[In my annual
end-of-year series, I’ll AmericanStudy some big stories from the year about
which I didn’t get to write in this space. I’d love to hear your thoughts on
these and any other 2015 stories!]
How history
reveals what’s not new about the presidential hopeful, what is, and how to stop
him.
As I wrote in this
piece for Talking Points Memo, the longtime adoration for Donald Trump among
many Americans (an attitude without which his current run for the presidency
would have been unthinkable) is inextricably linked to a far more longstanding
American narrative: our equation of wealth with success, and thus our
admiration for the very wealthy (or often, as in the case of Trump, those who
can appear very wealthy whether the facts bear out those appearances or not). I
wasn’t trying in that piece to equate Trump to Ben Franklin, and of course the
ever-increasing bigotry and ugliness of Trump’s campaign makes clear just how
much he is not like that flawed
but still very admirable founding American. Yet at the same time, there’s a
national throughline between the two men, and it’s what Franklin called “the way to
wealth.”
On the other
hand, I would argue that Trump does represent something new under the sun—not in
his familiar and all-too-American
exclusionary and bigoted rhetoric, but in the
21st century forces that have created a built-in, sympathetic
audience for even his most extreme ugliness. As I wrote in the piece for The Conversation at that last hyperlink,
from the earliest moments of his candidacy Trump has found a vital base of support
on Fox News, the network on which he had appeared for years as a candidacy.
Josh Marshall of TPM has called Fox News Trump’s
Leni Riefenstahl, and I couldn’t agree more with the analogy; not because Trump
= Hitler, necessarily, but because at no prior point in American history has
there been such a perfect symbiosis between a propaganda network and a
political figure. Fox News and Trump’s 2016 candidacy represent, to my mind,
something different from any prior presidential campaign—and that’s a very
worrisome shift indeed.
Studying
American history doesn’t only reveal those longstanding and new sides to Trump’s
popularity and campaign, though. It also, and most importantly, reveals how to
stop him: voting. In the years immediately following the Civil War, African
Americans and their allies voted in elections throughout the South, and African
Americans were elected to offices with regularity. With the subsequent rise and
dominance of Jim Crow and white supremacy in those states, denying the vote was
a vital way through which the worst bigots and bullies kept their power. And
when the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed and African Americans were finally
able to vote once more, many the worst such leaders (such as Sheriff Jim
Clark of Selma, Alabama) were voted out of office. No amount of public
scholarship or journalism or activism in other arenas could come close to
achieving, in opposition to Trump and much else of the current extremism, what
widespread voting can and will do. Fighting
for that right for all Americans remains one of the most American and vital
battles for the year ahead.
Next 2015 story
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other 2015 stories you’d AmericanStudy?
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