Donald Trump and the Return of American Fascism
In the past weeks, as the American polity — myself included — has finally come to terms with the fact that Donald Trump is not a flash in the pan, there have been a rash of “how did we get here” pieces. In the Times, David Brooks characterized Trump as the rise of an “anti-politics” and “anti-compromise” strain in our heretofore healthy American democracy. Vox’s Amanda Taub wrote an intriguing in-depth piece on Trump and the rise of American authoritarianism, with historical analysis that stretches back to World War II. And there have been many more where those came from. What a large percentage of these pieces have in common is the staunch belief that Trump’s rise runs counter to the American democratic tradition and today’s political establishment.
Brooks, for example, talks about our politics as “an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions” and “try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests”. He talks about the Constitution as a means “to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate.” To Brooks, and realistically, to most of the American people, the legacy of the founders is a politics that provides “a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence.”
In this narrative, Trump and his ilk are outside of the American political mainstream and their desires are anathema to the vast majority of us trying to adhere to the American political model. As Secretary Clinton put it recently, “Donald Trump is not who we are.”
But what if he is?
This nearly ubiquitous line of thinking on Trump betrays our desire for a relatively digestible explanation of our present predicament that insulates the American people and the American ideal from criticism. The problem with this convenient interpretation is American history.
As many know intellectually, but only marginalized Americans know viscerally, for most of the American experiment politics cannot honestly be characterized as the art of compromise between many different interest groups, nor has it resembled ruling diverse groups “without undue violence”. It has, in fact, been the exact opposite.
Whether the group in question is Native Americans, blacks (as slaves or free), women, myriad other people of colour, low income Americans, immigrants, ethnic whites including Jews, religious minorities or LGBTQ persons the actual nature of politics in America has been the exclusion of different interest groups. Undue violence, or the threat of undue violence has been the rule and not the exception.
The type of politics we all consider to be the norm — truly universal suffrage, the equal rule of law, minority interest groups exerting their influence on mainstream politics without being deterred, powerful groups accepting long-term compromise as the cost of doing business — is anything but normal. Where most Americans are concerned, insofar as this political order exists at all it is a very recent achievement attained through centuries of persistent upheaval.
The reason for this is simple. Donald Trump’s brand of politics is not at all new to the American political scene. He is, in fact, the heir to a grand tradition of white supremacy, antagonistic paternalism and demagoguery.
Consider Andrew Johnson, President a century and a half ago, and spiritual ancestor to Donald Trump. A virulent racist who opposed black suffrage, black citizenship, political engagement and equal protection, Johnson nonetheless found himself bloviating nonsensically about how he would be “Moses” to the freed slaves, bringing them into the promised land. He railed against the “pampered, bloated, corrupted aristocracy” of the South before using every ounce of his office’s power to ensure that former slave-holders specifically and southern whites in general be restored to nigh omnipotence in their region in an effort to keep blacks in their place.
But the blinding racism and xenophobia isn’t all these two have in common. We find in Johnson a foreshadowing of Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric focused through the prism of self-aggrandizing demagoguery.
In an hour-long address intended to commemorate George Washington’s birthday, President Johnson seized the opportunity to talk at length about himself, packing his speech with in excess of 200 self-references and wildly accusing fellow members of his party of plotting his assassination. On the campaign trail in 1866, he compared himself to Jesus Christ, and argued with hecklers. He was a staunch enemy of compromise whose pettiness and personal vendettas eventually made him vulnerable to impeachment by the House of Representatives. His legacy, according to prominent historians, was nothing less than “the maintenance of white supremacy…one that would trouble the country for generations to come”.
Please stop me if any of this sounds familiar.
The truth, which the American political mainstream is desperate to avoid, is that Trump in many ways represents a return to form for the American polity. He is the avatar of a shameful past we have never honestly contended with, but had the astonishing arrogance to write off as irrelevant.
When he speaks of the forced deportation of 11 million people, Trump revives the specter of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Native Americans.
His anti-Mexican xenophobia and sabre-rattling echo long-standing American attitudes and foreign policy in Latin America, the Caribbean and the South Pacific that brought us everything from the Mexican-American war, to the acquisition of multiple territories, to President Reagan’s illegal invasion of Grenada.
Trump’s recent contortions to avoid denouncing David Duke and the Klan recall the studied fence-sitting of American presidents from McKinley to Wilson in the face of thousands of lynchings of African Americans and regular ongoing acts of white supremacist terrorism.
The seemingly bizarre attempts of his surrogates to blame the actions of the Klan on left-wing elements are a throwback as well. This deflection harkens back to the Red Summer of 1919 when thousands of white supremacists started dozens of anti-black race riots across the country. In the wake of hundreds dead and thousands injured as well as homeless, racists in the government, law enforcement and the media managed to blame these atrocities not on their actual perpetrators but on alleged communist elements in the black community and progressive groups like the NAACP.
As Julia Azari notes, the Trump campaign’s violent, hateful mob mentality cloaked in a desire for “law and order” recalls recent American politicos from George Wallace to Richard Nixon. And it is worth noting that while they may never have served it up quite like Trump is, liberal politicians have also tapped into this animus for their own purposes. Hence Hillary Clinton’s now-infamous remarks on “super-predators” who “need to be brought to heel”.
The ascendancy of Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election cycle is proof positive that the past is not dead, that progress has not been inevitable and that the only way for us to truly move forward is to confront ugly, uncomfortable discussions head-on rather than cringing and hoping they will fade away. The repeated dismissal of his rhetoric as “divisive” misses the point. Lots of social, political and economic rhetoric is divisive. What makes Trump’s brand of divisiveness effective is that it is familiar and even comforting for more people than we would care to admit.
Donald Trump’s candidacy is a chance for a reckoning in America. We can now choose to truly address America’s long, ongoing legacy of institutionalized, government-approved, popularly supported white supremacist violence. If we decide not to take that opportunity, we can certainly count on a hard time dealing with Trump today, not to mention the predictable ascendancy of his political successors in the future.
