This article is the final one in a series on American history. Cross-reference to chapter 22 and the conclusion of A Patriot’s History of the United States, and chapter 25 of A People’s History of the United States.
Writers of history must always struggle to eliminate biases in their work. Many “historians” who fail to do this either misinterpret facts or ignore critical contexts to arrive at a designed conclusion. The temptation to take a side is strongest when the history is most recent—so recent that it can barely be called history.
Zinn wears his biases on his sleeve, and admits to them without shame. Patriot’s does not. Instead, as we march into the new millennium, Schweikart & Allen reveal their true colors—if there were any doubt left. Writing up until 2019, they are highly critical of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and emphatically praise the presidency of Donald Trump. One cannot help but wonder how Schweikart & Allen would have viewed things different given the past five years. At the time of this writing (late 2023), Trump’s presidency is viewed far differently than it was in 2019—COVID-19, a new public discourse around DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion), extremist political voices in both parties, a contentious 2020 election that Trump still disputes (and has been indicted on multiple counts for disputing in an illegal manner), and a war in eastern Europe.
Unfortunately, People’s doesn’t go as far, stopping in the early 2000s following the American response to the 9/11 tragedy. Yet we must simply cover what we can.
21st Century Breakdown
The 2000 election pitted Democrat Al Gore against Republican George Bush (son of George H.W. Bush), in an extremely tight race. The election hinged on Florida, where media coverage prematurely called the state for Gore, prompting many would-be voters to stay away from the polls. Yet the initial results were certified with Bush having the victory by an incredibly narrow margin: only a few hundred votes.
Although Gore had already called Bush to concede the election, the narrow margin convinced him to demand a recount and fight to the finish. In a series of legal appeals that would up at the Supreme Court, the recounts were ultimately stopped, partly due to a Constitutional provision that set a deadline on the election results. This ultimately left Gore no choice but to concede—but his no-stone-unturned approach would be copied by Donald Trump in 2020.
Within months of the Bush administration beginning, members of the extremist Muslim group Al-Qaeda hijacked four American planes. The hijackers crashed two of the planes in the World Trade Center towers, a third into the Pentagon, and the fourth crash-landed in Pennsylvania after passengers overpowered the hijackers.
Howard Zinn writes the following regarding the September 11th attacks:
It was an unprecedented assault against enormous symbols of American wealth and power, undertaken by 19 men from the Middle East, most of them from Saudi Arabia. They were willing to die in order to deliver a deadly blow against what they clearly saw as their enemy, a superpower that had thought itself invulnerable.
Coupled with People’s fierce criticism of American military operations in response to the attacks, it is clear that Zinn stands on radical and dangerous ground: serving as an apologist for the deadliest attack on American soil since the Revolution.
Patriot’s tells of a swift and popular response, of American troops operating in Afghanistan against the Taliban, who harbored Al-Qaeda operatives. In 2003, under suspicions of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein building weapons of mass destruction, American troops invaded Iraq and deposed Hussein—although the subsequent task of nation building would remain a quagmire for the rest of the decade. Further, Iraq appeared in hindsight not to have possessed any such weapons at all: “congressional committees would find an unprecedented level of failures of all the intelligence agencies in the conclusions that Iraq had WMDs.”
While Bush won reelection in 2004, his second term was marked by historic economic weaknesses. Patriot’s cites an “unsustainable” boom in housing prices, and structural incentives for mortgage providers to make loans to delinquent borrowers. As default rates climbed, bank balance sheets collapsed. In contrast to the response of the Federal Reserve in 1929, the Fed loaned large sums to the banking sector to prevent failures of the largest banks—although a few large firms failed. This Global Financial Crisis left Bush as a lame duck with a poor approval rating—Patriot’s suggests that “his own party ran away from him.”
A New Beginning?
Patriot’s labels the 44th president, Barack Obama, as “the most narcissistic person to ever hold the Office”—ironic given its favorable opinion of Donald Trump. Able to outflank Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, he faced John McCain (“one of the weakest candidates the Republicans ever put forth”) in the general election, and won handily, in part due to highly favorable media coverage.
Schweikart & Allen debunk the “global warming” theory that Obama endorsed: “As he spoke those words, the world was entering its coldest decade in recent history.” The Affordable Care Act (with many features of Hillary Clinton’s original plan) passed despite opposition from both parties, with many Democrats committing “political suicide to ensure its passage.”
Running for re-election against Mitt Romney (another of Patriot’s weak Republicans), Obama’s “You didn’t build that” line served to “denigrate the American dream and bash entrepreneurship…worse, Obama exposed his real view of the private sector—real achievement came only through government action.”
Pulling American troops out of Iraq in 2011, “Obama finalized the complete destabilization of the Middle East,” giving rise to further radical groups like ISIS, and “America’s standing in the world declined.” To bolster America’s image abroad, Obama worked to enter the international Paris Accords (a climate agreement) and a Trans-Pacific Partnership “which would lock the United States into an unfavorable trade deal with Japan and, ultimately, China.” However, Obama did achieve a key goal of American foreign policy: a team of Navy Seals located and killed Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Although Obama claimed he was proud of a scandal-free administration, Patriot’s cites over 25 major scandals that occurred during his two terms, including the Flint water scandal, destruction of the Colorado River, and the Iranian “give-away” nuclear deal. Whether one agrees with this, it speaks to the dissatisfaction felt by many voters, dissatisfaction that the right candidate could make political hay out of.
