Last night, Donald Trump shocked the world, or at least the pundit class, when the New York Times published a wide-ranging interview Trump had given the paper on the subject of foreign policy.

Trump said some scary things: that he didn’t think, for example, that the US should necessarily come to the aid of a NATO country if it were attacked by Russia.

But he also said some things that were true. Like this:

When the world sees how bad the United States is and we start talking about civil liberties, I don’t think we are a very good messenger.

And while the article makes a muchness of Trump’s refusal to pressure Turkey over its response to the failed coup, the fact is that Obama hasn’t done anything concrete on that score either (as the article acknowledges). Nor did Obama do much about the coup in Egypt or Honduras. To the contrary, in fact.

But that wasn’t the focus of last night’s chatter on Twitter. Instead, the pundits and experts were keen to establish the absolutely unprecedented nature of Trump’s irresponsibility: his recklessness when it came to NATO, his adventurism, his sheer reveling in being the Bad Boy of US Foreign Policy: this, it was agreed, was new.

In a tweet that got passed around by a lot of journalists, Peter Singer, senior fellow at the New America Foundation (who’s written a lot of books on US foreign policy), had this to say:

It is the most irresponsible foreign policy statement by a presidential nominee of any party in my lifetime. https://t.co/V3C6nbp5wu — Peter W. Singer (@peterwsinger) July 21, 2016

Hmm, let’s see.

Barry Goldwater said the US should consider using tactical nukes in Vietnam, which prompted one of the most famous campaign commercials of all time.

As Seth Ackerman quipped to me in an email:

TRUMP IS SO UNPRECEDENTED IN HIS RECKLESSNESS HE COULD LEAD TO A NUCLEAR BOMB GOING OFF RIGHT AFTER A LITTLE GIRL PICKS DAISIES IN A FIELD!!!!!!

And as Seth pointed out on Twitter, Goldwater wanted to hand the decision to launch nukes over to field commanders.

But Singer was born in 1974, so let’s stay within his lifetime.

In the 1980 campaign, Ronald Reagan claimed that:

SALT II was illegal, even though it had been ratified by Congress; negotiated and signed by the Carter Administration (and was only pulled from a Senate ratification vote after the invasion of Afghanistan);

negotiated and signed by the Carter Administration (and was only pulled from a Senate ratification vote after the invasion of Afghanistan); the United States had “no deterrent whatsoever” against Soviet medium-range missiles targeting Europe, even though it had submarines with 400 nuclear warheads patrolling the Mediterranean and the Northeast Atlantic, not to mention the thousands of other warheads that could easily be rained down on the Soviets in a retaliatory strike;

the United States had “unilaterally disarmed” throughout the 1970s, even though the US had built up its nuclear stockpile from four to ten thousand warheads during that decade (actually, he said that in March 1981, two months after his inauguration, though he repeated the charge during the 1984 campaign).

In other words, it should be possible to talk about the very real and undeniable dangers of Trump without ignoring or reinventing the insanity of American history.

(To be fair, I suffer from my own version of this amnesia: every time a pundit makes an ahistorical claim, I shake my head and wonder, have we ever had such a historically unaware media?)

Jamelle Bouie, of Slate, made a similar claim as Singer:

Seriously, is this the most dangerous thing a modern POTUS nominee has ever said? https://t.co/e9QWWUGLGK — Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) July 21, 2016

“Modern” is a slippery word, though I assume it includes Reagan.

But let’s move beyond the statement to the larger point it seems to be getting at: Trump is like nothing we’ve ever seen before in the realm of foreign policy.

This is a country, remember, where it was the operational policy of the government, at the highest levels, to be able to fight and win a nuclear war. That wasn’t just the crazy talk of Dr. Strangelove. That was the reality that Dr. Strangelove was satirizing.

Up through at least the first term of the Reagan Administration—and probably beyond—high officials in the national security establishment were talking about fighting and winning a nuclear war.

One of the US Army field manuals stated:

The US Army must be prepared to fight and win when nuclear weapons are used.

Richard Pipes, Harvard historian and senior adviser to Reagan’s National Security Council (also father of Daniel Pipes), had his position characterized thus in the Washington Post:

His strategy, which he says reflects official thinking, is a winnable nuclear war.

Even the official US Budget for FY 1983 stated:

US defense policies ensure our preparedness to respond to and, if necessary, successfully fight either conventional or nuclear war.

There’s a reason Bob Scheer titled his classic book on Reagan’s national security policies “With Enough Shovels.” (h/t Josh Cohen)

I’ll admit that I find it hard to take this ahistorical high dudgeon of the pundit class seriously.

