“You don’t scare me, I’m a historian.” There was a time when I not only fully embraced that sentiment, I also helped to popularize among colleagues, generating bumper stickers as giveaways at departmental award ceremonies and retirement events. I even suggested it to the director of the professional association I belong to. They took it up as one of their slogans too.
But today, the bumper sticker I keep hearing in my head is the reverse. “I’m a historian, and you scare the hell out of me.”
The list of terrifying things gets longer every day. The brutality of the ICE raids, the ostentatiously cruel firings undertaken by DOGE, the massive disenfranchisement of millions of already struggling Americans from health care coverage, the threat to reproductive rights, the relentless attack on science and on higher education in general – each of these is part of the slow dismantling of longstanding liberal democratic foundations in a slide toward autocracy, if not fascism as well.
As frightening is the public culture of contempt, viciousness, and hatred that undergirds the actions and orders promulgating the Project 2025 agenda. For let us call it what it is: a revolt against the status quo that favors the ultra-rich and is fueled by haters.
What is truly remarkable is that the haters don’t want to admit they are haters. And those who call them out as haters are disciplined and punished – as when Terry Moran of ABC News recently lost his job for calling out Steven Miller, himself one of the subjects of Jean Guerro’s 2020 book, Hatemonger.
If, as Taylor Swift has so memorably observed, haters are gonna hate, why can’t they just own it?
Because the haters prize something more important to them than hate. Something that is not getting the public attention it deserves.
And that something is innocence.
Innocent means not guilty. Innocence can also mean not knowing, not being aware of. In the case of the hate perpetrators, it means a posture of innocence when it comes to acknowledging their accountability for the dangerous and even lethal consequences of their hatreds for people and communities, here and abroad.
American innocence flourishes in the absence of the inconvenient truths of American history. Enslavement, indigenous genocide, imperialism, internment, sexual exploitation: these are among the hallmarks of the American story. They are part of what made us who we are today.
Yet the current administration and their supporters are determined to deny these past realities, and what’s more, to erase them from curricula at every educational level. Witness the rollbacks on Black history, evidenced today by restrictions in more than half the states on what can be taught about slavery and the struggle for civil rights.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill in 2022 that labels teaching concepts related to race, origin or sex discriminatory and hence impermissible. That constitutes plausible deniability when it comes to America’s unbecoming past.
History suggests that we must look beyond the continental United States to appreciate how deeply aversion to confronting the rapacious realities of US innocence runs. And more specifically, how linked it is to the denial of the facts of US imperialism.
What accounts for the so-called immigration crisis of the last half century? The unequal economic development of regions where the US had territorial interests and from which it extracted imperial resources and profits at least from the end of the 19thcentury. What accounts for the embroiling of US foreign policy in the Middle East? US imperial ambition at least from WWI onward.
As Daniel Immerwahr has shown in his 2019 bestseller, How to Hide an Empire, we have long been a global imperial power, with territories from the Philippines to Puerto Rico to the Marshall Islands. Or, as 1899 political cartoon from the Philadelphia Press representing the wingspan of an American eagle across the Pacific described it, “ten thousand miles from tip to tip.” So expansive was this imperial project that by the end of WWII, the US claimed jurisdiction over more people living outside the states than inside them.
Immerwahr’s point is to show that “colonialism hovers in the background” of the last century and a half of US global power. He also makes the case that we have been and remain in denial about – or, willfully innocent of – how our very way of life has been dependent on the militarism and violence required to maintain our territorial possessions.
That disavowal is what permits a culture of American innocence to thrive in the context of white supremacist hate and its public expressions. And it is part of what allows haters and their followers to be insouciant about the chaos and violence they unleash.
Innocence is a failsafe against shame, and shame appears to be at a historic low in American history right now.
With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaching, we are about to see a whitewashing of American history that enshrines American innocence in a version of heroism that masquerades as the highest form of patriotism. If the call for contributions to the National Garden of American Heroes issued in 2021 seemed innocuous enough to some, it anticipated what now looks to be an unprecedented paean to American innocence in 2026.
We’re told that this elite MAGA capture of history is all in the name of American greatness. But in fact it’s mobilized in the name of protecting the innocence of ordinary Americans from the reality of what the nation and its empire has done.
To be sure, no one living now is directly responsible for the crimes of the past. But there are many Americans who benefit from the inheritances of US imperialism and its adjacent histories– a project steeped in convictions about the superiority of whites and the expendability of those they wish to conquer, dominate, and otherwise neutralize.
As historians like Patricia Limerick, Lauren Hirshberg and others have shown across two generations of scholarship on US empire, attachments to American innocence in the face of the violences of its histories are part of America’s emotional and material preoccupation with security, whether personal or national. Security, that is, against those deemed unassimilable and therefore dangerous to borders and sovereignty.
Meanwhile, the way that American innocence undergirds American hate today is both a perverse and an undeniable part of our national-imperial history. And it operates, though stealthily, as one of the chief conceptual resources of the MAGA project.
But as James Baldwin famously wrote in his 1963 book of essays, The Fire Next Time, “the crime here is not only the violence and death that hatred generates. Rather, it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
With research and teaching that unearths the devastating histories of the American national-imperial project on the chopping block via legislatures and executive orders, there will be no end to American innocence any time soon. It is a crime with no penalty, except for those who determined to challenge it.
Have no doubt: histories that call out American innocence are key to eroding it, which is why they are under siege. As a historian, that’s what keeps me up at night.