Our Diverse History

There’s a reason the Trump administration and its White Christian nationalist base are so intent upon replacing education–especially classes in history–with a wildly inaccurate, “White-washed” version. The substitution of their fanciful and phony nostalgia for the inconvenient facts of America’s history supports their fond belief that only White Christians are real Americans.

Today’s historical revisionists like to insist that those who can trace their ancestry to the people they want to believe settled the country and/or who fought in the Revolutionary War are the “real” Americans. Since the country’s actual history is rather different from that version, they are working to subvert accurate historical instruction.

A recent guest essay in the New York Times focused on the history of this country’s diversity–a diversity that has existed from the nation’s beginnings. Titled “The Right Wing Myth of American Heritage,” the essay began by recounting a fight–in 1764 Pennsylvania–between Irish settlers and English Quakers. When Benjamin Franklin’s diplomacy averted an all-out conflict, the battle devolved to a “war” of pamphlets giving voice to what the author called “the toxic stew of grievances held by the wide mix of ethnic and religious groups in the middle colonies.”

There were pamphlets that accused the Quakers of taking secret satisfaction in the slaughter of Irish and German settler families at the hands of the Indians, and that called for Quakerism to be “extirpated from the face of the whole earth.” In the reverse direction, Irish Ulster Presbyterians were described as “Ulceration” “Piss-brute-tarians.” Franklin himself referred to the Irish settlers as “Christian white savages” and Germans as “Palatine boors” who refused to assimilate or learn English.

This was the state of relations among European settlers on the brink of the American Revolution. It’s a history that is inconvenient to the latest ideological project of the nativist right.

Those nativists insist that to be a “true American,” one must be descended from a group of founders who–they imagine– were united by a shared system of values and folkways, founders who (in their fevered imaginations) were all English-speaking Protestants from Northwest Europe. Those with bloodlines going back to those settlers–considered by nativists to be America’s “founding ethnicity”– are more American than those who lack such bloodlines, and they argue that immigration has “diluted” that “pure” American stock.

The MAGA bigots who embrace this ahistorical story are thrilled by Trump’s efforts to favor White asylum seekers over non-white ones, and his proposal to counteract growing diversity in America, which the Trump administration regards as a destabilizing cultural force. “The documents submitted in connection with the proposals assert that increasing diversity, “has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity.”

The Times essay quoted Vice-President J.D. Vance’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in which Vance disavowed the belief that the United States is a country built on a creed, and insisted that “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history.” As the author notes, that mythology is historically delusional.

Americans have never been “a group of people with a shared history.” The founders were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely — because they didn’t have any other choice but to do so. This was true even within the British majority; Puritans and Quakers alike were banished from Anglican Virginia, Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts, and English colonists in New England and the Tidewater region sided with and in some cases fought for opposing sides of the English Civil War. America was a nation that emerged in spite of itself…

Mr. Vance, like other nativists, refuses to acknowledge that cultural diversity, with all of its prejudices and conflicts, is in fact the through line of American history. The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common cultural heritage; we’re exceptional because we’ve been able to cohere despite faiths, traditions and languages that set us apart, and sometimes against one another. The drafters of the Constitution tried to create that cohesion by building a government that could transcend our divisions.

As the essayist concludes, the achievement of the founders would have been far less remarkable had the colonists been a monoculture. It is the very rejection of the pretense that any one group deserves some kind of privileged status that has made us  American.

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A Visual Representation

A recent newsletter focusing on a conversation between Charlie Sykes and Adam Kinzinger opened with a list of Trump’s  offenses against the rule of law (and arguably, sanity…) during just one week.

Posted a video of “King Trump” dumping feces on fellow Americans.
Announced that he is completely demolishing the East Wing of the White House to make room for his sh*tty ballroom.
Demanded that the DOJ cough up $230 million in taxpayer dollars to salve his wounded ego.
Murdered two more people on the high seas, without providing either due process or actually any evidence at all.
Presided over the explosion of the national debt to $38 trillion.
Screwed over America’s farmers as he bailed out his buddies in Argentina.
Commuted the sentence of chronic fraudster, fabulist, and MAGA lickspittle George Santos; even as we learn that one of the J6 rioters pardoned by Trump was arrested for plotting the murder of a top congressional Democrat.
Failed to end the killing in Gaza or the war in Ukraine. Failed to reopen his own government.
Declared that he — Donald J. Trump — is greater than either George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

And that was just one week! 

