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i dont think that historians are a single group: they occupy a range of political positions and operate from within those political positions (with varying degrees of self-consciousness)--there are conservative historians, particularly amongst americans who do american history--and there are althusserians and herds of other folk who occupy a wide range of political positions.
i also dont think history is one thing: it is not stable, it is not reliable, it shifts and mutates continually. there is nothing reassuring about the past, and to look to accounts of the past for reassurance (as to the stability of the world, say) is a mistake. if anything, working with the derbis of the past functions to dissolve a sense of stability of the present, to relativize it, to corrode the sense of certainty.
professional historians in general develop forms of conceptual art from asemblages of textual debris. that the internal assumptions about this conceptual art tend to negate the status of the results as conceptual art changes nothing, really: well, except for one thing....the results are usually quite bad conceptual art. i think this a fine state of affairs, however, in that corroding a sense of certainty opens up space for thinking about the present as political. this, however, is a minority opinion.
at any event, i wouldn't trust a historian who decided to announce that the bush administration (or any other) was a "success" or "failure" en gros. this kind of evaluation should be left to readers.
i dont think a historians responsibility is to assign gross categories like success or failure to an administration: when they do so, they are generally simplifying their analysis, perhaps in a bid to get some tv time and by doing that some status as "public intellectual" that can be used for other purposes in the curious internal political realm within which such types of cultural capital circulate and mean something.
historians in the main look at networks of text-traces that outline situations and try to understand linkages between them. often there is an assumption that by working with these text-traces something of the complexity of "reality" can be understood--but this is naive.
these assemblages of text-traces are carved up by subdisciplines: you have diplomatic historians, you have historians of the presidency, you have americanists within history departments, you have a host of americanists tucked away in other academic departments: each would look at particular aspects of an administration's activities and each would no doubt arrive at a different assessment of that administration as a simple function of the way data is carved up and the way in which the disciplinary politics and personal politics of the historian impact upon that data (in its organization/selection as much as in its explicit conclusions)
i am a historian professionally and i really do not understand the faith in thier ex post facto judgments that folk above seem to give them. histories require critical reading in the same way as any other ideological text requires it. they *are* ideological texts. so i would expect that the politics of a historian working for aei or hoover 20 years from now would make their assessments of the bush administration as entirely predictable (and problematic) as would the politics of left trotskyite historian. the bush administration would be created in the image of the politics of the historian, and would be assessed in those terms. to be taken seriously, there would have to be a certain adherence to the conventions for handling evidence--and adherence to these conventions would function to guarantee the "reliability" of the interpretations on techincal grounds--but that would change nothing about the politics of the narrative itself. it would only indicate that the historian writing the interpretation was technically competent.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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