This is the Cato Daily podcast for Wednesday, April 2nd, 2025. I'm Caleb Brown. The past is a weapon.

And pining for the past is an easy way to dismiss the challenges faced by everyone, but also those faced by specific groups.

Right and left are broadly guilty of it, but confronting

history is critical, and most especially the history that disagrees with our narratives. Phil Magnus is a

senior fellow at the Independent Institute. He is author of the forthcoming The 1619 Project Myth. We spoke

last month in Louisville, Kentucky.

There is a tendency, and I've seen it, I feel like I've seen it a lot more recently.

Maybe I've just been more attuned to it.

Of people being openly willing to reject basic facts about history because it hurts their ideological project or they think it hurts their ideological project.

Before we started recording, we were talking about this as it's profoundly weird, and I think it gives rise to allowing people the luxury,

and let's be clear, it is a luxury to just abandon reason in pursuit of ideological ends.

This is the great paradox that F.A. Hayek pointed out a great little book called capitalism and the historians.

He noted that many times people's perceptions of the past and their beliefs, ideological systems in the present are often conflated, and they enlist the past basically as a weapon in the present day to argue for political objectives.

Yeah, and so, like, I hear friends, and this is a minor example, I think, of an unwillingness,

or perhaps just a fear or concern about grappling with the past and thinking about it in a serious way of very old people saying,

I just want America to be like the America that I grew up in.

And I think, well, I don't know.

Sure seems like people had it pretty bad in the America you grew up in.

I don't just mean material prosperity. I mean like

women, minorities, gay people. These are groups that had it pretty bad in, you know, 30s, 40s, 50s,

60s, 70s, and to some extent the 80s. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you have both sides of the ideological spectrum.

They look to various ages in the past as the supposed golden era where everything was

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