Each of these offenses warrants an in-depth discussion. Some of them are additional evidence–as if additional evidence were needed–of his accelerating mental decline; others demonstrate his utter lack of qualifications for any public office, let alone the highest office in the land. But I want to focus in on what might seem like the least consequential of these assaults on decency and respect for the rule of law–the demolition of the East Wing of the People’s house.

That demolition is a metaphor for the entire Trump Presidency–not only because it is vivid, but because it demonstrates Trump’s inability to understand the office he holds.

In a very real sense, Presidents are tenants–entitled to reside in the White House during their terms of office. We the People are the landlords. Our tenants can make alterations if they are properly approved by the agencies entrusted with those decisions–a process that Trump has contemptuously ignored. 

Not only has Trump destroyed part of a historic structure that is not his, he is proposing to construct a gaudy and inappropriate “ballroom” that will extend over the site and dwarf the rest of the White House. And as Paul Krugman has explained, the fact that the proposed addition is gaudy and tasteless reinforces our understanding of Trump’s mentality.

Why, you might ask, at a moment of national crisis am I writing about Trump’s bad taste?

Masked government agents are snatching people off the street. The National Guard has been sent into major cities on the obviously false pretext that these cities are in chaos. The U.S. military is essentially murdering people on the high seas. Huge tariffs are, in addition to their economic costs, undermining a system of alliances former presidents spent generations building. Green energy is being eviscerated, vindictive prosecutions are the norm, and many millions are on course to lose their health insurance. So why do I want to talk about Trump’s appalling design sense?

But these aren’t separate issues, because tackiness and tyranny go hand in hand. Yes, Trump has terrible taste and probably would even if he didn’t have power and, thanks to that power, wealth. But the grotesqueness of his White House renovations is structural as well as personal. For the excess and ugliness serve a political purpose: to humiliate and intimidate. The tawdry grandiosity serves not only to glorify Trump’s fragile ego, but also to send the message that resistance is futile.

Trump’s tastelessness has long been the subject of derision. (The interior of his New York apartment–with its gold toilet, overscaled rooms, and inaccurate historical detailing has been widely mocked.) But as Krugman notes, the ballroom isn’t simply one more sign of Trump’s personal vulgarity. “Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can.” 

There’s an old adage to the effect that a picture is worth a thousand words. The photos of the East Wing’s destruction will test  the accuracy of that adage.

Citizens who are unaware of the administration’s assaults on democratic processes and the rule of law–people whose “information bubbles” don’t include the appalling behaviors of the incompetent clowns Trump has installed, or the video of Trump dumping shit on the American public– may nevertheless react to the visual evidence that this man is both mentally ill and exceptionally dangerous.

Not to mention vulgar and trashy.

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There’s A Lesson Here

A recent Vox article focused on a question–perhaps the question–that consumes most sentient Americans these days, especially the seven million of us who turned out for the No Kings protest: can America recover, or have we lost representative government forever?

As the article began,

The president of the United States is deploying masked troops to the streets of blue cities, working to put friendly billionaires in charge of the media environment, and attempting to jail his personal enemies.

Can any democracy come back from this?

There is relevant research on that question, and the article cited two papers published earlier this year that seemingly came to opposite conclusions. In both, researchers examined what are called “democratic U-turns.” Those are situations in which  a country that begins as a democracy subsequently moves toward authoritarianism, but recovers in relatively short order. The first research team’s conclusions were optimistic. “They identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.”

The second team, however, focused on 21 of the most recent cases and concluded that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were “short-lived mirages.”

After contacting both teams of researchers, the author concluded that the seemingly opposed findings weren’t actually inconsistent —and that the implications for the United States are both hopeful and disturbing.

Both research teams used a “democracy score” that takes into account how free the press is, whether elections are free and fair, and other accepted markers of democratic societies. A U-turn is defined as the country’s democracy score rebounding after a recent decline — and the data suggests that such U-turns are very common, that over half of all countries that have experienced a slide toward autocracy have also experienced a U-turn. And the research found that those U-turns have typically been very successful.

Good news, right? But as we know from differences in poll results, results will vary depending upon who you ask and how you frame the question.

The second group of researchers focused their analysis on twenty-one cases of democratic U-turns that occurred post-1994.  The authors then looked to see how many of those countries maintained their higher, post U-turn democracy scores. Their analysis extended to the years following those that the first team analyzed–looking to see whether the gains of a country’s U-turn were sustained. The findings on that score give us little cause for optimism; “out of the 21 cases, 19 countries experienced another decline in their democracy score within five years of the seemingly successful U-turn.”

