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And, I’m on the ground in England, jet-lagged but maybe ready to resume blogging. For today, just a quick thought inspired by two seemingly unrelated comments.

First, in a postmortem on the UK election Simon Wren-Lewis notes one failure of Labour in particular: it made no effort at all to fight the false narrative of Blair-Brown profligacy. Wren-Lewis writes,

I suspect within the Labour hierarchy the view was to look forward rather than go over the past, but you cannot abandon the writing of history to your opponents.

Meanwhile, Brian Beutler notes the very different ways Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are dealing with the legacies of the presidents who bore their surnames. Bill Clinton presided over an era of peace and immense prosperity; nonetheless, Hillary is breaking with some of his policy legacy, on issues from trade and financial regulation to criminal justice. George W. Bush presided over utter disaster on all fronts; nonetheless, Jeb is adopting the same policies and even turning to the same advisers.

These are, I think, related stories. Progressives tend to focus on the future, on what we do now; they are also, by inclination, open-minded and if anything eager to show their flexibility by changing their doctrine in the face of evidence. Conservatives cling to what they imagine to be eternal verities, and fiercely defend their legends.

In policy terms the progressive instinct is surely superior. It’s actually quite horrifying, if you think about it, to hear Republican contenders for president unveil their big ideas, which are to slash taxes on rich people, deregulate banks, and bomb or invade countries we don’t like. What could go wrong?

But I’m with Wren-Lewis here: progressives are much too willing to cede history to the other side. Legends about the past matter. Really bad economics flourishes in part because Republicans constantly extol the Reagan record, while Democrats rarely mention how shabby that record was compared with the growth in jobs and incomes under Clinton. The combination of lies, incompetence, and corruption that made the Iraq venture the moral and policy disaster it was should not be allowed to slip into the mists.

And it’s not just an American issue. Europe’s problems are made significantly worse by the selectivity of German historical memory, in which the 1923 inflation looms large but the Brüning deflation of 1930-32, which actually led directly to the fall of Weimar and the rise of you-know-who, has been sent down the memory hole.

There’s a reason conservatives constantly publish books and articles glorifying Harding and Coolidge while sliming FDR; there’s a reason they’re still running against Jimmy Carter; and there’s a reason they’re doing their best to rehabilitate W. And progressives need to fight back.