Trumpism Is More American Than We Want to Believe
An acknowledgement of how the MAGA movement has shattered the flattering image of America many may have held – and what history says about what the US is up against.
Like many others, I’ve spent my life holding a flattering image of America, borne of education, observation, and personal experience.
My dad, a poor, orphaned kid from the Midwest, fought on Iwo Jima as a US Marine in the war that saved the free world. He came home and became a prominent member of the generation of journalists who advanced civil rights and exposed the misdeeds of the first president ever forced to resign.
My mom, after growing up in the conservative, tradition-minded South, raised four kids while pursuing her own career before the feminist movement made that commonplace. She also found time to join protests that helped end the futile Vietnam War.
My parents emphasized our good fortune to live in the world’s greatest country, where the moral arc bent toward justice and a fair-minded democracy did the right thing, perhaps after first exhausting other possibilities. You know the bromides. In the end, the good guys win.
That explains why the second Trump administration, with its corruption and cruelty and racism and stupidity and wanton destructiveness, has come as such a shock. It triggers the “not who we are” reflex, as Joe Biden puts it.
But in fact, Trump’s reactionary MAGA movement reflects an important part of who we are and always have been – a bigger part than people like me have wanted to acknowledge. That message emerges from a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian’s unblinking reconsideration of the liberal tradition of progress long seen as the centerpiece of American exceptionalism.
America’s Shaky Foundations
In Illiberal America, New York University’s Steven Hahn documents the persistent strength of opposition to celebrated milestones marking our two-and-one-half centuries as a nation. As the Trump presidency demonstrates with demoralizing scope and force, that opposition frequently takes our country backward.
“My intention in this book is not to paint a dark and damning picture of the United States,” Hahn writes.