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Instead, Harris’s seamless, all-explanatory narrative feels increasingly and weirdly teleological, like a cult belief system.

In such a way he avoids the teleological danger of making everything in Britain about the war as the country hurtles toward some kind of inevitable abyss.

It is important here to distinguish between teleological history—the notion that history has a purpose or goal—and retrospective history, which seeks to study history as a process of development.

Ross seems to acknowledge that, but he also protests that the “Wagner-to-Hitler” meme suggests a teleological progression that, while perhaps convenient, is dangerously simplistic.

Journalist Garry Wills saw it differently, as he explained in 1976: “It is unfortunate that McCarthyism was named teleologically, from its most perfect product, rather than genetically — which would give us Trumanism.”