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Outlook

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022. WASHINGTONPOST.COM/OUTLOOK. SECTION B EZ BD

INSIDE OUTLOOK

The NFL only pretends to

care about racism. B5

INSIDE BOOK WORLD

Why we should eat lesser-

known species. B7

J

ust weeks before losing his bid for

reelection, President Donald

Trump went to the National Ar-

chives to launch his quixotic 1776

Commission to promote “patriot-

ic” education. There, he styled

himself as the defender of “centuries of

tradition” that culminated in the U.S.

Constitution, which was “the fulfillment

of a thousand years of Western civiliza-

tion.” That tradition was under assault,

he said, by an all-pervasive radical left,

including corporate boardrooms, statue-

smashing “mobs” of protesters on the

streets and insidious educators in class-

rooms who “try to make students

ashamed of their own history.”

“We are here today to declare that we

will never submit to tyranny,” Trump

said. “We will reclaim our history and our

country.”

The 1776 Commission, widely derided

by American historians, was unceremo-

niously scrapped the moment Trump left

the White House. But Trump’s grand-

standing over U.S. history is now a

central plank in the GOP strategy to

reclaim Congress in this year’s midterm

elections. It has already helped Republi-

cans to victories, notably in Virginia,

where new Gov. Glenn Youngkin has

promised to purge schools of “divisive”

attempts to examine the legacies of racial

injustice and white supremacy in U.S.

history.

And well beyond the United States,

nationalists of various stripes are seeking

ammunition in the past for their battles

in the present. The question of history —

or, more precisely, how it should be

remembered — courses through global

politics. The context varies in each coun-

try, b ut increasing numbers of right-wing

parties and nationalist leaders are stak-

ing their claims to power as defenders of

a glorious past under attack from en-

emies within.

History gnaws at France’s sense of

itself in a volatile election year. It occu-

pies the rhetoric of demagogues in Po-

land and Turkey, and strongmen in Rus-

sia and China. It fans the flames of

religious bigotry in India, the world’s

largest democracy. And it stretches the

widening political divides in the world’s

oldest one, where GOP politicians have

been bashing critical race theory and

passing state laws that restrict how

teachers may discuss questions of histor-

ical interpretation, race and identity. O ne

proposed law in Te xas, for example,

would suppress discussion of slavery in

school history curriculums about the

state’s fight for independence from Mexi-

co.

To those on the right in the United

States and elsewhere, the recent focus on

shameful, uncomfortable legacies is a

sign of an imbalance, an excess of doctri-

naire leftist scolding that corrodes the

national psyche. And it provides fertile

terrain to cultivate a politics of grievance,

not least as the old tethers of 20th-centu-

ry politics further loosen in many societ-

ies from traditional moorings such as

class or economic interest. Instead, tribal

passions and myths of belonging are at

center stage, and political forces on the

right aim to harness them.

SEE HISTORY ON B2

Marching

i nto the future

by rewriting

the past

PETE RYAN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Right-wing nationalists

around the world are

picking fights over history

much like the debates

in the U.S., says The Post’s

Ishaan Tharoor

Sarah Palin’s case could

rewrite libel law. B5

Perhaps our reality isn’t

the best reality. B8

Strikingly, many readers’ responses

doubled as paeans to their spouses. In a

Substack post, Jill Filipovic called her

own marriage “the first relationship of

my life that felt expansive.” “My marriage

is a source of intense joy in my life,” Josh

Barro wrote in his newsletter. “Why not

shout it from the rooftops?” Albert

Burneko, denouncing the excerpt as an

“incomprehensibly monstrous betrayal,”

also took the occasion to celebrate his

wife on the website Defector: “I follow

her around the house like a cat following

a laser pointer.” Some might call this

defensive; I find it sort of sweet. Though

their authors may not realize it, such

tributes operate in basically the same

genre as Havrilesky’s memoir. They at

least make many of the same moves:

Insist you are neither saintly nor smug

for glorying in your marriage; say you got

lucky.

Still, you’d be justified in taking “For-

everland” as an unwitting indictment of

hetero marriage, the nuclear family, the

whole catastrophe. Havrilesky, the long-

time author of the advice column “A sk

Polly,” makes the milestones of white-

picket-fence life sound miserable. When

they got engaged: “I knew for the first

time that Bill would never stop torment-

SEE MARRIAGE ON B6

By Sophia Nguyen

A

nalyzing other people’s relation-

ships — which is to say, gossiping

about them — can be “the begin-

ning of moral inquiry,” wrote the literary

critic Phyllis Rose. It’s how we workshop

our ideas about power, care and the way

we want to live. Lately we’ve been gossip-

deprived: The air’s been thick with judg-

ment, but that judgment has concentrat-

ed in less-intimate quadrants (public

health, politics). We’re hungry for stories

of others’ domestic arrangements, if only

to gain a little perspective on, or escape

from, our own.

So when Heather Havrilesky declared,

in the New York Times, “Do I hate my

husband? Oh for sure, yes, definitely,”

people feasted. The Atlantic’s D avid Frum

likened the essay, excerpted from Havr-

ilesky’s new book, “Foreverland: On the

Divine Tedium of Marriage,” to “filing

your divorce papers in front of millions of

people.” In a now-deleted tweet, the femi-

nist writer Andi Ziesler suggested, with

magnificent passive-aggression, “It

might be a net good if we stopped conflat-

ing ‘successful marriage’ and ‘marriage

that lasts forever.’ ”

What’s worse for a relationship:

A pandemic or a marriage?

basis.” (And, in any case, it should be

noted, archivists only rarely wear white

gloves.)

But don’t be deceived. For all the overt

calm of the retrieval, the very fact that it

took place dramatically underlines how

poorly prepared our institutions are to

deal with figures like Trump. The rou-

tines of presidential record-keeping (and

presidential transitions) anticipate a

generous, bipartisan spirit of coopera-

tion. So ingrained are these habits that,

even years into the Trump era, it's h ard to

describe Trump’s willingness to take

records the way we would if someone else

had done it: as an alleged theft of federal

property.

Congress and responsible executive

branch officials continue to underesti-

mate the magnitude of the challenge.

The fact that Trump could take the

records recently retrieved from Mar-a-

Lago — and that they could remain in his

possession for so long — demonstrates

that our institutions still haven’t adjust-

ed to the problem of a lawless and

disorderly president. It illustrates the

toothlessness of existing enforcement

measures, especially during the complex

transition between administrations.

Even if there were no law regarding

SEE TRUMP ON B4

T

his past week, the federal National

Archives and Records Administra-

tion retrieved 15 boxes of presiden-

tial records from Donald Trump’s private

club at Mar-a-Lago. The initial reports

conjured an incongruous image of mild-

mannered, glove-wearing archivists exe-

cuting a no-knock warrant to retrieve the

country’s nuclear codes. Somewhere, I

like to imagine, a CBS executive started

notes on a pitch for another law enforce-

ment procedural: “NARA: SWAT.”

Almost disappointingly, the retrieval

of the material seems to have been

relatively sedate. Most of the materials

seem to have been innocuous items, as

well, such as a model of Trump’s pro-

posed Air Force One redesign. Afterward,

Trump advisers stressed their “conge-

nial” relations with the National Ar-

chives. Trump himself put out a state-

ment emphasizing that the papers were

“given easily” and “on a very friendly

Trump turned over his missing

records. But the crisis isn’t over.

The National Archives is

ill-equipped for legal battles

with a leader as brazen as

Trump, says Paul Musgrave