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“Nowhere is the contingency of fact more apparent, or more strenuously denied, than in the management of the past.”
—Michael Herzfeld, The Future of Fact (1998)
One of the sadder news stories of the last few days is that of the Florida high school principal who emailed a parent that he “can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event.” When pushed to distinguish between historical events and conspiracy theories, he responded that “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened.” As a result, he has been removed from leadership of the school.
Even the BBC found this noteworthy, but sadly, it is not that uncommon. Our research on dueling fact perceptions suggests that perceptions of historical events may be even more polarized than perceptions of current conditions. While contemporary facts often provide a great deal of legitimate and relevant evidence, the application of evidence to perceptions of historical events may be more tenuous and more easily dismissed. This opens the door widely to the projection of values and identities.
One of the greatest dueling facts of the Cold War era was whether Alger Hiss was a Communist spy. Though it has faded into the past for many Americans, for several decades it was a deep divide that defined membership in liberal and conservative circles.
Senator Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1998 that “belief in the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss became a defining issue in American intellectual life.” The public debate reflected epistemology as well as ideology. Whom do you trust—a patrician Harvard Law graduate like Alger Hiss, who was a former Supreme Court clerk, endorsed by the Secretary of State? Or do you have more faith in a common man like his accuser Whittaker Chambers, who hid evidence in a pumpkin on his own farm? Elitism versus populism was a strong influence on perceptions far before the days of Trump.
In Witness, his famous book on the Hiss trial and its meaning, Whittaker Chambers referred to the ideological blindness of the twentieth century as “the loss, by the mind of a whole civilization, of the power to distinguish between reality and unreality.” In Chamber’s view, such deep misperceptions—about the nature of the Soviet Union and international communism, about the threats to American democracy, and about the nature of the divine—were not only wrong but crazy. Of course, the opposing side saw Chambers and his supporters as equally deluded.
A more recent historical controversy emerged during the Supreme Court confirmation of Clarence Thomas in 1991: was Anita Hill telling the truth about being sexually harassed, or was Thomas telling the truth that it was a politically-motivated lie (in his phrase a “high-tech lynching”)? Though nearly thirty years past, the controversy still evokes deep, certain, and disputed beliefs. In Strange Justice, a chronicle of the hearings and the surrounding politics, Jill Abramson writes that “for my generation, it was the equivalent of the Hiss/Chambers case, a divisive national argument about whom to believe in a pitched political and ideological battle, this one with an overlay of sex and race.”
The same dynamic repeated more recently when Judge Brett Kavanaugh was accused by Dr. Christine Ford of sexual assault. Beliefs about who was telling the truth have become definitions of social identity as well as perceptions of reality.
One might think that the accumulation of historical evidence would harden controversies into facts over the course of a few decades after the events. But during the same period in which the evidence is accumulating, the growing distance in time allows for the dismissal of that evidence as myth and manipulation. No one is truly forced to change their mind or admit past error, so they do not. Even about clear historical events, dueling fact perceptions remain. In cases where the evidence remains murky, dueling facts are rampant.
Examples of clear perceptual divides regarding recent events include the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown shootings. How we see these incidents may mirror the larger factual divide over the degree of racism and its influence in our society.
We included a question about the Trayvon Martin shooting in a 2013 national survey. The Zimmerman trial had concluded with a not guilty verdict in July, four months before the survey was fielded. Our goal was to look at the degree to which the dramatically divided perceptions of this specific event (48% approved of the not guilty verdict of George Zimmerman and 52% disapproved) were aligned with personal values and party affiliation.
Partisan identity was the leading predictor of perceptions of the event. Controlling for a string of other factors like race and education, Republicans were 32 percentage points more likely than Democrats to approve of the not guilty verdict. Core values also played a strong role. Americans with more individualistic values were 29 percentage points more likely to think the verdict was accurate. Race and gender played strong roles in perceptions—whites were 19 percentage points more likely than non-whites to approve of the verdict and men were 11 percentage points more likely than women. But the strongest roles were played by core values and partisan identity.
We have argued in other posts that core values and social identities shape perceptions of facts, but those perceptions also come to define our group memberships in the eyes of others. Perceptions of Hiss/Chambers, Hill/Thomas, Ford/Kavanaugh, and Martin/Zimmerman all divide us neatly into camps of clashing identities as well as competing facts. Just knowing someone’s perceptions of these events reveals and reinforces their social alignments.
