Breaking the Wheel

Americans aren’t failing to learn from history. They’re being taught not to.

Everyone knows the Santayana line: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” People slap it on coffee mugs and move on. But almost nobody reads what Santayana actually wrote — not just that line, but the body of work surrounding it. And when you do, the critique he was building lands squarely on the United States. On us. Today.

In The Life of Reason, written when he was at Harvard in 1905, the famous quote is about knowledge and memory — progress depends on learning lessons and then applying them. Without that, we all remain infants, forever making the same mistakes, never growing. It’s a universal principle. But Santayana spent decades applying that principle to one country in particular. By 1920, in Character and Opinion in the United States, he’d laid it bare: Americans were bound by a gospel of work and belief in progress, locked into a patriotic conformity that passed for freedom. What looked like forward motion was actually a feedback loop — a country committed not to learning from its past but to performing a story about its past.

That’s the wheel.

The mechanism is simple, and it’s everywhere. Americans aren’t taught their actual history. They’re told a story designed to make them feel good about being Americans under this version of the American state. The people intent on running history through classrooms and curricula aren’t interested in building critical understanding — they’re building national identity. It’s mythology dressed up as education. And it works beautifully — right up until it doesn’t.

Because here’s what mythology can’t do: prepare anyone for anything.

When crisis in America hits, people don’t reach for real lessons — they don’t have any. They reach for inspiration. They reach for the “better angels of our nature.” They reach for the story. And the same patterns repeat, not because Americans are uniquely foolish, but because the uniquely powerful focus on narrative makes it virtually impossible to learn.

This is what Santayana saw. Not that people forget — that’s the meme version, and it’s wrong. The problem isn’t forgetting. The problem is that remembering has been replaced by something that looks like remembering but isn’t. Americans think they know their history. They can name founders. They can recite phrases from the Declaration. They can tell you about the arc of the moral universe. They have a whole vocabulary of historical reference — and almost none of it is history. It’s national scripture. It’s catechism. And catechism doesn’t teach you how to think. It teaches you what to believe.

That’s why the wheel keeps turning. Every generation enters the same crises, the same fight for democracy, over and over again, with the same tools — not because they’ve been denied knowledge, but because what they’ve been given in place of knowledge is a story that was never designed to help them understand anything. It was designed to make them feel like, well, good Americans. To cohere them around a state. To give them a national identity that makes the system feel natural, inevitable, and fundamentally good — so that when something goes wrong, the only possible explanation is bad actors. Never bad design.

And this isn’t an accident. It’s a project.

In 2019, Jill Lepore published “A New Americanism: Why a Nation Needs a National Story” in Foreign Affairs and laid out the project in terms no one could misread. When historians stop writing national history, she argued, the void gets filled by “charlatans, stooges, and tyrants.” Her solution wasn’t to do better history. It was to do better nationalism: “When historians abandon the study of the nation, when scholars stop trying to write a common history for a people, nationalism doesn’t die. Instead, it eats liberalism.” And so the question she posed wasn’t whether historians should mythologize — it was whether they could afford not to: “Is there any option other than to try to craft a new American history — one that could foster a new Americanism?” The historian’s job, in this framework, isn’t to help people understand where they are. It’s to out-narrate the right — to win the story war over who Americans are and how they should act politically.

Lepore wasn’t actually saying anything new. She was describing a project that was already decades old and backed by the most powerful cultural forces in America. Film, television, publishing, politics — all of it, in one way or another, aligned behind the production of liberal nationalist mythology. Ken Burns turns every American catastrophe into a story about American resilience. Jon Meacham wraps the Declaration in Genesis language and conscripts Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. as witnesses for an order they spent their lives contesting. The West Wing taught a generation that politics is a rhetorical exercise and that the right speech constitutes victory. Biden ran on “the Battle for the Soul of America” and governed like the soul was never in question — just temporarily misplaced. The New York Times bestseller list is perennially populated with titles in service to it. Congressional Democrats today can’t stop posting on social media about it.

This is what keeps the wheel structural, not accidental. It’s not that Americans organically forget. It’s that the entire apparatus of American public life is organized around telling them a story instead of teaching them their past. And the liberal establishment isn’t fighting that apparatus — they are that apparatus.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. saw it. He’d helped build the consensus narrative from inside the wartime state — the OSS, the OWI — and carried it back into the academy. But by 1962, he recognized what the project was becoming, and he put the warning in the mouth of John F. Kennedy at Yale:

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth: persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”

One of the men who built the machine tried to shut it down from inside, using the best words he had, from the best podium available. And it changed nothing. Because the warning was still a speech, and speeches are what the machine produces. You can’t use a sermon to dismantle the church.

The wheel is why every crisis in American life is treated as a deviation rather than a pattern. Why the response to failure is always to restore rather than to rebuild. Why the liberal establishment reaches for the Constitution the way a congregation reaches for scripture — as a source of answers, rather than a document produced by specific people with specific interests at a specific moment in time, which might need to be questioned rather than worshipped.

Santayana diagnosed this over a century ago. He saw a country trapped in what he called perpetual infancy — not because it refused to grow, but because the conditions for growth were never present. You can’t learn from a past you were never taught. You can only repeat a story you were handed.

And that story is the wheel itself. It’s the thing that keeps a country cycling through the same crises, telling itself the same bedtime story, waiting for better angels that were never coming.

After 250 years, the angels aren’t late. They’re not real. They’re characters in a national mythology that was built to keep the wheel spinning — and it has never, not once, stopped.

But the wheel only works as long as the mythology holds. And the mythology only holds as long as the actual past stays buried under it.

This is what resistance history is for. Not a new mythology. Not a better story to make Americans feel good about a different set of founders. Just the past — as close to how it actually happened as we can get it, all of it, including the parts the priesthood left out because they complicated the narrative. The people who fought back. The people who were crushed. The people who saw the system for what it was and tried to change it, then were erased from the story because their existence made the mythology incoherent.

The orthodox national narrative isn’t just incomplete. It is itself an abusive authority — a version of the past imposed on the governed to serve the interests of those doing the governing. And like every abusive authority, it needs to be altered or abolished. Not with a better speech. Not with a new Americanism. With the truth — the whole, uncomfortable, demythologized record of what actually happened and who it happened to.

That’s how you break Santayana’s wheel. That’s how you escape Schlesinger’s paradox. Not by crafting a better myth, but by abandoning mythology altogether — by doing the one thing Kennedy warned was necessary and the priesthood has never been willing to do. Replace the comfort of opinion with the discomfort of thought. Replace the story with the history. And let Americans, for the first time, decide for themselves what to do with a past they’ve actually been allowed to see.