Lincoln, and proponents of it as being on the side of George Wallace, Bull Connor, Jefferson Davis. This formulation was inspired by Meacham.
Biden’s historians have also helped to inflate Biden’s own expectations about his presidency, a necessary complement to the idea that all who oppose him stand in the way of history’s proper course. Ironically, this reputational inflation has almost certainly helped to hobble Biden’s presidency. By encouraging Biden to think bigger than his electoral mandate would have justified, they have laid bare Biden’s incompetence and engendered a political backlash. This is to say nothing of the monetary inflation this reputational inflation has also helped create, given that much of Biden’s ego-enlarged agenda has consisted of increased spending.
As we approach the midterms, one of Biden’s historians seems not to have been humbled by any of this. NBC “presidential historian” Michael Beschloss is, instead, lapsing into a kind of hysteria. He told Chris Hayes on Wednesday night that “six nights from now, we could all be discussing violence all over this country,” and “we could be six days away from losing our rule of law, and losing a situation where we have elections that we all can rely on.” To be fair, he did say he hoped these things won’t happen.
But his historian’s peroration, keying off Biden’s unseemly Wednesday speech on “saving democracy” (undoubtedly inspired by this crew, whether directly or not) was particularly rich. After arguing that Lincoln in 1860 and FDR in 1940 focused not on the minor issues of their day, but on the fate of the country itself, Beschloss stated:
Joe Biden is saying the same thing tonight, and a historian 50 years from now, if historians are allowed to write in this country, and if there are still free publishing houses and a free press, which I’m not certain of. But if that is true, a historian will say what was at stake tonight and this week was the fact whether we will be a democracy in the future, whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed — we’re on the edge of a brutal authoritarian system, and it could be a week away.
Leave aside the ridiculousness of comparisons of Joe Biden to Abraham Lincoln and FDR, analogies Beschloss and his crew are nonetheless fond of making. It is, in the first place, ridiculous for Beschloss to attempt to predict the future — he is (allegedly) a historian, not a psychohistorian, after all. Yet like his fellow Biden historians, Beschloss sees the course of history as a vindication of the Left. Thus he must transport himself into the future to imagine himself having been retroactively vindicated — the flip side of which is complete dystopia if he does not get his way.
This is not how a historian thinks, but it is how a partisan thinks.