It was a crisp Sunday morning in Cambridge, the kind of morning where the light filters perfectly through the sycamores and makes you feel profoundly optimistic about the American experiment. I was sitting on my patio, enjoying a modest plate of brioche and leafing through the letters section of the paper, when I found myself confronted by an alarming amount of grievance. The readers were responding to a recent column by my friend David French, a man who has done more to champion the abstract concept of civic decency than anyone since the invention of the Oxford button-down.
The letters were, frankly, exhausting. There was a lengthy missive from Drew Faust, the former president of Harvard, warning us about the dangers of ignoring America's past. There were others harping on President Trump's tax burden. There were endless, tedious calls for accountability, historical reckoning, and remembering. As I folded the paper and took a sip of my espresso, a chilling realization washed over me: these people are completely obsessed with things that have already happened.
We hear a lot these days about the urgent need to rebuild trust in our institutions, our leaders, and our fellow citizens. I have attended no fewer than six panel discussions at the Aspen Ideas Festival this year dedicated solely to the topic of rebuilding trust. I have moderated three of them. And what I have learned, after countless dinners with senators, tech visionaries, and thoughtful centrist think-tank directors, is that trust is fundamentally incompatible with memory.
You cannot rebuild trust if you insist on remembering what the other person did to you. It is a logical impossibility. Trust requires a blank slate, a presumption of good faith, and a polite refusal to look at the historical record. When Drew Faust writes about the dangers of ignoring the past, she is speaking as a historian. And we must recognize that historians have a massive, unacknowledged conflict of interest here: they literally make their living off the past. If we stop caring about the 19th century, their entire industry collapses. We must view their insistence on historical memory with the same healthy skepticism we apply to a tobacco executive telling us about the benefits of smoking.
Let us look at the practical application of memory in our current discourse. The letters section featured a prolonged complaint about Donald Trump's tax burden. Why? The man filed those returns years ago. The ledgers are closed. The accountants have gone home. To demand that we litigate the tax strategies of the past is to trap ourselves in a cycle of retroactive hostility. How does auditing a billionaire's past deductions help us forge a bipartisan consensus on infrastructure today? It does not. It merely introduces unpleasant facts into a conversation that would be much smoother without them.
If I sit down at a negotiating table with a prominent real estate developer, and I spend the first twenty minutes reciting a list of his past bankruptcies, his unpaid contractors, and his previous indictments, am I building trust? Of course not. I am being rude. I am violating the fundamental social contract of the American elite, which dictates that every morning we wake up completely washed clean of yesterday's sins, provided we are wearing a suit.
The insistence on recalling past events is the most toxic form of incivility currently plaguing our republic.
My colleague Harrison understands this intuitively. We were chatting at a gala for the preservation of bipartisan norms recently, and we arrived at a shared conclusion: the European mind is trapped in history, while the American genius is rooted in strategic amnesia. Europeans hold grudges for centuries. They remember which duke stole which valley in 1412. They are weighed down by castles, ruins, and the crushing burden of cause and effect. America, by contrast, was founded on the glorious, liberating principle of moving to a new plot of land and pretending you didn't owe money to the people in the last town.
When we ask our leaders to answer for America's past—whether it is the legacy of redlining, the intricacies of foreign policy blunders, or a former president's creative accounting—we are asking them to do something profoundly un-American. We are asking them to look backward. A true visionary only looks forward, ideally toward a public-private partnership that involves significant tax subsidies.
I am not suggesting that we literally burn the history books, though I do think we could perhaps move them to a less prominent shelf in the library, perhaps behind the new releases about corporate synergy. What I am suggesting is a cultural pivot toward what I call Civic Presentism. Under Civic Presentism, we agree that history is a fascinating hobby for academics like Drew Faust, but it has no place in the serious business of governing or op-ed writing.
Imagine the freedom. Imagine a political discourse where we evaluate every policy proposal as if the world was created this morning. We could debate the merits of tax cuts without someone rudely pointing out that the last four tax cuts blew a hole in the deficit. We could discuss foreign interventions without someone bringing up the last time we intervened in that exact same region. We could rebuild trust with our political opponents by completely forgetting the things they said on television yesterday.
David French understands this. His columns are a masterclass in treating every new political outrage as an isolated, baffling anomaly, entirely disconnected from any historical trend or preceding event. That is the kind of intellectual discipline we need. We must train ourselves to look at a burning building and ask, with pure, innocent curiosity, how the fire started, while politely ignoring the man standing next to us holding a gas can and a match.
To acknowledge the man with the gas can is to engage in polarization. It is to point fingers. It is to let the past—in this case, the past five minutes—dictate our present. If we truly want to rebuild trust, we must turn to the man with the gas can, shake his hand, and ask him for his thoughts on fire safety regulations moving forward.
This is the hard work of democracy. It is easy to remember things. Any child can remember a broken promise or a historical injustice. It takes a seasoned public intellectual to look directly at the consequences of America's past and say, with a straight face, that it has absolutely nothing to do with us.
So I humbly ask the readers of this newspaper, and distinguished scholars like Dr. Faust, to put down the archives. Stop obsessing over tax burdens from a decade ago. Stop insisting that the past has a bearing on the future. Let us embrace the healing power of total, willful ignorance, and finally build the trusting, unified nation that we, in our glorious amnesia, deserve.