“Presentism: an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences” (Mirriam-Webster)

The term arose in 2022 from scholar James Sweet. Sweet got in trouble from those on the left of the political spectrum. “It’s the belief that people who lived a hundred or five hundred or a thousand years ago really should really have known better” (Bill Maher, “What this Comedian Said Will Shock You”).

Maher gives the example of Christopher Columbus committing atrocities against Native people. But such attitudes were common during his time. “Everybody who could afford one had a slave, including people of color in other parts of the world”. Slavery goes back thousands of years.

“The capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing, even though that doesn’t jibe with the current narrative. But in today’s world when truth conflicts with a narrative, it’s the truth that has to apologize. Being woke is like a magic moral time machine where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066, and you always win”.

As a local example of presentism, according to Maher, “Portland Public Schools teach kids that the idea of gender being mainly binary was brought here by white colonizers… . ‘When the United States was colonized by white settlers, their views around gender were forced upon the people already living here”.

Another example from American history: “In 1958, only 4 percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage…. In 2013, 87 percent approved”.

If you watch old Friends sitcoms, they’re viewed as strange because the storyline is about six friends of that time, all of whom were straight and white. This doesn’t happen anymore.

A progressive today expressed the view in the New York Times that “You’re witnessing white power and white privilege at an all-time high”. Is it higher than 1921 when Tulsa’s Black Wall Street was bombed or when 30,000 members of the KKK marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. in 1925, or when Jim Crow was the law of the land in the South?

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris was asked by Dana Bash in an interview why her views were more liberal in 2019 than they were in 2024. Harris avoided the question over and over again. She avoided admitting that we live in a different election cycle and she had learned since 2019. Had she said that, she would have been quoted and re-quoted over and over again and accused of being a “flip-flopper”, while her opponent Donald Trump bragged that he had packed the Supreme Court and that they had abolished Roe vs. Wade as a result, only to back off from his deed in unneeded fear of losing the women’s vote.

“The new trick in Democratic politics is to dig up something your opponent said decades ago that looks bad by today’s standards and then pretend that it’s mic-drop evidence of your awesome moral superiority”. Many progressives believe that had they lived back then, they would have modern views, rather than the culture’s commonly held perspectives. Nope.

For those of you old enough, do you remember the 1980s when women wore giant shoulder pads? It’s very likely you would have, too. If you were rich and white in the 1780s, you would have likely owned slaves and not thought about your neighbors who did, too.

Back in ancient times people smoked on planes and there were beauty pageants where young women dressed up in swim suits and paraded on a stage before millions of TV viewers. Wait! We’re still doing that. For those of you who will be alive 25 years into the future, you’re going to cringe at what you did and said today.

Presentism is a progressive problem that plagues us. The examples above are an inability to realize that you can’t go back and apologize for previous generations’ prejudices and flaws.

Conservatives, too, are not off the hook, because they look to the past as a time when America was apparently once great — never mind the racism and the sexism and sexual assaults that were committed. They, too, will likely cringe at the bad decisions they made and the problems we are now suffering as a result. Your candidate won the 2024 election, after all. You got what you thought you wanted, but you may have buyers’ remorse.

It seems that whether “woke” or reactionary, we humans want to reinterpret the past to fit our preconceived views of the present. Reality forces the truth upon us all.