The debate among Democratic Party officials about whether President Biden should drop out of the race has invited much commentary from the cadre of public-facing liberal historians who made a name for themselves during the Trump administration. At Slate, William Hogeland, himself a historian, disapproves. In a polemical essay titled “Is the Age of the Resistance Historian Coming to an End?,” Hogeland takes aim at Heather Cox Richardson’s claim, in a CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour, that “in the whole picture of American history, if you change the presidential nominee at this point in the game, the candidate loses.”
This assertion, Hogeland writes — “so clear, so forceful, so authoritative” — is “totally invented.” In fact, “changing nominees at this point has literally never happened before — not even once.” You can’t infer a pattern from nonexistent data points.
Hogeland’s concern is less with Richardson and Biden per se than with the broader movement in which she figures especially prominently, that of “the historian-as-self-appointed-indispensable-public-adviser-on-current-politics” (“Resistance Historians” for short, due to their popularity with the online anti-Trump political movement sometimes hashtagged as "#TheResistance”). At its worst, Hogeland suggests, academic historians’ slide into punditry tempts them to lean on their academic authority to buttress what are in fact merely political preferences. Besides Richardson, he names Princeton’s Kevin Kruse and Sean Wilentz and Yale’s Timothy Snyder. Back in 2019, in our pages, Sam Fallon made a similar argument.
For his part, Kruse is treating this as an affair of honor. “If you call me a goddamn ‘resistance historian’ to my face,” he posted on Bluesky, a social-media app meant to replace Twitter, “I will fucking cut you.”
