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Sooner or later someone can go after him - even when he unequivocally "I have carefully-developed views on historical subjects that I have studied, and I certainly have strong convictions about democracy. But beyond that, partisanship is just not my professional focus.”
Michael Beschloss is an historian specializing in the United States presidency. He is the author of nine books on the presidency.
✓ History With a Kick … Historian Michael Beschloss loves the archives. His Twitter is an oddly compelling stream of archival images that has gotten him a touch more than 800,000 followers over a decade. For most of that run, his history lessons have tended towards the anodyne. But in the Trump era, Beschloss has found his inner online provocateur, tweeting out pictures of the Rosenbergs as news broke that federal agents found nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago, or the Munich Beer Hall Putsch on Jan. 6th.
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Is he that way “irl”? Michael Schaffer went to see him for this week’s Capital City column, on a mission to figure out whether Beschloss is the classic TV historian, the guy with the quick Twitter fingers or something beyond either of those public personas.
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"With his sonorous baritone and his taut jawline and his impeccably gracious manner all still intact, Beschloss today may be the greatest example (or at least the one whose living room backdrop has the highest Room-Rater score) of a contemporary Washington phenomenon: The radicalized establishmentarian.
You can see the radicalism when you peruse his Twitter feed, an oddly compelling stream of archival images that turns ten years old next month and now has a touch more than 800,000 followers. Though the feed’s early years focused on images connected to mostly anodyne milestones, over the the years the feed, like his TV appearances, has become increasingly peppery: Photos of Mussolini and Hitler, allegations of fascism and racism, insinuations of ex-presidential criminality.
But you can see the establishmentarianism when you ask him about it and the first thing he does is assure you — with a suitably generous preamble — that he’s no angry yahoo. “Let me say what I assume I should not need to,” he says. “I was not suggesting that Donald Trump be executed. I was doing a historical tweet about the most famous nuclear secrets case in American history.”
Longtime Beschloss-watchers will also be relieved to know that he hasn’t become some kind of partisan, either.
“I was going through life happily, not spouting any views I might have on healthcare and taxes, which are still not well-developed, because I’m not by nature a very partisan person.” But what are those views? “I don’t really have many elaborate, strong views on a lot of current political issues. I have carefully-developed views on historical subjects that I have studied, and I certainly have strong convictions about democracy. But beyond that, partisanship is just not my professional focus.”
Attempts to get Beschloss to spill the beans on his own voting history are similarly unsuccessful. “I’ve been a registered Independent for decades. I think the last time I gave any money to a candidate was a modest donation in 1988 to Al Gore, who that year was one of the most centrist candidates — and to my home state Senator, Paul Simon of Illinois. In both cases, friends asked me. None of that suggests much about ideology.”
But the display of dispassion comes to an end when the subject turns to American democracy.
“The point I’m trying to make is that, until roughly 2017, I was not inclined to take public positions on current events. And that is because I did not feel that democracy was under immediate and serious threat. But if you and I had talked earlier, and we had been told that in the near future, democracy was going to be in danger and a President might be eager to tear apart just about every major institution of democracy that you care about, including free and fair elections as well as the rule of law — would you speak out? I would have said yes, I certainly would.”
✓As it happens, this question is one of the big divides in American media and politics right now: Whether to view the constellation of issues Beschloss puts under the threats-to-democracy rubric as simple political disagreements where the obligation to impartiality holds sway, or to treat them as something outside the bounds of partisan politics, a subject where it’s quite all right to root for one side. Beschloss has picked the latter option. . ."
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