Whenever I hear this kind of stuff—with all the faux-seriousness and operatic gnashing of teeth, the pompous heavy breathing, the weird identification with America’s global mission (as Tim Barker mused on Twitter, does Bouie seriously think the “end of US hegemony would be more dangerous than nuking a small post colonial state?”)—I wonder, whom are they performing for? Each other? Themselves? Political elites?

My mind wandered to Ted Knight’s Judge Smails from Caddyshack.

But there may something less funny going on here.

A lot of these pundits and reporters are younger, part of the Vox generation of journalism. Unlike the older generation of journalists, whose calling card was that they know how to pick up a phone and track down a lead, the signature of this younger crew is that they know their way around J-STOR.

Many of them have read the most up-to-date social science as well as the best history, from Ira Katznelson to Eric Foner and so on. Bouie, in particular, is among the most talented and learned of his generation. His articles, even when I disagree with them, are well-researched and grounded in the latest scholarship.

Yet so many of them seem to lack the most basic gut impulse of any historically minded person: if you think something is unprecedented, it’s probably not. Check your amnesia, dude.

Part of this is due, as David Marcus reminded me, to the fact that though some of them do read history, a lot of them tend toward the more ahistorical branches of the social sciences. Psychology and econ or the quantitative or rational choice parts of poli sci, without the more historically focused mediations of a subfield like American political development, which not only teaches us about the temporal dimensions of American politics (that allegedly permanent rules and norms sometimes change) but also about the temporal underpinnings of our knowledge of American politics. But that’s not all of it, I don’t think.

Though I’m a political theorist, one of the things I benefited from growing up when I did was that I had incredible history teachers: first in high school (Allan Damon, Tom Corwin, and Steve Houser, unbelievable all) and then as a history major in college (John Murrin, Arno Mayer, Lawrence Stone, among others). What all of these teachers gave me, beyond some rudimentary awareness of the past, was an unshakeable sense of the historical nature of knowledge. The sense that all of us are embedded in time, that when we look back to the past we’re doing so with questions from our present, that every consensus is contingent and provisional, that today’s knowledge is just tomorrow’s belief. Some people get this from Gadamer, I got it from E.H. Carr, which we read in high school European History. (The buzzing, the buzzing: another image from a book that I’ll never forget!)

I know this is nothing deep or fancy, but it does make me wonder if today’s generation of commentators, raised as so many are on the assumption that the biological sciences and social sciences—with neuroscience as the master mediator—are the source and model of all knowledge, are somehow at a deficit. Even when they read history: because they’re led to believe, once they’ve digested Katznelson or Foner or whomever, that they’re really getting the truth, the past as it was, without that sense that Katznelson on the New Deal is only this generation’s New Deal. And that tomorrow we’ll have another New Deal.

I’m not quite sure how far we can take this—sometimes, often, I feel paralyzed by the sense of relativism this leaves me with—but it does induce a certain humility.

And, as I said, a basic gut check when it comes to claims about the absolute novelty of our situation.

Update (July 22)

On a related note, here is Matt Yglesias today:

Being president of the United States is hard work. It’s important work, and Donald Trump has proven time and again he’s much too lazy to do the job….It [Trump growing, learning, working to acquire new knowledge] doesn’t happen because he can’t be bothered. It’s terrifying.

And here are some facts about Ronald Reagan, which were reported widely at the time.

A White House aide told Newsweek in 1982 that “he [Reagan] probably spends two or three hours a day on real work. All he wants to do is tell stories about his movie days.”

Reagan himself told a biographer, “I’m a lazy fellow. I work up to a certain point, but beyond that point, I say the hell with it.”

Early on, the Washington Post reported, “More disquieting than Reagan’s performance or prospects on any specific issue is a growing suspicion that the president has only a passing acquaintance with some of the most important decisions of his administration.”

The Los Angeles Times described a president so removed “from the day-to-day workings of the White House…that he is unaware of the dimensions of the problem or of its possible consequences.”

There’s a different point to be made here about the amnesia of the pundit class.

Yglesias’s complaint is a frequently heard among liberals. As Alex Gourevitch reminded me, they said the same thing about George W. Bush. Remember all those vacations he took? (879 days, or 30% of his time in office.)

But here’s the thing: Ronald Reagan (or George W. Bush] wasn’t terrifying because he was lazy. Do we honestly think that if he had worked harder he would have been less terrifying? When your entire belief system is jackboots and smiles, it doesn’t get less scary because you work harder; the opposite, in fact. Honestly, I’m thankful Reagan was as lazy as he was. God only knows how much more havoc he might have wreaked had he been awake during those precious afternoon nap hours.

Likewise, Donald Trump. The notion here is that if he had more knowledge of the things he talks about, if he just worked harder at his job, his positions would be moderated. Like Ted Cruz?