Popular Liberal Resistance History

The first Trump presidency brought such factually dubious, avowedly far-right interpretations of U.S. history that professional American historians were thrown into a tailspin. Many historians fought back on Twitter, now X, with the weapons at hand: quote tweets and viral threads. While useful for disrupting this onslaught of right-wing disinformation--and lucrative for historians, for whom their resistance provided new platforms and book deals--resistance historians' project lost their critical edge during the Biden era, revealing serious limitations to their seemingly progressive, politically enlightened public intellectual project. Newfound alliance with and proximity to the liberal presidency transformed some resistance scholars into unofficial court historians for Biden and the Democratic Party, leading them to stay silent on or even outright endorse Biden's willful (and arguably Trumpian) support for Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, his administration's intensification of anti-immigrant violence, and more. This paper will thus examine the imperialist underpinnings and intellectual shallowness of popular liberal resistance history in the age of Trump and beyond.