The Most Important Escalator in History
Television celebrity and billionaire Donald Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, coming down the escalator at a tower bearing his name. His list of campaign promises was radical: a border wall with Mexico to stop illegal immigration, a repudiation of poor deals made under Obama, and a resurrection of the American dream he referred to as “dead.” Never given a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, he steamrolled through the Republican primaries through a sea of ad hominem lines directed at both fellow Republicans and the Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton.
Patriot’s cited Trump as “closer to ordinary people” than his opponents on both sides, and he carved out a populist platform not seen since the 1896 election. Yet in this case, rather than the Republican Party swallowing this populist movement, Trump’s supporters, with red “Make America Great Again” hats, commandeered the establishment Republicans. “On election night, the impossible happened”—Trump, “who was outspent at least 2 to 1, who had 93 percent negative media coverage, and who never led in a single ‘respected’ poll, won the presidency.”
The Democratic response was to point to the possibility of Russian collusion in the election favoring Trump, for which they would seek to investigate Trump and his campaign throughout his term. Despite this, the first half of Trump’s term marked some fulfillments of his campaign promises. He named two justices to the Supreme Court (and would ultimately name a third), pulled out of the Paris Accords and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and announced plans to renegotiate the NAFTA trade agreement. He imposed tariffs on Chinese imports, starting a mini-trade war that held China accountable. He enforced policy “red lines” in Syria, destroying poison gas facilities that the Syrian dictator had employed against his own people. He also signed a “historic tax cut that gave the American middle class the largest proportional tax cut ever, and also cut the corporate tax rate by one-third.” Schweikart & Allen claim “the list of campaign promises kept has been astounding, unequaled except by FDR.”
The two-year spree came to an end in 2018 when the Democrats regained control of the House—in the second half of his term, Trump would be investigated, impeached twice, and grapple with the emerging threat of COVID-19—all of this unbeknownst to our authors.
Patriots & People: Where Does This End?
Where does all this leave us? How do we define our history, and reconcile complex and competing views?
Both our authors have clear biases. People’s leans left to the point of Marxism, suggesting a people’s utopia without big government, business interests, and unequal distribution of wealth. Patriot’s leans right—a bias less radical than People’s, and not admitted to by the authors, but present nonetheless.
In addressing their biases, however, our authors have very different messages. People’s revolves around one big idea: Marxism and the Marxist utopian vision. Patriot’s does not—indeed, Schweikart & Allen relay their message through a hundred small ideas. These include, of course, the generational virtues of Washington, Adams, and Lincoln, but also the unsung principles that guided Grover Cleveland, John Tyler, and Calvin Coolidge. To Patriot’s the message—American is great because of its ideas and people, not its government—is secondary to the story. To People’s, the message is the story.
This is partly reflected in their telling of history. Patriot’s is thorough, methodical, telling history with each chapter giving a start-finish pair of years. It reads like a series of cycles, from election to election, covering every single president, every single era, with equal thoroughness and a sea of citations. People’s avoids citations, with a limited bibliography in the end—partly due to Zinn’s more conversational style of writing.
People’s is most vulnerable on this ground: if Zinn is guilty of any misjudgment, it is that he insists on demanding more. He is not satisfied by the American system, by capitalism in general, or even the Soviet Marxist-Leninist system. He demands the Marxist utopia of communities of true equals, free from government or class interests. I consider this a fantasy that does not exist, and never has. Some may point to small utopian communities (Patriot’s briefly mentions a few), but these are not truly self-sufficient. Any would-be utopians require some assurance of security—as Thomas Hobbes wrote, such assurances are the product of governments, by which the liberties and perils of nature are sacrificed for the sake of stability in the hands of government. A small-scale utopia in Illinois, for instance, depends to some extent on the law enforcement of the state and federal government—without these, they are powerless against hostile outsiders. Game theory concepts like the “prisoner’s dilemma” illustrate further incentives that individuals have to break the communal code for their own gain, and humans are unchangingly selfish—no matter how desperately Zinn may wish the contrary.
Patriot’s makes few of the sweeping ideological claims that Zinn finds so compelling. Yet Schweikart & Allen still occasionally find themselves on shaky ground. They clearly make a case for conservatism throughout history, lauding small-government leaders like Cleveland at the expense of more popular progressive presidents like Wilson and the Roosevelts. Yet as the book progressed, the bias increased—peaking with Clinton, Obama, and Trump. To call Obama the “most narcissistic candidate” and then give a ringing endorsement of Trump is not only biased, but ridiculously biased. Where Patriot’s has the most value is it its thoroughness, especially in covering the periods before the 20th century. Yet the clear illustrations of bias in the most recent chapters must invite questions as to the objectivity of the whole.
It is up to we Americans to make sense of all this—a task that most of us take too lightly and many have given up on. This history must constantly be weighted against our founding ideals, and we must always ask ourselves what these mean—and consequently, what our history means.
I’ll leave it to Zinn to close on a note of epistemological skepticism.
Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.
To recite facts is to know history. To interpret judgments is to seek the truth.
