Let's Talk about Navigating "Historical" Times

What are your coping strategies? How can we support each other?

Make no mistake. Good ol’ G.W.F. Hegel was a douche, and people who identify as Hegelians today should probably go home and rethink their lives. Yes, even Charles Taylor—the Canadian philosopher, not the former Liberian dictator, about whose relationship to Hegel I know nothing.

Though I find some value in Taylor’s communitarian thinking, I do so always with one skeptical eyebrow raised, particularly as this Catholic intellectual has a tendency to romanticize times and places where one particular religious worldview can be taken for granted. That impulse is nothing new. It is rather a type of recycled reaction we can trace back at least to the proto-fascist Scottish curmudgeon Thomas Carlyle. Unfortunately, this fash-ish nostalgia all too often passes for serious thought today, when, for example, a nearly 600-page unoriginal rant about the ostensible horrors of “hyper-pluralism,” by a more flamboyantly conservative Catholic scholar than Taylor, becomes a monograph that elicits accolades from academics who should know better.

Seriously and relatedly, philosophy departments remain of the most unreconstructed bastions of misogyny in contemporary American and British universities, and with today’s fascist attacks on DEI, that’s not likely to change any time soon. But I digress.

This is an actual Hegel meme I’ve shown in class because I was one of those “cool” college instructors who are hip with the kids. Yeah, okay, I’m a dork.

In any case, I am no lover of Hegel, whose influence runs through the reactionary thinking I mentioned above. That being said, there is one Hegelian insight from his Philosophy of World History that I find myself coming back to over and over again these days. Namely this one: “The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it….” I keep returning to this thought because to me, at least, current events feel frighteningly “historical” in Hegelian terms, while I can look to earlier periods when I personally felt safer, though none I would perhaps rate as entirely “happy” if happy means long-term social stability.

But let’s turn to something more concrete.

According to a recent PRRI report, 52% of Americans agree with the statement that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,” compared with 44% who agree with the statement “President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”

Presumably, those 44% see the present as a “happy period,” whereas it is quite the opposite for the 52%. This begs the question of whether a “happy period” in history is something that could ever be measured more or less objectively, although it seems intuitive to me that a clearly angry and revanchist “happiness” is, well, not exactly truly happy. In other words, when the “happy” people are engaged in authoritarian efforts to force everyone else to conform or disappear (perhaps to a foreign prison), I think we can argue we’re in a “historical” time, and all else being equal I, for one, would rather live on a “blank page.”

In any case, it’s the breakdown of those PRRI numbers among various demographics that tells the real story. The following groups show the highest tendency to deem Trump, correctly I might add, a dangerous dictator: Christian nationalism rejecters (84%), Black Protestants (71%), Hispanic Catholics (69%), all Black Americans (67%), religiously unaffiliated Americans (65%), Jewish Americans (64%).

By contrast, 51% of white Americans see Trump as a strong leader, while only 44% consider him a dangerous dictator (though that number rises to 56% for white Americans with four-year college degrees). A full 73% of both white evangelical Protestants and Christian nationalism adherents put Trump in the strong leader box (the Venn Diagram between those groups is likely almost a circle), along with 66% of Mormons. Clearly religion, race, and ethnicity all matter to what one is able to see and what one does not see with respect to America’s disastrous political state. I am sure gender and sexuality are key factors as well, but that breakdown was not included in PRRI’s report.

These statistics, I think, largely speak for themselves, and so I won’t belabor them further here. Instead, I want to consider the issues of anxiety, guilt, obligation, and survival in turbulent “historical” times.