The Open History of Crisis

James Cairns

“It is exceptionally difficult to grasp the present as history.”[1] Thus begins David McNally’s book on the 2008-09 financial crisis. In everyday usage, the present means now, this instant. History is what happened in the past, and the future is time yet to come. The real relationship of past, present, and future, however, is far more fluid and interdependent. In fact, the present is the result of a process of active making over time, and the future is the product of our actions in this context. What that means, in McNally’s words, is that “the present is invariably saturated with elements of the future, with possibilities that have not yet come to fruition, and may not do so – as the road to the future is always contested.” Grasping the present as history means understanding the present as a becoming.

My forthcoming book In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times argues that exercising our historical imaginations this way is especially important in times of crisis. Crises can feel overwhelming. The pandemic spreads; markets collapse; fighting erupts; rights are suspended. People living through periods of severe instability and danger often describe feeling a crushing loss of agency. Understanding how a crisis developed and what outcomes are possible is crucial for affirming agency in decisive historical moments.  

I’m using the term crisis according to its original Greek meaning. The etymological roots of the word are in the Ancient Greek verb krino, meaning to choose, to judge, to decide. As the German historian Reinhart Koselleck explains, crisis to the Greeks referred to the period of extreme danger and uncertainty for gravely ill patients.[2] If patients died, their loss may have been a tragedy, a catastrophe for loved ones left behind, but death was not the crisis. The crisis was the period of struggle, transformation toward collapse or redemption, a moment still containing very different possible futures. The crisis was the time before history was settled, for example, by the death or recovery of the patient, the time for making history, when alternative futures were still possible.   

The historian Robin D.G. Kelley suggests that failing to grasp the present as history during times of crisis cultivates passivity by reducing what is, by definition, a two-sided, and therefore open-ended phenomenon – the struggle between recovery and death – to a one-sided unfolding of either path.[3] In practice, this might produce fatalism in understanding the current environmental crisis, either assuming that humans will be fine – we’ll recover eventually, we always do – or accepting the cataclysmic character of the crisis, on the assumption that the irreversible eco-apocalypse has already been triggered. Each of these perspectives contains part of the truth, and there are facts, hunches, reasoned arguments to support each opposing view. But the truth of the crisis lies in the whole, which contains many possible outcomes. Each partial truth is associated with different potential futures.

Over the past two months, I’ve deepened my thinking about the present-as-history while reflecting on how an essay in my book about Donald Trump’s first term as president might begin to look different in light of his second term thus far.[4] The essay criticizes characterizations of Trump’s first presidency as fascist. It compares media coverage from 2019 to 2022 that framed Trump as the killer of liberal democracy with the actual resilience of liberal democracy in that same period.

My argument in the book builds on the work of Corey Robin, author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, which shows why it’s a mistake to view Trump’s first administration as a break from democracy in America. The remarkable thing about Trump’s first term, Robin argues, is how little he accomplished, how constrained he was by democratic institutions. He never built his great wall, never brought factories back to the Rust Belt, never halted impeachment processes. Trump’s rhetoric might’ve been uniquely uncouth. But President Richard Nixon sacked an attorney general, then a deputy attorney general, until finding a lackey in the Department of Justice who would fire the special prosecutor on Nixon’s tail. Trump ranted about the witch-hunts against him but failed to sack the special counsel investigating him. When the Supreme Court struck down parts of Trump’s ban on immigration from Muslim countries, Trump just went along with it. Robin says that in comparison to Nixon’s autocratic record, the first Trump administration was “a joke.”

I recognize that Trump 2.0 is different. It is clear the US government has taken a sharp turn toward authoritarianism since January. The current White House’s persecution of transgender people and migrants, including migrants living and working legally inside the US; its political intervention in university governance; and the aggressive implementation of “unitary executive theory” of the US constitution, which assumes that the authority of the president stands above that of Congress and the courts, has indeed thrown democracy in the US into a period of exceptional danger and instability. Princeton historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor places the current administration’s relentless assault on diversity-equity-and-inclusion initiatives within a long history of anti-Black conservative politics in America. What I do not accept is that the actions of the Trump administration in spring 2025 are evidence that my analysis of the first Trump presidency was wrong.