Both teams of researchers emphasized that their findings were not in tension. For one thing, modern autocratization differs from the historical pattern. “Before the 1990s, democracies tended to be toppled by coups or revolutions — unmistakable uses of force that ended the current regime and replaced it with naked authoritarian rule.”

Nowadays, thanks in large part to democracy’s increasingly dominant ideological position around the world, the threat tends to come in a more subtle and hidden form — what scholars call “democratic backsliding.” In these cases, a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections. The ultimate aim is often to create a “competitive authoritarian” regime, where elections are not formally rigged but take place under such unfair conditions that they can’t truly be considered democratic. That’s what Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party did in Hungary, and what PiS tried to do in Poland.

And–rather obviously–what Trump is trying to do in the U.S.

As the article notes, because elected authoritarians were elected, they often represent a real constituency–one that is often large enough to make it impossible for their opponents to defeat them permanently and democratically illegitimate for those opponents to outlaw them entirely. Just because you have a democracy doesn’t mean you have a stable democracy. As the article concludes:

Even if America experiences a U-turn upon Trump’s departure, the country may not be out of the woods. The forces that made Trump possible in the first place will still remain, open to exploitation by any political leader with the requisite savvy and shamelessness.

“There is a reason why Trump came to power, and there is a reason why he won those elections… If you don’t solve the underlying reasons, then of course democracy will still be at risk.”

I am increasingly convinced that the U.S. will oust Trump and his band of wildly incompetent White Christian Nationalists–that we will experience a U-turn. I am far less sanguine about our ability to address those “underlying reasons.”

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Forget Dog Whistles

In the ten-plus months of this horrific excuse for a federal administration, the racism that powers the MAGA movement has become impossible to ignore or minimize. Trump and his sycophants aren’t even trying to mask their hatreds–they have withdrawn funding from universities and other organizations that engage in even the most modest efforts to level the playing field for minorities; waged war against (their version of) DEI; fired competent Black officials and replaced them with manifestly unqualified White ones; sent masked goons into Blue cities to kidnap Brown people…the list goes on.

Now, several media outlets report that the FBI has officially abandoned what has for years been its top domestic terrorism concern: White nationalism. The agency has cut its ties with two major civil rights watchdogs, yielding to pressure from MAGA influencers and Donald Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel.

The FBI has abruptly ended long-standing partnerships with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), organizations that for years have provided the agency with significant assistance in tracking hate groups. Not only has the FBI ended its relationship with those organizations, figures in the administration have libeled them. Kash Patel called the SPLC a “partisan smear machine,” and Elon Musk labeled it an “evil” source of “hate propaganda.”

The animus aimed at SPLC was evidently prompted by that organization’s Hate Map, which identifies White Nationalist, anti-government, and other extremist groups, and which includes Turning Point USA as one of  those anti-democratic, hard-right groups.

The FBI also ended its partnership with the ADL, which for years has trained agents to recognize antisemitism and hate crimes. (Patel mocked former FBI Director James Comey for praising the ADL, sneering: “That era is OVER.”) As one media source reported (link unavailable),

In 2017, then–FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress the agency had about 1,000 open domestic terrorism investigations, many linked to white nationalism. A 2021 GAO report backed that up: domestic terrorism cases surged 357% since 2013, with white supremacists responsible for the majority of deadly attacks.

But under Trump and Patel, the FBI is turning its back on civil rights, and walking away from groups that helped prevent homegrown hate.

It isn’t just the FBI. And it goes further than an administration that is “turning its back on civil rights.” This is an administration that absolutely revels in parading its bigotries. Actually, we shouldn’t be surprised by the degree to which its hatreds are being openly expressed–as the Brookings Institution, among others, has documented, racism has always been Trump’s not-so-secret sauce. In 2019, the Institution reported (emphases mine),

Donald Trump’s support in the 2016 campaign was clearly driven by racism, sexism, and xenophobia. While some observers have explained Trump’s success as a result of economic anxiety, the data demonstrate that anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and sexism are much more strongly related to support for Trump. Trump’s much-discussed vote advantage with non-college-educated whites is misleading; when accounting for racism and sexism, the education gap among whites in the 2016 election returns to the typical levels of previous elections since 2000. Trump did not do especially well with non-college-educated whites, compared to other Republicans. He did especially well with white people who express sexist views about women and who deny racism exists.

