Politics & Power Quote by David C. McCullough

McCullough lands the point with a clinician's metaphor: history isn’t pageantry, it’s memory, and memory is infrastructure. By comparing a nation to an individual with amnesia, he collapses the comforting scale of “the past” into something intimate and alarming. Amnesia isn’t just ignorance; it’s disorientation. You can still walk, talk, even work, but you can’t explain how you got here, what you’ve already tried, who you’ve harmed, who you’ve promised to protect. Function becomes imitation.

The intent is corrective, aimed at a civic culture that treats history as optional enrichment rather than operational knowledge. McCullough spent a career writing popular narrative history that made institutions and turning points legible to general readers; the subtext is a rebuke to the idea that democracy runs on vibes. Forgetting, in his framing, isn’t neutral. It invites repetition: the same demagogic tricks, the same scapegoating cycles, the same short-term fixes sold as bold new visions.

The line also carries a quiet accusation against a consumerist approach to citizenship. An amnesiac is easy to manipulate because they lack context; a nation with weak historical literacy becomes susceptible to myth, nostalgia, and strategically edited “heritage.” McCullough’s rhetorical move is to make historical knowledge feel less like trivia and more like self-preservation. It’s not that the past deserves reverence; it’s that the future requires recall.