By Jim Heffernan
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the term “structural amnesia”. I first encountered the term in Arlie Hochschild’s excellent book, “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right”.*
Structural amnesia is a term for a situation in which a social group selectively forgets certain aspects of their history—usually aspects that threaten group consensus or the interests of the powerful. Hochschild applied it to rural people from Louisiana forgetting the pristine past of their bayous and becoming fans of the oil and chemical industries that despoiled them.
I feel structural amnesia is impacting our thinking about Ukraine and about Donald Trump.
Until 1991, Ukraine was part of the USSR. In 1991, in a vote that wasn’t even close, they voted to become an independent country for the first time since medieval times. One complication was that Ukraine ended up with the third largest inventory of nuclear weapons in the world. Talks were held and in 1995 Ukraine relinquished control of its nuclear weapons and the US, the United Kingdom, and Russia promised that Ukrainian territory would be respected. Structural amnesia seems to have diminished the memory of our promises.
Donald Trump was elected on the empty promise of “Making America Great Again”. Seductive promise, but as I recall the only thing he delivered on was a tax cut, and even that fell primarily on the rich.
He told us he was going to be so busy as president that wouldn’t have time for golf. He went golfing 307 times. He continually promised to do away with “Obamacare” and replace it with something much better. Never happened.
He promised infrastructure programs. Never happened. He said we had Covid under control. Another lie.
The worst offense that continues unabated is the way “Making America Great” is conflated into emphasizing our divisions and “othering” those they chose as enemies.
Structural amnesia can make us forget the ugly facts of our recent past. Professional historians are very aware of structural amnesia and always consider it. It’s no accident that in a recent poll**, professional historians, rate Donald Trump as worst president ever
As always, discussion is welcome at codger817@gmail.com.
* https://www.tillamookcountypioneer.net/book-review-strangers-in-their-own-land/
** https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/20/presidents-ranking-trump-biden-list