Even more alarmingly, there is a clear correlation between Trump campaign events and incidents of prejudiced violence. FBI data show that since Trump’s election there has been an anomalous spike in hate crimes concentrated in counties where Trump won by larger margins. It was the second-largest uptick in hate crimes in the 25 years for which data are available, second only to the spike after September 11, 2001. Though hate crimes are typically most frequent in the summer, in 2016 they peaked in the fourth quarter (October-December). This new, higher rate of hate crimes continued throughout 2017.

What is so depressing is the “in your face” evidence that Americans haven’t come very far since the Civil War, that a significant percentage of White Americans continue to hate and fear people who are different. White Christian Nationalism is, in a number of ways, a continuation of the worst of the Confederacy, and it is still as fundamentally unAmerican as it was then.

Trump and MAGA are tearing down more than the East Wing of the White House. That destruction is symbolic of the arrogance with which they are trying to destroy the very fabric of a nation trying to live up to the principle that all people are created equal. 

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No News Is Definitely NOT Good News

A friend recently sent me a link to Northwestern University’s “State of Local News.” It was incredibly depressing. It also provides an answer to the question so many of us repeatedly pose: how can people believe X or Y? The answer, it turns out, is simple: they have no access to contrary information–or, for that matter, any contemporary news coverage that can credibly be labeled journalism.

Here is the first paragraph of the report’s Executive Summary: the emphases are mine.

Our first State of Local News report, published in 2016, examined the local news landscape across America over the previous 10 years, taking data from 2005 as its starting point. Now, in the project’s 10th year, we are able to look back through the past two decades and see dramatic transformations in the ecosystem of local news. Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news. This trend continues to impact the media industry and audiences nationwide. Newspapers are disappearing at the same rate as in 2024; more than 130 papers shut down in the past year alone. Newspaper employment is sliding steadily downward. And although there has been some growth in stand-alone and network digital sites, these startups remain heavily centralized in urban areas, and they have not been appearing fast enough to offset the losses elsewhere. As a result, news deserts – areas with extremely limited access to local news – continue to grow. In 2005, just over 150 counties lacked a source of local news; today, there are more than 210. Meanwhile, the journalism industry faces new and intensified challenges including: shrinking circulation and steep losses of revenue from changes to search and the adoption of AI technologies, while political attacks against public broadcasters threaten to leave large swaths of rural America without local news.

There are many reasons for the urban/rural divide, and access to reliable information is one of them.

According to the report, there has been a steady increase in the number of counties that are “news deserts” – defined as areas that lack consistent local reporting. The project found that 213 U.S. counties lack any local news source, an increase from the 206 such counties it found last year. And you have to wonder just how much “news” is delivered In the 1,524 counties having only a weekly newspaper. As the project reports, that leaves some 50 million Americans who have limited or no access to local journalism.

It isn’t just the rural areas of the country, although the problem is most severe in rural America. The disappearance of local news sources has been especially pronounced in the suburbs of large cities where, the report tells us, “hundreds of papers have merged together. The papers that remain look profoundly different than just a few decades ago, with significantly consolidated ownership and reduced print frequencies.”

One result of rural Americans’ diminished access to information has been an increased dependence on public broadcasting. So in July, Congress rescinded more than $1 billion that a previous Congress had allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As a direct result, all federal funding to local NPR and PBS member stations vanished. This leaves hundreds of public media stations at risk of having to reduce or suspend operations – at a time when their services are increasingly vital to Americans with limited alternatives for local news, especially in rural areas. In this report, we track 342 public media stations across the country. Collectively, the signals from these stations reach into more than 90% of all U.S. counties, including 82% of news deserts, making them a crucial piece of information infrastructure within the local news ecosystem.

The effort to kill public broadcasting is quite clearly part of MAGA’s effort to control the information environment–to deprive those living in news deserts of access to information inconsistent with GOP propaganda.

There’s much more at the link, but the quoted material goes to the heart of the information problem central to America’s polarization: the consolidation of ownership– of both print news and broadcast–means that the overwhelming majority of news delivery is now in the hands of the billionaires who are part of our governing kakistocracy. Meanwhile, the lack of traditional, reliable local news sources means that millions of Americans no longer have access to credible, vetted journalism.

What’s left is the Wild West of the Internet–filled with sites that provide “news” curated to confirm the bias of the person doing “research.”

No wonder we Americans occupy alternate realities.

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