My need to emphasize discontinuity between the first and second Trump presidencies goes beyond intellectual score-settling (see? I was right all along!). The point I want to make is that the descent into authoritarianism under Trump 2.0 was not inevitable (and, as a corollary, that the future of our present – which might look like further democratic backsliding, or like popular power resurgent – remains open). Post-2020 struggles within the Republican Party and the MAGA camp might have produced an alternative presidential candidate, or constrained Trump 2.0’s capacity to govern. According to Taylor’s analysis, if the Democratic administration of Joe Biden had not dismantled the COVID welfare state and supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it’s very likely that the Democrats would’ve won the presidency in 2024, meaning that there would never have been such a thing as Trump 2.0.

Omar El Akkad’s recent book – One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This – offers a twist on the concept of grasping the present as history. El Akkad argues that Trump’s current assault on liberalism’s ostensible rules-based order, both domestically and internationally, cannot be understood without taking into account the fact that Biden spent his final year in office bankrolling and providing diplomatic cover for genocide in Palestine. Biden’s unrelenting defence of Israel’s war crimes shredded whatever legitimacy or force international law may have once had.[5] Biden was president when a majority of US states passed laws censoring so-called critical race theory. Biden deported hundreds of thousands of migrants (many of them adults with children). In D.K. Renton’s words, the Biden presidency “created the opportunity for [Trump] to take the violence further.”

Different pathways, different futures were available in the now-history of 2020-2024 when it was present. The acceleration of authoritarianism under Trump 2.0 does not mean that Trump 1.0 could only have led here.

The problem with assuming that Trump 1.0 was leading in a straight line to where we are now is that it prevents us, in 2025, from imagining and working toward futures that deepen democracy and expand social justice. Because even in the present crisis we’re living through, which Renton describes as involving “a degree of authoritarianism that is equivalent to fascism,” the future is open, and we are making history, both through our conscious choices to act, and less conscious actions and inactions. Renton’s research, unsettling as it is, seeks “to learn from historical antifascist movements to formulate a robust counterpolitics to the Trumpian agenda.”

Thinking historically, using our historical imaginations, means thinking not only about how to respond to the latest Trump-created injustice making headlines, but also how longstanding struggles between democratic social movements and hierarchical forces of state and corporate violence are today creating the history upon which future struggles will play out. Grasping the present as history is key to developing effective political strategy in times of crisis. As Sheila Rowbotham puts it in The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s, “The charting of experience can bring a sense of direction.”[6]

Keeping alert to the fact that the past might have turned out differently is an essential skill. Without it, we are far more likely to experience and conceive of present periods of extreme danger and instability as though they are bound to end in ruin. We may talk about living through the ecological crisis, or the Trump-fueled crisis of democracy, but what many of us are really expressing is despair: resignation to the idea that climate change can’t be stopped before planetary collapse, resignation to the idea that far-right political forces have already won.

History has a knack for making itself appear inevitable, especially, as E.H. Carr noted, once it is “refracted through the mind of the recorder,” that is, turned into a story by the historian.[7] In our troubled times, when catastrophe can feel unavoidable, a politics of progress requires action on the basis of the many possible outcomes that are alive in the moment of crisis.

The philosopher Ernst Bloch, seeking grounds for hope in socialist revolution, wrote about looking for “tomorrow in today.”[8] He encouraged grasping the present as history not because today looked so promising, but because future history can only be made from the material in front of our faces. The insight is no less relevant in times of crisis. The richest interpretations of contemporary crises will attend to the potential for rebirth contained therein. Taking bold action without guarantees, working to create a future in which, to borrow from Walter Benjamin, visions of justice defeated in the past come alive and are redeemed in the future, this is the stuff of understanding the present as history.

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Notes

[1] David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland: PM Press, 2011), 1.

[2] Reinhart Koselleck with Thomas McCarthy, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).

[3] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Crisis: Danger, Opportunity, and the Unknown,” South 50, no. 1 (2017): 3-8.

[4] James Cairns, In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (Hamilton: Wolsak & Wynn, forthcoming June 2025), see “Google Alerts.”

[5] While the argument is developed throughout El Akkad’s book, I also recommend listening to his conversation with David Naimon on Between the Covers, 21 February 2025.

[6] Sheila Rowbotham, The Past is Before Us: Feminism in Action Since the 1960s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 301.

[7] E.H. Carr, What is History?, second ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 22.

[8] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol 3., trans. Neville Plaice, Steven Plaice and Paul Knight (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 1374.

James Cairns is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, Law and Social Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University.

The author wishes to thank Kate Cairns, Sue Ferguson, Alan Sears, and Sara Wilmshurst for feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.