RANDALL WHITE, NORTH AMERICAN NOTEBOOK, TORONTO. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 31, 2026. The US midterm elections on which so much about the future of American politics has lately seemed to depend are now just a few days away — on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

Along with many others in Canada (currently embarking on its future relationship with the European Union, from the pioneering Canadian transcontinental fur-trade metropolis of Montreal), I too am deeply fascinated by where some wider world will be on, say, the late afternoon of November 4. (Eastern Standard Time in New York City, or early afternoon in Los Angeles, on up to northern BC or down south to Baja California and beyond.)

(1) “Harvard’s Drew Gilpin Faust says history should make us uncomfortable”

Strictly by chance I have also been catching up on my New York Review of Books reading lately. I have just finished a piece by Drew Gilpin Faust — “known as a historian, a civil rights activist and the first woman president of Harvard,” but “groomed to become a proper Southern lady.”

The piece is adroitly headlined “The Slave’s Power … Two recent books employ inventive approaches to read against the grain of the archive left by those who defended and benefited from human bondage.”

This of course is not the kind of American history Donald Trump likes, as his battle against the Smithsonian Institution underlines. As a summer 2023 National Public Radio piece succinctly explained : “Harvard’s Drew Gilpin Faust says history should make us uncomfortable.” Donald Trump does not want to be made uncomfortable.

His reasons are petty at best. Yet for better or worse many of the 77 million American Trump voters of 2024 may not want to be made uncomfortable by their history as well, for far less petty reasons. And on this ground at least I can have some sympathy with at least some of them. (Who really may have, four years later in the midst of much else in their personal lives, just forgotten the latest darkest times of US federal government and politics, in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.)

(2) On not wanting to be made uncomfortable but still wanting realistic history

Even personally, I read and enjoy reading and otherwise trying to grasp a lot of history by many excellent historians of one brand or stamp or style or another. I don’t find that this makes me uncomfortable. And I don’t want it to make me feel that way either.

Unlike Donald Trump and some or even many of his 2024 voters, I do want the history I try to digest to be about some version of the real world as lived in by most people. And this real world is, I agree, a complex and often contradictory place.

Along with their great and beautiful human instincts, human beings for whatever reasons can also indulge in unpleasant, disagreeable, bizarre, appalling, and even wicked behaviour.

To me good history is about the real world, and it helps us deal with both the good and bad that lurks in the minds of men (and certainly women too).

(3) Wanting a history that makes us want to do better

To me as well, however, the quest for realism in human history is not the same as searching for stories that might make me feel uncomfortable. I don’t see being uncomfortable as some kind of virtue. And having now read her very good review of two recent books on the history of American slavery I don’t think Drew Gilpin Faust finally does either. In the deep end, as it were, she just believes in the same kind of historical realism that I and many others do.

At the same time, I can see, I think, how telling friends and colleagues at Harvard and in other similar circles that good “history should make us uncomfortable” may qualify as memorable and good enough advice. For some it can be a noteworthy way of alluding to the kind of real-world history that can tell us useful things about the present and future of humanity.

But I think I can also see how some altogether sensible people who live in quite different worlds from that of what President Lyndon Johnson from Texas liked to call “the Harvards” might believe a history that makes us feel uncomfortable is not finally a good thing for the country.

What we all seriously want on this view is a history that makes us want to do better — that includes eg a Civil War fought to at least start to end the long and altogether appalling ordeal of African American bondage in the slave states of the American Republic born in 1776. A history that just promotes some unenergetic uncomfortable state of mind is not going to do the trick.

(4) Worrying about what may or may not happen on Tuesday, November 3, 2026

Somewhere in the middle of such thoughts, induced by Drew Gilpin Faust’s very good New York Review piece on two recent books about “The Slave’s Power” lie my personal worries about what may or may not happen in the USA today on Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

I would very much like to see the Republican party finally taken over by Donald Trump and now (very badly and ineptly ) running the US presidency for a second terrible time, and effectively running the US congress for at least the second Trump Republican presidency’s first two years, handed an unmistakable major and massive 2026 midterm electoral defeat of historic proportions.

I’m still not quite or even at all convinced, however, that this is what will actually have happened by the late or early afternoon of November 4.

But in this respect at least I’d be pleased to be disappointed.