Who Best Predicts the Future?   Historians – Here’s Proof

By Shlomo Maital

Which discipline best equips people for predicting the future?

Economics? That’s a joke. Sociology? Psychology?

History! Precisely those who study, record and analyze our past history, are, I think, best equipped to predict our near-term future. And here is proof.

   Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee both times, Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns. Schlesinger served as special assistant and “court historian” to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He was a Harvard history professor and wrote many wonderful books, following in the footsteps of his father, Arthur Schlesinger Sr., a decorated historian. He died in Feb. 2007, at 89.  

   In 1992 he published a short little book, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. In it Schlesinger said this:

   “Instead of a transforming nation with an identity all its own, America increasingly sees itself in this new light as preservative of diverse alien identities. Instead of a nation composed of individuals making their own unhampered choices, America increasingly sees itself as composed of groups more or less ineradicable in their ethnic characteristics.

     Will the center hold? Or will the melting pot give way to the Tower of Babel? …the historical idea of a unifying American identity is now in peril in many arenas…”

The US Presidential election of Nov. 2016 provided the answer. It’s Tower of Babel, or as Senator Corker from Tennessee described it, the White House is a “day care center”.

   We are in the era of identity politics. My identity is determined not by the nation in which I live and sometimes serve, but by the specific ethnic, racial, social, economic, educational, and religious group to which I belong. The “we” of “me” has become very very narrow.   This is true not only in the US but all over the world – former Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Catalonia….  

   With identity politics, nations split apart.  When the supreme value becomes the celebration of diversity, rather than the cohesive force of national pride and identity, nations fall apart. Electing a leader who leverages this split, like Trump, for political gain is inevitable. And it’s happening all over the world.

   Schlesinger called it. The unifying American identity is gone. He saw this coming  25 years ago, in 1992. But nobody listened.

“The genius of America,” Schlesinger concluded, “lies in its capacity to forge a single nation from peoples of remarkably diverse racial, religious and ethnic origins.”

That genius seems to be gone, mortally wounded by a learning-disabled attention-deficit President who is unable to read a half-page briefing document. The glue that once bonded a redneck gun-toting blue collar worker from Chattanooga to a Harvard-educated Wall St. bond dealer with a summer cottage in the Hamptons is gone.

Only when that glue disappeared do we realize how vital it was to America and to the world.